Hacker News: farleykr

New comment by farleykr in "My Truck Desk"

farleykr — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:42:29 +0000

What are the aspects of working on a bus that make it impractical? When I find myself in your position usually I end up realizing I'm self-conscious about people seeing what I'm doing more than I'm concerned about any practical downside or benefit.

New comment by farleykr in "Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News"

farleykr — Thu, 15 May 2025 01:05:48 +0000

It is surely a sign of the times that this is in Teen Vogue.

New comment by farleykr in "AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans"

farleykr — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 12:52:43 +0000

Maybe if we spent more time learning how to interpret animal emotions than we do building AI to do it for us the title would read vice versa.

New comment by farleykr in "Why do AI chatbots have such a hard time admitting 'I don't know'?"

farleykr — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:08:03 +0000

True, no argument there. What fascinates me more is why people continue to think we can teach a chatbot how to recognize what's true and give us answers that we can't find for ourselves. At best a chatbot is going to be a tool that enables us to gain insights we didn't have before the same way a dictionary can "teach" you words you didn't know before.

I think the idea of using technology to solve life's ultimate conundrums has long since jumped the shark and veered into the area of religious belief. People are literally putting their faith in AI even if they wouldn't use religious vocabulary to label and define it as such.

New comment by farleykr in "Why Do AI Chatbots Have Such a Hard Time Admitting 'I Don't Know'?"

farleykr — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:03:35 +0000

I mentioned this in one of my other comments but even if AI figures this out where humans can't, I think this will involve coming to the conclusion that there really is an objective, knowable truth at the core of the universe or at least a set of tools will be developed for better discerning what that truth is. Even if you're talking about knowing who someone's spouse is, I'm not convinced we can ever teach a machine how you know what is true unless we're willing to have some sort of basic tenet of what truth is or how to discern it.

New comment by farleykr in "Why Do AI Chatbots Have Such a Hard Time Admitting 'I Don't Know'?"

farleykr — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:58:33 +0000

Fair enough. I think a lot of people are going to end up blindly trusting AI because its right often enough. But for those who are interested in what it really means to know something, I wonder if this will push people back towards embracing the idea that there is fundamental, objective, knowable truth at the core of the universe even if we can't ever know that truth perfectly.

New comment by farleykr in "Why do AI chatbots have such a hard time admitting 'I don't know'?"

farleykr — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:48:58 +0000

I might be getting overly philosophical here but I'd say it's because they truly don't know anything at all (as opposed to knowing some things but not others). To be able to say "I don't know" you have to first "know" on a deeper level that there is a fundamental true or correct answer to a question and that you are disconnected from it.

New comment by farleykr in "Stories from the Internet"

farleykr — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 23:16:14 +0000

The Forgotten Employee would make a great addition:

https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

New comment by farleykr in "The Origins of Wokeness"

farleykr — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 19:48:52 +0000

Point taken. I wouldn't recommend avoiding anything modern across the board and neither does CS Lewis. And innovation is great but I would guard against assuming that innovation is always positive and a step in the right direction even if not directly. It's also true that many old texts, religious or otherwise, contain timeless wisdom that can inform innovative efforts. And I'm not talking about old by many centuries either. For example, I think many of the hacker types that frequent HN and seek to build something innovative would probably benefit from reading some of Alan Turing's writings. On the other end of the spectrum, maybe Sam Altman could benefit from studying the story of the tower of Babel.

New comment by farleykr in "The Origins of Wokeness"

farleykr — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 18:54:02 +0000

I'm assuming you're exaggerating for effect at least a little but with that caveat I couldn't agree more. CS Lewis has a great argument for this in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation. Paraphrasing his argument: Time naturally filters out the nonsense and what we're left with are the books that are worth reading by virtue of the fact that they have stood the test of time. Truth or at least the closest we can get to it naturally bubbles up to the surface over time.

https://thecslewis-studygroup.org/the-c-s-lewis-study-group/...

New comment by farleykr in "Meta Movie Gen"

farleykr — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 18:39:11 +0000

I think pretty soon we will get to the point where there’s some sort of significant boundary at all levels between online and real life because the only way to be sure you’re seeing something real is to be interacting with it in real life. The internet will not be something you visit on a web browser to get information but will become a place you go where you will simply have to acknowledge that nothing is real. Obviously that’s a concern now but I wonder if we’ll get to a point where it’s taken for granted at large that whatever you see on the internet just isn’t real. And I wonder what implications that will have.

New comment by farleykr in "I Am Tired of AI"

farleykr — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:26:58 +0000

This is exactly what’s at stake. I heard an artist say one time that he’d rather listen to Bob Dylan miss a note than listen to a song that had all the imperfections engineered out of it.

New comment by farleykr in "Advice on Reading Homer in Translation"

farleykr — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 19:08:53 +0000

Not a fan of discourse?

New comment by farleykr in "Public Work: a search engine for public domain images"

farleykr — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 12:51:02 +0000

This has potential to be an amazing resource. Not sold on the infinite scroll that goes in any direction as a useful interface for browsing the images. As other commenters have noted, metadata such as source information would also be useful and should be included

New comment by farleykr in "Brian Kernighan on “The Practice of Programming” [video]"

farleykr — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 00:08:25 +0000

I think they mean that the description of the episode should have a list of books (and maybe other resources) that were mentioned in the episode itself.

New comment by farleykr in "Surprising gender biases in GPT"

farleykr — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 10:25:01 +0000

> This phenomenon likely reflects that while initiatives to integrate women in traditionally masculine roles have gained momentum, the reverse movement remains relatively under developed.

Not challenging you. Maybe it’s just the phrasing. But that sentence to me reads as if they think the presence of the biases in GPT means that they exist in the real world. And again, not challenging that the biases do exist. Just noting the trend toward trusting GPT in increasingly subjective areas that have to do with moral judgement. To me it’s not too much different than drawing conclusions about the world from religious texts.

New comment by farleykr in "Surprising gender biases in GPT"

farleykr — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 10:11:10 +0000

What’s interesting to me is that (if I understand correctly) they’re using GPT as a source of information to make this claim. Usually you see conclusions like these being drawn from some sort of sociological study. But here they’re just talking to GPT and using its answers to determine things about the real world.

Not disputing the claims. But talking to GPT to get answers about the real world that have to do with value judgements is just weird. There’s a big difference between asking GPT to give you a recipe for a cake and asking GPT to help you understand the value the world places on different people.

New comment by farleykr in "Diving into deep learning: Understanding Deep Learning book review [pdf]"

farleykr — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 10:22:26 +0000

What is the ‘delves’ style?

New comment by farleykr in "Google CEO: Building for our AI future"

farleykr — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 14:29:15 +0000

You're not wrong.

I'm taking issue with the fact that he's presenting Google and its mission as something objective and above reproach. By doing so he's going above and beyond asking people to align themselves with Google's mission and methods and asking them to assent to something that he seems to take for granted as transcendent.

It's religious language and behavior and it creeps me out.

New comment by farleykr in "Google CEO: Building for our AI future"

farleykr — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 13:33:10 +0000

I'm not taking issue with him expecting employees to get in line with the mission and methods. I'm saying he should be more frank and transparent about the fact that this is what he's doing instead of acting like Google as an entity is objective and impartial.