Hacker News: gg80

New comment by gg80 in "US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks"

gg80 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 21:50:11 +0000

Mine is anecdotal evidence at best: I co-authored a fairly obscure book about the application of category theory to an extremely niche subject. There's basically no mention of the stuff in the book anywhere on the internet, nor in any academic publication I'm aware of. If you want to have an idea about what's in the book you have to have access to it. I couldn't remember some details of it and being lazy and slightly curious I tried asking a couple of models (one by OpenAI and one by Google): they both managed to give me extremely detailed answers based on the contents of the book. Nobody has ever asked me or any other person involved in the publication for permission to use the book in any kind of training (they may have bought the book but not the rights to reproduce it).

The funny thing is what happened when I told one of the models (the Google one) I was one of the authors and that I had never given any consent to use the book for its training and that given that it was so willing to provide any user with the contents of the book nobody would have had any reason to buy the book. The thing told me that it had done it just because I was the author of the book (apparently me asking it about the content of an obscure academic book was sufficient to make it statistically plausible that I was one of the two people who had read the book, me and my co-author, excluding the editor a priori). It swore it would have never given that information to any other user.

I doubt that anyone could ever deny that LLMs are incredible tools that have incredible value. But denying that they have being made possible only thanks to egregious acts of piracy is disingenuous.

New comment by gg80 in "Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life"

gg80 — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:46:45 +0000

If I remember correctly, there was this hypothesis that these things were covered by symbiotic algae so the idea is that they grew tall to increase the photosynthesis of their symbiotic organism (so kind of a giant lichen). But I can't find the source anymore, and I think that there isn't much evidence of any photobiont.

New comment by gg80 in "The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars"

gg80 — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 07:42:08 +0000

Looking at this picture [1] of Bologna’s skyline from the sixties it seems it could be pretty realistic. The skyline has changed drastically and now you have many more tall buildings that make the remaining tower seems shorter. Also, I think the strangeness of the picture is due to the number of towers, but afaik there were around 100 towers in the city in the 13th century.

[1] https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torri_di_Bologna#/media/File...

New comment by gg80 in "AI real-time human full-body photo generator"

gg80 — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 16:57:45 +0000

Try with cargo pants. After three or four iterations the pants disappeared and were substituted by something that can only be described as an andrologist fever dream.

New comment by gg80 in "Photographer captures ultra-rare red ring of light over Italy"

gg80 — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 15:10:49 +0000

Nope, no more AI in Italy, at least that's what our government decided. And no more English too.

New comment by gg80 in "How to own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way"

gg80 — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 07:19:40 +0000

If I’m not mistaken RFC 4180 says that quotes should be escaped by prepending them with another quote, so “” and not \” (these are not double quotes but my phone won’t let me type normal quotes), but yeah I guess it is a rather perverse value to put in a csv.

New comment by gg80 in "Parmigiano Reggiano makers embedding tiny trackers in rind to fight cheese fraud"

gg80 — Wed, 18 May 2022 20:48:06 +0000

Actually it’s made in Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, part of Bologna and part of Mantua.

New comment by gg80 in "Why does pepperoni curl? (2019)"

gg80 — Fri, 13 May 2022 07:18:19 +0000

Nah, there are a bajillion ways of making pizza in Italy, it’s just that the thick and soft one is never round, but even the round one can be thicker or thinner depending on the local preference. It would actually be interesting to find out if the American style of pizza was influenced by a traditional Sicilian pizza called “sfincione” which is still very popular, given the strong Sicilian component of Italian immigration in the US.

New comment by gg80 in "Bear plus snowflake equals polar bear"

gg80 — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 08:47:33 +0000

It’s still debated if that is the correct etymology. A different hypothesis has “penguin” deriving from the Latin “pinguis” (fat).

New comment by gg80 in "Mediterranean diet may prevent memory loss and dementia, study finds"

gg80 — Sat, 08 May 2021 20:47:36 +0000

Blueberries are actually quite common in the Mediterranean area, but you are right about salmon.

New comment by gg80 in "Reforming the Mathematical Language of Physics (2002) [pdf]"

gg80 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 13:17:14 +0000

It seems the patent has been discontinued: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6853964B1/en