Hacker News: garspin

New comment by garspin in "The Double Standard of Carbon: Why we grant souls to meat but not silicon"

garspin — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 03:12:05 +0000

Consciousness & souls are defined by feelings.

Feelings need chemicals - dopamine, seratonin, oxytocin.

Our meat substrate has these, silcon doesn't.

While mirrors, TVs, Tiktoks, LLMs can evoke emotions in us, that's not sufficent to assign feelings, consciousness or souls to that substrate.

New comment by garspin in "Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears"

garspin — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:26:07 +0000

Making $$$ & keeping them are 2 different skills.

He's demonstrated the former 16B times, now he's demonstrating the latter.

The big downside risk I see for Nvidia is a garage startup inventing a more efficient AI algo.... that only needs 20W to run.

New comment by garspin in "Taking money off the table"

garspin — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 21:24:23 +0000

1) Making money & keeping money are 2 different skillsets. You've made some $$$, now learn how to keep it.

2) Time is far more valuable than money. If you can take life-changing $$$ off the table in exchange for time, do so. The 2nd $1M buys you a tiny proportion of the benefits that the first $1M did.

3) You have a v. high risk concentrated portfolio that is aligned with your income. That's massive risk.

4) Taking it now buys you time & optionality. Leaving some still buys you blue sky. Best of both worlds.

China's Floating Power Plants – Tapping Super High Winds

garspin — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 02:41:15 +0000

Article URL: https://cleantechnica.com/2025/09/25/chinas-floating-power-plants-tapping-super-high-winds/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382011

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Periodic Table of Cognition

garspin — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 00:33:24 +0000

Article URL: https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-periodic-table-of-cognition/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45354689

Points: 57

# Comments: 13

New comment by garspin in "The Bitter Lesson Is Misunderstood"

garspin — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 03:57:40 +0000

I doubt it. Brains run at only a few operations per second.... GPUS at TFLOPS. There just isn't enough bandwidth.

My brain only needs to get mugged in a dark alley by a guy in a hoodie once to learn something.

New comment by garspin in "The dollar's sell-off raises concerns that investors are losing trust in U.S."

garspin — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 05:10:00 +0000

> the U.S.'s vaunted system of checks and balances doesn't work and a similar president could be elected at any time

Precisely. The world has lost faith in both the US voters and its' checks & balances.

Buffet said he is prepared to lose $Bs, but not an ounce of trust - in 100 days the US has lost both.

New comment by garspin in "White House Considers Slashing China Tariffs to De-Escalate Trade War"

garspin — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 01:24:40 +0000

Some would say further than 4 yrs. Enough of the voters and Congress have demonstrated that they are tolerant of this mode of leadership behaviour - internationally trust has disappeared for a generation.

New comment by garspin in "The U.S. dollar is still the currency – but maybe not for much longer"

garspin — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:09:33 +0000

Things that have changed recently that may affect the trend -

faith in the stability of US govt

declining need for petro dollars

increase in US debt as %age of GDP

(IANA Economist)

The U.S. dollar is still the currency – but maybe not for much longer

garspin — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 22:48:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20250304133/the-us-dollar-is-still-the-worlds-currency-but-maybe-not-for-much-longer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43285818

Points: 13

# Comments: 3

New comment by garspin in "Norwegian fuel supplier refuses U.S. warships over Ukraine"

garspin — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:11:13 +0000

Speaking as an non-american reading local & global news sources....

...does Trump not understand 2nd round effects ?

From afar he seems to be intent on Making America Great for Billionaires at the expense of any country less powerful than the US.

New comment by garspin in "GPT-4.5"

garspin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 22:17:37 +0000

> and then you found that it offered marginal-but-not-amazing improvement over the previous version.

Then call it GPT 4.1 and allow version space for the next iteration.

I think the label V4.5 is giving the impression of more than marginal improvements.

New comment by garspin in "Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers"

garspin — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 21:44:13 +0000

I use minbrowser.org/ Some sites disallow it... min suggests changing the user-agent setting to something like - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/121.0

New asteroid discovery suggests how life on Earth started

garspin — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 22:06:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/bennu-asteroid-discovery

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42871853

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by garspin in "Why DeepSeek had to be open source"

garspin — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 21:30:51 +0000

An alternative explaination...

Deepseek is a side project for a hedge fund.

Shorting NVIDIA & releasing everything including the source would have a high probability of being hugely profitable, with almost zero downside if it went unnoticed.

New comment by garspin in "The Myth of Fuck You Money"

garspin — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 21:34:19 +0000

Joseph Heller (of Catch-22 fame) was one of them.

His response to a billionaire was 'I have something you will never have - enough'.

New comment by garspin in "Does current AI represent a dead end?"

garspin — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 23:53:26 +0000

LLMs are text compression algos. They are very good at memorising & retrieving text related to the user input. They can even pass bar exams based on that - some misinterpret that as intelligence.

However, no amount of scaling will change a text memorisation algo into a symbolic reasoning or composability algo, both of which are necessary for progress towards AGI.

So yes, LLMs are a dead end in the quest for AGI. However, they have their uses as a google/stackoverflow replacement.

New comment by garspin in "Boids, an artificial life program, which simulates flocking behavior of birds"

garspin — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 05:21:44 +0000

I implemented it in the browser. For demo & src, see https://svelte.dev/playground/2c1bf42e0d2a4cebb38b907fa7f90a...

Adjust separation, cohesion and alignment manually, or use the presets.

New comment by garspin in "Let's Stop Asking "Why Do You Want to Work for Us?" In Interviews"

garspin — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 05:59:40 +0000

> Pulling that off is the social skills test.

Surely the most significant side effect of any F2F interview is to evaluate social skills. An answer that the interviewer fully expects to be a lie just isn't required.

Anyway... "Why do you want to employ me over other candidates ? "

New comment by garspin in "Vigorous Exercise, Cognitive Decline, and High Blood Pressure"

garspin — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 09:13:17 +0000

Google 'polarized training'. It's 80% really slow conversational pace jogging, and 20% really hard, struggle to breath flat out sprinting. Just avoid the intermediate jogging that's comfortable, but unproductive.