Hacker News: chilmers

New comment by chilmers in "Natural Language Autoencoders: Turning Claude's Thoughts into Text"

chilmers — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:02:07 +0000

They tested for this. From the paper:

“We find little evidence of steganography in our NLAs. Meaning-preserving transformations, like shuffling bullet points, paraphrasing, or translating the explanation to French, cause only small drops in FVE, and this gap does not widen over training.”

New comment by chilmers in "Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world"

chilmers — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:29:02 +0000

Ironically, your comment is practically incomprehensible.

New comment by chilmers in "macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses"

chilmers — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:25:02 +0000

I think a primary concern when Apple evolves their new design language nowadays is competitive differentiation. Because so many people try to clone their UI, they seek to add visual elements like frosting, glass, squircles, etc. that are difficult or impossible to achieve in competing platforms. Gradually others catch up and they need to evolve it again. Liquid Glass seems like an aesthetic choice made purely for the technical difficulty of the simulated physics necessary to accurately recreate it.

New comment by chilmers in "Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT"

chilmers — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:44:12 +0000

There are many companies making money off alcohol addiction, video game addiction, porn addiction, food addiction, etc. Should we outlaw all these things? Should we regulate them and try to make them safe? If we can do that for them, can't we do it for AI sex chat?

New comment by chilmers in "Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT"

chilmers — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:17:36 +0000

Sexual and intimate chat with LLMs will be a huge market for whoever corners it. They'd be crazy to leave that money on the table.

New comment by chilmers in "Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores"

chilmers — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:33:42 +0000

Yeah, we had one near us, close to the metro exit, and it was genuinely great when you needed to grab something for dinner on the way home. Once you knew where things were, you could be in and out in 20 seconds. That said, it never seemed busy compared to other grocery shops in the area, so I think a lot of people were put off by it feeling "weird" to shop without checking-out.

New comment by chilmers in "The Responsibility of Intellectuals (1967)"

chilmers — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:31:20 +0000

I suppose it assumes the reader already understands the word, or has access to a dictionary.

New comment by chilmers in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

chilmers — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 11:22:50 +0000

To be fair to Wright, there were a bunch of big budget movies in 2025 that flopped: Thunderbolts, Tron Ares, Snow White, etc. There’s definitely a wider phenomenon at work of cinema struggling in general. But I agree, Wright’s big-budget career is likely over.

New comment by chilmers in "AI Destroys Institutions"

chilmers — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:03:52 +0000

It is literally called “ Boston Univ. School of Law Research Paper No. 5870623”

New comment by chilmers in "UK offshore wind prices come in 40% cheaper than gas in record auction"

chilmers — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:00:01 +0000

So RWE, the German multinational that won the largest share of this auction, with a yearly revenue of €29bn and an existing 153.2 TWh of power generation, is going to need a bailout from the British government, in the next four years, over a project to supply 7GW?

New comment by chilmers in "Maybe the default settings are too high"

chilmers — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 23:40:49 +0000

If you’re a fan of LOTR but don’t fancy reading it aloud yourself, I’d really recommend the new audio versions read by Andy Serkis. While I don’t vibe with every facet of his performance, overall it’s a tour-de-force, and really makes the prose come to life. Especially in those descriptive sections that it’s possible to glaze over when reading the text. Having an actor of the calibre of Serkis reading them to you brings out the poetry and beauty of Tolkien’s language.

New comment by chilmers in "I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude"

chilmers — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 20:23:53 +0000

You really can’t tell? Perhaps the bar for AGI is lower than I thought.

New comment by chilmers in "Microplastics: No longer a "maybe""

chilmers — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:02:41 +0000

"Ban all plastics" is a strawman that will not happen and no mainstream opinion is suggesting. But there is a wide spectrum of possibilities between "ban all plastics" and "do nothing".

A principal concern is ingestion of microplastics via food packaging, utensils, cookware, etc. There are non-plastic substitutions available for many of these items, and a precautionary approach would be to regulate to require them, where it is economically feasible, until such time as the effects of microplastic ingestion are better understood.

New comment by chilmers in "How the AI Bubble Will Pop"

chilmers — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 13:11:07 +0000

But isn't that a limitation of the AI, not necessarily how the AI is integrated into the software?

Personally, I don't want AI running around changing things without me asking to do so. I think chat is absolutely the right interface, but I don't like that most companies are adding separate "AI" buttons to use it. Instead, it should be integrated into the existing chat collaboration features. So, in Figma for example, you should just be able to add a comment to a design, tag @figma, and ask it to make changes like you would with a human designer. And the AI should be good enough and have sufficient context to get it right.

New comment by chilmers in "Evolving the Multi-User Spaceport"

chilmers — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 17:30:36 +0000

I think the context some may be missing here is that Blue Origin and ULA have been attempting to get the FAA to limit SpaceX's planned Starship operations in Florida on the basis that they will have too much environmental impact and impede theirs:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/theres-not-enough-room...

So this is basically SpaceX arguing back about how these concerns aren't valid or can be mitigated through more informed safety margins and co-operation between launch providers.

New comment by chilmers in "The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike"

chilmers — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:07:54 +0000

Yes, modern screenwriting classes hammer home some variation of the five-act structure and, the particular beats to hit at each point. It's rare for any narrative film, even indies, to deviate from it much, and you are absolutely told to map out your whole narrative and know where it's going before you begin.

I'm sure there are some screenwriters who ignore all that and just start writing. Particularly if they're experienced enough to have an intuitive grasp of structure. But if you're a first time writer and reach the night before a submission deadline and you haven't even finished the first draft, then you've got serious problems. Leaving aside the ending, any script needs multiple revisions with time in between so that you come back it with clear sight.

New comment by chilmers in "Clankers Die on Christmas"

chilmers — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:53:04 +0000

“I don’t think this kind of thing [satire] has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, ‘We need satire of them, not of us.’ I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War.” - Tom Lehrer

New comment by chilmers in "I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer"

chilmers — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:13:38 +0000

They're 24/7. There are usually some staff onsite during the day, but all the entry/exit stuff is always through the automated gates.

New comment by chilmers in "Vibechart"

chilmers — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 23:16:53 +0000

Eyeballing it, that bar looks to be around 15% in height. Typing "50" instead of "15" is a plausible typo. Albeit, one you might expect from a high-schooler giving a class presentation, not in a flagship launch by one of the most hyped startups in history.

Just remember, everyone involved with these presentations is getting a guaranteed $1.5 million bonus. Then cry a little.

New comment by chilmers in "Vibechart"

chilmers — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 22:54:01 +0000

That one is so obviously wrong that it makes me wonder if someone mislabelled the chart, but perhaps I'm being too optimistic.