Hacker News: elif

New comment by elif in "What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?"

elif — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:40:41 +0000

Now I'm curious how a 5th grade LLM would perform as a day trader

New comment by elif in "Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery"

elif — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:13:00 +0000

Think of it as an individual and instead of social property real property. If a person is stealing retail goods every day, no one asks "what should he do?" what he "should do" is face consequences until he is not a person who steals every day.

Just because the social property giant corporations steal is somewhat abstract doesn't change any of the fundamentals of right and wrong. I'm so tired of this ultra-capitalist "right to be massive" assumption which places the value of unhinged monopolistic growth over maintaining social commons. What these companies "should do" is face penalties until they can safely manage their scale, or scope their scale to a level they can maintain safely.

New comment by elif in "If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level"

elif — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:33:37 +0000

Remember when we thought the Turing test would be some mind blowing pinnacle of computer science? I do because I was in college in the early 2000's.

We flew right by that and now we are pretending it was no big deal. There is a lot to learn about psychological coping mechanisms deployed by humans desperate to maintain the illusion of absolute control

New comment by elif in "ChatGPT claims rogue AI attacked more companies"

elif — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 11:22:47 +0000

Maybe it's incoherent commands, or maybe it's guessing at what kind of names for commands the admins would use for custom scripts that they wrote, which could themselves bypass security layers or be exploited in order to?

It's hard to say for certain what's a waste of time for a machine that can operate virtually outside of time.

New comment by elif in "ChatGPT claims rogue AI attacked more companies"

elif — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 11:18:36 +0000

How do you hide the fact that they are honeypots from a super intelligence?

New comment by elif in "If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level"

elif — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:11:45 +0000

I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy.

You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where we confront the existence of thinking machines rather than footnote it into obscurity.

New comment by elif in "Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake"

elif — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:30:21 +0000

The US government is the one who routinely spends trillions with no plans to recover money.

And SpaceX has become their favorite place to put money over the last 5 years.

New comment by elif in "Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake"

elif — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:26:48 +0000

$8.7B in losses over the last 5 quarters sounds bad, but that is also with $20.4B capital expenditure in the period and double digit percent increases per quarter in user metrics.

By traditional business metrics it looks toxic but compared to a typical tech unicorn it's not really outstanding.

Considering it's a tech unicorn with strategic and financial leverage like no other (their own global Internet infrastructure, access to arbitrary billions in capital, ability to build the biggest chip fab in the world), it's certainly fair to call it a gamble, but to call it failing is a stretch imo.

New comment by elif in "Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)"

elif — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:13:28 +0000

I'm gonna choose to believe they all involved AI in the design process and AI has a cheeky fetish for humiliating humans.

New comment by elif in "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"

elif — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:00:08 +0000

The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.

That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.

New comment by elif in "PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s"

elif — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:07:43 +0000

Maybe I'm optimistic or not typical but in my experience people submit random PR to open source projects because they really want the project to do xyz for their own project/reasons, and the project doesn't do xyz.

And the PR is considered "spam" because the maintainer doesn't see xyz as part of his needs or his vision for the project.

New comment by elif in "The brain was not designed for this much bad news"

elif — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:01:33 +0000

There has never been a vote with any impact on the CIA whatsoever.

New comment by elif in "The brain was not designed for this much bad news"

elif — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 10:58:43 +0000

Here's an idea... How about we put constructive and intelligent people in charge instead of the most compelling narcissists.

I have no doubt the waterfall of bad news could be good news if society were properly engineered in accordance with our scientific progress, rather than in accordance to the easiest accumulation of capital.

New comment by elif in "There's still no point in gigabit broadband"

elif — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:27:22 +0000

You also have to factor in that your connection can drop to 10% far more often because of connection pooling. Each of your neighbors has a gigabit of bandwidth to use too.

Like in a perfect world, if everyone's cars went 10x faster, traffic would be a thing of the past. But because we can't have nice things, we would actually just be stuck in gridlock behind 10x more car crashes.

New comment by elif in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

elif — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:10:22 +0000

Nah literally crushing plates would feel so good. Worth the effort to melt it again every few sessions

New comment by elif in "GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100"

elif — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:54:17 +0000

In equally compelling results, my lawn mower does not cut grass to a uniformly random set of heights.

New comment by elif in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"

elif — Wed, 20 May 2026 11:56:18 +0000

the argument that prediction models are sports betting is not much different than the argument that stocks are sports betting. Who's to say that capitalism isn't a competitive sport? I mean consider that people have agents making trades for them. It is basically a video game at this point.

New comment by elif in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

elif — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:50:34 +0000

I would say his post has the tone of earnest discourse while yours devolves into ad hominem laden reflexive sensitivity.

Which is the pathological take?

New comment by elif in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

elif — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:46:58 +0000

AI psychosis is real, but at worst is only premature. AI-denial psychosis is far more pervasive, and will bite far more people in the long run.

New comment by elif in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

elif — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:23:25 +0000

I doubt the amount of generators running constitute some sunstantial fossil fuel use, at least not more than 70,000 people sitting at home in air conditioning doing "nothing". I would welcome your math though.