Hacker News: fnordlord

New comment by fnordlord in "Using AI to reverse engineer hardware"

fnordlord — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:19:39 +0000

I wrote something similar and decided to wait until the morning before sending. You said it better but I'm posting to hopefully give it more weight.

And don't forget, Behringer has been around and reverse engineering successful products as a business model. And I don't think they are putting anyone out of business because customers people know what they're getting when they buy knock-offs.

New comment by fnordlord in "Questions for believers in AI consciousness"

fnordlord — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 23:29:43 +0000

Me? No complaints here. I think I agree with you. The better our science, the more precise our map, right?

New comment by fnordlord in "Questions for believers in AI consciousness"

fnordlord — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:35:26 +0000

When it comes to the topic of consciousness, so far I feel science is not the right tool for the job. In the same way that a computer might store RGB values and be able to manage all the transformations necessary to render graphics, it's all a mathematical representation until it's left the screen. Science is that mathematical representation of the universe, consciousness is when it's "left the screen" and is experienced.

Those traditions, with their introspection and meditation, are drilling into experience of consciousness. Or that's my take on the whole thing.

New comment by fnordlord in "Questions for believers in AI consciousness"

fnordlord — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:38:21 +0000

There are traditions that have explored consciousness for thousands of years before some of those mathematical/physical concepts and completely independent of them. My guess is that you'd file them into the nonsense box but I think they drill down into what consciousness a lot better than science has so far.

New comment by fnordlord in "Decayfmt – a file format that corrupts itself a little every time you open it"

fnordlord — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 22:19:55 +0000

From what I remember, MS Paint do something similar when you would save the image as a jpeg. It would apply the algorithm each save and the image would degrade a bit each time. It was super fun.

New comment by fnordlord in "OpenLogi"

fnordlord — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:45:00 +0000

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The author might just dislike (or lack experience) in dealing with frontend. Especially if it’s free or open source. It’s generous to even pay for a domain, right?

New comment by fnordlord in "Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open"

fnordlord — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:05:36 +0000

I may be crazy but I've heard and used "orthogonal" in that context. Or I totally misunderstood the original sentence.

Quick googled definition option: "Very different or unrelated; sharply divergent."

New comment by fnordlord in "Stop the Apple Music app from launching"

fnordlord — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:42:22 +0000

This was annoying to me too but it is pretty easy to fix. Just right click on the .mp3 or whatever file, Get Info and change the default application to your preferred app and then click on "Change all..."

You have to do it once per file type but it's once and done.

New comment by fnordlord in "Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE"

fnordlord — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:09:18 +0000

I know I'm in the crazy minority but I'm over anonymity at this point. I want to know who's a real person and sincerely who they claim to be. The harms of trolling, scamming and societal mis/disinformation, for me, outweigh whatever benefit exists in anonymity. I've never assumed I was anonymous from the government anyway so really, we're just anonymous from one-another. Seems like a classic method of divide and conquer now that I think about it. All that said, I have no idea how to safely enforce ID'ing without some kind of authority (goverment or ideally something else).

New comment by fnordlord in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

fnordlord — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:54:39 +0000

This is a really good point and something that I think is important to clarify at the very start of the discussion. In that way, I'm less interested in explaining consciousness than explaining experience. When I read this article, I felt like the author was only making his points by convoluting the two. By the end, I felt like, for an expert on the subject, I don't think he actually groks the fundamental point.

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

fnordlord — Mon, 11 May 2026 01:43:48 +0000

I rely on Advanced URI, which opens certain functionality up to external apps. I use Raycast and with Cmd+Space, it lets me open vaults or daily notes. And Obsidian_to_Anki, but that's probably just me because I have no clue how to use Anki otherwise.

New comment by fnordlord in "Introduction to Obsidian"

fnordlord — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:36:12 +0000

The Raycast Obsidian plugin makes vaults pretty easy for me. Cmd+Space > "Open Vault" and then pick which one you want. You'll still have a window per vault but it makes it really fast to get to where you want.

New comment by fnordlord in "Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial"

fnordlord — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:59:10 +0000

Having lived through the exact same hysteria, this is a totally different argument being made. This isn't about the morality of a genre of violent YouTube videos or some other tawdry content. It's not the satanic panic or about explicit lyrical content. This is about the safety of designing systems that are psychologically manipulative for the purpose of extracting as much advertising budget possible from clients. If Mortal Kombat was free to play and learned to reprogram itself to keep the child playing for as possible with no ethical bounds. Even if it had to resort to calling the child names or making them feel like playing was only way they'd find some self worth... then we'd be talking about the same thing.

From my perspective, this will sound crazy in a decade or two but more like how harmful smoking is and how ridiculous it is we didn't see it soon.

New comment by fnordlord in "Netflix raises prices for every subscription tier by up to 12.5 percent"

fnordlord — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:42:03 +0000

I always thought that was just a Plex alternative. I’ll have to give it a second look.

New comment by fnordlord in "Netflix raises prices for every subscription tier by up to 12.5 percent"

fnordlord — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:45:19 +0000

I would love for a service to automate cycling through services. Some small fee to automate getting a month or two of service from a selection of providers and just rotate. I don't need year round Netflix, Hulu and Disney but I think I'd be in trouble if I cancelled all of them. Anyone wanna startup?

New comment by fnordlord in "Overcoming the friendship recession"

fnordlord — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:16:38 +0000

If it helps, I've found hosting a pizza night to be a really easy way to have some good hang time with friends. I make the pizza and it's good enough to be free dinner for them. The kids get to participate by customizing their pies. We all catch up for an hour or two in the kitchen, watching me scramble and make a mess. If somebody brings over a bottle of wine, even better.

New comment by fnordlord in "Helix: A post-modern text editor"

fnordlord — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:44:55 +0000

I'm in a similar boat. It's become my primary editor but I still open VSCode everytime I need search-and-replace or an easy git-blame.

For unselect, if I'm understanding correctly, ; will unselect with your cursor at the end of the selection, Alt-; will unselect and move your cursor back to the beginning.

New comment by fnordlord in "Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?"

fnordlord — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 02:49:43 +0000

This is where these questions take me. Since the experience is the only thing I can be certain of, I'm less drawn to "everything is physical" answers and more drawn to ideas from phenomenology and Bishop George Berkeley. And since I'm not super religious, I'm not really comfortable with those "answers" either.

New comment by fnordlord in "Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?"

fnordlord — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:55:54 +0000

It's embarrassingly silly to say but I've frequently just boiled down the hard question to the question of "where is the experience of the color blue stored in the universe?" Even as a non-dualist, I still haven't found much of an answer that I like. I'm all ears if you've got a book recommendation.

New comment by fnordlord in "Richard Carrington's first portrait has been found"

fnordlord — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:34:12 +0000

After reading this a few months ago, I hope it's a long while off. https://www.noemamag.com/the-unseen-fury-of-solar-storms/