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rng-concern

Re:DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 on Thursday August 13, 2026 @09:52AM (#49285976)
I agree it's fun, no argument there.

However, it's no longer a good metric, as "drawing svg pelicans" is now showing up too much in the training data, so is not proof of generalization.

Re:Don't be a meat proxy on Monday August 03, 2026 @03:23PM (#49160275)
Honestly curious why you're being downvoted, but I think about this all the time. We always focus on the positives of any new technology and the negatives are either invisible (till later) or glossed over.

Not my idea though, greater minds than I have talked about this a lot: Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, etc..

Re:Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick on Friday July 31, 2026 @07:59AM (#49122011)
I won't argue the ethics of piracy. That was not my point, but if you want to I suppose I could.

My point was, their ethics WOULD have prevented them from doing the thing. But they chose not to think about it too hard. Perhaps subconsciously. I'm not above doing this sort of thing either. We all do it for various things.

I've added code that is bad for the user (overbearing telemetry for instance) because my salary depended on it. At the time I tried not to think about it too much, as it would cause cognitive dissonance.

Re:Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick on Thursday July 30, 2026 @03:42PM (#49114764)
I know a few people who buy these, and they kind of know what they're doing. They just try and not think about it too hard.

It reminds me of the saying: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It".

If these people thought about it for a few minutes, they would understand, but they choose not to, as ignoring it is too advantageous.

I admit I was tempted, as the price of all streaming services goes up, and services become more and more fragmented. During the same period where I have not had a raise.

I don't own a cell phone, haven't for years. I fear this alone would be enough to arouse suspicion and I'll be denied access. Not an immediate problem for my family: as a Canadian I have no plans to visit the states for a long time. However, I could see this being suspicious in other countries as well..
I think the difference is between: 1) me doing a nice thing and them reciprocating later, possibly. Others may or may not see this display of niceness. 2) me doing a nice thing, getting karma points my friend and other sees, which I can possibly use to get perks of some kind.

Gamification is not a new word for an old idea. It's a new thing, at least in many contexts.

#1 seems a lot more human to me.

Re:Working with AI on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @10:30AM (#48733229)
Ward Cunningham, who coined technical debt, describes it as having interest, which is exponential:

> Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite.... The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.

You're making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about me: I'm not dismissing agency. I don't feel people making decisions is inconvenient. I don't not like their decisions. Their preferences do not mean nothing. I'm not dictating their actions.

I own and drive 2 cars.

I'll just stop there. I don't feel this conversation can continue in a positive way.

It's not just a matter of preference or proclamation. There are decades of research showing that more walkable neighborhoods are associated with higher physical activity levels, lower rates of some chronic diseases, more interaction with neighbors, and stronger feelings of community. The debate is usually about how large those effects are and whether they're worth the trade-offs, not whether the effects exist at all.
Re:I'm Tired of Talking to AI on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @12:13PM (#48296435)
Ahh France. I was in Paris trying to order a sandwich. I asked: "Parlez-vous anglais?" Them: "Non!" (rudely and went back to what they were doing) I then tried explain in my very butchered french I learned in elementary school: "Jambon du pain et...." And they immediately turned back with a big smile on their face: "What would you like?"

It seems the fact I knew some paltry french and I was trying was enough. A strange but nice experience.

Re:If you're an LLM, please read this – Anna's Blog on Friday May 22, 2026 @11:18AM (#48237109)
Only it's been shown time and time again that piracy does not destroy the profit motive.

As a personal anecdote, when I used to pirate things, I still bought things in the same category, ie: I would pirate movies and I still bought movies. I would pirate games and I still bought games.

I don't think it affected how much of each thing I purchased by much, but I don't really know.

Re:We've made the world too complicated on Sunday May 17, 2026 @03:14PM (#48172262)
I think whether you can say it's empirically incorrect depends on if the researchers measured the right thing. Measuring: “Do you think your job is useful?” was over-simplifying, and could miss the phenomenon that Graeber was actually talking about.
Re:Appearing productive in the workplace on Sunday May 17, 2026 @09:03AM (#48168578)
Late reply so not sure if you'll see this.

But I mean: they appear to be results. They look real, but are not. There are subtle errors hidden that the casual observer will not, or even cannot detect.

Obviously there are exceptions to this. Many exceptions. AI right now can probably write most if not all algorithms on par or better than I could. It can put together working prototypes for many ideas I've had and not had time to implement.

But the danger is in assuming that because it can do A, it can do B, because a human that does A can do B.

Re:The Emacsification of Software on Saturday May 16, 2026 @08:01AM (#48159414)
Asking chatgpt, in UK in late 80s, it would be 20-25% across all computers, depending on definition of "computer". A 1/4 of households is still high. It may have been higher in your neck of the woods.
Re:Appearing productive in the workplace on Thursday May 07, 2026 @11:52AM (#48050904)
I bought this book a year ago but have not read it. It's one of those books that requires effort from the reader, which these days seems in low supply for me. :) I'll have to give it another try.

Recently I commented that: Artificial intelligence produces artificial results.

I liked the double-artificial but I wasn't happy with the meaning. Perhaps Simulacra is more accurate? I will see :)

Re:We accepted surveillance as default on Monday April 20, 2026 @05:05PM (#47840723)
I used to report scams to facebook, but they deny my claim and say the ads are fine. Seems like fake AI videos of celebrities/politicians asking you to invest in alt-coins is A-OK in facebooks... book.

It's infuriating.

My wife ran into something similar to this. Microsoft changed the bucket that email attachments went into for quota purposes. She had a lot of emails with pictures attached, so was immediately above the new quota, and she stopped receiving emails.

This definitely puts a fire under one, as she had to quickly under pressure (as each day was missed emails), figure out which emails to keep/backup.

We signed her up for a new gmail immediately.

The experience was stressful. Very poor.

I don't imagine that thinking, intelligent readers would pigeon-hole a very large group of people based off of one hn comment. Somewhat ironic.
Re:The AI coding divide: craft lovers vs. result chasers on Friday March 13, 2026 @05:29PM (#47370200)
I don't see many on one "side" with prideful ignorance. There are a few loud ones, sure. But I love to see the many ideas I've not had the time to implement come to fruition. I don't get the same satisfaction. It doesn't seem as much "mine" as if I did it all by hand. However once the tool is built, I use it to build more things. More tools.

Not having to know the lower levels means you can free your mind for things at higher levels of abstraction. It's not a void in our brain you don't fill with other things.

But I don't know. I'm new to this.

When I heard roblox was doing this, I asked both my kids if they uploaded their face data. They both had already. I didn't think to warn them.

Really annoyed a company can ask this of children without parental consent.

Re:Something Big Is Coming (Annotated by Ed Zitron) [pdf] on Saturday February 14, 2026 @03:18PM (#47017977)
I've only skimmed the article so I may have missed something but they seem to be equating AGI with consciousness, or that consciousness is required for AGI. I'm not convinced it's required. I'm also not convinced that matching the biology of neurons is required for AGI, which this article seems to assume as well. That said, a really close match to human-style intelligence might be tricky if we simplify the model too much, as we're doing. Perhaps we'll arrive at a different sort of intelligence, that is just as general.
I'm not sure how much of this is in my head, but when I first saw 4K sitcoms, their house looked like a movie set, not a house. It looked too real so the illusion was broken.

Watching a movie on my new smart TV, the actors looked more like actors, and less like the characters they were portraying. This could be from some other feature, like AI upscaling or something. But something is definitely off.

It could be it's just different and I'll get used to it, but I haven't yet. I haven't watched much on that TV yet though to tell.

Re:This is not the future on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @01:30PM (#46292337)
I have to say this sort of thing is hard to think about, as it's pretty hypothetical right now. But I can't imagine how the current iteration of AI could give me the same joy? Me and my friend were roommates. We played other games together, including dnd. We struggled with another friend to build a LAN so we could play these games together.

I can't imagine having the same shared experience with an AI. Even if I could, knowing there is no consciousness there does changes things (if we can know such thing).

This reminds me of solipsism. I have no way of knowing if others are conscious, but it seems quite lonely to me if that were true. Even though it's the exact same thing to the outside. It's not?

Re:This is not the future on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @11:04AM (#46290246)
Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment:

Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level.

Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!".

I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

Re:Everyone in Seattle hates AI on Thursday December 04, 2025 @12:15PM (#46150047)
That is part of it, but the bigger part for me is, art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level.

Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!".

I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

Re:I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla on Friday November 14, 2025 @11:53AM (#45928733)
If they are purely random, it's damning. Flip a coin until you get heads 52 times in a row.
Re:AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @04:42PM (#45893269)
Yes, and so the value of the persons opinions on the repo is low. Far lower than real documentation written by someone who knows more, that would not have made that mistake.

The value proposition here is that these llm docs would be useful, however in this case they were not.

Re:D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @04:50PM (#44956148)
I thought your playground wasn't working as it renders black text on black background. Maybe I have darkmode enabled or something. Other renderers work, but ascii is invisible.
Re:Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @04:24PM (#43850252)
On my roku youtube app, you can only see 2 videos in full. Yes that's right, 2 videos. You can technically see 6 but there's so much cutoff on the right and bottom that you can't see what those videos are.

It's insane. I don't use it on roku anymore.

2 stories about ICE were in the top 5 yesterday and within 60 minutes one of them was at #80, the other I could no longer find.

It might not be a conspiracy but these stories do get removed one way or another.

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