Hacker News: flashman

New comment by flashman in "Study links GLP-1 drugs to bigger jump in women's employment than a degree"

flashman — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 02:21:30 +0000

> "If it's going to make me more money to paint my face, clown me up," she said.

Oh you're already a clown

New comment by flashman in "ReFrame – The EPaper Camera"

flashman — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:49:22 +0000

When John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats started recording albums to cassette on his portable Panasonic stereo, he got a sound that was so much more lo-fi than what could be obtained in a studio, or even with a more expensive recorder and microphone.

His genius was to realise he'd made a sound that most professional musicians would never bother with, and thus it became his own and his signature. I think not worrying so much about fidelity probably gave him more time to concentrate on the lyrics and music.

Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?

New comment by flashman in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

flashman — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 05:17:23 +0000

> The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies

Incorrect; 94% of Reddit's 2025 revenue came from advertising, it's right here on page 81 https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001713445/42e4fe7...

This is why Reddit is supposedly ending its licensing agreement with Google: when the latter shows AI snippets in its search results, Reddit misses out on advertising revenue, and Reddit has judged the Google juice to not be worth the squeeze.

New comment by flashman in "Is The Economist Always Wrong?"

flashman — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 05:58:14 +0000

You assert that, but can you prove it? Likewise I can say that the model is biased towards rating the Economist's claims as 'mainstream' and 'bang on' because as a high-profile publication those claims are repeated elsewhere and hence up-weighted.

I could be wrong - my point is, how would we know?

New comment by flashman in "FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs"

flashman — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:31:43 +0000

The current ID verification requirements for phones were introduced to Australia in 1997

New comment by flashman in "The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true"

flashman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:03:59 +0000

> Claude and ChatGPT are not indoctrinating into the manosphere users asking about discounted cash flow formulae.

You're defining an extremely narrow case and then saying bias is irrelevant within it. At the risk of Godwin's Law that's kind of like saying it's okay if my accountant is a Nazi as long as they only ever have conversations about accountancy.

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

flashman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:44:57 +0000

In the same way that a photograph is not dissimilar to the thing it represents, that is, in the most important way.

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

flashman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:41:50 +0000

vast oversimplification of the experience of brain damage

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

flashman — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:39:12 +0000

Maybe when the system can generate its own state, rather than that state existing as a deterministic output of its inputs, maybe then we can consider it to have the interiority and reflexiveness required to call something 'thought'.

A very convincing simulation of thought is not thought, especially without memory or any evidence of an independent will. LLMs have the same kind of consciousness as a nematode, albeit with less-complex behaviour.

New comment by flashman in "1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices"

flashman — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:28:26 +0000

well we could [HN terms of service violation]

New comment by flashman in "1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices"

flashman — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:27:35 +0000

I didn't say there wasn't bot-generated content in the past. I said we weren't excited about a future where it was de rigeur.

New comment by flashman in "1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices"

flashman — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:13:07 +0000

I don't know what else you'd call the widespread and enthusiastic adoption of a technology that is designed to exploit people's trust in the veracity of images by mimicking reality as seamlessly as possible. I think it's both aberrant and abhorrent for the tech industry to be actively developing something that's permanently polluting our information environment.

Here's a local story published after I made my comment, about tour operators using AI images to misrepresent destinations in the area: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-01/ai-videos-spark-conce...

Increasing the availability of fake image generators directly enables more harms like these.

New comment by flashman in "1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices"

flashman — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:19:04 +0000

Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.

New comment by flashman in "The Pack That Killed the Pack Mule"

flashman — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:07:05 +0000

hey OP what's with all the carryology submissions in the past two days

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279413

New comment by flashman in "AI is a technology not a product"

flashman — Mon, 18 May 2026 02:16:22 +0000

Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models, which is really what we mean by 'AI' here. It costs a lot to create and to run, nobody is willing to pay enough to cover those costs, and when that financial reality hits, it's going to take the knees out from under some major corporations.

Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia. That would be a useful vertical integration.

New comment by flashman in "AI is a technology not a product"

flashman — Mon, 18 May 2026 02:03:50 +0000

No, it's asking for my two-legged horse to have four legs

New comment by flashman in "Googlebook"

flashman — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:36:22 +0000

But we all knew what they meant and here you are being tedious about it

New comment by flashman in "SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites"

flashman — Mon, 11 May 2026 01:47:32 +0000

Misleading, because satellites are made of different materials to meteors. Satellites are the dominant injection source of 24 elements into the atmosphere, including Al, Cu, Ti, Nb, Co, Zn, Sn, Pb, Ag, Li, V, Hf, W, Ge, Mo, Zr, B, and Ba. This list includes many transition metals, whose catalytic effects on ozone and cloud nucleation are mostly unknown.

Copper in particular is a well-known catalyst for the destruction of ozone.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311772...

New comment by flashman in "Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan"

flashman — Mon, 11 May 2026 01:19:26 +0000

well there was this previous issue in the crypto community where it turned out someone was not a competent engineer and should have stuck to their online exchange for magic: the gathering

New comment by flashman in "Canvas is down as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

flashman — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:50:12 +0000

What's in the files they've already released? Some of them are > 800GB.