Hacker News: happytoexplain

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack"

happytoexplain — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:28:29 +0000

I might not really understand this response - are you trying to justify a dystopia by describing how it can be literally survived? I.e. imminent physical death is your bar for where revolting is "allowed"? I'm reeling trying to understand how this can be what you're doing.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack"

happytoexplain — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:27:03 +0000

>[if] most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.

This is even more hideous than expressions of approval for individual violence. This is a dystopian acquiescence.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack"

happytoexplain — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:07:04 +0000

>you believe in them universally or you don’t believe in them at all

I know what you mean, of course, but it's just not true in honesty - when pressed, there are no binaries in morality, as romantic and proud as the idea is. "Violence is never the answer" is both true and also irrelevant once a person is asked to consider the existence of his very way of life, his values, his livelihood, his culture, his home, or other resources historically at the center of revolutions.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

happytoexplain — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:01:02 +0000

This feels like a pointless semantic trap. Everything is "waffling" or "wiggling". I don't see the parent saying anything in a disguised manner. It's just that reality is complicated. In the immediate wake of violence, it's exceedingly easy to paint any sentiment aside from "this is horrible" as disrespectful or weasel-worded. That's cheap (as I mentioned elsewhere, it's like the way conservatives refuse to talk about guns in the wake of gun violence).

New comment by happytoexplain in "What is a property?"

happytoexplain — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 01:33:57 +0000

True! I just think it's particularly exaggerated in IT.

New comment by happytoexplain in "What is a property?"

happytoexplain — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 23:57:29 +0000

I was being humorous/pithy. I meant e.g. the difference between "property" (the dictionary word) and "property" (the programming word, which is a domain-specific usage of the dictionary word) and "property" (as in Property-Based Testing, an even more domain-specific usage). It's analogous to the concept of regular nouns vs proper nouns, but not the same (which is why I didn't use the term "proper noun").

New comment by happytoexplain in "What is a property?"

happytoexplain — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:58:05 +0000

Maybe I have a bit of a brain problem, but for me, 90% of the effort that goes into learning anything in tech is spent on identifying which nouns are Nouns, and which are just nouns, and the (often mushy) semantics of how people use those nouns in varying contexts and sub-contexts. I understand the reasons for this complexity - domain-specific terminology is valuable and forms naturally from pre-existing words. It's just that, in tech, everything is abstract, and everything consists of multiple contexts spread across multiple dimensions (vertically, in abstraction layers; horizontally, in use cases), so the domain-specific terminology explodes like an exponential web. Sometimes I'm talking to somebody and they are using some word, and it takes me days to even realize that they are using it in a much more specific context than I assumed. It's a little hellish.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

happytoexplain — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:45:09 +0000

I am not speaking for the parent, but my personal interpretation is that they are trying to add perspectives/thoughts, not denying what Dan said (i.e. it's not "inadvertent" in as few words).

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

happytoexplain — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:28:58 +0000

I wish we all felt so sickened by this.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:51:34 +0000

You might as well say it's bad to be human.

What FOBO smells like, is what's happening.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:46:09 +0000

They aren't mutually exclusive. Often the former and latter, in that order, are two parts of the same historical event.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:43:15 +0000

A lot of what happened during the French revolution was horrific... This is such a bewildering sentence in this context. Yes, killing the rulers is horrific. Revolutions are horrific. Wars are horrific. It seems irrelevant to what the parent is (sarcastically) saying.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:37:48 +0000

FYI, you started out with a very common word used to exaggerate or cherry-pick the opinions of enemies ("giddy").

It's more valuable to discuss grievances than to pretend they are simply un-discussable in the wake of related violence (in the vein of "it would be disrespectful to talk about gun control in the wake of gun violence").

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:32:22 +0000

Of Altman, Trump et al, Elon, the Nvidia guy, etc? Or am I not understanding the question?

New comment by happytoexplain in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:27:55 +0000

Historically, was it always so common for powerful or famous people to seem to purposefully garner hatred like he, and others, have been for the past decade? To speak in a petty, self-important, "trolling" manner, to a very broad audience? To embrace traits that are intrinsically negative? Or are we living in a rare time?

New comment by happytoexplain in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:43:31 +0000

I can't tell if you're criticizing the parent or are innocently asking how Claude knows the temperature for chicken.

To be clear in the case of the former: Harm data points have approximately one trillion times the weight of no-harm data points, as a rule of thumb.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:33:26 +0000

For sure. I'm not defending human perfection, I'm defending human caution (Disclaimer: The format of the preceding sentence was chosen without AI assistance).

New comment by happytoexplain in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:29:08 +0000

Also scary: Seeing a comment this ostensibly un-controversial in grey.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:25:06 +0000

People get things wrong in a different, more observable/predictable way. Sure, we are easily tricked dummies and we can't know if a human is right or wrong, but our human-trust heuristics are highly developed. Our AI-trust heuristics don't exist.

New comment by happytoexplain in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

happytoexplain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:24:24 +0000

I mostly agree that it's an overreaction. However, "irrational" is a really bad choice of word. Every non-technical person understands that sometimes AI says wrong things - like, random, crazy wrong things, not just a little off. It's just a general rule kept in the back of the mind. Food is easily in that realm of "be careful". Did the AI produce a recipe that would be harmful to you and the cook didn't notice? Almost certainly not. So, sure, they were being over-cautious. But "irrational"? No, no, no. It's definitely rational.

Look at what you're writing.

"Doing X is so clearly irrational that I chuckled a bit."

Please don't perpetuate the image of the elitist techie. That is what was just firebombed.