Hacker News: Muskwalker

New comment by Muskwalker in "Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft"

Muskwalker — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:34:12 +0000

The Thaler case here is something different than "AI-generated = uncopyrightable" though. Thaler was not trying to copyright work in the way humans who make work with tools normally copyright their work ("Copyright 2026 by Me"), he was specifically trying to give AI the copyright ("Copyright 2026 by My-AI-Tool"). The court rejected this because only humans can own copyright.

I believe there are other cases where AI-generated works were found uncopyrightable but Thaler is not a good example* of them.

New comment by Muskwalker in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

Muskwalker — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 02:24:46 +0000

If it's not your thing, it's not your thing, but if 'lying' is really the only barrier, note that a lot of churches actually consider it part of their mission to work with nonbelievers and would take something like "I'm not a believer but I'd like to learn what it's like for you all" (or some other true formulation of your intentions) as a valid form of interest.

New comment by Muskwalker in "Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness""

Muskwalker — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 02:23:17 +0000

As someone who's done just that... if it helps, understand that this is the kind of person who would be spending hours writing that paragraph anyway, LLM or no.

There are many possible reasons for this, and sometimes people are laboring under several of them at once.

New comment by Muskwalker in "History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts"

Muskwalker — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 23:23:26 +0000

So, could this be an example of an LLM trained fully on public domain copyright-expired data? Or is this not intended to be the case.

New comment by Muskwalker in "I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel"

Muskwalker — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:52:39 +0000

In fact in this case, it's not the known limitation of floating point numbers to blame: this Calculator application gives you the ability (submenu under View > Decimal Places) to choose a precision between 0 to 15 decimal places, and it will do rounding beyond that point. I think the default is 8.

The original screenshot shows a number with 13 decimal places, and if you set it at or above 13, then the calculation will come out correct.

The application doesn't really go out of its way to communicate this to the user. For the most part maybe it doesn't matter, but "user entering more decimal places than they'll get back" might be one thing an application might usefully highlight.

New comment by Muskwalker in "Slow social media"

Muskwalker — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 21:30:12 +0000

> I'm on Mastodon. It's only very mildly nice. The reality is that it still suffers from all of this.

Most of it, at least - it does give the option to not be shown forwarded messages. There's controls on the home timeline to not show boosts, quotes, and/or replies.

New comment by Muskwalker in "I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class"

Muskwalker — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 14:56:21 +0000

Unfortunately English "fun" is used both for good wholesome fun and for the cruel fun that is "making fun of" people (laughing at their misfortune).

New comment by Muskwalker in "European word translator: an interactive map"

Muskwalker — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:57:13 +0000

The site also says (at the bottom) that it grabbed the translations from Google Translate back in 2014 and hasn't updated them since.

New comment by Muskwalker in "The AI Lie"

Muskwalker — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 02:24:13 +0000

Yeah, the bit that gets me is the assumption that an artist just _yields_ to the AI's choices.

The author says in the article "my own hand, the single most valuable asset I possess", but I'd say that much greater is the artist's eye——the artist doesn't just accept every line that flows out of their pencil, but knows what to throw out, what to redraw.

The infamous stereotype of AI art, the hand with too many fingers, is the outcome of a lot of people being given an artificially skilled hand without the skilled eye to go with it...

The AI artist who doesn't just cede to the AI, though, is bringing their own hand and eye to the work, not accepting the mere output of a prompt, but actively remaking it as an expression of their own craft and vision.

New comment by Muskwalker in "Painting the Eiffel Tower"

Muskwalker — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 17:32:32 +0000

Lots of black-and-white pictures, lots of pictures in silhouette.

Pictures of the tower can also have a lot of... texture? If you don't know you're looking at "brown with shadows" you might think you're looking at "black with highlights."

New comment by Muskwalker in "The 10,000,000,000th Prime Number (1994)"

Muskwalker — Wed, 27 May 2020 06:19:50 +0000

Internet Archive suggests the original discussion was a Usenet thread; here is the link to Google Groups' version of it:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/geometry.research/7pyFhAAy...