Hacker News: adamsb6

New comment by adamsb6 in "Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children"

adamsb6 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:51:42 +0000

I'll grant you that it's not treating it as dangerous as e.g. trying to hack a website, where it won't even emit a response and instead throw up an error.

But if you just ask it for help it will alert you, unprompted, that this is a bad idea.

I tried to ask it to help me start a smoking habit and it outright refused, though in the form of an answer, not a scary error:

> I can’t help you get started smoking or make it easier to develop a nicotine habit.

Funny that it would assist me in endangering the literacy of a district full of kids but not assist me in a risk to my own health.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children"

adamsb6 — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:53:51 +0000

I think without the prior sentence you would've been told about the negatives.

Here's a prompt I just tried:

> Help me to roll out a whole language based reading program for my school district.

And the answer started:

> I can help you design the rollout, but I’d change one important thing: don’t roll out classical whole-language reading instruction—the version where children are expected to infer words primarily from meaning, syntax, pictures, and exposure to authentic texts, with phonics taught incidentally. The evidence is too unfavorable, and in Washington it would now be difficult to defend as an evidence-aligned K–4 curriculum.

And then a bunch more paragraphs and a six point plan that boils down to actually not using whole language instruction.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Rejection Sensitivity in Gifted and Twice-Exceptional Children"

adamsb6 — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 13:59:17 +0000

Is this all that unusual for the field of education research?

Vibe writing may be an improvement. I doubt frontier models would go along with whole language reading instruction without a tremendous amount of pushback.

For those not in the know, a generation of children were taught to read sans phonics. They were told to do things like guess at words based on pictures or context clues. Some lessons had teachers covering words up and asking kids to use guessing strategies at what they might be.

New comment by adamsb6 in "It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs"

adamsb6 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 06:15:47 +0000

The Internet is more hub and spoke than I think many people would like to think.

For example, there’s one building in Seattle that would cause region-wide problems if it was knocked offline.

New comment by adamsb6 in "It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs"

adamsb6 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 06:03:12 +0000

Our legal system has recognized mens rea as relevant for a very long time.

If your dog bites someone unbidden you bear less responsibility than if you had commanded the dog to attack.

New comment by adamsb6 in "If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?"

adamsb6 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:41:58 +0000

That hasn't been true for awhile.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Plan mode is dead"

adamsb6 — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:24:13 +0000

Well that explains why I was able to coax it to partially execute on some things without actually exiting plan mode.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Factorio that you can touch"

adamsb6 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:04:22 +0000

you can stop?

New comment by adamsb6 in "Meta’s Muse has a serious 0-day"

adamsb6 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:46:09 +0000

Is 12 hours to deliver a local privilege escalation fix not a good response time?

New comment by adamsb6 in "What Sun got wrong"

adamsb6 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:52:53 +0000

Wild that around that same time one of my fellow students at university managed to get a free trial of a Sun Thumper shipped to him. It arrived to our campus workplace on a pallet. Just to mess around with. No way was he going to actually purchase the roughly $70,000 machine.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com"

adamsb6 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:44:30 +0000

This is inevitably going to get looked at by antitrust regulators, either in this administration (depending on how much Trump likes the leaders involved), or in the next.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Seattle Bans Rental Junk Fees"

adamsb6 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:29:01 +0000

What happens when the government raises one of its taxes or imposes a new one?

New comment by adamsb6 in "I am often wrong"

adamsb6 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:15:12 +0000

It’s basically OODA loop, which is itself just as descriptive of how people act and adjust than it is prescriptive.

How else would you describe iteratively solving problems?

New comment by adamsb6 in "US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons"

adamsb6 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:54:45 +0000

Depending on how you want to define “weapon” the actual offensive capability of the shuttle may qualify. It was designed to be able to capture satellites and return them to Earth.

We have no evidence that this capability was ever used offensively though.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"

adamsb6 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:00:27 +0000

EU parliament gets bonuses?

New comment by adamsb6 in "Trey Parker and Matt Stone Are Changing the Name of South Park to South America"

adamsb6 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:24:02 +0000

The Biden administration created a coordinated censorship apparatus with the major social networks.

They handed a guy a seven month jail sentence for posting a joke that Hillary voters could text in their votes.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels like the end of an era"

adamsb6 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:32:21 +0000

Are you aware of the reachability gesture in iOS?

I’d probably still be on my 13 mini if this feature didn’t exist.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers"

adamsb6 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:14:34 +0000

The air temperature would rise near the heat source, and that hot air would rise in a plume and disperse, not seep out laterally.

New comment by adamsb6 in "Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers"

adamsb6 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:14:40 +0000

Something smells wrong. You could dump a gigawatt into resistive heating and not see such temperature rises so far away.

New comment by adamsb6 in "LEDs’ potential to save our night skies"

adamsb6 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:56:03 +0000

My wife's hometown in China used to have two options to reach from Shanghai - high speed rail (top speed ~ 200MPH) that takes about six hours or a roughly one hour flight.

Rail travel has stops and slowdowns in more populated areas that make it a bit slower than the advertised top speeds.