Hacker News: geye1234

New comment by geye1234 in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

geye1234 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:26:41 +0000

Look up the English Enclosure acts. They brought about a large-scale robbery of peasants by landowners in the 17th and 18th centuries, and created a proletarian class that needed factory work to survive. Things got a little better in the 19th and especially 20th centuries.

New comment by geye1234 in "30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format"

geye1234 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:21:11 +0000

I think this is one reason people like asking LLMs things. They have many downsides, but they're never rude or belittling.

New comment by geye1234 in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

geye1234 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 01:21:39 +0000

Once you see it, you can't unsee it:

https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

And if you have more time:

https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/kupdf.net_bernays-et...

New comment by geye1234 in "GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents"

geye1234 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:15:38 +0000

Curious to hear if anyone has tried running the 2-bit or 3-bit quantization of this. With a bit of investment I may just be able to swing it locally. I already have 96GB VRAM, so with 192GB RAM, which seems to be the most one can find these days with a 4-slot motherboard, I may be in with a shot. Yes, it'd be slow, but I could give it overnight jobs. But I don't know if running at such a low quantization would make it hallucinate with only a small context.

Qwen and Gemma are great, but they need babysitting every 30 mins, which is quite a cognitive load.

New comment by geye1234 in "How the Fifth Lateran Council unlocked financial theory"

geye1234 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:49:28 +0000

How far would you take this? Let's grant that the difference between murder and a just killing is what someone (maybe the guy in power) says it is, nothing more. Would you say the same about robbery? Is it only robbery to point a gun at someone and take his money if someone says it is? If yes, at what point does the distinction between one thing and another thing become real, and not just based on what some guy says?

New comment by geye1234 in "How the Fifth Lateran Council unlocked financial theory"

geye1234 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:54:26 +0000

Yes. A full-recourse loan and a non-recourse loan are different: in the way a cat and a dog are different, not in the way a small dog and a big dog are different. It's most unfortunate (and probably deliberate) that they both go by the word 'loan'. Aquinas explains this very clearly in his discussion of usury in the Summa.

Anyone failing to distinguish between the two has no business talking about the ethics of usury, or the history of late-medieval Catholic teaching on the same.

Making a profit on a full-recourse loan, regardless of whether the lender or borrower are Christian or not, is a sin, and a pretty serious one at that. Usury is to fraud what robbery is to larceny. Many people try to claim that the Church has 'changed its teaching' on this, but they can never point to a source that shows this.

New comment by geye1234 in "Big AI labs are hiring philosophers"

geye1234 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:50:44 +0000

For those of us who have read Paul Graham's submarine essay, should the last paragraph be a giveaway? The "AI theoretician's" quote seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the article.

New comment by geye1234 in "Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies"

geye1234 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:35:46 +0000

It's astonishing to me that advertising and marketing is accepted as normal. The majority of B2C marketing is designed to manipulate people's emotions so that they act against their interests, in order to make you money. It's really disgusting.

New comment by geye1234 in "The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)"

geye1234 — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:29:14 +0000

Someone posted these photos a while back which seem to capture the spirit: https://issung.com/posts/lanphotosarchive/

New comment by geye1234 in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

geye1234 — Mon, 18 May 2026 11:12:31 +0000

> During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.

This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?

Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.

New comment by geye1234 in "Claude Code to be removed from Anthropic's Pro plan?"

geye1234 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:38:47 +0000

I was seriously considering investing in an RTX 6000 rig, and I think this is just enough to tip me over the edge. I know it's not as good as CC, but at least I know it'll be there tomorrow.

New comment by geye1234 in "Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD"

geye1234 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:46:23 +0000

I am interested in hearing how to get hard drives to last longer. Should you keep them locked away in the closet? Spin them up occasionally but not too much? Keep them always-on? I understand the less reading and writing, the better.

How does external compare to internal, if at all? Is 3.5" going to last longer than something smaller?

New comment by geye1234 in "Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD"

geye1234 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:54:09 +0000

Yes, I'm grateful I run Linux. You can get quite a bit done with 4GB RAM and a 6th generation (or even earlier) CPU. All 64-bit. I don't think such ancient hardware will be affected by AI demand to the same degree (though I think we'll still see some prices rise if people stop buying new stuff).

The worry is that at some point the older hardware will stop working.

New comment by geye1234 in "Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology"

geye1234 — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 16:14:13 +0000

Peter Hitchens had a hell of a time trying to fix Wikipedia's appalling biases:

https://hitchensblogarchive.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/goodbye...

Search the site for other examples of the fun he had with it.

I'd choose Wikipedia over AI, of course, so I'm ultimately grateful it's there. But better than both would be a well-edited traditional encyclopedia, written by experts in a single voice, and possibly peer-reviewed.

New comment by geye1234 in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

geye1234 — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 11:14:44 +0000

Potentially-ignoramus comment here, apologies in advance, but amazon.com itself appears to be fine right now. Perhaps slower to load pages, by about half a second. Are they not eating (much of) their own dog food?

New comment by geye1234 in "How England misplaced its first king"

geye1234 — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 13:30:39 +0000

Worth remembering that the Venerable Bede was writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People two centuries before Athelstan, so clearly there was some notion of unity as early as that.

New comment by geye1234 in "The biggest sign of an AI bubble is starting to appear – debt"

geye1234 — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 13:16:45 +0000

This will have a big effect on those in passive index funds I think?

Tech made up about a third of the S&P last time I checked, but the AI hype is also affecting non-tech sectors.

New comment by geye1234 in "Newton for Ladies (1737) – Newtonianism vs. Cartesianism"

geye1234 — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 21:32:04 +0000

I recommend "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science" by E.A. Burtt if you're interested in that period. It discusses both the science, and the different philosophies of physics that were informing and perhaps influencing them. The book is a hundred years old but very readable.

New comment by geye1234 in "New H-1B visa fee will not apply to existing holders, official says"

geye1234 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 21:19:22 +0000

Fine, so there are some that fall below the O-1 bar. Nonetheless, those are a drop in the ocean compared to the regular $150k jobs being lost to H1Bs.

New comment by geye1234 in "New H-1B visa fee will not apply to existing holders, official says"

geye1234 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 20:55:28 +0000

There's the O-1 for that.