Hacker News: advael

New comment by advael in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

advael — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:27:14 +0000

Smacks of collusion honestly. Maybe Microsoft offered them some kind of deal

New comment by advael in "Most Americans don't trust AI – or the people in charge of it (2025)"

advael — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:09:51 +0000

I can't currently completely describe the US as a country with a free press, but I do speak english and not (yet) mandarin, and a lot of the information I was able to find about the guy was in fact from the english-speaking press. I was more looking for "does anyone have any better info on this guy or was he just mentioned because he's another foundation model CEO?"

New comment by advael in "Most Americans don't trust AI – or the people in charge of it (2025)"

advael — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:08:13 +0000

I have to say, while I can't seem to escape constant articles about the drama of OpenAI and Anthropic, about Altman and Amodei and at various times other figures in these companies, I had to look up Liang Wenfang and frankly what I do find seems to suggest that there may be some upsides to China's lower relative deference to CEOs than the US

New comment by advael in "Most Americans don't trust AI – or the people in charge of it (2025)"

advael — Mon, 18 May 2026 05:00:12 +0000

I had heard the folk etymology "stalker fan"

New comment by advael in "Googlebook"

advael — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:37:16 +0000

I've already stated what I expect

New comment by advael in "Googlebook"

advael — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:33:01 +0000

I'm pretty much at I need very strong justification to own something I haven't wiped and installed a clean and open operating system on. I'm certainly curious if this is easy to do with this device, but I suspect the intention is quite the opposite

New comment by advael in "The bottleneck was never the code"

advael — Thu, 07 May 2026 01:20:48 +0000

Sure, it's a tool that I think that's not a particularly compelling use of. Like I can at least see an endpoint of slop code where the right guardrails and model improvements create a means by which people can ask their computers to do things in natural language, and semantic search is genuinely a novel and powerful capability. Maybe we even get other nice translation protocols to structured forms of language. But in a context where the premise is that we're trying to communicate with other humans, using a model that generates plausible prose is a mechanism that obfuscates rather than clarifies. I don't think it's fit to purpose for that thing any more than a hammer makes a good screwdriver. If it helps you to bounce your ideas off an LLM, by all means do so, but this will mostly just serve to homogenize the writing of everyone doing that. Possibly of value to some people, but not to me

New comment by advael in "The bottleneck was never the code"

advael — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:30:41 +0000

Wouldn't know if I'm a smart writer, but I see little value in writing with a model if that's what you're asking. Language models are good for searching, getting alright at structured outputs like code, and trash at meaningfully expressing my thoughts in prose. Frankly, it concerns me that people think vomiting their thoughts onto the internet could possibly benefit from computational assistance

New comment by advael in "Write some software, give it away for free"

advael — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:52:12 +0000

Well, in our current world, one species of apes has, by banding together into coordinated groups and allowing individuals to specialize in building various skills and knowledge, discovered numerous complex mechanical properties of the universe and created technologies that have over time accumulated to obviate a giant subset of struggles that define the lives of most living organisms, and certainly comprised the majority of those apes' activity and struggle in all but the most recent few millenia, itself less than a percent of the time their species has existed, effectively eliminated the overwhelming majority of threats to their survival that doesn't arise from the activity of other members of their species, and even made some progress toward eliminating those. I think you'll find that this is a fairly weird position for a species to find themselves in, but a consistent strategic element of this success has been that periods of greater discovery, economic activity, and improvement of conditions have mostly come from increasing the number of apes that are, rather than desperate and focused on their short-term survival, free to pursue weird projects like figuring out how plants grow and change over time, how electricity propagates through various materials, how to build a better mousetrap, etc. Now, most existential threats to these "humans" are of their own making, both on a micro and macro level. Desperate humans commit crimes or wage wars over resources. On a larger scale, incredible advances in technology have created weaponry capable of wiping out entire groups of humans or ecosystems, possibly even planet-wide ones, on a number of different timescales. Meanwhile, an incredible amount of these things are busy toiling away at things they call "jobs" in order to make "money", a system entirely constructed by humans, and now those people increasingly feel that this arrangement isn't benefiting them and doesn't incidentally create opportunities to do things they consider meaningful, and a bunch of loud and powerful voices among the ever-shrinking segment that does not feel this way are increasingly loudly announcing at every turn that they'd very much like to reneg on their end of the bargain, deem those other people unnecessary, and implicitly, eliminate them. I speak of "destitution" because this is a name for the means by which the current arrangements among humans achieve this elimination most often. In fact, there's no natural universal law that says that we can't use this "economy" thing we've invented to double down on the basic strategy that got us here, guarantee access to a small share of resources and technology to everyone to a degree that provides them the freedom to specialize at their leisure, possibly going down dead ends, or possibly solving real problems out of sheer curiosity or idiosyncratic obsessions, starting businesses about it, or joining ascetic sects to hunker down and research together, as humans have basically always done. Instead, we have for some reason arranged several systems to create holes in the social fabric. Circumstances in which several things going wrong can cause someone to lose a job, their home, and eventually their freedom entirely. This seems sub-optimal, and it's at this point entirely a choice we've collectively made. We have some evidence of what outcomes may result from such disparities in priorities, and generally solutions that involve eliminating the threat of destitution result in more economic activity, discovery, and the thriving of apes more generally, and solutions that don't involve lots of murder and strife. I know which kind of outcome I prefer, and so I think it's quite wise to consider strategies of the former kind

New comment by advael in "The bottleneck was never the code"

advael — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:26:52 +0000

In general, hypocrisy is a pretty weak argument. It's an annoying personality trait, but consistency is a thing humans often fail at, and humans failing at holding consistent opinions is a failure of those humans, not the claims they're making. It's not quite as weak as the more non-sequitur kind of ad-hominem attack, because it does at least pertain to the argument being made, and kind of resembles a logical contradiction if you squint, but it seldom does a good job addressing the merits of the argument, rather than the arguer. It's a successful political tactic for the same reason ad hominem arguments in general are, of course, especially in the context of representative forms of government, where the person's character or competence is relevant when they're running for an office. Much less so in contexts where the merits of a position are being debated in abstract.

I think it's very silly to make the argument that "groupwise hypocrisy" is not a fallacy in such a conversation. In politics, the reality is that people have to form coalitions with people with whom they don't agree on everything, and non-political groupings are even more non-sensical, often holding people responsible for the opinions of other people who happen to share things like inborn characteristics. It's especially ridiculous to explain this with this idea that people are engaging in some kind of elaborate coordination to argue with you on the internet. Yes, some people, and indeed political parties, engage in that kind of behavior, and if you think you're arguing with something like a botnet, there are larger considerations to make about what you gain as an individual by trying to engage with such a machine at all. If I believe I'm arguing about the merits of an idea with an actual person, and I find myself reaching for something like "your group is collectively hypocritical on this issue" to make my argument, this is cause to reflect on whether I actually have any real arguments for my position, as that one is... well, essentially meaningless

I think you're trying to invoke what's commonly called a "motte-and-bailey" argument, where people argue for a maximally-defensible position when faced with serious criticism, but act as though they're proving a much less defensible version of their argument, often including a nebula of related ideas, in other contexts. This is something individuals and coordinated factions absolutely do, but again doesn't really support treating any grouping you want to draw of some kind of collective hypocrisy. Even assuming we care about hypocrisy, it seems like this kind of reasoning about nebulous groups that don't explicitly coordinate would allow making that argument about any position in any context, depending on how you draw the boundaries of the group that day. It's well-understood that you can go on the internet and find someone who believes just about any crazy thing you can think of, or find someone who makes the argument for any position poorly.

New comment by advael in "Write some software, give it away for free"

advael — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:50:39 +0000

A lot of comments can't help but mention the constant looming threat of potentially permanent destitution that pervades our society. It's increasingly hard to understand the position of people who think that this is a feature, excepting of course those very few with the resources to use that pressure rather than be driven by it

New comment by advael in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

advael — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:10:17 +0000

Right, but it's hard not to claim those people would likely get more out of an OS they could customize more, and also that it's considerably more exploitative of those people across the divide of corporate product versus community project

New comment by advael in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

advael — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:57:38 +0000

It fascinates me to speculate about who this is for. At least among people I've talked to, the ones who still want windows (instead of the obvious alternatives) cite wanting things to "just work", often claiming that they "don't want making the computer work to become a second job" or similar. I personally don't think these preferences reflect the reality of how much effort using e.g. a linux distro is in this day and age, to be clear, but these are the beliefs I encounter. Are there really people who want to deal with providing feedback and stress testing an operating system and its various software components and features, but doing this for a corporation that sets the terms of their transparency efforts and ultimately does this for profit and will still grab the reins and exert control against their users' will when they feel like it?

New comment by advael in "Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March"

advael — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:48:55 +0000

Hard to overstate the sunk-costness of it all

New comment by advael in "America's Expanding Domestic Surveillance"

advael — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:30:54 +0000

Multiple independent and credible sources including documents from within the DHS show a deliberate strategy of terrorizing and harming civilians who have done nothing illegal, and numerous serious and sometimes lethal cases of violence against protestors (protest is in fact supposed to be legal) and just random people, as well as spurious immigration arrests to meet unreasonable quotas, cruel and inhumane conditions in the holding facilities they've rushed to build to support all this, and a general lack of due process and proportionality throughout all of this. You are uncritically repeating state propaganda

New comment by advael in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

advael — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 22:13:20 +0000

Really the hill to die on is that the first amendment should preclude any content-based restrictions for anyone. If you believe children shouldn't be exposed to certain materials that's between you and your kids, and should not involve the government whatsoever

New comment by advael in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

advael — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:30:28 +0000

I tend to set people up with a chat interface, which is pretty good for asking for commands or scripts that the user will then copy into their terminal. Most people I've gotten to try linux do pretty well with just a wiki, but once they run into something they want to do that's kind of idiosyncratic they tend to ask me for help. While I think running models that have access to a shell is dangerous and should be handled carefully, the fact that they've been trained for this use case generally means they're pretty good at shell commands and can give you one a decent chunk of the time. I'm never willing to inject an external dependency controlled by a company into people's computing needs unless they specifically ask for it, so this is usually a lightweight local model specialized in tool use, but not given shell access. This isn't much different from how they'd use search engine for this purpose these days, but if running locally, it can be more fault-tolerant to issues that affect their internet access as well as offering better privacy guarantees, albeit obviously a little less capable

New comment by advael in "Your phone is about to stop being yours"

advael — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:49:07 +0000

I will say, an underrated use case for even small, local LLMs is making command line tools drastically more accessible to laypeople

I now know zero people I don't think should use linux, and people I know seems to run quite a gamut of technical know-how compared to most other technical folks I know

New comment by advael in "We accepted surveillance as default"

advael — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:15:24 +0000

I don't think we disagree on anything about that, but it does take some recognition of the problem that advertising isn't just lending political, but also technical cover to surveillance

New comment by advael in "We accepted surveillance as default"

advael — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:48:07 +0000

No, but surveillance is profitable outside of advertising, and advertising provides a perfect cover for surveillance: It's hard to make things that can separate third-party content from surveillance from third-party content for advertising, or for UI JS libraries for that matter