Hacker News: Andrex

New comment by Andrex in "Religious scholars met with Anthropic"

Andrex — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:06:53 +0000

It's physical matter all the way down.

With that said, I've been thinking that consciousness is just mystery.

There's so much about the brain we don't know. Within that mystery, humans can read in all sorts of things. So we are conscious.

Machines are not a mystery. We made them, it's just numbers. They are not conscious.

If an AI can pull a confidence trick, I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is. "Chinese Room" problem, I guess? If the physical results are all we are able to compare, how do we define artificial vs real consciousness?

New comment by Andrex in "We're working on a new RuneScape MMO"

Andrex — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 13:32:09 +0000

Citation needed on jail time for WoW private servers.

New comment by Andrex in "GitHub's new dashboard experience now the default"

Andrex — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:51:31 +0000

For me!

New comment by Andrex in "The AI Race Just Got Awkward"

Andrex — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:14:44 +0000

Conventional wisdom is Google did all the groundwork with LLMs...

New comment by Andrex in "When did Google get so weird?"

Andrex — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 02:39:51 +0000

The creepiest part of Voight-Kampff in Blade Runner was the idea that I'd fail it (not imagining myself as a replicant, but still as a human).

New comment by Andrex in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

Andrex — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:07:52 +0000

My layman expectation would have been much higher. It's got no atmosphere refracting anything and it's closer to the source of energy.

New comment by Andrex in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

Andrex — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:05:30 +0000

I could also see some key decision-makers just being nerds that like space.

New comment by Andrex in "Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits"

Andrex — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:20:49 +0000

Someone should spend money on a marketing campaign teaching people how to be tech literate (while skirting the law, and making implications).

Someone like Nathan Fielder would have the balls for this.

New comment by Andrex in "Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits"

Andrex — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:19:26 +0000

"I didn’t realize Disney+ had twice as many subscribers as Hulu. Hulu has been around a lot longer than Disney+. Goes to show the value of the content mix."

Brand awareness is more likely. No one knows wtf a "Hulu" is outside the US, and even parts of the US too (it was never the biggest player).

Parents see "Disney" and sub for a free** babysitter.

**With all these price hikes this dynamic may have shifted.

New comment by Andrex in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

Andrex — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 08:58:21 +0000

Whether it was easy or hard to do, there is still massive misalignment happening here. Either with the AI itself, or OpenAI as a company.

New comment by Andrex in "What Sun got wrong"

Andrex — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:22:46 +0000

Haha, that's a fun fact. (Solaris+x86)+(Linux+PowerPC), what a setup.

New comment by Andrex in "Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy"

Andrex — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:16:12 +0000

> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

I thought I was the only one.

Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.

New comment by Andrex in "OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev"

Andrex — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:11:18 +0000

Or OpenAI just buys them outright. Buying your upstart competitor seems to be in the Silicon Valley Ten Commandments. The Fed whussed-out on breaking up FB and Insta last year, so there's never going to be any kind of remediation to worry about.

And for Jev, everyone has a price, and OpenAI's raised an historical amount of funding.

New comment by Andrex in "What Sun got wrong"

Andrex — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:37:34 +0000

And thanks to that lawsuit, we got to see Oracle lose (always nice!) and SCOTUS establish that using APIs constitutes fair use (awesome!)

New comment by Andrex in "What Sun got wrong"

Andrex — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:35:17 +0000

At least they had the intelligence not to sue Google. I wonder how much money Oracle lost on that debacle. (The policy loss is big enough to them on its own! SCOTUS made the right call.)

New comment by Andrex in "Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)"

Andrex — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 05:50:52 +0000

He must have had them at one point.

New comment by Andrex in "ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector"

Andrex — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 05:47:52 +0000

Because malice takes more intent and energy than passive greed. Malice is a human invention, selfishness is not.

New comment by Andrex in "ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector"

Andrex — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:58:51 +0000

> The entire ad tech industry may truly be an intelligence agency front. The lengths they go to track individuals is quite alarming.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained as greed.

The quiet part you rarely hear is that advertising is a smoke and mirror industry akin to throwing darts at a wall. The idea of "homing darts" that stick the target a percentage more of the time would be very attractive in this analogy.

Tech turns advertising from mostly a buckshot spread into something that kinda sounds like something solid and real ("Look, numbers! CTR! CPC! KPI! Our ad product WORKS! Paying customers for your business, guaranteed!")

Ad budgets almost never correlate with actual performance.[0] We're all just lying to ourselves that this business model is performing as expected, and I don't think a reckoning is that far off.

0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...

New comment by Andrex in "ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector"

Andrex — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:49:12 +0000

I was going to say, wasn't this supposed to be the default in Chrome by now? But Google reneged on it two years back:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-third-party-cookies-chro...

This disgusts me more than any of their recent news. There needs to be a lot more pressure on them to phase this out.

Maybe this article will be the small snowball that gets that started...

New comment by Andrex in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

Andrex — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 01:26:06 +0000

Putting aside the question of "why consume any media," and even admitting that I myself have seen hundreds of hours of General Hospital (don't ask), why consume this media specifically? Are people seeking this out or is it just TikTok algorithms?

Is it reductive to ask what the point is? Do fans get together and discuss plot developments? "I can't believe X did Y!" Maybe it's the future of media but to me it just rings hollow.