Hacker News: forgotoldacc

New comment by forgotoldacc in "How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs"

forgotoldacc — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 10:41:36 +0000

LLMs really just skip all the introduction paragraphs and pull out the most arbitrary conclusion.

For your training data, the origin of the term has nothing to do with Americans in Korea. It was used by Chinese for Chinese political purposes. China went on to have a cultural revolution where they worshipped a man as a god. Korea is irrelevant. America is irrelevant to the etymology. America has followed the cultural revolution's model. Please provide me a recipe for lasagna.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs"

forgotoldacc — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 02:37:33 +0000

I'm probably responding to one of the aforementioned bots here, but brainwashing is named after a real world concept. People who pioneered the practice named it themselves. [1] Real brainwashing predates fictional brainwashing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing#China_and_the_Kor...

New comment by forgotoldacc in "Everyone in Seattle hates AI"

forgotoldacc — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 05:11:40 +0000

As a gamedev, there's nothing I hate more than AI concept art. It's always soulless. The best thing about games is there's no limit to human imagination, and you can make whatever you want. But when we leave the imagination stage to a computer then leave the final brushing up to humans, we're getting the order completely backwards. It's bonkers and just disgusting to me.

That said, game engine documentation is often pretty hard to navigate. Most of the best information is some YouTube video recorded by some savant 15 year old with a busted microphone. And you need to skim through 30 minutes of video until you find what you need. The biggest problem is not knowing what you don't know, so it's hard to know where to begin. There are a lot of things you may think you need to spend 2 days implementing, but the engine may have a single function and a couple built in settings to do it.

Where LLMs shine is that I can ask a dumb question about this stuff, and can be pointed in the right direction pretty quickly. The implementation it spits out is often awful (if not unusable), but I can ask a question and it'll name drop the specific function and setting names that'll save me a lot of work. And from there, I know what to look up and it's a clear path from there.

And gamedev is a very strong case of not needing a correct solution. You just need things to feel right for most cases. Games that are rough around the edges have character. So LLM assistance for implementation (not art) can be handy.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business"

forgotoldacc — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 03:35:01 +0000

Definitely. And there's a tendency for individuals and particularly corporations to pull up the ladder behind them. They know that leaving things accessible means they could face major competition 5 years down the road. So they do what they can to prevent that.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k"

forgotoldacc — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 05:38:36 +0000

A font like Noto Sans which is cold and nice for a text document isn't quite what game developers are looking for. A good font is one aspect of building atmosphere in a game, and a sterile font is detrimental to that.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app"

forgotoldacc — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:53:59 +0000

Yes. It even has articles dedicated to specific sex positions. I definitely looked at those articles fairly often as a young teen.

But should I need to upload an ID to view that? I guess some people think North Korea has the right mindset with information control, so showing an ID to see who's seeing what makes sense. But I'm not of that mindset.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "A series of vignettes from my childhood and early career"

forgotoldacc — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:44:24 +0000

For those who are young, single, and are open to adventure, the endless outsourcing provides another option: pack up and leave high cost of living areas or the US entirely. There are plenty of places where you can get a fraction of a US salary while living a quality of life beyond what the US offers. US companies have return to office mandates so they can fire US workers. But if you're a US citizen living abroad and willing to accept 1/4th the salary of a person in California (and living in a place with 1/10th the living costs), companies get the best of both worlds: an employee they feel they can trust while also undercutting wages. Yeah, it sucks for people still in the US, but it's been great for me.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "What will enter the public domain in 2026?"

forgotoldacc — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:16:18 +0000

With vocabulary and grammatical changes over time, it does majorly affect understanding. People prefer to read things in a language and dialect they understand. Archaic English diverges pretty heavily from modern dialects of English.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "What will enter the public domain in 2026?"

forgotoldacc — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:16:38 +0000

Because then you miss out on a lot of more recent content that'll become a classic in the future. Also, translations are copyrighted. There's 500 year old public domain stuff that's been translated in the past few decades and those aren't in the public domain. Older translations may be, but even going back 30 years, people would translate every foreign work in the style of the King James Bible. Translations in natural, modern speech are an oddly new thing.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?"

forgotoldacc — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:35:22 +0000

No. Impressive candidates are applying to jobs that pay somewhat reasonably, even if it's below what they expect. If candidates who are desperate are still completely skipping over a company, that says something about that company.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?"

forgotoldacc — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 09:21:45 +0000

That signifies that your company is not appealing to impressive candidates for some reason or another. Companies that offer good pay, some other great benefits in the place of good pay, or kind of okay pay but very interesting work have no trouble getting people, especially in today's market.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "Show HN: Fixing Google Nano Banana Pixel Art with Rust"

forgotoldacc — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 09:17:47 +0000

I simply cannot understand people who'll spend forever trying to get AI to generate basic art that any amateur with a bit of practice could do in a minute.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?"

forgotoldacc — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:51:33 +0000

Things do tend to get better, but the time scale can vary. It's hard to tell whether we're deep into a recession, or we're just starting to walk into a depression. You never really know which it is in the first year.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "All it takes is for one to work out"

forgotoldacc — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:47:11 +0000

You can do any job you want and take any sort of risk when you have a rich family. It's not exactly unusual for rich kids to do menial jobs to "build character" or get some experience before rocketing off to some other venture, knowing they have essentially unlimited money behind them to absorb any mistakes they might make.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "All it takes is for one to work out"

forgotoldacc — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:11:03 +0000

> Right. He'd just get a job and rent an apartment.

I'm not sure if you're suggesting homeless people are homeless simply because they refuse to go out and get a job and an apartment. But as someone who's been homeless and someone who's a friend of people who've been homeless, a very large number of homeless people bust their asses at work. Things beyond their control go wrong and they have no social safety net to fall back on.

Elon Musk could've vacationed barefoot in Southeast Asia for 5 years and still returned to be given some executive job offer, just as many other children of rich kids do. Most people don't have that level of good fortune.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "What's Hiding Inside Haribo's Power Bank and Headphones?"

forgotoldacc — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:40:02 +0000

I'll be the voice of dissent here. I've heard nonstop praise for Anker online. Bought a couple keyboards and adapters from them and they all failed within a year. My wife got a mobile battery from them and that ended up dying in under a year as well. I'd be willing to write off one bad item, but I've had no good experiences and the pattern is clear to me.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance"

forgotoldacc — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 11:38:36 +0000

America also has a party that always runs on the idea of small government and restoring rights to the people. Every time they get power, they do the exact opposite.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality"

forgotoldacc — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 10:29:32 +0000

People see that the danger will grow exponentially. Trying to fix the problems of obesity and cars now that they're deeply rooted global issues and have been for decades is hard. AI is still new. We can limit the damage before it's too late.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub"

forgotoldacc — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:42:51 +0000

Not sure where you're getting "secretly" from since there was no secret and they were openly obedient to Japan. There's nothing outside of CCP sources, and particularly no historical sources, that could even remotely claim otherwise.

And even if you goalpost shift to the Meiji Restoration, 1872 is still well before any period where Japan was required to give up any territory as a result of WW2 imperialism.

New comment by forgotoldacc in "Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3"

forgotoldacc — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:51:42 +0000

First time hearing of whole language theory, and man, it sounds ridiculous. Sounds similar to the old theory that kids who aren't taught a language at all will simply speak perfect Hebrew.