Hacker News: darkpicnic

New comment by darkpicnic in "How Invisalign became the biggest user of 3D printers"

darkpicnic — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:20:47 +0000

Just do what I did: ignore your orthodontist and wear them only at night, smashing them into your mouth like some kind of idiotic brute. 4 years later, great teeth!

New comment by darkpicnic in "Microgpt"

darkpicnic — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:25:23 +0000

LLMs won’t lead to AGI. Almost by definition, they can’t. The thought experiment I use constantly to explain this:

Train an LLM on all human knowledge up to 1905 and see if it comes up with General Relativity. It won’t.

We’ll need additional breakthroughs in AI.

New comment by darkpicnic in "Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion"

darkpicnic — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 12:46:18 +0000

I created an open source tool to help apps stay near the Dunbar Number: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed. I think the concept of social networks is interesting, but the ultimate unbounded result is a disaster.

Edit (missing link to github repo): https://github.com/darkpicnic/ten_cubed

Ten_cubed: A novel approach to safer and healthier social networks

darkpicnic — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 20:13:46 +0000

Article URL: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/ten-cubed

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43082898

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by darkpicnic in "Tim Wu Is Out of Control"

darkpicnic — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 22:29:49 +0000

I've always been confused by this First Amendment argument with regards to TikTok: they're an organization that has been tied directly with an adversarial foreign state. How is this a rational take? Using this logic, Russia should be allowed to foment unrest through fake hate groups on Facebook (which they've done).

People should familiarize themselves with Gresham's Law: bad actors will always beat good actors if bad actors suffer no penalty. If bad actors leverage the rights and freedoms of a democracy to perform attacks without repercussion, we're toast.

Mental Ledgers: how small groups cooperate

darkpicnic — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 14:15:57 +0000

Article URL: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/mental-ledgers

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520648

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The Era of Bespoke Applications

darkpicnic — Sat, 13 May 2023 21:03:12 +0000

Article URL: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/the-era-of-bespoke-applications

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932689

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Low Hanging Fruit

darkpicnic — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 14:12:34 +0000

Article URL: https://highlyprobable.io/articles/low-hanging-fruit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33943338

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by darkpicnic in "OpenAI quietly launched Whisper V2 in a GitHub commit"

darkpicnic — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 01:30:53 +0000

"Silence" is a problematic term. For me, that word encompasses: squeaky chairs, typing on a loud keyboard, moving objects around on my table, etc. In a perfect world, Whisper —like a human— can easily distinguish a human voice from the din of my office, and only try and transcribe my voice.

Does anyone have solutions for clearing out "silence" from an audio file that works off something a bit more accurate than just "<= decibel x"?

Edited for grammar.

New comment by darkpicnic in "OpenAI quietly launched Whisper V2 in a GitHub commit"

darkpicnic — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 23:11:21 +0000

Does anyone know if this new model handles silence better? I was trying to use whisper for transcribing bursts of talking amid large spans of silence, but the frequency of hallucinations was too high.

New comment by darkpicnic in "Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI"

darkpicnic — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 17:58:09 +0000

I just wrote a script with Hazel to automatically transcribe my voice notes to txt. It handles punctuation extremely well. What a wonderful contribution!

New comment by darkpicnic in "Local-First Software (2019)"

darkpicnic — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 16:51:14 +0000

Simply put: your state exists on each client and the mechanism to reconcile that state across clients is not mission critical. Almost all apps currently are built to get their state from a centralized, remote location. This is easy to build but is fragile and not forgiving for loss of network connection.

CRDTs and local-first ideals means putting the client in charge of its state which leads to all these positive side effects: virtually instant UX interactions, privacy (your not sending data necessarily to a central server, and even if you are it could just be opaque, encrypted blobs that are proxied), network-agnostic syncing (email, bluetooth, internet, wifi, etc) and no fears of a service completely going out of business and losing your data.

An NFT collection of bears made of two pixels

darkpicnic — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 03:06:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.twobitbears.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28835645

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

How a blockchain skeptic became a convert

darkpicnic — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 11:55:18 +0000

Article URL: https://highlyprobable.substack.com/p/finding-the-signal

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28785066

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Prediction: Current social networks will be illegal in 10 years

darkpicnic — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 15:29:43 +0000

Article URL: https://highlyprobable.substack.com/p/a-failed-experiment

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28695016

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by darkpicnic in "Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that"

darkpicnic — Fri, 14 May 2021 23:53:46 +0000

You're describing one of my favorite mental models: https://fs.blog/2020/03/chestertons-fence/

New comment by darkpicnic in "Reliability of police mobile phone evidence questioned after hack"

darkpicnic — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 12:43:39 +0000

I don't think this analogy works. I think it is more akin to police opening a folder and seeing paper evidence, but having no idea who put the paper there, when it was last opened/modified and unable to determine if the evidence is legitimate.

For me, this story isn't about fear that police could leverage the bugs to manipulate a case. It's about the constant fear that laymen rely on unverified "experts" to put people behind bars for years.

New comment by darkpicnic in "Write tasks not user stories – Linear Method"

darkpicnic — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 21:36:07 +0000

I'm glad to see this article is eliciting in others the same reaction I had when reading it. I'm a huge fan of Linear and use it for our company, but this article just has so much hand-waving going on it's staggering. Where is a single example? They claim that user stories are outdated, inefficient, not valuable and yet show no alternative to the seriously difficult problem of engineering tasks missing context and purpose, especially after a certain amount of time has passed. I can't count the number of times I've fired off a one-line task thinking "This is fine. I'll remember what I need to do when I get to it" only to, after a few weeks, go "WTF?".

The part about writing your own tasks is also strange. So my coworker finds an issue and instead of just writing the task out with context, explanation and direction, he has to... explain it to me in some medium... then I go do it? Really?..

I feel like this article was written as some kind of SEO "let's just get people here looking at our product" kind of thing. I can't believe this was written by someone who actually writes software.

(edited for typos)

New comment by darkpicnic in "Drivers new to level 2 driving assistance had lower awareness of on-road events"

darkpicnic — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 23:54:07 +0000

Hilarious. Thanks for sharing!

New comment by darkpicnic in "Drivers new to level 2 driving assistance had lower awareness of on-road events"

darkpicnic — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 19:47:48 +0000

Man, this is why self-driving cars can’t come soon enough. Everyone else’s replies to this already sort of answer your question, but for me this hints at the bigger issue: people don’t take driving seriously. My counter is: why do you need to be looking at your phone in a car? What text is so important that you can’t pull over and read it? Why give up the situational awareness that is absolutely required to safely operate a machine that can kill people?

Life is about trade offs and constant cost/benefit analysis. How is reading/responding to a text message slightly sooner worth the decrease in situational awareness and possible accident involving a 2 ton vehicle?

I think we have normalized the dangers of driving a vehicle to the point where we sort of just shrug at the monumental number of vehicular deaths. I’m confident that when my kid is an adult, he’ll look at us with astonishment when we say we used to drive vehicles around, poorly trained, staring at phones, half-drunk, kind of paying attention sometimes, a bit sleepy and it was not only legal but _normal_. It’ll be like us hearing about how our great-grandparents had a 2 year old work dangerous farm equipment alone. You think “How the hell did anyone survive?”