Hacker News: cwmma

New comment by cwmma in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

cwmma — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:54:00 +0000

Probably not, we're nowhere near the complexity of the human brain yet, there are also quantization limits to the human brain (i.e. molecules, quantum physics, etc) so to characterize them as having infinite detail is probably a bad modal.

If I'm going to be honest most of the people who advocate this type of thing tend to be, shall we say, crypto-duelists who really believe in a soul but not like intellectually but intuitively and keep trying to come up with excuse with it's not just meat. So like you can find philosophers advocating stuff like this but they tend to have a bit of an agenda.

New comment by cwmma in "Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says"

cwmma — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:12:46 +0000

besides zoning laws, the judge fairly explicitly states that one of the reasons he thinks it's fine is because corporations aren't doing these kinds of shenanigans, so if you were to do something like that he might revise the ruling.

New comment by cwmma in "Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says"

cwmma — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:10:24 +0000

I find myself defending this shitty ruling (which I honestly think is bad, but bad for completely other reasons) the ruling basically says, since corporations are not using this to dilute the vote it's fine, which basically means in other words, if corporations where to do the shenanigans you're suggesting, the judge is open to revising the ruling.

New comment by cwmma in "Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says"

cwmma — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:35:07 +0000

yeah so it sounds like if you did this IN THIS TOWN and didn't also live in the town you'd get a vote. I'm not sure if you'd get a vote if you owned the land directly but for all I know you might.

New comment by cwmma in "Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says"

cwmma — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:31:11 +0000

I don't think this is a good opinion or anything, but issues with vote dilution were expressly addressed in the opinion.

New comment by cwmma in "Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says"

cwmma — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:27:14 +0000

It's specifically about corporations that own property in a specific town voting. So no you can't just spin up a bunch of LLCs to rig an election, this is about the rights of absentee landlords.

New comment by cwmma in "Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says"

cwmma — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:25:39 +0000

It sounds like you it's only corporations that own property in the town that get to vote. So that's probably whats preventing you.

New comment by cwmma in "We are Poles, so, of course, we print in Latin"

cwmma — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:55:22 +0000

There is a specific medial jargon developed form latin designed to be unambiguous and often intentionally different from lay words is one thing you're hearing in American tv, the other is that many technical words are English words but of latin origin.

New comment by cwmma in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

cwmma — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:11:44 +0000

no they have a securities license. Also while a lot of stuff in stock markets are gambling like, the stock market is a positive sum game where very basic techniques (e.g. index investing) have positive expected values.

The buyers and sellers are not the only ones there, there is also the companies injecting money into it via dividends and stock buy backs, I can be a winner on the stock market without there having to be a loser.

New comment by cwmma in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"

cwmma — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:44:41 +0000

In the American system juries figure out questions of fact and judges figure out questions of law.

In this case I guess the question was 'when did the incident actually happen' with Elon arguing it was later then Altman.

New comment by cwmma in "dBase: 1979-2026"

cwmma — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:25:58 +0000

Shapefiles, the legacy multifile file format for geospatial stuff that is still an incredibly important interchange format since it has basically universal support is built around DBF files.

So despite it being an incredibly old file format it's still used constantly in the GIS world and it's probably not going to go away because while it's not a good format, it does basically everything at to at least a mediocre level which can't be said for any of the newer formats that tend to do a few things great but other things terribly.

Like Geojson is great for interchange but you can't really do in place edits or even in place seeking from disk, shapefile can.

Sqlite allows great editing and seeking but you can't use that in a browser without doing something complicated like compiling the sqlite binary to js or wasm.

New comment by cwmma in "Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test"

cwmma — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:21:59 +0000

my understanding is that there are a few MOND champions who are still holding on to the idea while everyone else has moved on.

New comment by cwmma in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs"

cwmma — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:14:12 +0000

What are you talking about, the only use of meat is in "Meat Shield", a phrase that's been around a long time now.

New comment by cwmma in "A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines"

cwmma — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:13:11 +0000

he pretty explicitly states that AES 128 is not in any imminent danger and mandating a switch to 256 would distract from the actual thing he thinks needs to happen.

New comment by cwmma in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

cwmma — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:15:15 +0000

The page isn't allowed to know what extensions you have, instead LinkedIn is looking for various evidence that extensions are installed, like if an extension was to create a specific html element, LinkedIn could look for evidence of that element being there.

Since the extensions are running on the same page as LinkedIn (some of them are explicitly modifying the LinkedIn the website) it's impossible to sandbox them so that linked in can't see evidence of them. And yes this is how a site knows you have an ad blocker is installed.

New comment by cwmma in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

cwmma — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:18:14 +0000

I have had to repeatedly attest to my insurance that treatments and meds for my 6 year old son with a genetic condition is not work related. My 6 year old who I will point out is unemployed. Usually it's just a popup screen but occasionally it's a scary letter that threatens to not pay for surgery if not properly filled out.

New comment by cwmma in "Intel Demos Chip to Compute with Encrypted Data"

cwmma — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:26:04 +0000

In theory you only need to trust the hardware to be correct, since it doesn't have the decryption key the worst it can do is give you a wrong answer. In theory.

New comment by cwmma in "My journey to the microwave alternate timeline"

cwmma — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:53:54 +0000

American microwaves almost always have a fairly easy way to change the power level, it's just nobody bothers to use it.

New comment by cwmma in "Why NUKEMAP isn't on Google Maps anymore (2019)"

cwmma — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:48:58 +0000

Usually the 'look' is not the issue as much as the geocoder (which you are only allowed to use with a google basemap, no that clever idea you have isn't going to work), like clients are often excited to use a more customizable basemap but balk when it comes to other geocoders which are nice but are not the google one which people really really are used to.

New comment by cwmma in "Why NUKEMAP isn't on Google Maps anymore (2019)"

cwmma — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:40:28 +0000

not OP but the google maps API doesn't actually support other vector tiles (and other map libraries are not allowed to use the google map basemap) which means it's not easy to just have two versions of the site that differ only in basemap