Hacker News: infotainment

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.

New comment by infotainment in "San Francisco Weighs PG&E Takeover Amid Soaring Utility Costs"

infotainment — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:03:34 +0000

The angle of this that people may not realize is that San Francisco already owns the power generation (ie, the Hetch Hetchy dam). [1]

PG&E simply owns the wires, and overcharges for their use.

[1]: https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/hetch-hetchy-powe...

New comment by infotainment in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

infotainment — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:40:49 +0000

The major difference is that this is currently the only New Glenn launchpad, which is likely to cause major launch delays.

New comment by infotainment in "Getting arrested in Japan"

infotainment — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:23:12 +0000

> The arrogance of American tourists is truly boundless. How dare Japanese people not speak English! Who do they think they are?

This attitude is so unbelievably prevalent among native English speakers. "Obviously everyone should speak *my* language -- why should I ever have to learn another one?"

New comment by infotainment in "Getting arrested in Japan"

infotainment — Sat, 09 May 2026 23:18:20 +0000

100% this -- westerners love to criticize Japan's justice system, while ignoring the fact that much of it actually works.

Drugs? Petty crime? Homelessness? No other country comes close to managing these problems as well as Japan does, and Japan somehow manages to do this without descending into a 1984-esque surveillance state. Wander the streets of Tokyo at night and you will see zero drug-addicted homeless people. How many western cities could one say that about?

New comment by infotainment in "To my students"

infotainment — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:51:56 +0000

> Andrej Karpathy can train a GPT-2 class model for less than $80 now, so at least the environmental cost of training may drop to a point that it's acceptable to LLM vegetarians: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587

I suspect that even if you reduced the cost of training or any other real world metric, the goalposts would immediately move. It seems to me that it has never been about those things, but simply about the feeling of superiority one can attain by eschewing something seen as trending.

New comment by infotainment in "To my students"

infotainment — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:42:30 +0000

Of course, which tells you the position from which the author of the linked post is arguing.

New comment by infotainment in "To my students"

infotainment — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:35:14 +0000

> built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources

This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.

New comment by infotainment in "[dead]"

infotainment — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:01:50 +0000

I suppose opinionated people on the internet and ideological consistency have never exactly gone hand-in-hand.

> Like the boring fence-sitter I am, I think it will have a mix of positive and negative effects.

Definitely the correct way to think about AI, but "nuanced and reasonable" is not the way of internet debates, sadly.

New comment by infotainment in "EFF is leaving X"

infotainment — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:21:52 +0000

Always has been

New comment by infotainment in "How Costco Won in Japan (2025)"

infotainment — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:15:26 +0000

Online shopping is a pox upon society

New comment by infotainment in "GIMP 3.2 released"

infotainment — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 23:37:20 +0000

Don't worry, GIMP's UI never made any sense to anyone (Graphic Designer or otherwise), save for hardcore GIMP fans.

New comment by infotainment in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

infotainment — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:50:28 +0000

> Did Meta spend around 60Mn lobbying for age verification to be forcibly added to every OS install ?

Of course they would want this -- as long as the OS reports that the user is over 18 via such a system, then Meta is legally off the hook for any COPPA violations.

New comment by infotainment in "Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years"

infotainment — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:42:21 +0000

> The proposals, which return to Parliament on Tuesday, would replace juries in England and Wales with a single judge in cases where a convicted defendant would be jailed for up to three years.

Wow, this is literally the plot of the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney video games. I'm sure it will go great with no downsides.

New comment by infotainment in "North Korea Was Right About Nuclear Weapons"

infotainment — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:43:32 +0000

This article misses a major point: even without nuclear weapons, NK has always had the option to shell Seoul with conventional artillery and completely destroy it.

That, above all else, is likely why no one tried to topple them before they were able to develop nuclear weapons.