Hacker News: herculity275

New comment by herculity275 in "Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen"

herculity275 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:41:42 +0000

It has dual HQs. The one in Dublin is tiny (or at least it was the last time I visited), all the executive leadership is based in SF.

New comment by herculity275 in "Show HN: Autism Simulator"

herculity275 — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 15:32:07 +0000

There seems to be a prevalent pop psych view that a bunch of these conditions (Autism, ADHD, Anxiety-Depression, OCD) are sort of clustered together and people who manifest one will often manifest symptoms of others. It gets muddier because a lot of these conditions are understood as spectrums and different people who identify with them may manifest them in vastly different ways. I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.

New comment by herculity275 in "The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI"

herculity275 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 12:44:42 +0000

> The moment our hearts shattered? It belongs to us.

I'm ambivalent about a lot of other cited examples (could be AI, could just be bad ghostwriting) but this particular sentence does have very distinct AI smell.

New comment by herculity275 in "The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI"

herculity275 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 12:39:24 +0000

Reminds me, there was a Stephen King interview from a ~decade ago where he observed that when he passes away his son (Joe Hill) could probably keep publishing under his name for at least a few years since he's perfected imitating King's general style.

I think the distinction, for me, is that when I pay for a book I want access to the author's creative thoughts and personality, not just their particular "brand". I realize that a lot of readers don't care, especially in the YA space, but I'd rather read a worse novel from the person who conceived The Hunger Games than a perfect imitation from someone who's merely imitating the brand.

New comment by herculity275 in "The latest Hunger Games novel may have been co-authored by AI"

herculity275 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 11:59:49 +0000

My issue with that as a reader is that when I purchase a book authored by Suzanne Collins I expect it to have been actually written by Suzanne Collins, not by somebody she contracted to imitate her style.

New comment by herculity275 in "I have two Amazon Echos that I never use, but they apparently burn GBs a day"

herculity275 — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 10:16:58 +0000

Most people use Echos as voice controlled music players with occasional smart assistant functionality, this shouldn't be too hard to replicate in OSS. You could argue that the extend to which they're not making you buy into the Amazon ecosystem is a major failure of the product line.

New comment by herculity275 in "Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war"

herculity275 — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 10:28:46 +0000

"Please stop referring to this thought experiment because it has possible interpretations I don't personally agree with"

New comment by herculity275 in "Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed"

herculity275 — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:28:22 +0000

> how long it'll take to Neuralink to turn their army of computer connected paraplegics into some Mechanical Turk-esque Grok clean up

It's really hard for me to imagine that making more logistic sense than the current state of affairs - which is hiring armies of poor able-bodied people in developing countries.

New comment by herculity275 in "Neuralink 'Participant 1' says his life has changed"

herculity275 — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:24:46 +0000

Once Elon gets a robotic arm, steel teeth and prosthetic eyes that's when we know we're in real trouble.

New comment by herculity275 in "Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer"

herculity275 — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 13:51:59 +0000

At this stage in the war keeping your social spaces free of malicious users seems like a much higher priority than providing the other side's civilians with accurate information. Russians can access all the info in the world with a simple VPN setup, that clearly doesn't change the situation in Russia.

New comment by herculity275 in "AGI is not multimodal"

herculity275 — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 10:48:19 +0000

Tbf a lot of the thought experiments around human consciousness hit the same exact conundrum - if your body and mind were spontaneously destroyed and then recreated with perfect precision (a'la Star Trek transporters) would you still be you? Unless you permit for the existence of a soul it's really hard to argue that our consciousness exists in anything but the current instant.

New comment by herculity275 in "OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive"

herculity275 — Thu, 22 May 2025 09:06:04 +0000

> even people that some people decry as bad and terrible people (for example Elon Musk) still can make amazing leaders

None of the leaders in this conversation are good people. Elon's controversies are way past the point of "some people decry" (why even use a phrasing this convoluted unless you just want to signal that you don't agree with it?) and firmly in "lots of great people wouldn't touch it with a pole". Part of leadership is creating a safe work environment and shielding your companies/brands from unnecessary drama, and Elon has done an absolutely abysmal job at it lately.

New comment by herculity275 in "Evolving OpenAI's Structure"

herculity275 — Tue, 06 May 2025 12:02:52 +0000

The goalposts seem to have shifted to a point where the "AGI" label will only be retroactively applied to an AI that was able to develop ASI

New comment by herculity275 in "We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job at Kraken"

herculity275 — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:15:01 +0000

Depends on what your definition of "good jobs" is but I know plenty of people from no name unis in third world countries who landed well paying jobs in FAANG thanks to the current process.

New comment by herculity275 in "We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job"

herculity275 — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:09:34 +0000

I can think of a few reasons, most obviously that it's a security nightmare - you've got a non-employee accessing and modifying your company's code and possibly having access to customer data. Some shops might not care about this, but it's ridiculously irresponsible in principle.

New comment by herculity275 in "We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job"

herculity275 — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:04:21 +0000

> with a "maverick" view of how organizations worked derived from reading Warhammer books or something

Did they want to serve the god emperor of SAAS?

New comment by herculity275 in "We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job"

herculity275 — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:01:57 +0000

Do you want the industry to go back to only hiring from the top ~20 schools and by word-of-mouth networking? Coz that's the only viable alternative to the current interview process.

New comment by herculity275 in "Marijuana hospital visits linked to dementia diagnosis within 5 years – a study"

herculity275 — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:07:11 +0000

I see a version of this reply every time somebody mentions that cannabis is not entirely harmless. Without getting into the weeds (lol) of what is and is not brain damage, surely you can recognize that habitually blazing extremely potent strains of a hallucinogenic plant is not harm-free?

New comment by herculity275 in "Marijuana hospital visits linked to dementia diagnosis within 5 years – a study"

herculity275 — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:02:04 +0000

Having had my share of experiences in my 20s going out sober with both drunk and stoned friends I can attest that tipsy people are usually a lot more coherent than the comparably stoned ones.

New comment by herculity275 in "Netflix’s Media Production Suite"

herculity275 — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 14:29:38 +0000

You parsed it wrong - it's a large budget feature film. A feature film is a theatrical movie too long to be called a short film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_film