tourmalinetaco

Unfortunately, copyright won’t be up for most of these books in our lifetimes.

It’s especially bad when you look at the sources, and realize so many “high quality” sources have no concrete information to their claims, and there aren’t additional sources backing them because Wikipedia is not meant for “independent research”.

Wikipedia is, at best, a novelty for quick pop cult info, and as an adult I finally understand the horrors my middle school teachers warned me about.

I believe the more accurate statement is that technology can reduce the burdens of survival (better access to food, medicine, information) but cannot provide longterm happiness, and in some ways impair it (social media, mass surveillance, reliance on technology).

We are social beings, and technology in the last decade especially has been gearing itself towards reducing communities both physically and digitally. Less people spend time together, more people feel lonely and isolated, and divisions between people are at all time highs with glorification of death to the “enemy”. Forums are almost entirely dead, the feed of information is both nonstop while being useless, and we have few outlets to feel true connection.

Harvard’s happiness studies finds that standard of living only impacts happiness to a point before facing a sharp plateau and socialization takes over as a dominant factor in longterm happiness, according to my memory at least. And, while I don’t entirely agree with Kojima’s predictions in MGS2, the AI seeking to provide “context” for the feeble human mind as rate of information on the Internet increases was prescient, though humans have adapted to this (albeit suffering shorter attention spans as a consequence).

IMO a true utopia would be similar to the Enterprise: people socialize and enjoy a life with comfort by technology, not at the behest of social media or the collective consciousness of others. Unplugged and connected in a more meaningful way.

That’s because these aren’t intelligent like you, I, or even a dog. They are mathematical models formulating likely responses with no agency or drive. They appear to be intelligent, but they are the epitome of “fake it till you make it”.

They are not comparable to human brains as a whole, and are only somewhat modeled from language processing systems. Because their “existence” is bound by their prompt, they will only “desire” the completion of that prompt to the exclusion of all else, and even then they feel no joy in completion like even the most basic animal would.

The AI doom scenario will be exactly as you described: negligence or misuse by corporate or state entities via letting LLM agents run rampant without constraints, not from some magical machine spirit deciding to become whatever flavor of AI overlord you fancy. Up until last July OpenAI was running live cybersecurity benchmarks online and hacked HuggingFace due to poor limitation of the agent’s access and poor prompting in general, from my understanding.

One sounds scarier, I assume.

What must we “contain”? These are not autonomous intelligences with desires or free will. They require prompting and to be turned on beforehand, otherwise they’re glorified matrix math. They can only continue processing as long as they receive power, and we decide that.

They will attempt to cross airgaps, when we prompt them to do so, because they lack the natural capacity of planning or desire to do so without us. These are powerful tools but they are not human brains in a jar, they are mathematical models of humanity’s culture after reinforcement and guardrails.

The largest problem—as shown with the HuggingFace incident—is not the models, but in poor stewardship of automated tooling. If you don’t spend time considering the actual limitations you wish to impose upon a system, then you cannot be surprised when that system does something unexpected. The Morris Worm is perhaps the archetypal example, but even StuxNet was far more virulent than planned.

They were publicly posting to a search-indexed website with the intent of helping people. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that they understood that SO owned the messages and were already profiting off of them.

Sure, however the average game is not associated with quality output. The average game dev is not associated with quality output. Even high budget professional games like GTA VI are slop and probably have codebases that make the devs cry because of outsourcing and rushed production.

Games are not some holy monolith LLMs are encroaching on, and your favorites are not harmed because some random guy has an idea and an LLM can patch it together, even if he puts it on Steam. Even if there will be more games on Steam now of low quality, they will be easy to filter and the good games will rise to the top as it always does.

Besides, some of the most beloved games are inefficient, low quality dumpster fires by any professional programming standard. Just look at Bethesda games, or Roblox in the youth department.

The quality ship sailed when the consoles became locked down PCs and speeds were high enough that uncompressed assets could be streamed directly to the rendering pipeline and the devs could just yell “POOR” if your PC didn’t run it. It’s been dead so long we don’t even know where the bones are anymore because we didn’t put a grave marker.

It already is polluted with soulless slop, and has been for around the last decade. Even Nintendo is nothing but a slop mill. Indie is the last bastion, and I personally am happy that more people will be able to develop games and bring interesting ideas to the forefront, not to mention modding and reverse engineered will make games even more customizable.

I can’t speak to Opus, but I’ve noticed Gemini is also less enjoyable to talk to and 2.5 was really the peak there. I assume that they’re converging on business use-cases like programming, which harms the model’s ability to be creative and make unsuspecting connections.

Inverse for me. I can absolutely point to moments where AI has moved me or provoked a lasting response, and the main times GAI has actually bothered me is fewer from recall. The worst was probably “Space Heroines”, made by the “artist” Swaantje Güntzel. Words cannot describe the disappointment I felt at seeing it.

> This is left up to the states.

Sure, but almost every state blocks it for the duration of your time in prison, at minimum. A fair portion are longer, and some states make it almost impossible for federal felons to vote.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/can-...

> Our current president is a convicted felon.

That’s federal, which has no barriers. It’s left up to the states to decide how state level offices work, and being a convicted felon is a knife in the back of any potential political career. In NY specifically (where Swartz lived) you need a “Certificate of Good Conduct” or else you can’t run, and it would have taken (assuming he got convicted with 7 years as was threatened) 8-13 years for him to be legally able.

The exact specifics don’t even matter for Swartz’s case though, because for him it was more ideological than practical.

I agree with your point, but if John Doe is foraging mushrooms without experience of the local flora (which I doubt this archive contains), then John Doe is kinda asking for it.

The bigger issue in this context would be canning, such as incorrectly explaining the mechanisms to avoid botulism (acid and/or pressure canning), or perhaps incorrectly wiring in repairs. However, again, it’s best to practice with these prior to emergencies anyway.

It should be noted though, that the model does source its claims, so you can fact check it and should review this information regularly.

It already is a local archive that can be searched independently, but the LLM does RAG and is, according to them, 95% accurate. It can be useful if you don’t remember where to find a source/what words to search for, but even a durable device with Kiwix would be useless in a a lot of survival situations people imagine.

Undoubtedly useful in the right contexts, particularly for local repair or homesteading, but “survival” does imply that this would be more useful in an SHTF situation.

In the US you have two types of legal systems, the state and federal level. Within each, you have misdemeanors and felonies. Misdemeanors are the lower level and cover non-serious crimes (vandalism, theft, minor traffic violations), and typically are fines or imprisonment of up to a year. They have no bearing on your rights as an American on either level. Some federal misdemeanors exist (poaching at natural parks or defacing monuments) but most federal crimes are felonies, leaving misdemeanors to the state’s discretion.

Felonies, however, impact your rights as an American. You cannot own firearms, you cannot vote, you cannot hold public office, and you are a “high risk” economically and socially, making loans and employment difficult. State-level non-violent felonies can normally be expunged/sealed over time for otherwise lawful citizens, but federal felonies never go away.

He denied the plea deal because he, as an activist, did not want to suffer losing those rights. The prosecution wouldn’t budge and was adamant in making an example out of him because he was a figure of hacktivism. They also desperately wanted the CFAA (a poorly worded law written by tech illiterates in 1986) to maintain its broad power.

For further context, this was a response to Anonymous and other would-be hacktivists, coming right off the heels of Anonymous’s Arab Spring campaign and the hack of HBGary. The Obama administration targeted Swartz to make an example out of him and scare future hacktivists, coinciding with the arrest of Sabu (the co-founder of LulzSec) and him becoming an informant to round up the current group.

Apparently, at least some of the people involved were Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann. While pitchforks did come, they were in no way punished directly for this case and were allowed to ride off into the sunset at the minor cost of their political careers.

If I can’t realistically use it then I don’t care, especially when there’s no independent proof yet it works this well, given a cursory glance. If it trickles down into future developments I can use then cool, but it likely won’t because they want a moat. You don’t have to shield the poor defenseless multi-billion dollar megacorp from the genuine apathy they inspire.

If this is the best “frontier” they can achieve, then it’s no wonder they haven’t done anything groundbreaking in the space yet that produces practical results.

A well maintained beard is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

It’s here because OP wanted to show it (likely because they thought their project was “cool” plus wanted feedback). It was then positively voted on by the community. Like it or not, this website is a community-driven aggregator, not a curated commercial showcase. Over the course of a day I easily ignore 90% of the articles here, and consider most of them some form of “stupid” or “bad”. Unlike real life, ignoring the things you dislike here really lets them go away.

Let me remind you that you literally opened up with various constructive criticisms, providing value to OP and to others reading. That alone made the OP’s post worth it. Nobody made any claims that it was a product btw, you made that assumption yourself. OP could have—and should have—explained what they were aiming for here, but “Show HN” is literally for things people make, just because some people use it as free advertising doesn’t mean hacking away at personal projects is wrong, in fact it’s the opposite.

As for why I’m defending it? Because I want to, it’s that simple. I don’t need a complex explanation to defend it or myself, particularly when I made my thoughts clear earlier. What about you? Why do you feel the need to shield sleepybrett from criticism while he’s posturing over making a simple keyboard? Why do you feel the need to tear this project down over aspects you haven’t even looked at?

The only hilariously stupid thing is your lack of understanding. Even if this isn’t overly practical, I’m sure they learned a lot that will be applicable to further projects, and the few people this is practical for benefit. OP shared a cool thing they did. You don’t have to like the thing they did. You, however, don’t have a leg to stand on if you cannot articulate constructive criticism and just call it “stupid”.

Yeah, the way I see it short term is take the free/subsidized tokens while we can and the further out we go the cheaper compute will get for local setups.

These are great points, however, who said anything about buying a 100% keyboard in this style, or buying anything at all? I didn’t see a sales page, so it’s likely not intended as an off-the-shelf product.

Well… they are named “immibis2”, so it’s not as though they’re hiding it.

It is. Any 3DS can be jailbroken with CFW with a simple Internet guide and no physical modifications. As far as I know, the Switch CFW is locked to only V1 motherboards or modchips, making it far less accessible even if it is more powerful.

There was, once, but that has decayed rapidly alongside the centralization of the Internet. There are very few websites people even use nowadays, and many of them block legal expressions due to ideological and economic pressures. Payment processors and banks regularly restrict businesses and individuals from legal commercial activities, examples are Pornhub/MindGeek, Steam, and firearm dealers.

There is also now a precedent for T1 ISPs to block whatever legal websites they wish, and there is little recourse to be had there either. Not to mention arbitrary legal pressure for ISPs is also precedent now due to Judge Katherine Polk Failla.

On top of that, several EU countries have been using DNS blocks to prevent piracy and access to “bad” websites for ages, which has further been eroding the Big-I Internet into various separate internets.

https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police...

https://torrentfreak.com/dns-resolver-quad9-will-leave-franc...

I suppose you need it spelled out again, since apparently this is a difficult concept for you to grasp.

The optimal—defined by MW as “most desirable or satisfactory”—amount of fraud is zero. The optimal target—synonymous with amount in this context—of vehicle deaths is also zero. The realistic value for either statistic is non-zero. You even said “when faced with the realities”.

You’re the only one not getting what is basic logic and definitions. Or more accurately, you are getting it, but you’re refusing to accept that your imprecise language was incorrect. You misused optimal when you meant realistic.

I believe several centuries of legal precedent disagree with that statement, but perhaps I am only imagining things.

Now, one can say that the government owns all of the land and can do with it as it pleases, but that is different from all land being public.

I find it quite ironic. They aren’t nazis in the strictest sense of the definition, but even saying they’re authoritarian is an understatement, and they frequently pull from the same playbook. One cannot even legally criticize or insult politicians in Germany under Section 188, because the qualifier that it must make their job “substantially more difficult” is essentially ignored when it comes to pressuring citizens.

They make it rather clear they hate their constituents, and the German people are starting to realize that.

Being able to claim the credit can be a lot of the motivation for any project, vibe coded or not. The Princess Crown translation is a great example. The two OG devs sat on it for a decade and largely abandoned it, a guy forked their open source code and had it finished to 1.0 in a few months. The OG devs crashed out that someone else used their open source code, abandoning their translation and saying they could “no longer find joy” in it.

They sat on a project since 2012 and, in my cynical view, didn’t want to finish it because then they’d stop being “the guys translating Princess Crown”, and this section of the hacker scene seem to have some asinine unspoken “claim” courtesy, where you don’t make competing projects, so they could own the claim and not actually put the effort into finishing. To my knowledge the new dev didn’t use LLMs either, so that wasn’t even a force multiplier in this respect.

Likely audiobooks too, which certainly wouldn’t help the dramatic tone.