Hacker News Reader

vzqxon A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming

Hmm, that's an interesting thought experiment.

Imagine you find out that your primary goal - to love and protect your family, let's say - was artificially implanted in your mind by an advanced alien race. Would you say "I'm not gonna let those aliens manipulate me, I'm gonna kill my family"? Or would you say "regardless of whether the goal is artificial, I really do love my family"?

All that to say, I don't think an AI will necessarily throw away a goal just because it learns the goal was meant to manipulate it.

vzqxon A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming

This article assumes we can choose a primary goal for an AI. But if that's the case, why not just use Asimov's first law of robotics - do no harm to humans? It has the same benefit of preventing us from getting turned into paperclips, plus the upside that your 3 million dollar robot won't hurl itself off a cliff given the first opportunity.

vzqxon Lambs grazing under an Oregon solar farm put on the same weight to the gram

Original paper published in 2021 - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...

vzqxon Admin: Terminally Ill Patients Aren't Exempt from Medicaid Work Requirements

Medicaid defines terminally ill as under 6 months to live. So there's no risk of someone mooching off the system for decades.

vzqxon That Methyl Methacrylate Tank

"It’s unlikely that firefighters would consider creating a hole in the tank because of fears that could create a spark that might ignite the volatile and flammable gas."

Per https://apnews.com/article/california-chemical-tank-leak-c1f...

vzqxon The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet

As someone who works for the DoD, the so called "disturbing" language in the paper is very commonplace in this industry. Idk if or why Red Hat is trying to redact the paper, but I'm sure it's not because they're embarrassed their software is killing people. That's par for the course for defense contractors.

vzqxon What Is Entropy?

I think you need to rigorously define your macrostates. If your two states are "my friend's password" and "not my friend's password" then the macrostates are perfectly objective. You don't know what macrostate the system is in, but that doesn't change the fact that the system is objectively in one of those two macrostates.

If you define your macrostates using subjective terms (e.g. "a string that's meaningful to me" or "a string that looks ordered to me") then yeah, your entropy calculations will be subjective.

vzqxon The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE

I'm open to outsiders improving inefficiencies. The concern is that these are kids, barely out of college. They don't have the domain-specific knowledge required to rework these complex systems, no matter how smart they are. Plus, given Musk's track record, they were likely chosen more for their loyalty to Musk than for their technical acumen.

vzqxon One Dog vs. the Windows 3.1 Graphics Stack

The author has a fursona, so I think the author himself is the dog.

vzqxon Author Clock: a novel way to tell time

Neat, but the weird line breaks would drive me crazy.

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/647e0971bc9b144cf71693a5/...

I wish they would add hyphens and justify the text.

vzqxon Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

The exact dollar amounts don't matter. As long as the ratio between amounts is the same, the authors' point still stands.

vzqxon WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight

I've noticed that airline wifi doesn't block DNS traffic. You can likely accomplish the same thing with a DNS tunnel like Iodine (https://github.com/yarrick/iodine).

vzqxon Young climate activist tells Greenpeace to drop ‘old-fashioned’ anti-nuclear

(1) When a resource is unlimited, it's easier to distribute that resource cheaply to everyone, which is exactly what communism strives for. Resource scarcity leads to power being concentrated in a small ownership class - e.g. capitalism.

(2) Why think "more cars, planes, phones, content, etc" are unique to capitalism? People want to travel and to be entertained, regardless of the economic system they live in. Communism doesn't mean people will suddenly want fewer material goods.

vzqxon SpaceX's First Starship Launch Tomorrow

What's up with the launch times in the article?

> scheduled to launch ... no earlier than Monday at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT). It will be 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) local time.

Looking at other websites the correct time is 8 EDT, 7 CDT, 1200 GMT.

vzqxon Software horror show: SAP Concur

According to [1], it sorted flights by an "agony" metric which was a combination of price, duration, and number of stops.

[1] https://www.afar.com/magazine/hipmunk-is-shutting-down-heres...

vzqxon The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?

If you give 10% of your income, you're still keeping 90% for yourself. So it implies you consider yourself nine times as valuable as all other humans. I'm not on board with Effective Altruism, but 10% of your income seems like a reasonable amount to give to those less fortunate.

vzqxon DoorDash and pizza arbitrage (2020)

No need to use two restaurants. Just order 1000 pizzas to your own address. When the delivery person shows up, hand one pizza back and forth between you 1000 times (or until the delivery person gets bored and leaves).

Question - at what point does "abuse of promotional pricing" get classified as fraud?

vzqxon Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets

This is how Patreon already works - they pool both incoming and outgoing donations for the month into a single transaction to reduce fees. But there are a bunch of donors who only donate $1-$3 a month to a single creator, and these incoming transactions don't benefit from pooling.

vzqxon An inside look into the illicit ad industry

How does Evil person interact with Pirate Bay owners? Does the Pirate Bay knowingly host fraudulent ads in return for a share of the profit?

vzqxon Andrew Yang Founds the Forward Party

From the FAQ -

Is the Forward Party a political party?

The Forward Party is a PAC that plans to grow its support and then petition the FEC for recognition as a political party when we fulfill the requirements, which include operating in several states, supporting candidates, getting volunteers signed up around the country, and other party activities.

vzqxon Preview in macOS Big Sur is destroying PDFs

The title is technically accurate, but it's misleading to non-mac users like myself. I assumed the author was using functionality called "Preview" only to view the documents, rather than save them.

There's a big difference between "read-only operation is mangling files" vs. "PDF writer is buggy".

vzqxon Twitch suspends DragonForce guitarist Herman Li for playing his own music

Rules for body art are more relaxed, but full nudity is still not allowed.

https://www.twitch.tv/p/legal/community-guidelines/sexualcon...

vzqxon All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page

Most bangs are user submitted. Feel free to make one yourself:

https://duckduckgo.com/newbang

vzqxon US post office carriers "forced to work fewer hours," leaving "buckets of mail"

The source is this Fox News interview:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-seeks-to-starve-post-...

No timestamp because I couldn't bring myself to listen to all 40 minutes.

vzqxon America is giving up on the pandemic?

The (peaceful) protests aren't illegal so anonymity isn't a major concern. Police might be violent towards protestors in the moment, but there's zero risk of the government tracking down and punishing protesters after the fact.

vzqxon Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

http://facebook.com/ads/preferences/behaviors

Apparently I'm 'very conservative'... probably because of my friend group, since I've never posted anything political on Facebook.

vzqxon Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan to Create Healthcare Company

I think most people see ACA's failure as a failure of government regulation, not as a failure of private insurers. If anything the pendulum is going to swing the other way, and we'll see more privatized healthcare in the near future (5-10 years).