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Re:AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a da...
on Monday October 12, 2026 @04:27PM (#50062545)
Verdict is out on whether or not they'll survive after that. START expired this year and the powers that be are going gangbusters into nuclear proliferation. It always made the assumption of benevolence for the regulatory organizations, which probably won't survive the long tail.
Re:AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a da...
on Monday October 12, 2026 @04:16PM (#50062377)
How's that one going for humanity in 2026?
Re:AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a da...
on Monday October 12, 2026 @04:14PM (#50062342)
Waiting patiently for Anthropic's next month article, "LLMs made a fully functional intercontinental ballistic missile. We accidentally wiped Greece off the face of the Earth in the process. Tragically, we are not responsible."
Re:Ask HN: What has been bothering you lately?
on Wednesday June 17, 2026 @10:48AM (#48571318)
Many successful and failed revolutions happened without an economic crisis. For example, the American Revolution was led by an oligarchical class upset about taxation. The American Civil War is another example where a portion of states felt economically threatened and initiated conflict. The Glorious Revolution was almost completely ideological in nature, revolving around royalty and religion. It simply requires some powerful fraction of the country to believe they'd be better off under another ruling party, no one needs to starve for it to happen.
People who are experiencing unrest and idleness are easy to recruit -- and if you hang out with people ages of 18-30, you'll see there's no shortage of them.
Re:Southern Poverty Law Center indicted for fraud, money laundering
on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @11:25PM (#47858545)
Certainly checkbook journalism has had a past in the USA, but I don't recall anyone ever being charged with a serious crime over it.
Re:Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
on Friday October 17, 2025 @06:12PM (#45622747)
It's baffling to me. I was already making API calls and embedding context and various instructions precisely using backticks with "md". Is this really all this is? What am I missing? I don't even understand how this "feature" merits a press release from Anthropic, let alone a blog post extolling it.
Re:Meta Leaks Part 1: Israel and Meta, the Greatest Global Mass Censor...
on Monday August 11, 2025 @03:20PM (#44868342)
dang knows, it's his handlers who don't care.
Re:The Rise of Whatever
on Friday July 04, 2025 @09:02AM (#44464152)
open blog
> But yes, thanks: I was once offered this challenge when faced with a Ren’Py problem, so I grit my teeth and posed my question to some LLM. It confidently listed several related formatting tags that would solve my problem. One teeny tiny issue: those tags did not and had never existed. Just about anything might be plausible! It can just generate Whatever! I cannot stress enough that this is worse than useless to me.
The probabilistic machine generated a probabilistic answer. Unable to figure out a use for the probabilistic machine in two tries, I threw it into the garbage.
Unfortunately, humans are also probabilistic machines. Despite speaking English for nearly a lifetime, errors are constantly produced by my finger-based output streams. So I'm okay talking to the machine that might be wrong in addition to the human that might be wrong.
> It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. Bitcoin is the future. It’ll replace the dollar by 2020. You’re gonna be left behind. Enjoy being poor.
I mean, you were left behind. I was left behind. I am not enjoying being poor. Most of us were left behind. If we invested in Bitcoin like it was the future in 2011 we'd all be surfing around on yachts right now given the current valuation.
Re:Analyzing a Critique of the AI 2027 Timeline Forecasts
on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @04:23PM (#44370631)
I think the author is right about AI only accelerating to the next frontier when AI takes over AI research. If the timelines are correct and that happens in the next few years, the widely desired job of AI researcher may not even exist by then -- it'll all be a machine-based research feedback loop where humans only hinder the process.
Every other intellectual job will presumably be gone by then too. Maybe AI will be the second great equalizer, after death.
Re:What Google Translate Can Tell Us About Vibecoding
on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @12:41PM (#44311377)
I'm using o3 and Gemini Pro 2.5, paying for the high tier subscriptions. The complaints I get are from native speakers -- editors and end consumers. The LLMs tend to overfit to the English language, sometimes make up idioms that don't exist, use false friend words (especially verbs), directly translate English idioms, and so on. I've translated several book length texts now and I've seen it all.
Re:What Google Translate Can Tell Us About Vibecoding
on Wednesday June 18, 2025 @09:13AM (#44309614)
It's funny -- I independently implemented the same thing (without vibe coding) and found it doesn't actually work. When I ended up with was a game of telephone where errors were often introduced and propagated between the models.
The only thing that actually worked was knowing the target language and sitting down with multiple LLMs, going through the translation one sentence at a time with a translation memory tool wired in.
The LLMs are good, but they make lot of strange mistakes a human never would. Weird grammatical adherence to English structures, false friend mistakes that no one bilingual would make, and so on. Bizarrely many of these would not be caught between LLMs -- sometimes I would get _increasingly_ unnatural outputs instead of more natural outputs.
This is not just for English to Asian languages, even English to German or French... I shipped something to a German editor and he rewrote 50% of the lines.
LLMs are good editors and suggestors for alternatives, but I've found that if you can't actually read your target language to some degree, you're lost in the woods.
Re:Marines mobilized in response to LA protests
on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @09:58AM (#44236888)
50 people raiding a Nike store in LA isn't even beyond local news lol... you can find hundreds of videos online of this happening on a regular basis for the past decade.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/group-50-people-shoplif...
Re:US defense secretary circumvents the official communications equipment
on Thursday May 01, 2025 @11:24AM (#43858952)
> That's possible I suppose, but do you have any evidence of that
Yes, in the chat where a reporter was accidentally present, many of the messages were set to be disappearing. I don't know why anyone would do that if not to avoid recordkeeping laws.
> The images of the text chain show that the messages were set to disappear in one week.
https://apnews.com/article/war-plans-hegseth-signal-chat-inv...
Further, Project 2025 suggests bypassing federal record keeping legislation by simply holding in-person meetings without record.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxe55mU4DA8
Oddly, the Project 2025 training videos that presumably the members of the executive cabinet have seen say _not_ to delete messages or set messages to auto-deleting _because_ that would be in violation of federal record keeping legislation.
Re:DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sou...
on Friday April 25, 2025 @02:57PM (#43797340)
Wired reported that his might be happening previously, but this is a separate report assembled by CNN. Please kindly do not report as dupe.
DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say
Re:Hegseth had an unsecured internet line set up in his office to conn...
on Friday April 25, 2025 @02:53PM (#43797302)
It also doesn't make it true. As other people mentioned, there doesn't seem to be anything backing up the claim and others have contrary experience.
Re:Hegseth had an unsecured internet line set up in his office to conn...
on Friday April 25, 2025 @09:26AM (#43793345)
Legit can't tell if this is a real comment or someone put the article into an LLM with the prompt "Use technical jargon and an authoritative tone to make a response to this article justifying the SecDef's decision to have an unsecured line installed." I can't find anything online referencing unsecured lines being referred to as "unattrib".
Re:US Government threatens Harvard with foreign student ban
on Thursday April 17, 2025 @06:20PM (#43722848)
I didn't mention Nazism, I said _fascist salute_. The fascist movement that was popular earlier in the 20th century and led to Nazism, but is not exclusively limited to it. The adoption of the "Roman" salute was from Italian fascism, which the Germans borrowed.
Re:US Government threatens Harvard with foreign student ban
on Thursday April 17, 2025 @04:29PM (#43721871)
This. When dang replied to a post about Elon's fascist salutes as being "celebrity troll moves"* I knew that hackernews moderation was no longer politically neutral, if it ever was.
Re:Whistleblower details how DOGE may have taken sensitive NLRB data
on Tuesday April 15, 2025 @01:01PM (#43695574)
Personal enrichment? There's already an enormous amount of evidence here to indicate that DOGE is working on behalf of a foreign nation state. It is seeming more and more likely that members of the DOGE team are simply secret agents for a foreign military.
> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis.
Re:Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching o...
on Saturday March 29, 2025 @09:30AM (#43515383)
Correct. It's classic Russian propaganda-style whataboutism and deflection.
Re:Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching o...
on Saturday March 29, 2025 @09:20AM (#43515312)
"Let's do all of this, but much worse, with more corruption, and more violently" is a weird response to perceived political grievances. Like how Leninist critiques of the Russian monarchy and subsequent revolution lead to a system at least as bad as that of the Tsar.
If you want to deconstruct the status quo, make sure that your outcomes will be actually be better for you. Even Stalin ended up as a victim of his regime at the end of days, his physician ending up arrested and being interrogated while his health declined.
Re:I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks
on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @09:54AM (#43412038)
There's always https://news.ycombinator.com/active
It's embarrassing that to get to the content that technofascists don't want you to see, you need to visit a secret URL.
Elon Musk's DOGE Posts Classified Data on Its New Website
Re:DOGE Exposes Once-Secret Government Networks
on Friday February 14, 2025 @12:01PM (#43050448)
Is there some way to see these dupes? I always search first but when searching this URL, it didn't come up.
Seems I can't delete this now either so...
DOGE Exposes Once-Secret Government Networks
Re:DOGE Staffer Is Trying to Reroute FEMA Funds
on Thursday February 13, 2025 @12:57PM (#43039017)
> There have been no AI drones in that war. Drones are reigning free because nobody established air superiority.
This hasn't been true since last year, when automated targeting systems began entering the battlefield. They still are not as widely deployed as personnel controlled drones, but over time it appears to be shifting towards battlefield autonomy. Nuclear weapons are a cudgel, automated human-free weapons are a scalpel.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/missiles-...
Re:DOGE Staffer Is Trying to Reroute FEMA Funds
on Thursday February 13, 2025 @11:14AM (#43037461)
I see. My opinion is that nuclear weapons are more or less useless in a modern conflict, as has been observed in the Russia-Ukraine war with endless Russian sabre-rattling. The collateral damage from nuclear weapons makes their usage suicidal, and in the case of the US, states breaking away from the Federal government would also inherit a nuclear arsenal -- leading to a stalemate.
The Russia-Ukraine war has convinced me that artificial intelligence driven drone warfare has rendered nuclear warfare obsolete. The drones act as a force multiplier which can mass target the enemy with little collateral damage.
Re:DOGE Staffer Is Trying to Reroute FEMA Funds
on Thursday February 13, 2025 @09:59AM (#43036502)
It seems like there is a winner-takes-all opportunity here to me. Since many of the billionaires in the US have made the decision to align with Trump, if many of the states unify and can overthrow the government, they also stand to separate the billionaires from their wealth.
The Federal American government looks like it's playing a dangerous game -- or at least makes the assumption that individual states within it will be unable to mount a concerted response. With inflation and unemployment rising, and hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of jobs, it's possible state governments may become radicalized.