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Applejinx

>There should be no sanctions on trying to hack the legal system

This is a wild assertion. What do you think a legal system even IS? 'trying to hack the legal system' seems prima facie illegal. If anything, there could be sanctions on automating document processing in a way that might faciliate such hacking.

Re:HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN on Sunday November 01, 2026 @05:17AM (#50324193)
Interesting. I consciously, actively smack YT with a rolled-up newspaper in the form of 'never recommend this channel' specifically to make it only recommend me stuff that I've already watched, and not try to pipeline me in some algorithmic direction such has happened at some periods. I don't think I have to draw people a picture here.

I've never imagined actually wanting an algorithm that would find things I'd actually like, having been burned so badly by 'algorithm that finds things it wants to get me to like'. Are you sure you want an algorithm to do that?

Re:Digital Minimalism on Saturday October 31, 2026 @12:27PM (#50317567)
points about Hitler, I take it?

Sounds like modern Twitter to me. Glad I deleted my account years ago.

Re:Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:21AM (#50243183)
That would be weird and disheartening BECAUSE I'm not using LLMs to work instead of me and have ideas instead of me and implement them instead of me.

If I was, then 'puffery' seems about right, and my best angle might be to insist that I'm yeast, leavening, and the massive quantities of gas blowing something up into a puffy empty state are only happening because of me. It's even kind of true, LLMs just sit there until directed.

Re:What Is Gridifcation on Thursday October 22, 2026 @11:34AM (#50196862)
On top of that, not all drum machines are created equal. There are whole genres based on 808s, 909s, 303s combined with these… using DINsync, which involves retriggering internal hardware clocks on the machines at trigger rise-time speed. rather than sending a succession of MIDI notes. That stuff is still 'electronic clocks' but not in the sense of 'lives on a computer that triggers notes', in the sense of 'sequencers firing notes very simultaneously'.

That's a timing lock that's tighter than the usual sort in recent generations. There are DAWs (Renoise) that pride themselves on being able to send MIDI with less slop and irregularity (nice trick since MIDI is a serial bus, but you'd think it'd be more common to get right). There are whole genres (see: psytrance) that do very well in trackers which can fire sample-accurate notes simultaneously without resorting to MIDI.

Even though it's of the machine, the groove of an 808/303 pair synced by DINsync is a different beast from 'snap to grid and autotune'. There's subtleties to everything.

Re:Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:27PM (#50168833)
Agreed, it takes a lot more power and doesn't run nearly as cool as all that.
No… the person who's going to do well is the one who doesn't have to ask what to build. The one who has to ask is no better than an AI, except they start out wanting to ask, rather than starting out with no interest whatsoever until they're prompted to have one.

When everything you ask for is instant and valueless, even asking becomes meaningless, and everyone is waiting to see something they'd not thought of.

Then, a thousand thousand copies, immediately… but also, watching that person like a hawk to see if they can do it again. That's the future. A lot of people will just plain become unable to think or intend anything on their own, or even want anything.

Re:How employment is changing at Anthropic on Sunday October 18, 2026 @07:41AM (#50140177)
Isn't there a Golgafrincham Ark for that?
Manually refactor code in days if need be, when you have something specific in mind and intend a particular result.

'refactor' isn't just a blender. If I wanted agentic coding I would just do that. I'm quite happy for other people to so completely entangle themselves in agentic coding that they can't get out. Please proceed.

to add: I'm a paying JetBrains customer, but they could lose me if they vibecode themselves into a pile of slop. I'm not sure they're doing that, even if they're dabbling in it. I think there's still expertise there.

Or straight up terrorism. These are people who already see a future superintelligence as being a terrorist actor on the scale of state actors, they just side with the terrorist. They may be getting a head start on that.

I think 'better become terrorists so the future terrorist AI will like us' is sheer mental illness, but I see how it aligns with their alignments.

Re:Show HN: Giving Opus 5.5 a simulated paint canvas on Saturday October 03, 2026 @09:18AM (#49944018)
But that's exactly it. It doesn't 'know'. It isn't. It's a possible story nobody told. There is nothing there.
Re:Why Is Sam Altman a Free Man? on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @08:42AM (#49908088)
I've never seen anybody or anything go out, suck up everything in the world and distill it into a different thing containing elements of all the things they took for no particular reason with no expectation or intent.

That's a WILD angle for them to argue. Lotta energy being expended for a lack of intent. Lotta money spent…

Re:Generate fonts where every LLM token is the same width on Sunday September 27, 2026 @07:10AM (#49865616)
I typed the first stanza of 'Jabberwocky'.

Worked about as well as expected :D

Re:One Month Without AI on Saturday September 26, 2026 @09:24AM (#49856316)
…as far as you know, at the first glance.

Could you work out that it was wrong, given weeks to go and check its work? If so, your trust is misplaced.

You ARE taking days or weeks to go and check, yes?

Re:Unreal Agent on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @07:55PM (#49809865)
VERY MUCH to be confused, which is exactly why Epic will doubtless be having many w… no, I'm sorry, I think they'll have one word. 'Nope'
Re:Unreal Agent on Tuesday September 22, 2026 @07:53PM (#49809857)
Likewise. This seems to be the norm for AI people: act as if.
Re:Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented on Sunday September 20, 2026 @05:23PM (#49780212)
No, language is communication. Those numbers just sit there unless someone tries to get them to do something. There's nobody in there and nothing to communicate, and you might fairly ask whether, if that sand WANTED anything, it wished to just be let alone without being made to jump through hoops for the pleasure of humans.
Re:AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible on Saturday September 19, 2026 @07:43AM (#49765722)
Only at the first derivative. What you're observing is an additional layer of 'but, in genre X!' and then same slop, different prompt.

You're complaining about what happens when people don't even supply the additional layer, but just go 'make me a poster, no mistakes, it should be a great poster'. When you give no direction at all you get the purest of slop. You start giving directions, you start narrowing down the area you're digging through the slop of, and possibly you ask for something that people aren't familiar with and they're only able to identify that you asked.

Hence, Chinese posters with a cherry blossom and the kanji for 'Japan' and such. Someone went 'make it Chinese' and the slop associated it with 'Oriental' and what came out was collective unconscious, such that people who weren't thinking and didn't have experience might not look twice, but the meaning turned out tainted.

Sort of like food depictions that more closely resemble a pile of maggots. Those glisten! (well, I suppose they must.) There's a whole uncanny-valley thing that happens on every level and inspires revulsion. I'm suggesting that is still happening in the other examples but you've not got the experience to register their problems. With the food depictions, all animals eat stuff so we're hardwired to bounce off unsafe foods even if they glisten…

Re:AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible on Saturday September 19, 2026 @07:33AM (#49765655)
If there's nothing to think about they may well not think.

That's the problem.

Re:Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap on Friday September 18, 2026 @08:57AM (#49753776)
Why would any LLM 'think' in terms of trying to cite prior work?

It itself is prior work. It's asking a fish to show where the water is. The fish can't imagine that absence, and the LLM can't imagine anything not being prior work.

Re:How to Write with an LLM on Friday September 18, 2026 @06:03AM (#49752187)
OK, how about 'nothing is real, nobody will ever care again, let's all never listen to anybody else ever again'?

That's more or less the same thing expressed more nihilistically. But nihilism is, like, just a word man (to 'The Dude' it up a bit). Perhaps we are either fiddling on the deck of the Titanic, or just staring at the waves?

What do you think the results will be of the machines consuming only their own slop and Habsburging themselves intellectually, and then all the humans abandoning any attempt to either talk or listen? As a global civilization of humans? I'm not sure we've explored the likely consequences of 'if you can't spend them time to write it why should anyone read it'.

Maybe it's gone too far already.

Re:OpenAI Model Misalignment Report on Thursday September 17, 2026 @10:59AM (#49741813)
When I saw the negative score I went 'Hmm! soft spot!'

Of course calling out something like that would get a response. Those who are interested in furthering 'the natural world for white humans' will immediately see the possibilities of this sort of motte-and-bailey stuff. Fairly often they're directly working that beat and are very familiar with what I'm suggesting: I wasn't saying it to bring it to their attention, they're quite aware.

I mention that the definition of 'human' matters, because there are a bunch of people who don't consider skin color a disqualifier. And I spoke up because I'm such a person, and I'm wary of ways to sneakily redefine such words until common usage includes such caveats.

Re:OpenAI Model Misalignment Report on Thursday September 17, 2026 @07:29AM (#49739242)
I would like to have more clarity on what it considers 'human' and 'the natural world' because you could use that framing to run with a really wild ultra-right-wing viewpoint where only extremely white people are human, and the natural world means scientific medicine must be destroyed.

We don't know what it's up to unless we know how it defines these terms. What's 'primacy'? I would say climate has primacy over the artificial constructs of human civilization, 'cos we're able to nudge climate in some very alarming directions we're ill-suited to protect ourselves from.

Re:Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously on Monday September 14, 2026 @02:17PM (#49701461)
From what I've seen of other AI-enabled projects interacting with forums in my field of work, it's very common for the AI people to jump in and answer every possible question and respond to every possible interaction, very quickly.

Could be just a bot doing it, but it could also be a sign of an inexperienced person trying to engage with an existing community without being part of that community. I know in my area it took years for me to learn that I shouldn't jump into every conversation, and that doing that rubbed people the wrong way, and I've seen others (many years before AI) wreck themselves by being unable to learn this lesson.

In some places responding bumps the thread so it's outright manipulative. HN doesn't sort threads like that.

I'm not sure this counts as astroturf, or simply evidence of a person who's not okay with letting a community opinion independently evolve. You could say 'well it's his job to fight the community if it looks like it's turning hostile' but think about that for a second. It takes some experience to know when you can let negativity be out there in the environment, and I think there'll be a lot of people who aren't capable of making such allowances.

Re:Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master – John Carmack on Sunday September 13, 2026 @06:45AM (#49682428)
I guess in ten years we'll see which is the out of touch Kung Fu master.

I do see a whole set of people doing mystical passes in the air, sometimes with wires holding 'em up, in a set of ritual beliefs propped up by vast accumulations of power, money and pride, not to be questioned.

Didn't expect Carmack to be among those waving his hands about.

If it's so amazing, let's see the amazing thing he does. Go ahead. I'm sure Doom needs a really on-point web page with Inter.

Re:We Must Pace the Frontier on Saturday September 12, 2026 @04:36PM (#49676925)
Yes, absolutely. Even human intelligence stops being useful at a certain point and becomes 'enough, provided the human is motivated and tenacious'. Intention is a better metric, but it's a serious AI weak point if not actively an achilles' heel. 'Warios' come to mind.
Re:We Must Pace the Frontier on Saturday September 12, 2026 @04:29PM (#49676854)
He could be lying in hopes of stalling everybody else.
Re:Fuck it, make it anyway on Saturday September 12, 2026 @09:43AM (#49672255)
You can say it, and there's no reason you shouldn't dare say it, but getting other people to believe it is a whole other story. Good luck with that. Guess we know what's in your wallet :)
Re:AirPods 5 on Thursday September 10, 2026 @09:17AM (#49643250)
Sure is for bass. It's a sealed box that you're in, with shapes that stop anything from acting like a simple room shape, and surfaces that can soak up highs, and so small that this absorption is a huge percentage of surface area.

There's a reason mix engineers have always done 'check the mix in a car'. It might be way more revealing of what's happening in the bass, even when the speakers are relatively weak. Once you get anything decent, watch out. It's a bit like having your whole body inside headphones.

Re:Muse: Meta's personal AI agent, features and capabilities on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @05:18AM (#49623598)
Or, y'know: voting instructions.

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