Hacker News: abecedarius

New comment by abecedarius in "Claude's new constitution"

abecedarius — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:28:53 +0000

I'm on your side in this argument (approximately; asking what ethics even is and where it comes from can be productive but shouldn't conclude "and therefore AI agents working with humans don't need to integrate a human moral sense" -- at least that'd be a really bad conclusion to humanity as AI scales up).

Can't recommend letting an LLM write for you directly, though. I found myself skipping your third paragraph in the reply above.

New comment by abecedarius in "Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code"

abecedarius — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:21:48 +0000

Thing is, when you open a webpage it's clear that it may automatically execute code (Javascript, WebAssembly). What needs to be clear (and by default limited) is the authority of that code.

New comment by abecedarius in "There is no comfortable reading position"

abecedarius — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:14:59 +0000

The Screen of Damocles: could be a market for it.

New comment by abecedarius in "Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling"

abecedarius — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 23:19:18 +0000

Bookies determine the odds and typically refuse to take bets from skilled bettors.

A market is open to all, with the odds influenced by all participants. In established betting markets such as for stocks, pros dedicate their careers and their organizations to improving the public estimates emerging from the market (though not for the sake of that improvement).

General prediction markets might turn out bad, but the above isn't an argument why, it's namecalling.

New comment by abecedarius in "Flux 2 Klein pure C inference"

abecedarius — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 22:51:01 +0000

A suggestion born of experience: besides printing the seed for an image, add it to the image file as metadata. Otherwise, if you're me, you'll lose it.

New comment by abecedarius in "Chainalysis Successful Deanonymization Attack on Monero"

abecedarius — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 03:32:50 +0000

Thanks for explaining. I'm still confused: CakeWallet (and similar) were a reason to doubt the original claim. Are these "popular" wallets rarely used, or are you considering the nodes that they trust as equivalent to your own node?

New comment by abecedarius in "Chainalysis Successful Deanonymization Attack on Monero"

abecedarius — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 03:21:51 +0000

It was a form of "huh, interesting. I tried to quickly find some more evidence for this but failed."

If Claude as search engine were able to link to some backing (maybe like "we estimate around n nodes regularly joining the network, which roughly matches the order of magnitude of estimated users" ) -- that'd be great! I'd have said I was surprised but look what I found.

Instead:

- it couldn't dig up anything supporting, except that Monero sites encourage users to run their own node;

- one point it raised against was confirmed by another reply to my comment ("apps like CakeWallet, where their node is used and assumed as trustworthy"). (Claude listed the same and a couple more wallets it called "popular" with similar trust dependence.)

I agree with GP that just relaying a chatbot is rude. That's why I didn't do that.

New comment by abecedarius in "Chainalysis Successful Deanonymization Attack on Monero"

abecedarius — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 17:36:54 +0000

> running your own node, as most people do.

Huh, surprising -- it's very different from most people using most software. (Of course HN is not most people.)

I tried to fill myself in by asking Claude Opus neutrally "do most users of Monero run their own node?" and was told it couldn't find good data, it's community-promoted behavior, but there were multiple reasons for skepticism.

I have no idea, I'm just noting my surprise.

New comment by abecedarius in "A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z"

abecedarius — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 14:53:31 +0000

When they changed it is also when they misspelled his name. Opus got it right. I was surprised Stephenson took the misspelling as an AI tell.

ASI existential risk: reconsidering alignment as a goal

abecedarius — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 20:41:06 +0000

Article URL: https://michaelnotebook.com/xriskbrief/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43686078

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by abecedarius in "Show HN: Resurrecting Infocom's Unix Z-Machine with Cosmopolitan"

abecedarius — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 16:40:23 +0000

The UCSD system was indeed astonishingly, unusably slow. When I got to try it in high school computer lab, in the 80s, I was like "Did whoever ported it to this particular computer just totally fuck it up? WTF?!"

An Infocom adventure on a machine with 16k RAM also had frequent pauses to fetch from floppy, but it was much more tolerable.

Re verb lookups in Basic: you could use DATA statements and READ in a FOR loop for lookup. I don't know what was typical but that's what I recall from some examples.

New comment by abecedarius in "Cells are swapping their mitochondria. What does this mean for our health?"

abecedarius — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:10:11 +0000

Interesting -- you can keep mitochondria alive outside of cells? Are there papers on what they need for that?

New comment by abecedarius in "Nix Derivations, Without Guessing"

abecedarius — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:00:41 +0000

Maybe it's better now, but what I ran into in trying twice is that if you're not into installing by "curl | sh", then trying to build from source was an awful experience. It had out of date instructions for installing a whole lot of dependencies. I'd figure out one problem only to run into another, and another. Gave up both times, a few years in between.

New comment by abecedarius in "Brazil's government-run payments system has become dominant"

abecedarius — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 16:37:21 +0000

That doesn't sound small?

New comment by abecedarius in "Neural Graffiti – Liquid Memory Layer for LLMs"

abecedarius — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 16:33:37 +0000

IME both ChatGPT and Claude had a sycophancy problem, but I'm surprised by the claim it's more of a Claude thing. Is that the general opinion of people who keep up with both?

(I unsubbed from OpenAI after Altman's coup. ChatGPT was annoyingly sycophantic up to then at least.)

New comment by abecedarius in "AI 2027"

abecedarius — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:56:59 +0000

Good question. I tried to phrase a concrete-enough prediction 3.5 years ago, for 5 years out at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29020401

It was surpassed around the beginning of this year, so you'll need to come up with a new one for 2027. Note that the other opinions in that older HN thread almost all expected less.

New comment by abecedarius in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

abecedarius — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 17:37:23 +0000

Calling out names was an argument just for not dismissing AI as a thing "everyone knows" is fake.

Above you wrote "we all know the only real Intelligence ... is" as your support for attributing venial motives to people taking AI progress seriously. OK, now I know your basis for that claim. I've read three of the guys you mention, agree they're intelligent and except for Searle have some good things to say. But it's really unconvincing as support for an AI-is-fake claim, and especially for an everyone-knows claim.

New comment by abecedarius in "James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rotate Clockwise"

abecedarius — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 14:00:59 +0000

Yeah, the headline is misleading for just that reason. But rotation in 3d does have an unambiguous orientation which we call right-handed or left-handed (the "right hand rule" if you're unfamiliar with this). I don't know which orientation our galaxy's rotation has, the article only says it's opposite the majority in this sample.

New comment by abecedarius in "The Biology of a Large Language Model"

abecedarius — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 19:25:42 +0000

They're doing natural science on a thing full of complex purposive undesigned machinery. There used to be Artificial Life conferences -- the proceedings were pretty interesting. Now the objects of study are getting past a "gosh that's cute" level but I doubt anyone here's misled by the title.

New comment by abecedarius in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

abecedarius — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 17:42:47 +0000

If it's just cash-heads pushing a narrative, where do Bengio and Hinton fit? Stuart Russell? Doug Hofstadter?

I mean fine, argue that they're mistaken to be concerned, if that's your belief. But dismissing it all as obvious shilling is not that argument.