Hacker News: SamoyedFurFluff

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

SamoyedFurFluff — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:31:02 +0000

Doesn’t one major fund reducing investment in fossil fuels and increasing investment in renewable energy precisely migrate towards the notion of helping solve demand and encourage technological breakthroughs and innovation?

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

SamoyedFurFluff — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:19:23 +0000

Generally, academia has always had a measure of bias to it. However the bias was never so blatant and never so against producing an environment where good research could feasibly be created. The vast majority of research is non political increments of existing non political increments where the main conflicts are personal beefs among flawed individual PIs and maybe being asked what fig leaf one offers to ensure that the funding doesn’t just go to a bunch of white wealthy straight men. Once you have funding you can be set for years to focus on your work, assuming you don’t do something dumb like make sexist or racist remarks, and even then your funding is generally secure you just might not get a new round 3 years later(probably will though because controversies die pretty fast).

I know a lot of hay and media exists about how academia is yadda yadda biased and anti intellectual. But of course a lot of that is cherry picked examples of controversial figures or individual missteps among individual institutions. This is a bit like taking a classroom with one rowdy asshole and then declaring the whole school must use physical violence as discipline from now on.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

SamoyedFurFluff — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:44:35 +0000

I believe the evidence claimed is that there aren’t better outcomes for smart kids. Schools that claim they have better outcomes just selected for kids that would always have better outcomes. Like if I claimed my basketball team has better outcomes because I got to make sure all my players were above 6 foot. These 6 foot players don’t necessarily benefit from being in a team with other 6 foot players, but I’m saying people should apply for my team because I’m doing so much better than the team that can’t make those weeding out decisions. I’m intentionally conflating the success of my capacity to select for success with my capacity to coach a team.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters"

SamoyedFurFluff — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:01:59 +0000

I think games don’t have to be fun. There’s plenty of games where fun would be super inappropriate and yet the games are very popular. This applies to a lot of psychological or survival horror games. I think better is that a game must be compelling. There must be something encouraging you to play more, more so than any frustration or conflict the game introduces.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches"

SamoyedFurFluff — Mon, 18 May 2026 20:23:37 +0000

Then we are at an impasse, because here is a guy who has been accused of rape actively doing a speaking gig, so…

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches"

SamoyedFurFluff — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:40:09 +0000

Note that I was not speaking on the guilt or innocence of any specific person, just pointing out that when it comes to committing sexual violence the incentives to make accusations don’t appear to actually mete out as is claimed because the people who are accused rarely, if ever, have any actual negative consequences.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches"

SamoyedFurFluff — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:01:56 +0000

There really isn’t that much incentive to accuse a much wealthier man of rape. Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so.

If you’re so confident it’s a solid way to get ahead, please go ahead and try it yourself.

LLMs Don't Understand BGP. Here's What It Takes to Change That

SamoyedFurFluff — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:08:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.supertrace.ai/blog/llms-dont-understand-bgp

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978805

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Live Updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman's Court Battle over OpenAI

SamoyedFurFluff — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:18:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/tech/917225/sam-altman-elon-musk-openai-lawsuit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47967690

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division"

SamoyedFurFluff — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:33:39 +0000

I really like Ray Nayler’s work, who intersects his real experience in international politics with science fiction technology. His Tusks of Extinction uses the sci-fi notion of brain transfer and bringing back mammoths to explore the economical pressures behind poaching. His “Where the axe is buried” explores surveillance state technology with political bodies that feel like real modern nations.

Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? (2025)

SamoyedFurFluff — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:49:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/13/why-is-the-american-diet-so-deadly

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089546

Points: 22

# Comments: 53

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "AI makes you boring"

SamoyedFurFluff — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 04:46:37 +0000

No, sorry, a lot of the original post I was responding to was my bafflement that artists are supposed to be gatekeeping their strategies or techniques when it’s very evident to me that the art that moves me the most really didn’t gatekeep anything, and in fact the opposite. I’m not particularly anti LLM being involved in the creative process, I just had no idea wtf you were talking about with gatekeeping artistic intent. I also think these pieces fundamentally don’t work if the story they were telling was fiction. There are fictional stories like Pose that speak to very similar cultural moments but Pose is not Paris is Burning and that distinction is fundamentally important to the place of art in society. I’m very baffled that you’re seemingly saying as long as I am lied to about what I think is true, thats the same as a real work existing.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "AI makes you boring"

SamoyedFurFluff — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:29:26 +0000

Man this approach and philosophy about art baffles me because the greatest and most moving works of art to me couldn’t possibly be created by an LLM. For example “Electric Fan (Feel It Motherfuckers): Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate”, which is the only item remaining when the artists lover (Stephen Earabino) died of AIDS and his family threw out everything he ever owned leaving just the box fan. It’s just a box fan but there’s so much loss and pain in that installation. Same as “"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) ", which is just a pile of colorful candy that audience members are welcome to take from, whose original weight is the ideal weight of a Ross who diminished and died of AIDS.

There’s no gatekeeping in the processes of these works, no secrecy, not even really whatever you’re talking about. These works would in fact be utterly diminished by being produced by an LLM because they’re trying to capture the stories of real, existing people who had real, painful experiences. I have no empathy with a machine but I have all the empathy of a man who loved a man whose family hated him so much when he died they wouldn’t even leave his lover with anything more than a box fan and so he decided to declare the box fan to be art.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "Minnesota judge holds federal attorney in civil contempt"

SamoyedFurFluff — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 23:10:51 +0000

Iirc this is an attorney who cannot quit his job because he’s actually a military lawyer, and subject to military law (quitting is a dereliction of duty and comes with criminal consequences). It’s likely he was voluntold and is now stuck in an unwinnable situation.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging"

SamoyedFurFluff — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:58:41 +0000

Millennials are not the younger generation anymore. That refers to Gen Z and alpha.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup"

SamoyedFurFluff — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:37:28 +0000

The thing that makes me nervous is the statement that they plan to use AI. AI? The thing that is mathematically incapable of perfection, on finance information, for which perfection is table stakes? Not to mention all the privacy issues (although that boat has sailed).

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "UK to force social media to remove abusive pics in 48 hours"

SamoyedFurFluff — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:58:14 +0000

I think if I produced inappropriate images that are identifiable as a specific child victim, who obviously cannot consent to have inappropriate images generated of their likeness, I believe images and photos are a distinction without a difference.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "Rethinking High-School Science Fairs"

SamoyedFurFluff — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:49:53 +0000

I don’t think this is part of humans because so many of us genuinely chafe against the system. I think it’s because of power and hierarchy and signaling. It’s like when you play board games with a friend and then they turn it into a competition and then it’s not fun anymore. At least with a board game you can walk away. But if it’s your child’s future on the line you will be just as competitive even if you don’t want to be.

So long as there are humans who want to amass power in some way and treat it as a zero sum game, there will be other humans forced to play similarly. Prisoners dilemma.

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "The suck is why we're here"

SamoyedFurFluff — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 02:03:06 +0000

I think somewhere along the way something has gone terribly wrong in the way we allocate capital to incentivize behavior. Somehow as a society we incentivize (aka distribute capital to) the people who educate our next generation and the people who care for our elders less than the people who smoke weed on podcasts and talk for hours into a camera or a microphone…

New comment by SamoyedFurFluff in "I rebooted my social life"

SamoyedFurFluff — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 12:46:06 +0000

Can you name a few topics that you feel benefit from taking an abhorrent position as a way to understand the truth? I also deeply seek open ended conversations about incredibly thorny subjects but I almost never purposefully take a position to I consider abhorrent in order to do so. For example while I am curious about and want to understand antisemitism as a political movement, I don’t see how actually adopting antisemitic beliefs even as a thought exercise would make me understand them more. I find I much more benefit from trying to develop a framework of analysis based on a mix of books from experts (which help as a kind of a meta study crystallized into a person with deep expertise in a subject) and witnessing individual antisemetic acts to see if they fit into the metanarrative by the experts— if they don’t, why not, etc.