Hacker News: golemotron

New comment by golemotron in "An Alien Mind"

golemotron — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:53:18 +0000

It's hard to get humans to agree to things that are in their collective interest but many not be in their individual interest. It is at the root of many problems. Look up "collective action problem."

New comment by golemotron in "An Alien Mind"

golemotron — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:38:47 +0000

Unfortunately, it is a collective action problem. Whenever I hear "we" I flinch.

New comment by golemotron in "Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one"

golemotron — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:18:35 +0000

It's so bad for me that I often drop down into Terminal, find there (with 'find') and then use 'open'. I'm very used to doing this.

I've just assumed that Finder is fine for non-technical user so no one complains. But fair point. It can be fixed.

New comment by golemotron in "Don't be a meat proxy"

golemotron — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:04:56 +0000

When you say "X proxy" the 'X' stands for the thing that is being proxied not the thing that is doing the proxying.

New comment by golemotron in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"

golemotron — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:20:10 +0000

Imagine what happens when human readability is discarded as a goal. LLMs are already very good at inferring meaning with little context. If the objective function is reduction of token consumption, it's hard to know where we will end up.

New comment by golemotron in "The lost civic life of movie rental stores"

golemotron — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:21:30 +0000

I wonder when we'll see articles on the lost civic life of social media? With increasing AI use, it is happening.

New comment by golemotron in "Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey"

golemotron — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:07:19 +0000

Reminds me of Elon's answer to the question of what various countries can do about StarLink: "They can shake their fists at the sky."

New comment by golemotron in "PlayStation can delete all your digital games after 3 years of inactivity (EU)"

golemotron — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:54:58 +0000

I'd just be happy if companies were required to call them licensed and forbidden to call them sold or owned by the buyer.

New comment by golemotron in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

golemotron — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:08:55 +0000

The subtle thing in all this is that it externalizes labor costs. You are the one doing the work. I was thrown by this a while ago checking into a hotel with kiosk. I was out of my time zone and literally half asleep. Typing my name was real labor at that point.

New comment by golemotron in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

golemotron — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:45:17 +0000

I don't think that "root[ing] for mathematicians to go away" is the problem. The problem (if there is one) is that the process by which that occurs is economically determined. No amount of complaining will stop AI from being useful in mathematics or erase the incentives to make it better. It's automatic process, like photography sidelining painting or shoe factories sidelining cobblers. We go through this with every technological advance and the outcomes are pretty much determined. No cheerleaders are needed.

New comment by golemotron in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

golemotron — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:49:47 +0000

It seems like California is the furthest country in the EU.

New comment by golemotron in "Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered"

golemotron — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:14:28 +0000

Those old stories may have been full of crazy stuff, but look at children's programming over the past 30 years. SpongeBob characters, under the ocean, jumping off a diving board into a pool, again, under the ocean. It isn't violent, but it is crazy.

I think that children's authors primarily amuse themselves knowing that it will pass right over the heads of their target audience. It sure seems true of Collodi.

New comment by golemotron in "Desmond Morris has died"

golemotron — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:13:28 +0000

I'll never forget his theory about the origin of the heart symbol.

New comment by golemotron in "72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes"

golemotron — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:06:53 +0000

The Gompertz function strikes again.

New comment by golemotron in "Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books"

golemotron — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 17:58:43 +0000

That's true, but it can be a trap. I recommend always generating a few alternatives to avoid our bias toward the first generation. When we don't do that we are led rather than leading.

New comment by golemotron in "Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One"

golemotron — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 17:23:39 +0000

Yet we see directors as artists. Kubrick, Coppola (both of them), Hitchcock, etc.

New comment by golemotron in "Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One"

golemotron — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 01:36:51 +0000

Look at it this way. The carver doesn't have to grow the tree. Using an LLM for coding is a lot like being a carver. You can take broad or small strokes and discard what you don't like.

New comment by golemotron in "Classical statues were not painted horribly"

golemotron — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:07:23 +0000

I'm in the conserving camp. It's more truthful than the narrativization that accompanies attempts to restore. We should remember that we all had a reptilian vision of dinosaurs for decades (centuries?) before the latest feathered view. We would have been better with neither. Just display the bones: what we have. Everything else burdens the public with guesses.

New comment by golemotron in "Bring bathroom doors back to hotels"

golemotron — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 20:36:59 +0000

It's nice to see a passion project.

New comment by golemotron in "GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT"

golemotron — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:09:42 +0000

I would go so far as to say that it should be illegal for AI to lull humans into anthropomorphizing them. It would be hard to write an effective law on this, but I think it is doable.