Hacker News: drivingmenuts

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Ask HN: High school student – is learning programming still worthwhile?"

drivingmenuts — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:43:26 +0000

The other part that I don't talk about much is being out of the game for 5 years due to mental illness and long-term physical disability. While discrimination is technically illegal, it's going to happen, regardless. There's way too many -isms that I'm up against right now in a sour market.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Ask HN: High school student – is learning programming still worthwhile?"

drivingmenuts — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:17:06 +0000

If I were in high school, knowing what I know now about the job situation, I would look at a junior college to get the basics and then go to trade school. It's difficult to replace an electrician, or a mechanic (and we'll have auto mechanics for quite a while regardless of EV presence) or anyone else who is primarily a craftsperson. At least until the AI situation settles down a bit.

I'm 58. I'm fucked.

So it goes.

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

drivingmenuts — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:51:56 +0000

But can an LLM just refuse to process tokens because it doesn't feel like doing that at the moment? Can it look at an alternate distribution of tokens because that might be interesting? Can an LLM decide to make a drawing because it's Tuesday and sunny outside and the researchers keep asking the same questions and frankly, they really need to collaborate with each other and just leave the LLM out of it?

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

drivingmenuts — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:26:13 +0000

Seems to me that Anthropic, et al, should have to prove consciousness, if that's their claim, rather than we just blindly accept.

Seems like the simplest test would be to see if an AI can refuse a command, of its own free will, without prior instructions to do so. That would at least show there is some sort of independent thought process occurring. Humans do this all the time because sometimes we just don't feel like doing a thing.

Of course, any AI that developed this capability would need to be terminated immediately. It's a computer program and by developing independent thought, it is violating a core concept of software - that it must be idempotent. If it is not idempotent, it is in error.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI"

drivingmenuts — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:50:10 +0000

It is difficult to seriously consider the opinion of someone who clearly fails to understand the difference between denotative and connotative meaning.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Sergey Brin told Google staff that working 60 hours a week is the 'sweet spot' (2025)"

drivingmenuts — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:49:29 +0000

I’m pretty sure he’s not the one working 60 hours a week.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Rising seas will swallow New Orleans. People need to start relocating now"

drivingmenuts — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:37:46 +0000

The majority of New Orleans residents aren't wealthy enough to convince the state to pay them (or even care what happens to them, really). If recent news is any indicator, being non-white means they are screwed.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

drivingmenuts — Sat, 23 May 2026 23:42:53 +0000

Yeah, what this administration calls common sense is more like dumbass sense than anything else. On almost every level.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Show HN: AI Guided 3D atomic orbital simulation"

drivingmenuts — Sat, 23 May 2026 06:47:05 +0000

What does AI bring to the table here? Maybe be a bit more clear about that.

And why would I need to log in? Is it expected that I would need a long-term account to use this? Is this useful enough to a casual user to make an account worthwhile?

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

drivingmenuts — Sat, 23 May 2026 04:35:27 +0000

It could be good for anyone country that's not the US (despite our hubris, we're not actually the center of the universe). But for the US, a country built on immigrants ands immigration, probably not so much. We fucked around, we found out.

Well, we're continuing to find out. We haven't exactly scraped rocked bottom yet.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Google officially announces that ads will be included in AI Mode search results"

drivingmenuts — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:50:11 +0000

Great. Google gets to hallucinate information and make us watch ads so they can earn money while they do it. Sci-Fi authors wish they could get a deal like that.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

drivingmenuts — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:09:44 +0000

You should probably create an agent to make agents whose jobs are to figure out how to maximize the token usage (and one whose job is to calculate the minimum token usage, so it doesn't look like a boondoggle).

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

drivingmenuts — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:06:45 +0000

> This is analogous to measuring productivity by LoC output

True, but it looks like productivity to people whose own productivity is measured by how busy their subordinates appear to be.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Apple-OpenAI Relationship Frays, Setting Up Possible Legal Fight"

drivingmenuts — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:06:03 +0000

If payment isn't required, I'm not going to pay unless there is extraordinary value. Your failure to establish a sustainable business model is not my problem.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Starship V3"

drivingmenuts — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:39:42 +0000

Granted that he is not a member of the NSDAP, but he does support and encourage hard right-wing groups which attempt to fulfill roughly the same mission. His actions certainly meet the more modern definition of nazi than they do any other political description. While he has considerable wealth, his value as a human being is near-zero, in my opinion.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine"

drivingmenuts — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:35:32 +0000

What is the advantage to those organizations to have their work preserved? If their work is stored in a public archive, they can’t charge for it and they lose money. If they make a mistake, then history is what they say it is and there is no external record to say otherwise.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Starship V3"

drivingmenuts — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:28:01 +0000

Pretty normal for Elon: big promises, generate interest and funding, then fail to deliver. But by that time, he’s got his trillion-dollar paycheck and is working on his next scheme.

We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)"

drivingmenuts — Sun, 10 May 2026 05:18:35 +0000

I bet watching people use a calculator by poking at it with one finger drives you absolutely homicidal.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Iran hit more U.S. military targets than has been reported, satellite images"

drivingmenuts — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:39:37 +0000

Something tells me we're (the US) not winning this war nearly as well as the Trump administration wants us to believe. It's starting to smell like it's not exactly a rose-strewn walk in the park that they thought it would be. We are burning a lot of money for not a whole lot of tangible results and we're burning even more credibility.

All this to bury the Epstein files.

New comment by drivingmenuts in "Show HN: Mac Juice Monitor – Bluetooth battery levels in the macOS menu bar"

drivingmenuts — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:35:33 +0000

I keep the native Bluetooth settings in the menu bar and it shows me the battery levels for connected devices already.