Hacker News: Jiro

New comment by Jiro in "Apparently Google hates us now"

Jiro — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:13:25 +0000

They're a private company, they can ban whoever they want.

Or at least that's what I heard a few years ago when it was politically incorrect people complaining about being banned with no accountability. They're a private company, it's their servers. You may not even be paying anything. So they can do anything they want to you and you have no cause for complaint.

New comment by Jiro in "FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive"

Jiro — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:38:56 +0000

People always use that link as reference to say that Internet Archive ignores robots.txt but it only actually says they are ignoring it for government sites. It suggests that they might do it for other sites in the future (of 2017), but does not actually say that that they have done it.

https://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims... which is a year later mentions that they have an automated process which is still following robots.txt for displaying old pages where the robots.txt was added later.

https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/ does say they follow it for scraping, but this is phrased in such a way that would still be true for past sites whether or not they changed the policy. There is a page https://www.sysjolt.com/2021/archive-org-no-longer-honors-ro... which claims they don't follow it, but the site owner misspelled "robots" as "robot".

New comment by Jiro in "Meta deletes popular 1M follower account after Kuwaiti request"

Jiro — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:28:33 +0000

Which is true here, except "do anything you want" is "be displeasing to Kuwait".

It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.

New comment by Jiro in "I Bought a “Junk” PSP From Japan"

Jiro — Sat, 16 May 2026 22:54:45 +0000

I would have gotten a Vita. It runs PSP games (especially when jailbroken), is faster, has a better screen, and also runs Vita games.

New comment by Jiro in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"

Jiro — Sat, 16 May 2026 22:48:56 +0000

I don't know what the status of this is today, but a number of years ago my biggest complaint about Gutenberg is that a lot of books had images added back when low resolution images were the standard, so you have a ton of books with image resolutions from the year 2000.

New comment by Jiro in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

Jiro — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:49:12 +0000

Could it be that cheating was enforced dispropportionately along racial lines because cheating happened disproportionately along racial lines?

New comment by Jiro in "California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy"

Jiro — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:44:33 +0000

No, it isn't. The book was written during the Great Depression. We're not in the Great Depression now. Pretty much nobody nobody is dying of malnutrition in the US and nobody is dying of pellagra specifically, because we've invented fortifying food with vitamins.

But the big difference is that the peach trees are being destroyed because nobody wants the peaches. That's the exact opposite of the quote, in which there are starving people clamoring for the food and the food is being destroyed to raise the price.

New comment by Jiro in "Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models"

Jiro — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:30:21 +0000

From that abstract it doesn't sound like they allowed for the possibility that the LLM could be trained to say "I don't know" for some things.

New comment by Jiro in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

Jiro — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:21:18 +0000

The system doesn't know that you're a smart person who will only say "I have a regular cycle" when you've had something that could reasonably be called a regular cycle. A lot of patients are stupid, and requiring a quantitative answer eliminates one source of stupidity. Yeah, this particular doctor knows you're smart, but I hope you can see what disasters might result if the procedure said "the doctor may skip this step if the patient is smart".

It's the same reason why the doctor will take your temperature, instead of accepting your word that you took your own temperature and it is normal.

https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/primary-care-checkli...

New comment by Jiro in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

Jiro — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:36:26 +0000

I asked three things. I asked it about Father Coughlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin) and it didn't mention that he was a radio broadcaster and claimed he was from Ireland. This may have been a complete hallucination, but I can't prove it, and I don't know how well known Coughlin was in 1930. I asked him about https://www.openculture.com/2013/12/ladies-home-journal-publ... and it hallucinated a text from Harper's in 1909. I asked it about the Lost World (1925 silent film based on the Arthur Conan Doyle book) and it hallucinated a film from 1923 that takes place in the Antarctic.

Me: Then why have I seen a film from 1925 by Arthur Conan Doyle that takes place in South America, and not a film from 1923that takes place in the Antarctic?

Talkie: Because your informant confused the films "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" and "The Lost World".

I then asked it:

Me: Tell me what books were written by Agatha Christie.

Talkie: Agatha Christie wrote "The Mystery of Choice", "The Secret Adversary", "The Man in the Dark", and "Open Country".

(Three of those books were written by other people.)

Me: When was the first postage stamp created?

Talkie: The first postage stamp was issued in 1840, and bore the effigy of the city of Berhn.

(Well, it got the year right.)

New comment by Jiro in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

Jiro — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:10:17 +0000

The US public domain currently covers up to the year 1930, which is probably the reason it cuts off at that year. To get a 1936 variant you will have to wait until 2032 for them to be able to legally train the model.

New comment by Jiro in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

Jiro — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:42:00 +0000

They wear masks to make it more difficult to arrest them (something which doesn't really apply to ICE).

New comment by Jiro in "Peers vote to ban pornography depicting sex acts between stepfamily members"

Jiro — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:41:08 +0000

A politician voting for a bill is legal. Giving money to a politician is legal. But giving money to a politician so he'll vote for a bill is not legal.

New comment by Jiro in "Introduction to Nintendo DS Programming"

Jiro — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:29:18 +0000

This should have a (2008) on it.

There is no reason to use a slot 2 cart nowadays and the state of the art for a slot 1 cart is the DSPico at https://gbatemp.net/threads/dspico-an-open-source-flashcart-... .

New comment by Jiro in "Binary obfuscation that doesn't kill LTO"

Jiro — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:05:07 +0000

The early Switches had an exploit in the Nvidia graphics processor that was so low level that the operating system can't be patched to get rid of it, so there are a lot of hackable Switches around.

New comment by Jiro in "Delve allegedly forked an open-source tool and sold it as its own"

Jiro — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:24:48 +0000

Using the GPL like this doesn't help unless you are willing to sue people. If you can't or won't sue people, all that happens is that the software with the GPL license is avoided by people who want to use it in GPL-incompatible ways but have a conscience, while bad people still take it and use it anyway, and since you're not going to sue them, they don't care that they're violating the license.

New comment by Jiro in "Colorado House passes bill to limit surveillance pricing and wage setting"

Jiro — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:35:14 +0000

The season is the same for all customers, so that isn't surveillance pricing.

New comment by Jiro in "Don't make me talk to your chatbot"

Jiro — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 03:35:28 +0000

Because if you charge for support but refund it if it's the company's fault, the company now has a big financial incentive to never admit it's their fault.

New comment by Jiro in "EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear"

Jiro — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 23:21:46 +0000

Failing to predict cold winters is not incompetence in the normal sense.

New comment by Jiro in "CD Projekt issue DMCA takedown notice against popular Cyberpunk VR mod"

Jiro — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 05:09:15 +0000

In the 9th circuit you would have to get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Star_v._FormGen_Inc. overruled.