Hacker News: hollerith

New comment by hollerith in "US battery manufacturing output continues to break records"

hollerith — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:19:39 +0000

I don't agree with "mostly capitalist" when (again) most investment is made by regional banks that are state-owned enterprises with strong guidelines set by Beijing about what sectors to invest in.

New comment by hollerith in "US battery manufacturing output continues to break records"

hollerith — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 02:36:00 +0000

No. Beijing instructs Chinese banks what to invest in (e.g., AI, electrical generation infrastructure). The Fed has never done that. When there is an economic downturn, e.g., the Dot Com crash in 2001, the Fed makes it easier for US banks to borrow money. When there is a lot of investment, e.g., now with all the investment in AI, the Fed makes it harder for the banks to borrow money (because the money is not needed as much because the economy is being stimulated by all the spending by the recipients of the investments into AI). Beijing does that, too, no doubt, but again they also decide for the majority of the investment money, which parts of their economy get the investment.

New comment by hollerith in "Dopamine Fracking"

hollerith — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:10:39 +0000

Are you sure you don't mean Andrew Huberman? Jordan Peterson has probably mentioned dopamine, but if so, its at a rate of about one mention every 50 to 100 hours.

New comment by hollerith in "US battery manufacturing output continues to break records"

hollerith — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:14:06 +0000

No, most investment is still done by banks controlled by the Party whose priorities are set by Beijing.

New comment by hollerith in "What happened to nerds?"

hollerith — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:33:18 +0000

I didn't see any shitposting on the internet in the 1990s or the decade after that, nor anything remotely like "tits or gtfo" before I saw it on 4chan (which started in 2003).

I did see a lot of trolling and a little harassment (not of women or other disadvantaged groups).

New comment by hollerith in "CrankGPT"

hollerith — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:01:46 +0000

It's not more sustainable though. It takes more energy to grow the food to get the calories to metabolize to turn the crank than it would to run an electric motor or a engine to do the same work.

New comment by hollerith in "How to earn a billion dollars"

hollerith — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:08:49 +0000

And I suppose these jobs that pays 10x would go to people that AOC approves of, i.e., preferably no Republicans?

New comment by hollerith in "UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s"

hollerith — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:23:10 +0000

>We're bringing it up because it's not being mentioned

Huh? I must've read thousands of comments on this site over the years to the effect that any censorship of the internet would be wrong.

New comment by hollerith in "4 things to know about the new sunscreen ingredient the FDA approved"

hollerith — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:37:47 +0000

Correction: UVB, not UVA.

Correction: the standard used for clothing is UPF, not SPF. They're similar, but there are differences.

New comment by hollerith in "4 things to know about the new sunscreen ingredient the FDA approved"

hollerith — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:59:25 +0000

That sounds right, but SPF 50 shirts are readily available, and at least the ones made from polyester are cheap.

New comment by hollerith in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

hollerith — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 11:43:03 +0000

FoM == freedom of movement

New comment by hollerith in "The redistribution of housing wealth caused by rent control (2023) [pdf]"

hollerith — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:46:38 +0000

Well, there's 2 ways to become a landlord: to buy a house or to build a house. I was focused only on the second way.

The cost of the wood and the labor needed to build the house is unaffected by the rent control, so if cost remains the same, but the reward (or "revenue") from building the house decrease from $100K to $95K, then fewer houses will get built.

New comment by hollerith in "The redistribution of housing wealth caused by rent control (2023) [pdf]"

hollerith — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:26:23 +0000

It's worrying because it reduces the incentive to build more housing.

New comment by hollerith in "4 things to know about the new sunscreen ingredient the FDA approved"

hollerith — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:20:33 +0000

It means only 2% of the harmful rays (UVA) are getting through the shirt or alternatively the skin under the shirt can spend 50 times as long in the sun as it could without any protection.

New comment by hollerith in "GLM 5.2 Is Out"

hollerith — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:36:34 +0000

Yudkowksy gave up on trying to make a god-in-a-box to stop other gods-in-boxes in 2015. Since then his approach to stopping the gods-in-boxes has been to lobby governments.

New comment by hollerith in "Every Frame Perfect"

hollerith — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:17:59 +0000

It is easier for me to play speed chess with smooth animation of each move rather than when a piece instantly teleports from origin to destination, but I have reason to believe that I'm unusually intolerant to frequent activation of my orienting response.

New comment by hollerith in "GLM 5.2 Is Out"

hollerith — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:38:40 +0000

Either that or the only reason they've been releasing the models under permissive licenses is that that the only way they have get any attention in a market dominated by American companies.

(Also, they don't need to make a profit because their system does not prioritize profit potential when making investment decisions: it prioritizes alignment with directives out of Beijing, which include keeping up with the West in strategic technologies.)

New comment by hollerith in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

hollerith — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:54:32 +0000

It remains possible that Altman and Amodei are sincere: they might believe that AI is dangerous like nuclear weapons, but there's no way to stop its development (especially since it would need to be stopped globally, not just in the US and countries the US can influence) and they consider themselves to be more likely to do a good job of it than their competitors.

New comment by hollerith in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

hollerith — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:51:55 +0000

Most of those researchers would disagree with your statement that the next major breakthrough is probably decades in the future.

Many of the insights accumulated in the decades up to now will probably prove useful for creating non-LLM AI, and the researchers can use LLM AI to speed up their research into non-LLM AI.

New comment by hollerith in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

hollerith — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:40:22 +0000

"LLMs can never become out-of-control superintelligence" might be relevant if there weren't many hundreds of researchers working (at OpenAI, Anthropic and elsewhere) on AI designs not based on the transformer (LLM) architecture.