Hacker News: fluoridation

New comment by fluoridation in "Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests"

fluoridation — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:06:28 +0000

I've done it. I don't agree that it's therapeutic.

New comment by fluoridation in "Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests"

fluoridation — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:12:31 +0000

Your behavior is even stranger than that which you are questioning. The fact you take the time to type out the response means you also feel the urge to respond, and that urge is strong enough that you don't stop yourself before starting, even though you know you are likely to just delete before sending. It's odd that you would ask why someone would reply to a comment when you should already understand why someone would do that: because they feel the same urge you do, and don't have the compulsion to stop themselves before sending.

New comment by fluoridation in "Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM"

fluoridation — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:52:26 +0000

Why did that have to be transported in a thumb drive? It can't have been more than a few hundred megabytes at the most, right?

New comment by fluoridation in "Over 12% of links posted to Hacker News are Show HN projects now"

fluoridation — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 02:22:15 +0000

Yeah, I think the ideal AI user for coding is the one who is not so ignorant that they can't even explain what they want done, but not so knowledgeable that they could simply do it themselves. It's like a crutch: if you don't have legs it's completely useless, but it can let you hobble around if yours don't work perfectly, and if they do work then it's also pretty much useless.

New comment by fluoridation in "I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots"

fluoridation — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:19:52 +0000

I'm pretty sure the company that owns the compute is the one paying for the power. Who would agree to have an ugly noisy cube in their property that they have to pay maintenance for? What would they get out of that deal?

New comment by fluoridation in "DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro"

fluoridation — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 23:31:23 +0000

It didn't work. DeepSeek failed to load on LM Studio due to a tensor format error. I don't have the time to do deeper troubleshooting. Qwen 3.8 Next did work, but the performance was abysmal.

New comment by fluoridation in "DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro"

fluoridation — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:15:41 +0000

Thanks, I'll give that a try. I basically have the same use case, only on Strix Halo.

New comment by fluoridation in "DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro"

fluoridation — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:26:48 +0000

Interesting, I had assumed it'd be too large to fit. What quant and context size are you running?

New comment by fluoridation in "I Changed My License"

fluoridation — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:25:56 +0000

It's also possible if contributors agree to waive rights to their contributions, thus having multiple contributors and a single rights holder.

New comment by fluoridation in "Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them"

fluoridation — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:36:58 +0000

Correct. We can either accept the claim or disregard it. The comment I replied to opted to accept it and then committed a fallacy, hence my response.

New comment by fluoridation in "Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them"

fluoridation — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:10:29 +0000

Okay, but the anecdote states that every model repeated the pseudo-factoid about Foobar square, not just the 4 GB open source model equivalent of a tabloid.

New comment by fluoridation in "Move in C++ without a std:move"

fluoridation — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:34:55 +0000

Yes, of that I'm sure. This optimization is only possible if the compiler has control of both sides of a call. If the function may be callable from other translation units or modules I imagine it generates a thin wrapper that's externally callable.

New comment by fluoridation in "Move in C++ without a std:move"

fluoridation — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:18:25 +0000

N/RVO works by (at the machine language level, of course) rewriting the function signature to return void and take an extra pointer parameter, which is written to before returning. If you're returning a newly-constructed object, the compiler can rewrite that into calling the constructor on the pointer, but if you're returning a named object, the class may have a non-trivial destructor that needs to run after the move, such that it's not possible to rewrite uses of the local object into uses of the pointer.

I'm not too confident on that last part, because such an implementation would mess with semantics in case of an exception, so anyone feel free to correct me on that.

New comment by fluoridation in "Move in C++ without a std:move"

fluoridation — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:46:48 +0000

Unfortunately, I don't think there's getting away from just understanding value semantics to get the correct and/or performant behavior.

New comment by fluoridation in "The safest job from AI may be writing"

fluoridation — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:37:49 +0000

So they go for a wildly shitty LLM translation?

New comment by fluoridation in "The safest job from AI may be writing"

fluoridation — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:34:52 +0000

>It's reference material of all sorts. Technical books, manuals, software localizations, etc.

Yes, I covered that under "formulaic content". As I've already said, a lot of this was already done decades ago. East Asian manuals and copies using machine translation are kind of a meme. Human translators are not losing any work from this. These are all businesses that were never going to employ a translator to begin with; it was either machine translation or nothing.

>Second, you vastly overestimate the desire that book publishers have to pay for good translations. I've seen books from reputable European publishers that were (badly) machine-translated by a contracted translator keen to dig their own grave. Yes, Harry Potter will get a good translation, but 1,000 lesser books won't.

Well, you're not citing any examples, so you you don't give me much to work with. I haven't read a translated book in ages (I don't think), but I do move in circles where translations, human- and machine-made, are freely distributed, and people kick up a fuss over machine translations that they didn't even have to pay for. I can't imagine a paying reader being any kinder upon realizing that they're traded their hard-earned money for machine-produced nonsense. You yourself admit that the translator who does this is digging their own grave. How is this not a problem that corrects itself?

New comment by fluoridation in "The safest job from AI may be writing"

fluoridation — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 02:41:17 +0000

Those people were never going to pay a human translator, though.

New comment by fluoridation in "The safest job from AI may be writing"

fluoridation — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 02:26:55 +0000

Manuals have been machine-translated for ages, well before algorithms were anywhere close to ready for the task. No change there.

>a limited amount of diplomatic communiques

With zero data to support it, I'd bet good money the vast majority of semi-professional translators (that is, those not employed by publishers but still making some money off of their work) work on fiction, translating comics, subtitles, etc.

Actually, come to think of it, mixed media like those will be the last where machine translation will be able to fully take over humans, just because the text doesn't contain the entire relevant context for the job.

New comment by fluoridation in "The safest job from AI may be writing"

fluoridation — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 01:58:15 +0000

AI will definitely not take over translation for a long time. Machine translation has improved to the point it's mostly no longer incoherent, but for non-formulaic content it's still very hit-and-miss, not that much better compared to 10-20 years ago. For example, something they still struggle with is consistently translating terms coined within the text with consistent phrases.

>A budding painter or a musician could support themselves off commissioned / commercial work while working on their grand opus... but now, the customers just prompt gen AI.

Are you joking? The only people I see using generative AI are either companies, shitposters, and spammers. Who are all these people who have stopped paying commissions and moved over to prompting AIs?

New comment by fluoridation in "Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting"

fluoridation — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 01:38:14 +0000

The thing is, there is no real evidence to back up the classification. The assignment between words and objects is arbitrary. A consistent definition for "planet" can be given and immediately after define the Solar System as being comprised of nine planets, with the understanding that a "planet" and a "planet of the Solar System" are similar but distinct concepts. The same is already done in biology with paraphyletic groups, with for example "reptiles" not including birds.

(I say this as someone who doesn't care either way whether Pluto is a planet or not.)