Hacker News: indigo945

New comment by indigo945 in "If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level"

indigo945 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:05:39 +0000

There's no inherent, technological reason to feed the historic data into the prompt, though. You could train a network with a second input for model-states, and during inference, feed into that input historic model-states that occured for the same LLM when consuming input that is somehow associatively related to whatever input is currently being consumed. Can you definitely show that this would be meaningfully different from how humans "experience" memories?

New comment by indigo945 in "If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level"

indigo945 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:46:55 +0000

    > And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate 
    > physical manifestation - rather than being merely a
    > rhetorical device.

Denial of Qualia has long been an outlier position in the philosophy of mind, so this is not altogether surprising. (This is saying nothing, of course, about whether it is true or not.)

New comment by indigo945 in "If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level"

indigo945 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:34:12 +0000

This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it.

Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.

New comment by indigo945 in "If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level"

indigo945 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:21:21 +0000

I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do humans still dream at all?

New comment by indigo945 in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

indigo945 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:40:29 +0000

That's also great for integration testing their systems, if they have any code in a language where datetimes are a value type.

New comment by indigo945 in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

indigo945 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:38:54 +0000

This doesn't really when the CLI tool needs to access any data in your /home. There isn't a straightforward way using standard POSIX tools to share a directory with another user. (Of course it's possible, but it's not easy.)

New comment by indigo945 in "OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom"

indigo945 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:04:41 +0000

The point is they can't tell.

New comment by indigo945 in "45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero"

indigo945 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:03:48 +0000

Mineral oil is what people use these days, but it is much less funny. In practice, any oil will do, although olive oil is not suggested - smells nice at first, but will break down over time.

New comment by indigo945 in "45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero"

indigo945 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:40:18 +0000

    > The Cray supercomputer were fluid cooled back in the 1980's, the entire 
    > board had an inert liquid flowing across it.

You can still do this with any computer, by the way: just submerge the entire board in motor oil. Slightly smelly and might make a mess, but absolutely workable.

New comment by indigo945 in "OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom"

indigo945 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:27:04 +0000

> The idea that only nerds care about the cost of things is... absurd.

For hardware purchases, laypeople may go about it the other way from what nerds would do: instead of deciding what they need in terms of computing power and memory, and then finding a cheap offer for that, they just decide how much they want to spend, and then buy a device at that price point irrespective of its performance characteristics. If you shop like this, and would have purchased anything but a rock-bottom low-end device two years ago, prices have remained stable.

New comment by indigo945 in "OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom"

indigo945 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:21:03 +0000

One obvious use case is edge computing, such as in industrial applications that cannot tolerate the risk of a network link or cloud service going down. Even embedded use cases are possible, such as an image classifier model in a security camera.

New comment by indigo945 in "FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model"

indigo945 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:47:54 +0000

In German, it's also extremely annoying that even common compound words will not be suggested. Google Keyboard has somewhat improved here, but FUTO Keyboard still drops the ball on this completely.

New comment by indigo945 in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

indigo945 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:42:07 +0000

Yes, but Hetzner is not "some low-end provider". They have proper, high-quality datacenters with all the redundancy you want, excellent connectivity, great service, and much better privacy controls than any American company would be legally able to provide. Hetzner also offers instant scalability and has Terraform and Ansible support for infrastructure automation.

We have some VMs on Azure and some on Hetzner, and the latter have much better performance (especially since they give you basically infinite IOPS, which matters a lot for your database) and connectivity (especially lower latency).

The large hyperscalers were ever only worth it if you need/want all the additional PaaS infrastructure they provide, like Lambda, SQS and so on.

New comment by indigo945 in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

indigo945 — Wed, 20 May 2026 11:17:47 +0000

Not only is "arguments are evaluated left-to-right" less easy to formalize than you think, it would also make all C code run slower, because the compiler would no longer be able to interleave computations for more efficient pipelining. The same goes for "expression is [only evaluated once]/[always evaluated twice]".

Of course the developer is navigating a minefield every time they use volatile, that's why it's called "volatile" - an English word otherwise only commonly used in chemistry, where it means "stuff that wants to go boom".

New comment by indigo945 in "I accidentally made law enforcement shut down their fake honeypot"

indigo945 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:52:35 +0000

Yes, this surprised me as well. Credit card and Paypal information should give the police everything they need to identify the criminal (in a way that's much more simple and reliable than via IP address, which may be obfuscated via a VPN or similar). Why not take it, it's free?

New comment by indigo945 in "Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs"

indigo945 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:01:06 +0000

People are already not using libraries because they'd rather rot their brains on TikTok than read a book. (Also, for information lookup, the internet and search engines exist, and have for a while now.) This has no actual causal relation.

New comment by indigo945 in "Creating a Color Palette from an Image"

indigo945 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:59:11 +0000

This is quite amazing. The quality of the created palettes is surprisingly good.

For the fourth iteration (guarding against phantom blue from shadow pixels), I wonder if it may help to also take into account how close the pixels in each cluster actually cluster together in the actual photo. (None of the heuristics used here seem to be interested in the position of the pixels at all, only in their values - as-is, it seems one could sort the photo's pixels before running the program and get the same result.) Actual objects usually form connected areas, whereas at least in the fruit image, the phantom shadows are spread across the entire photo in largely disconnected chunks.

New comment by indigo945 in "Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained"

indigo945 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:25:12 +0000

You can of course take a SQL dump that is version-independent, but if you're serious about creating backups, you want to take backups of the actual on-disk format of the WAL, because that's more efficient and also the only practical way to get point-in-time recovery. (For the efficiency, you could alternatively also take ZFS snapshots, which will work independently of the Postgres version, but those also don't give you PITR.) The WAL format is a Postgres implementation detail and therefore tools wanting to read and write it need maintenance whenever the format changes (which can happen on major version releases).

New comment by indigo945 in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

indigo945 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:15:08 +0000

    (I'm kidding, but I'm sure someone has a pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startup 
    about to disrupt topography using either AI, blockchain, or both.)

Well, there was that plan to use scores of nuclear bombs to alter the geography of Egypt in such a way that the Mediterranean could be drained into the Qattara Basin [1]. I think the story is somewhat well-known now, but it proves, at least, that pie-in-the-sky geoengineering startups are not a phenomenon unique to the 21st century. And given that nuclear bombs essentially were the blockchain of the 1950s, that is altogether unsurprising.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project#Fri...

New comment by indigo945 in "DIY Soft Drinks"

indigo945 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:07:34 +0000

Late capitalism is when a traditional tea recipe is referred to as "homemade ClubMate (R)".