Hacker News: EarlKing

New comment by EarlKing in "Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI"

EarlKing — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 08:22:13 +0000

The word "relying" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The point I'm making is that "relying" on human experts, as opposed to AI experts, is the same thing: you're giving up your autonomy for the illusion of productivity, and in the process courting disaster. To put it another way: Every single one of you who downvoted me has clearly never read Frank Herbert's Dune. Machine-think is not limited to machines.

New comment by EarlKing in "Kentucky man becomes the first humanist granted religious exemption from AI"

EarlKing — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 13:59:46 +0000

The ironic part is that this same guy undoubtedly relies on the expertise of millions of human agents and sees absolutely nothing wrong with that.

New comment by EarlKing in "A new model for open source: closed to pull requests, open to remix"

EarlKing — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 01:48:01 +0000

Sounds like the OpenBSD model to me. Actually, if I'm honest, that's really just the Freeware model of Andrew Fluegelman. You get the program, the source code, the right to make modifications and release them, just don't expect upstream to incorporate them. (If confused, go look up PC-TALK.)

New comment by EarlKing in "Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks"

EarlKing — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:22:08 +0000

Whether you're stowing, picking, diverting, or working the dock... you literally just grab someone to cover your position for a few minutes. That's it. There are process assistants present who can literally do that if they have to. There's no reason to deny a pregnant worker this except "This is making my day harder because I can't run my aisles at an absolute minimum head count and still stand around with my cart pretending to do useful work".

The only real case I could see where grabbing someone to cover you while you take a bathroom break might not work is, for example, someone working as a yard marshal... since that's not something everyone gets trained for, so the pool of replacements is smaller (including among process assistants).

So unless this worker was working the yard... there's not a lot of reason to deny them bathroom breaks... and that goes whether they're pregnant or not honestly.

New comment by EarlKing in "Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks"

EarlKing — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:17:18 +0000

...while looking like a discount Lex Luthor.

New comment by EarlKing in "Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks"

EarlKing — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:02:43 +0000

When it comes to a company known to hire union-busters rather than deal with a burgeoning union in good faith? Yes. Yes they do.

New comment by EarlKing in "Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM agent"

EarlKing — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 01:25:10 +0000

Yeah, there's no question this one's over-the-top when it comes to trying to gross out the reader, but I'd like to think people can overlook that.

New comment by EarlKing in "Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM agent"

EarlKing — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:42:04 +0000

For everyone downvoting: It's literally a story about the creation of mankind's first artificial general intelligence, Prime Intellect, and the consequences of that discovery.

New comment by EarlKing in "GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2"

EarlKing — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:34:36 +0000

"I come here to code GNU Hurd and chew bubblegum, and I got a whole lotta bubblegum..."

New comment by EarlKing in "The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing"

EarlKing — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:33:39 +0000

Clearly the writers should be subject to a Voight-Kampff test just to be sure.

New comment by EarlKing in "GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2"

EarlKing — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:31:09 +0000

Fun fact: Duke Nukem Forever shipped before GNU Hurd.

New comment by EarlKing in "Stolen Buttons"

EarlKing — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:46:46 +0000

I suppose this is a healthier hobby than stealing hotel towels and ashtrays.

New comment by EarlKing in "The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]"

EarlKing — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 06:04:51 +0000

> How is this not obvious to everyone?

Because everyone's thinking around intelligence is incredibly muddled by a variety of factors, and no one is particularly motivated to actually correct anyone's mistaken notions on the matter.

New comment by EarlKing in "Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained"

EarlKing — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:54:39 +0000

> stopping child sexual abuse

> suddenly touches everyone

..............I see what you did there.

New comment by EarlKing in "The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows"

EarlKing — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:48:00 +0000

Allow me to introduce everyone here to a new definition (original content, donut steel):

qontouria, n. The feeling of having your work passed off as someone else's.

New comment by EarlKing in "Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures"

EarlKing — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:16:38 +0000

If only those 1.3 million signatories pledged to never buy from a company that Kills Games again...

New comment by EarlKing in "What the fuck happened to nerds"

EarlKing — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:32:12 +0000

Simple: These aren't nerds. These are grifters selling you a product using product packaging (nerdface) that you find appealing. Enjoy your purchase.

New comment by EarlKing in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

EarlKing — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:29:23 +0000

The deep desert. As far from the pyons as the sands go.

New comment by EarlKing in "A jacket that harvests drinking water from the air"

EarlKing — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:18:25 +0000

I don't know about the rest of you, but if somebody spots Shai-hulud out in the Sahara I'm outta here.

New comment by EarlKing in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

EarlKing — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:18:51 +0000

Attesting who is responsible is more of that "bullshit most of us didn't ask for". I'm not interested in identifying myself so some cretin can know whether I am, or am not, an AI... particularly when the vast majority of posters on any platform act like NPCs anyway.