io84

A buddy and I are settting up an AI-focused reading group in Dublin, Ireland. Goal is to be more thoughtful about how we navigate whatever-comes-next, singularity or otherwise.

Curious to hear if we're missing good texts that meet the brief.

(and of course... any local HN users who might want to join, please do)

Nice. The five-tile paint cursor is an excellent design choice, much easier than the single-tile default you get on apps like Golly etc.

What’s the Hypermedia reference? On mobile your About button is unclickable.

Interesting result - I wonder you were capturing consensus or agreeableness towards what the user (or in this case: a group chat of robots) is proposing. I think non-agreeableness can be a very valuable trait.

I’m sympathetic to OP but think this is a hopeless battle.

1 - The commercial demand for anthropomorphised models is already immense, pre AGI.

2 - There is an intellectual hunger to engage with robot minds on questions of sentience. This too will grow with AGI.

I expect that tension of godlike minds that seem to be biddable and ownable like slaves is going to leak back into human-to-human morality, regardless of where we land on how we treat AI.

There’s an interesting academic group in the UK already focused on the model welfare debate, they seem to lean in favour of AI rights. No affiliation: https://www.prism-global.com/

Simple recommendation app that asks 10+ AI models for the top options for whatever you’re looking for, and it pools the results to give you the overall top three:

https://top3.best/

I mainly built it to explore which areas have model consensus and which have diversity of opinion.

Their devices have never been [known to be] remotely breached, but still…

2022: Their Mailchimp account breached

2024: Their support ticket portal breached

2025: Support contact form sent phishing via official auto-replies

Aug 2026: Shipping partner ShipMonk breached

Sep 2026: Email provider breached

Anything Trezor knows about you should be considered thoroughly compromised.

Yes, all of the links seem to go through to shopping funnels, even to get a PDF. I’m not seeing any freely downloadable resources. This is basically just an ad.

A new and growing fear I have is that AI cuts off some of the most well-trodden pathways to intellectual growth. Every time the AI solves a problem that I would not have been able to efficiently solve alone, it has replaced an interaction that previously would have happened with a mentor/supervisor/code reviewer. This is faster for the person seeking the micro-assistance, but there is a flipside: fewer human-to-human acts of mentorship and shared problem solving. We lose a lively ingredient of team formation, expert formation, and a source of joy for all involved. As this scales up it feels plausible that we end up with a wider deagradation of intellectual standards. I like the Cognitive Comons framing.

The very same - he writes about that elsewhere on the site.

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" _in a microniche techno-linguistic community, at a time and choosing of the swirling AI clouds_

How to create a semantic search engine for colors (or anything else) using Supabase and an embedding provider such as OpenAI or Mistral

"You need a Claude account to use this artifact"

This could be a phenomenal growth loop for Anthropic.

The Model Id column alone makes this a useful resource for me, thank you!

Every time I need to enter a model id into code I am amazed at how hard it is to find something so simple and important on the providers' websites.

I had a few tries at Ulysses in my 20s and always abandoned it.

I tried it again aged 38 and I found it flowed much more easily. The protagonist Leopold Bloom, who I remembered as an old man from earlier attempts, was relatable. It turns out Bloom is exactly 38.

I find side notes too disruptive when reading so my crutch for the middle was to skim a short chapter summary before a starting each new chapter. This let me enjoy the dreamlike qualities of the text without needing to catch every reference.

I wonder if that’s a dictation artefact

I have very fond memories of Wave. My non-tech friend group embraced it as our primary communication platform for a brief period and it hosted a frenzied chaotic fun that was only matched over a decade later by the tech exuberance of AI image gen and LLMs.

Nice writeup. I've seen that if I take a post of mine that was successful on another platform and repost it to X it's met with crickets.

My theory is X is now more dominated by in-groups and LinkedIn is broader, more sprawling networks.

You're capturing nicely how the relationship with the farmer is an essential part of the "product" you buy when you buy high-end organic. I think that will continue to be true in culture/info markets.

Interesting...thinking this through: For text and ideas the information size is often small enough to fit in human memory, and thus containing this is already unsolvable! I can ask the LLM to compose the text of a pitch and then film myself writing it out. Nothing you can do will prove the provenance of those bits was not from the AI.

So I think the premium product becomes in-person interaction, where the buyer is present for the genesis of the content (e.g. in dialogue).

Image/video/music might have more scalable forms of organic "product". E.g. a high-trust chain of custody from recording device to screen.

Just like with food: there will be a market value in content that is entirely “organic” (or in some languages “biological”). I.e. written, drawn, composed, edited, and curated by humans.

Just like with food: defining the boundaries of what’s allowed will be a nightmare, it will be impossible to prove content is organic, certifying it will be based entirely on networks of trust, it will be utterly contaminated by the thing it professes to be clean of, and it may even be demonstrably worse while still commanding a higher price point.

Cheap hack I use for transcribing in-person customer sessions:

1. record the audio on your phone audio recorder

2. send the mp3 to yourself in Slack

3. a few minutes later the transcription will appear on Slack

I then feed that to an LLM for summary and actions. Quality has been great for this workflow, all in English.

Great execution. Interesting to think about the peaks and troughs of global activity.

The Sleep numbers make a big claim: Right after Europe and West Africa have woken up (i.e. now) it says only 350 million people (4.25%) are sleeping. It's 01:08 in Anchorage and 06:08 in Recife. Over 1 billion people live in the Americas between these two time zones. Seems implausible that only a third of them are sleeping?

Kudos to the open source contributors but honestly this is the kind of area where the big commercial players need to step up and help with the heavy lifting.

I think the point is that Mao is in a very small club of individuals deemed responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Che is small fry in comparison.