Hacker News: allturtles

New comment by allturtles in "The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

allturtles — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 21:25:14 +0000

That's fine, but that leaves two legitimate options:

1) Warn readers there are "spoilers ahead" and then proceed to actually say something.

2) Withhold from writing a totally vacuous post and write about something else instead.

As it is this reads like an Onion article titled "Man, that twist at the end of Empire Strikes Back was totally crazy!"

New comment by allturtles in "The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

allturtles — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 19:35:39 +0000

This actually says nothing at all about how the documentary deceives you. It simply claims that it does, with no evidence provided. This basically a clickbait headline stretched out to blog post size. Total garbage, IMO.

New comment by allturtles in "I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities"

allturtles — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:32:48 +0000

I just have zero interest in looking at any of these "AI did a thing for me." posts.

New comment by allturtles in "What is the actual percentage of people for and against AI?"

allturtles — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:22:18 +0000

> I've been excited for this day ever since I saw "2001" in the matinee theater as a kid

You've been excited for the arrival of AI ever since you saw a movie about a murderous AI who tries (and mostly succeeds) to wipe out the entire human crew of its ship? Dr. Strangelove also got you psyched up for a nuclear war, I guess?

New comment by allturtles in "The AI Race Just Got Awkward"

allturtles — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:05:44 +0000

Why? Are we doing labor theory of value now?

New comment by allturtles in "Calling the AI bluff: Adding "Do not guess" cut made-up claims from 71% to 20%"

allturtles — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:07:09 +0000

Yep, familiar with it. I think the Chinese room is clearly a bad argument. The brain is just as much a "chinese room" as a computer is.

New comment by allturtles in "Calling the AI bluff: Adding "Do not guess" cut made-up claims from 71% to 20%"

allturtles — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:15:36 +0000

So by your lights, the vast majority of humans don't reason either (and even those who do don't do it most of the time)?

New comment by allturtles in "George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts"

allturtles — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:14:06 +0000

> Chicago would have been in land owned by the Chicago Park District which is part of Grant Park and is meant to be free and open to the public

You can call it part of Grant Park if you like, but it is a big paid parking lot. The Lucas proposal would have replaced some of the asphalt with new actual green space that was free and open to the public.

New comment by allturtles in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

allturtles — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:54:30 +0000

For those who doubt the AI apocalypse is possible, because "you can always pull the plug", our AI overlords provide a ready-made answer: the data center whose plug can't be pulled! Put a few nuclear warheads on board (we need our own weapon to answer the threat of Chinese super AIs, after all) and you're good to go.

New comment by allturtles in "OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005"

allturtles — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:59:10 +0000

You could say exactly the same about humans. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Every human depends on a vast corpus of prior human knowledge to be able to accomplish anything. This doesn't mean they have no intelligence.

New comment by allturtles in "Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits"

allturtles — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:24:01 +0000

You're also against public education, I guess? Kids should just figure out what's valuable and do that without having values and habits imposed on them.

New comment by allturtles in "The Beauty of Roundabouts"

allturtles — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:58:33 +0000

> They work where each direction has an approximately equal amount of traffic. However, usually, one direction (north/south, say) has a larger share of the traffic. In those cases, the bulk of traffic all needs to slow down, downshift, turn a bit in one direction and then turn a bit in the other direction for the minority of traffic that's bleeding on or off the main artery. In those cases, a traffic light is better because the timing can be adjusted to the proportion of traffic from each direction (and more flexible since it can be adjusted over time).

I'm not convinced of this either. It may make sense when considering one intersection in isolation, but over a corridor with ten intersections, you are going to get caught in a red light at least once, and that one full stop will cost you more than all the gains you get from not having to slow 10 mph through each intersection.

This is setting aside fuel efficiency and safety considerations which also favor roundabouts, IMO.

New comment by allturtles in "The Beauty of Roundabouts"

allturtles — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:44:40 +0000

> Small fender benders and sideswipes are much more frequent

All the sources I can find say roundabouts reduce crashes of all types.

Carmel, IN, America's "roundabout capital" has more than tripled in population while reducing overall traffic accidents / year: https://eri.iu.edu/erit/case-studies/carmel-indiana-roundabo....

New comment by allturtles in "An Alien Mind"

allturtles — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:26:56 +0000

I don't think it requires the agreement of that many parties. How many organizations/physical sites can create chips capable of training and running frontier models? That is your bottleneck. It is equivalent to targeting uranium enichment in nuclear arms control.

New comment by allturtles in "An Alien Mind"

allturtles — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:24:08 +0000

> if you have any strategic adversaries whatsoever you MUST NOT slow.

What if the most dangerous strategic adversary you have is the one you are building?

New comment by allturtles in "Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again"

allturtles — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:40:35 +0000

This is a power they already have. Google could ignore this change just as MapQuest has done. They are not legally compelled to follow government naming conventions, and I think it would be a clear first amendment violation to attempt to compel them to do so.

New comment by allturtles in "Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again"

allturtles — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:19:04 +0000

> No, they show what the respective government datasets contain

Which matches popular usage in the respective countries. Your example is a non sequitir for explaining why matching popular usage can't possibly work.

For the popular usage of major geographical features to change is extremely rare, so I am skeptical that it's a huge amount of work to keep up with changes in popular usage. People made maps before they had automated pipelines for ingesting geographical names.

New comment by allturtles in "Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again"

allturtles — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:08:37 +0000

> Choosing one via popular usage would not be a good solution.

Huh? Isn't that exactly what you've described? In the UK they show the popular usage in the UK, and the same in France.

New comment by allturtles in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

allturtles — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 19:11:41 +0000

This is exactly the kind of pointless concern I'm talking about. How many legal digitial providers of those rare books are there now? Zero, I believe.

It's the logic of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, which prefers that no one benefit rather than Google see any benefit.

New comment by allturtles in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

allturtles — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:48:36 +0000

Yes, this was a great tragedy. I was very sad to see academics at the time arguing against Google providing what would have been one of the greatest storehouses of readily available knowledge in the world, in favor of an imaginary alternative that didn't exist and never would.