Hacker News: fwlr

New comment by fwlr in "'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us"

fwlr — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:20:44 +0000

You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.

New comment by fwlr in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

fwlr — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 03:17:35 +0000

I have now seen several people using the “arsonist / forest fire” analogy in the context of the Australian hack, seemingly unaware that Australia does not treat arson and wildfires as acts of god that just happen and you only have yourself to blame for improperly preparing for it, but rather as acts of man that are addressed with things like “total fire ban” (if translated back to the AI context this would ban even individuals using airgapped local models), “levy fines” (e.g. 2M for a 20B corp so if translated back to OpenAI’s context ~1B), and “class action lawsuits” (e.g. 500M for a 10B corp so if translated back to OpenAI’s context ~50B).

New comment by fwlr in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

fwlr — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:50:05 +0000

In Australia we have some experience with this scenario (usually with higher temperatures) and some of the measures we have found effective are “total fire bans”, “jail the arsonists for extended periods of time”, and for negligent companies whose insufficient vigilance caused the fire specifically, “levy steep fines” and “find in favor of the plaintiff in class-action lawsuits for significant fractions of the company’s net worth”. Perhaps these measures could be of use here!

New comment by fwlr in "28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days"

fwlr — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:52:34 +0000

It is absolutely and undeniably a real phenomenon. Take your pick of explanations, nobody actually knows for sure, but you have to tell yourself something or you’d toss your phone out the window when you get the 40th notification that you might be interested in the exact same job that auto-rejected you the previous 39 times. Speaking from personal experience over the last year.

New comment by fwlr in "What Capital Never Told You About Rent"

fwlr — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:58:12 +0000

I am not familiar with every theory behind every condemnation of usury (there are a multitude) but this is not true for any of the theories that I do know.

In fact it rather sounds like an intentionally foolish theory invented by someone practicing usury as the only possible reason anyone could disagree with them, and then incorrectly attributed to any opposition to their practice. You can sort of tell this is the case, because if you reverse the theory you get “usury creates wealth while other activities just shuffle it around”, which is a very flattering thing for an usurer to believe.

New comment by fwlr in "What Capital Never Told You About Rent"

fwlr — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:38:55 +0000

Charging rent on capital was historically called “usury”, and was denounced by everyone from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Moses to Buddha to Muhammad. I suspect they had the right of it, which poses some problems for our present society, fractally composed of usury (as the article aptly outlines).

New comment by fwlr in "AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You"

fwlr — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:07:36 +0000

I mean, you can s/“won”/“had their ideas reach a supermajority in the population such that their future (and our present) resembled the future they wanted instead of the future they worried the target of their ire would (and did) bring about”, or equivalent, at your leisure - I think my point stands either way.

New comment by fwlr in "People Training OpenAI's AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI"

fwlr — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:00:07 +0000

Are you having trouble following the metaphor? In it, I would be the conspiracy theorist saying it’s poisonous, and OpenAI would be the government saying it’s harmless but it’s also a fireable offense to feed it to us and we’ve hired a second set of contractors to watch for any violation of this rule.

(I’m not trying to be disingenuous, though I am trying to express a niche viewpoint. Hopefully, my willingness to take the metaphorical role of conspiracy theorist is understood as epistemic humility.)

New comment by fwlr in "People Training OpenAI's AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI"

fwlr — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:34:19 +0000

“Suppose the government puts a certain drug in the water supply … A couple of conspiracy nuts say it makes your fingers fall off one by one, but the government says that’s ridiculous … However, government employees are all observed drinking bottled water exclusively, and if anyone suggests that government employees might also want to take the completely innocuous drug, they freak out … If by chance you manage to slip a little bit of tap water into a government employee’s drink, and he finds out about it, he runs around shrieking like a banshee and occasionally yelling “AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!”. At some point you might start to wonder whether the government was being entirely honest with you.”

What is it, exactly, that makes AI-generated text so poisonous to AIs but totally harmless to humans? What is mode/model collapse, and why can it only happen to AIs with too much AI text in their training data and not to, say, human students with too much AI text in their textbooks? The people who know the most about this phenomenon seem much more careful about contamination than they are encouraging us to be.

New comment by fwlr in "AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You"

fwlr — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:05:08 +0000

Was Socrates even wrong, though? There have certainly been millions of words written that were lacking in wisdom and have convinced people of falsehoods to their detriment! When’s the last time you saw a debate be reasonable? devoid of cheap jokes or hot takes? actually change someone’s mind? or the whole audience’s mind?

In the world where we didn’t outsource Western manufacturing to China, our homes would not be overflowing with disposable junk; in the world where the Luddites won, our wardrobes would not be stuffed full of disposable clothes; perhaps in the world where Socrates won our minds would not be jammed full of nonsense.

New comment by fwlr in "Robin Williams' Daughter to Fans Creating AI Videos: 'Have Some Shame'"

fwlr — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 03:46:35 +0000

Unfortunately, AI content creators have no shame, and neither do social media content curation algorithms; in the current configuration of the world, those two entities form a closed loop that produces and serves this shameful content to unwilling bystanders. From a God’s-eye perspective it is easy to say “we should change this system so this doesn’t happen”, but from within the system each participant can only say “let us follow our incentives to become slightly more rich than other participants” (and any entity that might’ve once held a God’s-eye view along with the power to make such a change has long since abdicated their role).

It is decent microcosm of the state of the world if you’re looking to understand why younger generations seem so fatalistically, nihilistically depressed - they are simply aware that nobody can break these vicious cycles.

New comment by fwlr in "Jev-Leftpad"

fwlr — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:35:00 +0000

    The tests mock Jev.

10/10 no notes

New comment by fwlr in "Winning the visa lottery"

fwlr — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 05:22:44 +0000

The firms who do not win the visa lottery “just become smaller firms” instead of hiring market-rate labor because they still have to compete in a market against other firms who won the visa lottery and have access to below-market-rate labor.

Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?

New comment by fwlr in "AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons"

fwlr — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:21:38 +0000

If we come together to create a new digital renaissance, they’ll just feed that into the machine as well.

We are not entering a new dark age so much as we are being pushed, by specific actors who make no secret of their actions, and are identifiable and locatable.

New comment by fwlr in "Can you tell which images are AI-generated?"

fwlr — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 01:41:58 +0000

Every generation prompt has this suffixed:

    The scene should feel incidentally noticed during daily life, not arranged for an advertisement. Natural perspective and subtle everyday wear. No cinematic grading, stock-photo staging, deliberate blur, artificial grain, fake low resolution, extreme background blur, exaggerated HDR or oversharpening. No collage, border, caption or added watermark.

At some point during the process of building up this collection of turd-polishing techniques, the thought should’ve occurred that this is actually a lot of effort to get generations confused for reality. But I suspect this process was being carried out by something that couldn’t have an original thought.

New comment by fwlr in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

fwlr — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:53:41 +0000

If the AI makes a “better” poster that everyone hates because it’s AI, and a person makes a “worse” poster that everyone likes because it’s human, isn’t the business better off with the “worse” poster?

New comment by fwlr in "I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago"

fwlr — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:46:26 +0000

“Codex, build a novel frontier model and post it on HackerNews —”

“Claude, roast this noob, tell him that his model isn’t novel or frontier —”

both in unison “— and make no mistakes!”

It’s all so tiresome

New comment by fwlr in "The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It"

fwlr — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:39:36 +0000

When I look up the word “pain” in a thesaurus I also get back a bunch of words related to pain. Is the book in pain!? Maybe we should run some undergraduate psychology studies on it.

New comment by fwlr in "Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'"

fwlr — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 22:54:43 +0000

A key consideration in most legal definitions of theft is “intent to permanently deprive the owner”. While this has historically meant scraping is not theft (because copying doesn’t erase the original, nobody is deprived), in this specific case the AI companies’ business plan (copy a person’s content and train on it to make their model more capable of replacing that person) could very well meet the bar of intent to deprive.

New comment by fwlr in "Show HN: Ax-check.com – Can agents use your product?"

fwlr — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:29:08 +0000

Claude, use AX-check to make my site score a zero. Make no mistakes