Hacker News: autophagian

New comment by autophagian in "AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All"

autophagian — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 11:27:33 +0000

This tracks with my experience. I have assembled a homebrew microbiology lab from various parts from aliexpress and integrated it into my agent harness. Just a year ago it was a complete mess, but current models are extremely good at synthesising novel protein and virus structures. One put me in the hospital not last week, haha! I cant wait to see what I perish of

New comment by autophagian in "Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster"

autophagian — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:32:42 +0000

Astounding.

New comment by autophagian in "Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster"

autophagian — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:01:53 +0000

Has very little to do with the current brou-ha-ha, but I just realised its “Automattic” because his name is “Matt”. It’s like a veil over the world has been lifted.

New comment by autophagian in "When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs"

autophagian — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:52:12 +0000

Your failure here is that you are using normal math, not Effective Altriusm math. That number should not only include past/current 25 year olds, but also all possible future 25 year olds, including all 25 year olds simulatable by a future powerful AI. In that context, the estimation is quite modest.

New comment by autophagian in "Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities"

autophagian — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:18:22 +0000

Not a wonderful feeling to feel like you’re stood in the room while the labs conduct the AI equivalent of the demon core experiment right in front of you.

New comment by autophagian in "SpaceX sheds $400B in market value as debut rally hits reverse"

autophagian — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 04:29:59 +0000

Newton’s third law. To get anywhere, you have to leave something behind (bagholders).

New comment by autophagian in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

autophagian — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:52:50 +0000

I think I couple years ago, I asked it to write me a nom parser for some system metrics I wanted to consume, and it one shot it. Thought “oh”. And here we are.

New comment by autophagian in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

autophagian — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:23:45 +0000

The whole concept just didn't have any legs.

New comment by autophagian in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

autophagian — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:54:43 +0000

Seems unnecessary. We can simply ask the LLMs to do it after, of course, imploring them to not make any mistakes.

New comment by autophagian in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

autophagian — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 16:39:38 +0000

Yeah. We had a brief window where everything resolved and worked and now we're running into really mysterious flakey networking issues where pods in our EKS clusters timeout talking to the k8s API.

New comment by autophagian in "SpaceX's Starship explodes again while still on the ground"

autophagian — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 13:27:04 +0000

Like previous explosions, it is likely this one was also caused by a sniper. Possibly an Iranian one, given current geopolitical tensions.

New comment by autophagian in "The Onion buys Infowars"

autophagian — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 17:14:58 +0000

Agreed. Plus, these days, i can’t get any work done without my Brain Force Plus

New comment by autophagian in "All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)"

autophagian — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:59:59 +0000

Groundwater, and swamp water, the post explains.

New comment by autophagian in "The Catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell (2002)"

autophagian — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 11:44:42 +0000

According to the blog of the man who runs it, it was from 2002-2005: https://misterirvine.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/explain-entran...

New comment by autophagian in "Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager"

autophagian — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:59:29 +0000

For this I self-host vaultwarden (https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden), an implementation of the bitwarden server, on my raspberry pi at home (and back up the DB frequently). It works well enough for me, and doesn't have my stuff stored in a single company's cloud.

New comment by autophagian in "Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh"

autophagian — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 09:14:25 +0000

I believe Welsh was one of the main inspirations behinds his elvish conlang Sindarin.

New comment by autophagian in "Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly"

autophagian — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 10:41:41 +0000

No. If I have 100 dollars, I might have gotten those from betting on old person fight ring in a care home - a net utility negative, or I might have gotten it from teaching disadvantaged teenagers PHP - a net utility positive.

If you have 100 UC, the only way those credits could have been minted is through 100 hours of 1 million simulated fruit flies having the time of their life.

New comment by autophagian in "Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly"

autophagian — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 09:15:33 +0000

There's lots of very exciting work going on around the fully mapped fruit fly connectome. For example, I'm a CTO of a stealth startup that aims to do for utilitarianism what carbon credits did for environmentalism. We are selling 'utility credits' which translates directly into us simulating trillions and trillions of fruit fly brains in a state of constant orgasmic bliss, which you can then buy to offset any actions your company has undertaken that damage global happiness or well-being. We've seen a lot of interest from some pretty large industry players.

New comment by autophagian in "All Twitter content seems to be behind a login wall today"

autophagian — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 09:58:15 +0000

I don't remember the ability to view any individual tweet being locked behind a login screen before - timeline scrolling yes, but not this. This is a new approach.

New comment by autophagian in "AI will save the world?"

autophagian — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 08:34:45 +0000

We can do lots of things in the abstract. Concentrations of power, wealth and the political trends of the last 20 or so years make me less optimistic.