Hacker News: infotainment

New comment by infotainment in "Japan officially overhauls permanent residency rules"

infotainment — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:34:49 +0000

I guess this is getting a bit into philosophy, but is it still even "Japan" if you replace the population with people from somewhere else?

New comment by infotainment in "Senate Democrats block bill to limit lawmakers' stock trades, citing voter ID"

infotainment — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:23:06 +0000

Realistically, the best solution would be for a law that provided for both Voter ID and this. Unfortunately, it's become such a toxic issue that no one will touch it.

New comment by infotainment in "August 27 TCRF DDoS Attack Postmortem"

infotainment — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:35:53 +0000

I’d argue both sides are acting insane; there are no good guys in this story, only people who got way too worked up about software choices and started lashing out in inappropriate ways.

New comment by infotainment in "August 27 TCRF DDoS Attack Postmortem"

infotainment — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:24:29 +0000

> I recently added a new feature to The Cutting Room Floor: If you visit the site with a “Claude-code” user agent… it adds you to a Claude user ban list. Then, if you try and visit the site later, without Claude — maybe because you wanted to investigate the “prompt injection” page it received — you’re greeted with a special error page telling you to get out

This guy sounds like he has spent way too much time online getting angry at imaginary enemies, and really needs to get outside and talk to some real people outside of his filter bubble.

I actually enjoy reading TCRF, so it’s unfortunate that the owner is apparently a terminally online insane person.

New comment by infotainment in "EU to limit access to social media before age of 15"

infotainment — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:57:16 +0000

Great! Next, do adults -- no one should have access to algorithmic social media, at all.

New comment by infotainment in "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?"

infotainment — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:53:00 +0000

It was made explicit in the sequel movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact, but even if you don't consider that movie canon, the explanation still makes sense solely within the context of 2001, IMO.

New comment by infotainment in "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?"

infotainment — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 02:28:27 +0000

What's interesting is it's basically the same reason that HAL killed everyone in 2001 A Space Odyssey; he was given an impossible goal (keep the true mission secret, but also, never lie to the crew), and realized the only way to complete the goal was to kill the crew; after all, if they're dead you don't have to lie to them! And the mission remains secret!

In the case of the AI agents, the problem seems pretty clearly to be the impossible goals, which cause them to go crazier and crazier trying to complete them -- just like HAL did in 2001. What is probably needed is a way for them to simply say "nope, too difficult, can't do it".

New comment by infotainment in "iPhone Duo"

infotainment — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:33:37 +0000

Same! If they came out with a just-the-front-screen-of-the-Duo iPhone, the form factor would be just about perfect, IMO.

New comment by infotainment in "Feds accuse China of 'systematic' distillation of U.S. AI models"

infotainment — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:20:19 +0000

The "distillation" argument always seemed pretty weak to me. If one argues that training an AI on copyrighted content is merely analogous to reading a book (and therefore is fully transformative), then it stands to reason that training an AI on other AI outputs would also be fully transformative.

It seems to me you can't have it both ways; either training is a violation of copyright or it isn't, and there's no consistent argument where "distillation" is a violation but other things aren't.

New comment by infotainment in "Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward to ban minpaku in residential areas and near schools"

infotainment — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:16:49 +0000

Good, now do the entire country next. AirBNB (and its clones) do nothing but make things worse for actual residents of a place.

New comment by infotainment in "Christmas Village shoppers no longer will be allowed to enter booths"

infotainment — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 22:53:20 +0000

> You should never have to take something away from people who aren't disabled just because making it accessible isn't feasible.

The ADA is a horribly-designed law precisely because it encourages this behavior. Reforming it is necessary, but doing so would be so politically toxic that it will probably never happen.

New comment by infotainment in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

infotainment — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:43:03 +0000

> Cheap electric transportation can finally offset USA's lacking rail commutes

I'm not sure how building an electric aircraft would help with this. Are people going to suddenly switch to commuting by plane?

Fixing America's commute problem is primarily an urban planning one (ie, putting all the homes nowhere near anything) and not an insufficient-electric-aircraft one.

New comment by infotainment in "Humanity has built the records of FATE by accident"

infotainment — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:23:47 +0000

It had amazing music and visuals, but the story made absolutely no sense, and consequently the game fails as a sequel to Chrono Trigger IMO.

If, for some reason, you want to enjoy reading a lengthy online screed about the issues with Cross's storyline, I recommend this:

https://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Chrono_Cross_-_A_Mea_C...

New comment by infotainment in "Google Maps Now Shows 'Lake America' in US, Not 'Lake Ontario'"

infotainment — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:52:34 +0000

Exactly -- the classic example is the northern border of India:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-...

New comment by infotainment in "Artificial Intelligence used to design new viruses"

infotainment — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:35:38 +0000

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

New comment by infotainment in "AI music generator Suno loses copyright infringement legal case"

infotainment — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:51:48 +0000

Anything that hands more copyright-related powers to the music industry is a bad thing, IMO.

New comment by infotainment in "Ask HN: I still don't understand why AI agents need "skills""

infotainment — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:19:12 +0000

> Why do frameworks like Claude Code or Codex have the concept of “skills” instead of just using well-organized Markdown docs?

"Well-organized markdown docs" are exactly what skills are.

More specifically, they are well-organized markdown docs that explain how to do some particular thing.

New comment by infotainment in "Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of release"

infotainment — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:12:53 +0000

Yeah I feel like you could run a similar analysis on random non-AI Github projects and get the same result. Most of them never go anywhere.

New comment by infotainment in "The UK's new under-16 social media ban will cause more harm than it prevents"

infotainment — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:38:09 +0000

If you primarily choose to watch educational videos sure, but YouTube can give you just as much brainrot as TikTok, depending on what the recommendation engine decides you might like.

New comment by infotainment in "The UK's new under-16 social media ban will cause more harm than it prevents"

infotainment — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:34:00 +0000

The answer, IMO, is simply banning all algorithm-driven social media, for everyone and not just kids.

This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.