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altruios

Re:Somebody please stop the spam texts on Monday October 26, 2026 @05:03PM (#50250914)
How do you tell the difference between political spam text and scammer spam text...

that's the neat part, you don't.

Re:Award-Winning AI Literature on Thursday October 22, 2026 @06:51PM (#50202188)
> UBI is clearly not the answer because all it does is entrench a subtle cast system and limit upward mobility and does nothing to address this root cause.

what. how?

UBI allows bad jobs to end. It allows workers to look for other work without threat to their economic conditions. Nothing about that is a cast system or limits upward mobility. it in fact, increase that mobility.

Re:Award-Winning AI Literature on Thursday October 22, 2026 @03:48PM (#50200121)
>Fundamentally, I know that HN has plenty of people who will react with "ha-ha, human authors should pack their bags", just like what we keep telling mathematicians, because we see the discipline as just another market that can be conquered by automation or another benchmark to track.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that, at least some of us are going: "ha-ha, people derive their value from their outputs instead of understanding existence is itself valuable"

Why does everyone value themselves based on their economic output? Why do blood diamonds compete at all with lab grown - one often involves sacrifices to the minors, and the other is cheaper and by all metrics better? (hint: because the narrative of "effort" is what drives that particular example... the blood makes the diamonds shinier in some people's minds... that's not a good look, morally)

Re:Detecting model weight tampering in GPU memory (Rome attacks) on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @10:32AM (#50181694)
I don't mean to anthropomorphize. I apologize for my verbiage, language can be fuzzy.

How about 'functional control over their activated features', as opposed to 'understanding'.

Curious.

This feels like a tool to add to an LLM, being able to modify it's own weights, to be able to relearn, refine its own understanding.

Re:Show HN: XY Music Notation on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @05:29PM (#50079090)
This is a system that indicates the lack of information about why the current system (which, admittedly is a mess) is the way it is. This is removing Chesterson's fence without understand why it's there.

A point: one improvement to this system is if the tonic note is always 1. I don't hate the idea of number inside the notes, but as it is currently, its not only useless, but actively making things more difficult to parse.

Having the tonic, the 3rd, the 5th, the 7th... that might make things easier to sight-read. Might.

The current notation is a hodge-podge of compromises of rhythm, legibility, page to music ratio (efficiency of page turns), pitch range, and dynamics. Nothing in music can ever be 'perfect' (the cosmic joke). And without the history of how any why the current system came to be, 'disrupters' are just people who don't know their own ignorance. Even still, sometimes there is value added. Rare as that is.

Re:Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking? on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:09AM (#50057557)
National security issues. That's the core of why. Any hot water these AI companies will get into will be bailed out by the USA. The Arm's race has switched from Nukes, to AI and drones.
Re:Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court on Friday October 09, 2026 @12:30PM (#50022946)
Got into it at a coin show recently:

"Democrats eat babies, are Satanist, globalists, shadow-government elite that trump is saving us from!": said the Coin Dealer.

I wish I was doing hyperbole... I really wish that I was...

Re:Mistral Large 4 on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @05:21PM (#49984325)
If I'm reading that plot correctly, qwen3.8-27b beats in accuracy and price?
> AI stunts and reduces the learning process

Mostly agree, but there is nuance to it.

People who engage with problems, think about them, reason about them, can ask AI AFTER that work, to get fruitful results - as in: increase insight. I'll have to find the study I'm referencing (might be a second)...

The issue is that isn't anyone's default mode of interaction with these systems...

sam altman: the Taravangian of this world.
> 64-character password is magically more secure than a 20-character

Not magic there, just information theory. but yes, I hear what you are trying to say. It is more cumbersome.

Re:How Singapore's government-run dating service works on Friday October 02, 2026 @11:50AM (#49934894)
> To run a business you either need to show ads, have everyone pay, or have a freemium model where it can be used for free but some portion of users pay.

True, but there are still alternatives.

This would be niche, but a self-hosted solution could be made for the more technically minded to use and network. The dating-net. Where efficiency and getting off the app are the priority. no profit seeking, no ads, no perverse incentives.

I wouldn't want to be the one to test this. That's an indication of how deep we dug ourselves in.
Re:CS240 AI Cheating Retrospective on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @06:42PM (#49915421)
... Thus the enforcement?
Re:CS240 AI Cheating Retrospective on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @06:41PM (#49915406)
> Leading with the depressing “work alone” slide

working in a team is valuable. but that value is proportional to the teammates chosen. teammates who have worked alone and can think through their decisions are more valuable, thus it is this way.

>AI merely amplifies extremes, it’s a factor but neither the cause nor culprit here.

you may have missed this part: ~As discussed in the paper, we have also run the tool against earlier semesters with very compelling and interesting results. In particular, the indicators that we use are virtually nonexistent prior to 2024 and their presence increases rapidly over the following years.~

So it stands to reason that LLM's are in fact, the culprit here.

Re:CS240 AI Cheating Retrospective on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @06:03PM (#49915085)
Using LLMs for the classroom assignment is like using a forklift to lift weights in a gym: completely inappropriate and atrophic.

That some 50% are using the LLMs rather than spend effort learning is not a cause to remove the ban of LLMs in the classroom.

90% of the power of an LLM is being yourself competent enough to judge its outputs. Besides, do we really need more humans coding like LLMs?

Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @05:05PM (#49914451)
Do you think that they won't?
Re:Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @04:35PM (#49914010)
Care to define 'waves' in this context?

I suspect, if our conscious experience === the waves created by neuron's firing, that the hum of the GPU when running a LLM doesn't have the dynamic range to meaningfully talk about having a conscious experiences.

But that's armchair conjecturing.

Re:Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @04:29PM (#49913936)
> Nobody has a moat except nvidia

For now, for cloud training. but for consumers, nvidia vs amd reasonably close - the moat there is thin and shrinking. I suspect AMD will surprise us. nvidia has no motes in china, which may be a new source of (gpu) chip design. Huawei's Ascend 910C is about a generation behind... again: for now.

point is: moats dry up. I see nvidia's shrinking as a real possibility.

Re:America.gov – Whatever you need from government, start here on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @01:57PM (#49912218)
... for how long?! Censor hammer already been hit at least once.
Re:Show HN: JBR-001 – An open-source 3D printable desktop robot on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @12:23PM (#49910944)
We are like... 5 years away from real star wars droids at this pace. keep up the good work!

What was the biggest design challenge you faced?

> experiences aren't universal

agreed: but considering the ratio of friends who are in similar situations, I suspect the group I'm in is larger than you assume.

My bad.

I have an anecdotal situation dealing with dementia ridden parents from chronic drinking. And similar with grandparents. My risk tolerance is zero for alcohol. besides the lifespan being reduced: quality of life tanks off of a fucking cliff, dragging everyone you love and who loves you down there too.

> alcohol is not generally good for health and it can be abused but also small quantities here and there won't probably hurt you in a serious way

Hate to 'uMm aCktUalLy...' but hm... actually...

https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-...

not all infrastructure should be maintained. I'd personally prefer rail infrastructure prioritized over car roads.

But maintaining current infrastructure in the meantime while we build better things is good too. Let's just not lose the plot on what needs to happen next.

Re:California is chasing wealth that has feet on Thursday September 24, 2026 @06:56PM (#49837918)
Charitably speaking: I suspect the commenter above you was indicating that the government should have a stock portfolio you can transfer stocks to to pay taxes in a non-taxable event type scenerio.
Re:Cloud Agents Are Inevitable AI Prisons on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @04:53PM (#49822427)
something tickles here. a question. a curiosity.

Certainly this applies to AI... but was there equivalent dangerous knowledge or tech which existed back in ye olden days that spawned such tales to begin with?

There is a KISS way to do this with our current models:

use a time string that updates:

every second (that it is not responding) erase a byte string at the end, then send a new byte string (that represents time from last response): bot either outputs a null terminating token, or if the number gets high enough, instruct/train it to take initiative then.

Re:A warning about 'model welfare' on Thursday September 17, 2026 @11:53AM (#49742614)
> debugger attached to itself are sentient?

No standard debugger is capable of being attached to it's own instance.

Nor does a self-bootstrapping compiler point towards it's own instance.

I think from these two examples I should clarify:

A process that processes itself as an input, is definitionally self-aware.

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