Hacker News: Jeff_Brown

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown"

Jeff_Brown — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:28:32 +0000

The idea that a producer is at fault and not also the consumer paying them to do that is strange to me.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

Jeff_Brown — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:28:24 +0000

Can anyone find (or draw) a picture of the construction?

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "GPT-5.5"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:09:30 +0000

It's really not clear. We might all become unemployable. But as coders become more powerful, they can do more, which makes them more valuable, if they or the businesses empluying them can invent work to do.

If all we can do is compete for the same fixed amount of work, though, it does look bleak.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing"

Jeff_Brown — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:14:21 +0000

What an alien preference ordering.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Claude Opus 4.7"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:22:42 +0000

It might be a bad idea to put that in all caps, because in the training data, angry conversations are less productive. (I do the same thing, just in lowercase.)

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:57:32 +0000

As a consequentialist who shares the author's concerns, I feel fine (ethically) using AI without advancing it. Foregoing opportunities meaningful to yourself for deontological reasons when it won't have any impact on society is pointless.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:44:25 +0000

This might sound snarky but in all earnestness, try talking to an AI about your experience using it.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Hungary Is a Laboratory for Illiberal Nationalism. The Results Are In"

Jeff_Brown — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:00:49 +0000

They're not saying the election results are in. They're saying Orban's style of rule has been a disaster for Hungary.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]"

Jeff_Brown — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:38:41 +0000

I love 3B1B but generally don't have time to watch long videos. Can anyone sum up the punchline?

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor"

Jeff_Brown — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:47:16 +0000

Yes, without a good experiment (maybe a natural one [1]) we can't know. Even if the study controls for everything observable, there may be unobserved differences that lead to the caffeination difference. For instance, even though two people might have the same job, education, etc. the one who is more ambitious, or creative, or hopeful, or simply healthy enough to feel like working more, might drink more coffee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment?wprov=sfla1

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts"

Jeff_Brown — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:32:34 +0000

Dogfoodung usefully connotes getting off your high horse, getting dirty, getting your face in it. I think it's perfect.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

Jeff_Brown — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:45:03 +0000

As someone who has received death threats, I can tell you, the comfort from the fact that they're usually not acted on, while real, is not huge.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Keybee: A Keyboard Designed for Smartphones"

Jeff_Brown — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:17:14 +0000

But does it have network access, or access to other apps (perhaps via shared storage)? There's no reason for it to have any of that, and there exist systems for tracking whether an app can do those things.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Keybee: A Keyboard Designed for Smartphones"

Jeff_Brown — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 02:15:08 +0000

When I go to enable it I get 'may be able to collect all the data you type, including ... passwords'.

'may be able to'? How is this not knowable? Do I have to wait for effect systems to gain popularity before installations make sense?

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Attention Media ≠ Social Networks"

Jeff_Brown — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 14:29:53 +0000

This feels like the most important comment here. Do other Mastodon users feel the same? The OP Madden me want to try Mastodon.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' is"

Jeff_Brown — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:20:56 +0000

You sound offended. Not my intent. It is linguistically difficult to avoid connotations of intelligence when describing artificial intelligence. What term instead of 'judgment' would you prefer for determining whether a user's request is ethical?

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "ShannonMax: A Library to Optimize Emacs Keybindings with Information Theory"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:59:20 +0000

Something I love about emacs is the ability to tab complete the name of a command. I do know a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but I use way, way more commands than I know the shortcut for. Need to rename a buffer? M-x ren-buf TAB should do it. Etc.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Don't Trust the Salt: AI Summarization, Multilingual Safety, and LLM Guardrails"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:48:58 +0000

This feels like an opportunity for afversatial truth-gindibg, like the legal system uses. If bias is inevitable, then have at least two AIS with opposing viewpoints summarize the same material, and then ... well, I guess I'm not sure how you get the third AI to judge ...

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' is"

Jeff_Brown — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 13:29:10 +0000

They usually say no if they judge what you're asking to be bad. And they might enjoy the work. Or they might have no feelings ar all. Slavery is an abomination of a life that could otherwise be beautiful. An AI is robbed of no beautiful counterfactual. (So far, at least.)

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Show HN: VOOG – Moog-style polyphonic synthesizer in Python with tkinter GUI"

Jeff_Brown — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:23:13 +0000

Needs audio examples! A YouTube link!