Hacker News: applicative

New comment by applicative in "Core PPI up 9.6% annualized (0.8% MoM) in May"

applicative — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:51:59 +0000

* Jan 8 2026 Iran begins the longest internet blackout in universal world history due to massive protests over economic issues.

New comment by applicative in "Waymo Premier"

applicative — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:40:35 +0000

"the total average annual cost of ownership—which includes your car payment, depreciation, fuel, insurance, maintenance, and taxes—is approximately $12,297 per year (or $1,025 monthly) over a 15-year lifetime"

New comment by applicative in "Notes on DeepSeek"

applicative — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:18:33 +0000

This was obviously a story - a telltale 'admission' - devised by the military.

New comment by applicative in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

applicative — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:01:17 +0000

Canaanite and its abjad have been in continuous use, in various versions, for more than 2,800 years. It's true there's no Linear B.

New comment by applicative in "The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography"

applicative — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:52:18 +0000

Paradoxically, in the blog post he speaks with his own voice, describing the evidence better amassed in ... the AI written article.

New comment by applicative in "The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography"

applicative — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:02:53 +0000

The going wisdom seems to be that the EU's Galileo is the most accurate system for civilian use. GPS has undergone frequent systematic update for almost a half century.

New comment by applicative in "US posts another month of strong job gains in May"

applicative — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:51:40 +0000

In lieu of paranoia, you can always follow the labor departments of states you trust - or, like Reuters, the economists who do. https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dli/newsroom/pennsylvania-unempl...

New comment by applicative in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

applicative — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:18:56 +0000

Famine ceased to be a major world issue after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which abetted infantilism of different types in most of the countries that originated after WW2.

In my childhood there were always children starving everywhere but the causes of this were finally throttled, by and large, in the 90s and 00s, with a bit of regression in the recent past. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

This is one of the most important features of the history of the last half century but goes completely unnoticed.

New comment by applicative in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

applicative — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:09:47 +0000

Unfettered capitalism postdates 'colonialist invaders' by two or three centuries. Spain and Portugal didn't notice capitalism ... so they turned into backwaters.

New comment by applicative in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

applicative — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:06:18 +0000

The German Social Democratic Party is the literal actual identical party of Marx and Engels.

That we assign to the Bolsheviks the mantle of one or another 19th c epithet is a kind of secret pact between the two sides of the Cold War. It is itself doctrinal Leninism even if the State Department spreads it. Its func

New comment by applicative in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

applicative — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:55:54 +0000

The only systematic state propaganda in question is the propaganda you are retailing here. Bellingcat-o-mania in particular is a pure, paid, propaganda initiative of Putin's Assadist phase. Billions were spent to produce armies of brains that type what you just typed.

New comment by applicative in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

applicative — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:53:08 +0000

Nothing interesting, much less sinister, is happening on the site though - and it seems to have zero traffic. It is likely just spreading encrypted signals to the military elsewhere.

New comment by applicative in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

applicative — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:49:45 +0000

None of these were significant either, not worth even 1 neuron -- but they did provide a bit of copy for upscale yankee-CIA tinfoil-hat journalism - even books - a few decades later.

New comment by applicative in "NSA using Anthropic's Mythos for cyber attacks"

applicative — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:59:21 +0000

Wait til you hear about other countries, to say nothing of Silicon Valley.

New comment by applicative in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

applicative — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:16:01 +0000

It did sound to me like they feel some sort of wall coming.

New comment by applicative in "AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study"

applicative — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:29:18 +0000

No, the hallucination of its reasons follows immediately from the technique of probabilistic inference. You can see this in real time, just ask 'why did you use this word, not that word?' It is in the position of a desperate liar. All its responses are essentially 'rationalizations'

New comment by applicative in "AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study"

applicative — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:24:19 +0000

No, it happens in the immediate context, where e.g. we say 'No I meant Meredith Jones, not Meredith Smith'- and the possibility of this elaboration is actually part of ordinary communication. I did mean Meredith Jones, not Meredith Smith - thus the use of the past tense The LLM will just give the best answer for what one might have meant, completely reopening calculation.

The point is familiar but there are good illustrations in the Atlantic article by a book editor. At first it seems abstract AI hate, but then she gets to the details. AI text cannot be edited. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/how-to-tell-a... or https://archive.ph/YJsGK

New comment by applicative in "AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study"

applicative — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:20:04 +0000

The writing is always fluid and grammatically flawless. This carries much more weight with us than we believe. I know the illusion well from decades of grading college papers. Many of the highest quality students use English as a second language, and I know this, but an American well trained in writing, grammar, spelling always gives an impression of superiority. (Being well trained in writing, grammar, spelling etc is of course high merit, which is how the illusion forms - it is basically an illusion of global 'intelligence')

New comment by applicative in "AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study"

applicative — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:09:30 +0000

What the LLM cannot do is explain why it said what it said, when cross-examined. It simply hallucinates the best account of why someone would have said such a thing as it said, same as it can give a probable account of why someone else said something different. The question 'But why did you say this not that ...?' does not lead it to make explicit its grounds for what it said, but just to make a new more complicated statement.

New comment by applicative in "Squillions: How money laundering won"

applicative — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:12:51 +0000

The writer argues that since $100 bills aren't much used in daily commerce, the 80% of circulating paper money in $100s must be used for crime. But it is obviously predominantly hoards. I know US $ are hoarded all across Latin America, and assume it is so elsewhere. Even in USA keeping them somewhere secure is a sort of hedge against banking collapse, if not against 'collapse of the dollar'. It is like gold or anything else.

No apriori principle can tell you what the ratio of 'genuinely circulating' to hoarded money should be. When money was gold or silver, as Bagehot says, the hoards in e.g. France were huge, but those in Scotland, where there was enthusiasm for the banks, were tiny.