Hacker News: fssys

New comment by fssys in "An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time"

fssys — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:38:31 +0000

amazing work deserves much better than this dreadful llm write up!

New comment by fssys in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

fssys — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:12:37 +0000

Shakespeare is good for kids, its mostly quite light and fun and not very long, theres a linguistic challenge but thats a good learning opportunity

New comment by fssys in "Britain’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi"

fssys — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:13:11 +0000

Im referring to brexit and to his "cut the green crap" which left us horribly exposed to energy price shocks caused by Putin. North sea barely has any gas left and is not economically viable. And yes as you have alluded, most of the NZ policies the rw populists are raging about were drafted years ago under the conservatives.

New comment by fssys in "Britain’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi"

fssys — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:49:19 +0000

energy prices are firmly david camerons fault!

New comment by fssys in "Dopamine Fracking"

fssys — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:36:32 +0000

none of these things are that important, or even particularly true. The greater effect is social/cultural. Wholesale capture of industries/social phenomena by technocapital. Describing everything in terms of neurotransmitters is rather silly, doesnt even really describe the experience of the individual.

New comment by fssys in "Dopamine Fracking"

fssys — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:27:58 +0000

every time someone coins a new term for these phenomena i think of how Adorno already explained it all. "enshittification" SHUT UP

New comment by fssys in "Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis"

fssys — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:56:14 +0000

what if you believe that someone is suffering from delusions and has beliefs that are increasingly disconnected from reality due to overexposure to ai generated responses and underexposure to human conversation? would that be psychosis?

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

fssys — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:00:38 +0000

exactly

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

fssys — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:08:46 +0000

yes

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

fssys — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:08:09 +0000

you think qualia are the soul then!

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

fssys — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:07:47 +0000

My argument is that qualia are actually cognitive artefacts bound up with language, not the base elements of "what it is to be" you or me, which is how people often speak of them, so the p-zombie concept is a bit nonsensical to me.

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

fssys — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:04:15 +0000

reflexes have nothing to do with qualia. you can differentiate objects without knowing what is a triangle and what is a square, or that this colour is red. but I think qualia as commonly understood involve concepts in a way that means they are not immediate experience in some kind of cartesian sense. We speak of them as categorised. certainly the way people commonly speak about them they are very carefree about invoking "the qualia of a horse" or some other specific object.

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

fssys — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:42:51 +0000

No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.

New comment by fssys in "The map that keeps Burning Man honest"

fssys — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:43:57 +0000

it is quite on the nose that they have this quirky sf-tech-bro coded word for "waste" or "litter". Hey I've got this crazy idea, what if instead of cars we all rode in one big car and it had metal wheels and roads to reduce friction... it's only at Burning Man you can find people with big ideas like this

New comment by fssys in "Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them"

fssys — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:09:53 +0000

extremely naive!

New comment by fssys in "You Had No Taste Before AI"

fssys — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:34:39 +0000

in order for anything to become truly profitable its uniqueness must be quantified and integrated into existing power structures, it must be expressly oriented towards fulfilling the needs/desires of the largest amount of people for the least amount of expenditure. Profitability IS intrinsically distasteful. Market forces, online ecosystems etc, quickly strip away any idiosyncratic features present in a viral trend, they aggressively select for sticking power, everything tends toward uniformity. This is closely linked with the process of reification.

New comment by fssys in "Introduction to Computer Music"

fssys — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:04:20 +0000

puredata or supercollider - although I would honestly recommend Max/MSP over either (but it is commercial). Ableton is great and most DAWs in general are useful and quite similar so the skills are transferable, but they do lend themselves to specific orthodox kinds of composition, dance music and sound collage basically.