News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

timmytokyo

Re:Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews' on Saturday October 31, 2026 @12:16PM (#50317486)
I question the premise. In fact most of the religious fanatics I see these days are the ones willing to sacrifice their skills and their ability to think to the machine god.
Re:Proton goes all in on using AI on Thursday October 29, 2026 @09:45PM (#50298882)
Is it good security practice to replace engineers with product managers?

"This will be the last year that we hire engineers, and starting next year we hire what we used to call product managers, to build things with AI."

By the way, this is where the industry would like to go. Pay attention, people.

Re:Proton goes all in on using AI on Thursday October 29, 2026 @09:41PM (#50298862)
They're more like veal calves.
Re:Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance on Thursday October 29, 2026 @07:34PM (#50297767)
He's legally not allowed to have anything to do with the company anymore (except as a shareholder). But you know how that goes under the current enforcement regime.
Re:The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @08:58PM (#50189767)
At his daughter's urging, he went to a sketchy Russian clinic where they subjected him to an unresearched protocol: stop the medication cold turkey, then put the patient into an induced coma. Who knows what kind of number this did on his nervous system. Based on his subsequent behavior and illnesses, I think it's safe to say he's been permanently disabled.
It's a good thing structural and civil engineers don't design infrastructure this way.
Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @01:33PM (#50121589)
Re:X Is Bad, Though on Monday October 12, 2026 @05:53PM (#50063571)
Some people just enjoy writing and reading racials slurs, I guess. X is a nice home for them.
This is how you end up with a big ball of mud [1]. If the argument is that LLMs are just as capable as humans at building big balls of mud, then I'm not sure it's much of an endorsement of their use.

[1] https://www.laputan.org/mud/

Re:Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours on Friday October 09, 2026 @12:47PM (#50023224)
I hate to break it to you, but about those elections...
Re:From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4 on Saturday October 03, 2026 @12:02AM (#49941260)
Here's a sample of the site's headers. Note the heavy reliance on slop marketing-speak (rule of 3, X not Y, etc.).

"Compressed, not lobotomized."

"Dense, resident, yours."

"Local frontier inference, narrow on purpose."

"ds4 hardware fit: local, streamed and distributed."

The whole site says nothing with so many words. It's also got all the hallmarks of a typical vibe-coded web site (small all-caps text, highly sectioned content, silly animations). Why do people do this? It doesn't impress. In a few years, we'll look back on sites like this like we look at geocities sites today.

Re:When did Google get so f-ing weird? on Monday September 28, 2026 @12:38PM (#49880734)
Since you're here, can you comment on the problem of SEO spam and what DDG is doing about it? Just today I was looking for instructions on how to replace the cushions on my headphones. I typed into DDG the query "instructions to replace bose headphone pads" and it came up with pages and pages of links to SEO slop. The link to the actual Bose website containing accurate instructions was near the bottom of the second page of results.
The New York Times had a similar article a couple days ago [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/technology/agi-house-ai-c...

Re:Why is Hacker News like that? on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @06:50PM (#49823713)
In a real tug-of-war, the teams are balanced. In the HN tug-of-war, flaggers have an advantage because flagged posts are invisible to people who might otherwise upvote them.
Not sure there's a better avatar for the absurdity of AI slop imagery than the "cowboy on horseback". That's a pony with a child's saddle on it, and they've composited a grown man on top of it.
Re:AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult on Saturday September 19, 2026 @06:12PM (#49770523)
The Venn diagram has huge overlap.
Re:Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse on Thursday September 17, 2026 @07:10PM (#49747982)
Exactly. And companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are disproportionately populated by people deeply connected to Effective Altruism or the Bay Area rationalist movement.
Re:AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult on Thursday September 17, 2026 @02:45PM (#49744861)
War and Peace is shorter than HPMOR.

Anyone who knows anything about Harry Potter fandom in those years knows that its readers were always thirsty for something new in the Potterverse to read or be exposed to. By latching onto that universe's incredible popularity, Yudkowsky exposed a large number of young, inquisitive people to the ideas of rationalism. It was essentially a recruitment mechanism, one that was wildly successful. Many rationalists freely admit that their first exposure to rationalism was via HPMOR.

Re:AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult on Thursday September 17, 2026 @11:42AM (#49742477)
I don't think the argument is that their sexual practices inherently make them part of a cult. Rather, the argument is that it's very common for cults to include communal sexual practices that fall outside typical social norms.

Common signifiers of cults include:

1. Apocalyptic world view.

2. Charismatic and/or exploitative leader.

3. Insularity.

4. Esoteric jargon.

5. Lack of transparency or accountability (often about finances or governance).

6. Communal living arrangements.

7. Sexual mores outside social norms, especially around the leader.

8. Schismatic offshoots.

9. Outsized appeal and/or outreach to the socially vulnerable.

Rationalism checks most of these boxes.

Re:AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult on Thursday September 17, 2026 @11:36AM (#49742380)
Is it really a satire if the same woman in the photo (Aella) went on to have a "birthday gangbang" with numerous men, some of whom are present in the photo?
Ok, iPhone.
Re:One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire on Friday September 11, 2026 @12:08PM (#49660773)
Effective Altruism. Also the related Bay Area group known as the "rationalists". Effective accelerationism, while seemingly opposed to EA, is in fact the flip side of the same coin. Look up the term TESCREAL.

Members of these groups are deeply embedded and heavily represented within top AI companies. Anthropic is particularly impacted, as its leadership is almost entirely made up of EAs. One of EA's goals has been to get EAs hired at the major AI labs so that they can influence AI's development. If you ever hear people discussing their personal P(doom), you're listening to a discussion topic originated by rationalists.

The problem with your counter-hypothetical is that not only is it unrealistic, it's utterly impossible. No human would be able to do in such a short timeframe what the LLM did. Part of what makes the OpenAI move so egregious is how bullying it was. It was the big guy coming along with their nearly infinite resources and squashing the little guy who's devoted a good chunk of his career to the problem.
Re:Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one on Sunday September 06, 2026 @06:05PM (#49591416)
A shortcut that isn't visible in any of Finder's menus. Which makes it virtually undiscoverable.

Finder is full of these kinds of hidden secrets.

One must also consider the well-known biases and motives of the authors. They are going to do everything they can to create hype around threats posed by AI.

METR is a cog in the effective altruism machine. It was spun off from Paul Christiano's Alignment Research Center. Christiano is a well-known longtermist and AI doomer, who predicts a 50% chance that AI will end humanity once it reaches human capacity [1].

The author of this piece is also a well-known member of the Bay Area rationalist cult.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-researcher-ai-doom-50...

Re:U.S. State Department Pauses Immigrant Visa Applications on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @03:51PM (#49454848)
You forgot [INCOMPETENCE]
"The project is in no way consumed by politics."

https://bsky.app/profile/aly.codes/post/3mttrv3hjcc27

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