Hacker News: arde

New comment by arde in "Could AIs Become Conscious?"

arde — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:20:36 +0000

Mine was a straight question you should be able to answer directly for any debate to go forward, not any "rhetorical move" nor any "approach" involving anything. Any rhetorical moves or approaches of mine, reductive or not, conceding or refuting, would come after your answer but couldn't come before it because your point needs this disambiguation.

So again: please, without resorting to tautology from which anything could be implied, define what consciousness is to you in a way you don't consider reductive, so we can clearly see what there would be to reduce at all.

New comment by arde in "Could AIs Become Conscious?"

arde — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:04:56 +0000

I'm sorry, then what was that "more scientific" reason you gave for?

New comment by arde in "New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson"

arde — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:53:33 +0000

There's some Pynchon in these times too.

New comment by arde in "Could AIs Become Conscious?"

arde — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:49:37 +0000

The body is the mind's interface with the world. Why couldn't a digital mind "feel sensations", subjective as they are, on its own interface with it? If it's assumed to not be a subject, then how could it be a mind at all?

New comment by arde in "Could AIs Become Conscious?"

arde — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:43:24 +0000

For that to be reductive there had to be something to reduce. What would that be, without resorting to tautology?

New comment by arde in "Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian"

arde — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:10:52 +0000

Hello, fellow Dendron user. I haven't found good-enough alternatives either.

New comment by arde in "Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?"

arde — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 17:56:37 +0000

They're loud because silence is not a priority in their design and their fans run non-stop.

New comment by arde in "Let's Talk About the Bidet, the Bathroom's Best-Kept Secret"

arde — Mon, 12 May 2025 00:31:25 +0000

Yes. One might want to take care of the main stuff the usual way at least in part before passing on to the bidet, though, so as not to risk soiling. Source: Argentina, land of bidets.

New comment by arde in "Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life"

arde — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:22:55 +0000

That would be a reimplementation of the venerable HP 95LX palmtop.

New comment by arde in "Show HN: 10 teams are racing to build a pivotal tracker replacement"

arde — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:06:58 +0000

Too bad its UI is ugly and its update procedures make me nervous. It needs a rewrite.

New comment by arde in "In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work"

arde — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 01:46:55 +0000

The message seems to be: sales is a soul-sucking job, a demoralizing exercise on psychopathic exploitation in which making people feel something (be it good or not) is the way into their wallets.

New comment by arde in "Drone-zapping laser weapons now effective (and cheap) reality"

arde — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:41:58 +0000

Looking forward to there being some derivative technology for mosquitoes.

New comment by arde in "New research on anesthesia and microtubules gives new clues about consciousness"

arde — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 18:42:12 +0000

For anyone interested in the phenomenon of consciousness who finds this microtubules idea suspiciously impenetrable like I do, I suggest to look into the Reticular Activation System in the human brain, which acts as its on-off switch and could well be its seat too.

New comment by arde in "Making the Easy Things Easy with WireGuard"

arde — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 16:36:26 +0000

"And up to this point, no other VPN solution has ever been integrated into the kernel." Not so. IPSec is implemented by a kernel module.

New comment by arde in "Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle"

arde — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 14:22:22 +0000

It's probably the carbs.

New comment by arde in "A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"

arde — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 02:49:16 +0000

We exist but p-zombies, as far as we can tell, do not. So their existence is a hypothesis we cannot assume.

New comment by arde in "Yerba mate, from Paraguay to Syria"

arde — Wed, 29 May 2024 04:59:11 +0000

And without milk. Milk has no place in mate cocido. There's a different name for combining it with milk (mate de leche).

New comment by arde in "My Hour of Memoryless Lucidity"

arde — Tue, 28 May 2024 06:48:21 +0000

It's not a matter of disrespect as much as of disobeyance. If there isn't (or shouldn't be) any subordination, disobeyance may not imply disrespect. The problem arises when people differ about whether there's subordination.

New comment by arde in "MSX Elite"

arde — Tue, 14 May 2024 17:00:07 +0000

Right on!

New comment by arde in "Too much serendipity"

arde — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:42:23 +0000

To make it explicit for those who haven't tasted it, mother's milk tastes distinctly sweet (literally), in a way cow milk does not.

So yeah, there's a probable purpose for sweet receptors. An interesting question is whether seeking sweet foods in modern adult life, which would probably not have been available in our evolution, guides us to a healthy diet.