Hacker News: etherealG

New comment by etherealG in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

etherealG — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:33:20 +0000

And a meta-point on top of the objectively better revenue argument swinging back to the other point about honor: if some or even most of the people involved in the honor system believe it works for the purpose of maintaining honor between each other, then it will encourage honorable behavior, even when there's significant dishonorable behavior.

The fact that most people don't know that the honor system is about money not honor is part of what makes the money part of the honor system work.

New comment by etherealG in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

etherealG — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 15:10:44 +0000

And what I find fascinating is I see similar mimicking by my 5 year old. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to call this a lack of being genuine. Sometimes emotions are learned in humans but we wouldn’t call them fake.

I don’t want to declare machines to have emotion outright, but to call mimicry evidence of falsehood is also itself false.

New comment by etherealG in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

etherealG — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:45:04 +0000

Replace apple with nothing. Replace now with always. Replace ads on with nothing. You now understand news.

News is a scam. It’s called propaganda. We knew this for a long time.

New comment by etherealG in "An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia"

etherealG — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 05:22:19 +0000

Because google search and llm teams are different, with different incentives. Search is the cash cow they keep squeezing for more cash at the expense of good quality since at least 2018, as revealed in court documents showing they did that on purpose to keep people searching more to have more ads and more revenue. Google AI embedded in search has the same goals, keep you clicking on ads… my guess would be Gemini doesn’t have any of the bad part of enshitification yet… but it will come. If you think hallucinations are bad now, just you wait until tech companies start tuning them up on purpose to get you to make more prompts so they can inject more ads!

New comment by etherealG in "We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own"

etherealG — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 11:50:38 +0000

I'm so sorry that's the situation in your country. Another answer to your message from Germany is pretty close to my experience in France, child protection is way less combative and genuinely invested in what's good for children.

New comment by etherealG in "We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own"

etherealG — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 16:49:49 +0000

I think I might enjoy the CPS scenario... let them call CPS, and wait for CPS to arrive, and then discuss with CPS who is endangering the child, the parent or the school. I'm pretty sure a judge will quickly decide whether their rule makes sense or not, and I think judges in child protection cases are going to quickly side with what's important for the child.

I HATE this kind of nonsense, and threatening you as a parent is only making things worse. Why not offer a way to handle this on a simple website? It would have lower cost to the school and be more accessible to anyone with any device able to access websites. Nonsense.

New comment by etherealG in "Why LLMs can't really build software"

etherealG — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:28:01 +0000

Because once you figure out the correct way to handhold, you can automate it and the tediousness goes away.

It’s only tedious once per codebase or task, then you find the less tedious recipe and you’re done.

You can even get others to do the tedious part at their layer of abstraction so that you don’t have to anymore. Same as compilers, cpu design, or any other pet of the stack lower than the one you’re using.

New comment by etherealG in "Vibechart"

etherealG — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:36:52 +0000

But the way they learn to be wise in the context of using LLMs is to try using them and fail, just like all learning experiences. Companies insisting on the use of these tools seems logical to me when the assumption is that they will, once learned, be better than previous methods of working, but only with practice.

New comment by etherealG in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

etherealG — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:10:44 +0000

how do you know what you want if you didn't write a test for it?

I'm afraid what you want is often totally unclear until you start to use a program and realize that what you want is either what the program is doing, or it isn't and you change the program.

MANY programs are made this way, I would argue all of them actually. Some of the behaviour of the program wasn't imagined by the person making it, yet it is inside the code... it is discovered, as bugs, as hidden features, etc.

Why are programmers so obsessed that not knowing every part of the way a program runs means we can't use the program? I would argue you already don't, or you are writing programs that are so fundamentally trivial as to be useless anyway.

LLM written code is just a new abstraction layer, like Python, C, Assembly and Machine Code before it... the prompts are now the code. Get over it.

New comment by etherealG in "Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android"

etherealG — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:35:03 +0000

exactly, the more interesting question: would anyone be willing to prosecute a Meta executive over this? Sadly, I expect no.

New comment by etherealG in "The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything"

etherealG — Sun, 11 May 2025 17:39:03 +0000

Imagine this as a voice chat interface between 2 human beings. This is basically pretending like the interaction of thought and perception of what is on screen is somehow gated by a “I have fully consciously absorbed everything on screen and decided my next action” perfect modeling where both the human ability to perceive and the computer ability to represent information are prefect.

No. That’s not how humans interact with computers. It’s not how humans interact with each other either.

Turn based games can be fun. They are not how we want to interact for day to day life.

Sorry but your idea comes across as one that makes the job of making the computer good to interact with easier, but not as one that makes the computer better to interact with as a human.

Please stop over simplifying a complex system. Humans are complex, the solution is t to be less human. It is for computers to become better at human interaction on human levels.

New comment by etherealG in "Gemini 2.5"

etherealG — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 13:21:30 +0000

I’m not sure lacking comprehension of a comment and choosing to ignore that lack is better. Or worse: asking everyone to manually explain every reference they make. The LLM seems a good choice when comprehension is lacking.

New comment by etherealG in "US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s"

etherealG — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 21:06:06 +0000

Because stock prices and the people's interests they reflect only care about immediate returns that allow investors to then dump those returns into the next immediate returning investment again, to maximize return with no consideration for the overall health of the system they operate in. Capitalism. Long term health of the stock systems. Long term health of the underlying value they reflect. Nothing long term matters in a stock buy at all.

Why do you even ask this question, did the answer really not seem obvious, or was it rhetorical?

New comment by etherealG in "Nobody cares"

etherealG — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 13:30:09 +0000

I totally agree, but also wonder how to fight against this cancer. It seems to me like it’s a natural state of groups of people to devolve into this kind of group as the group grows in size. Are we simply doomed to failure?

New comment by etherealG in "Cognitive load is what matters"

etherealG — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 16:28:21 +0000

I think the argument against comments is that while function names are a necessary form of communicating intent of the code, comments aren’t. The more forms there are the more work there is to update on each change in the code. Comments mean more to update and hence more to fail to update. They also generally can’t be detected for staleness as well as functions, although that is changing now with better ai, not only compilers etc.

New comment by etherealG in "Cognitive load is what matters"

etherealG — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 18:33:39 +0000

Db changes are generally at runtime, how would you recompile rust code during the save of the data to the db? How do you rollback the change if a compile fails? How do you add the necessary code to handle new cases of the enum but not have it present in the db? This is amazingly interesting to me, would love to know more.

New comment by etherealG in "1-800-ChatGPT"

etherealG — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 18:17:37 +0000

Why do you try to mandate how others experience the world?

New comment by etherealG in "Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking"

etherealG — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 20:51:56 +0000

Shouldn’t that headline read “or can benefit from”. Not a shining example of good mathematical thinking. Oh the irony.

New comment by etherealG in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

etherealG — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 18:22:54 +0000

Why would you ask for a citation of something so easy to verify?

New comment by etherealG in "M4 MacBook Pro"

etherealG — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 13:53:57 +0000

For my parents: “under utilities” means it’s mostly impossible to use. What does under mean? What are utilities, are they different from apps? Can I Google search that? Where is connections? What is a connection, is that like a friend?

Glad to see your parents are tech savvy, but this reads like you live in a very different reality from mine.