Hacker News: izzydata

New comment by izzydata in "Tesla Roadster"

izzydata — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:53:56 +0000

I've never been so convinced by dead internet theory than I am today with this huge wave of bots advertising for Tesla today.

New comment by izzydata in "I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep"

izzydata — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:29:50 +0000

Perhaps they could some day. I'm basing my understanding on the current day capabilities. Once that changes I will update what I think.

New comment by izzydata in "I know why Mathematicians weep"

izzydata — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:17:27 +0000

I would be curious to see the end result of letting it endlessly update its inputs from its own outputs. I was under the impression that eventually this would cause delusions and if you let it do this long enough and it is solving problems that no humans can verify as correct that it isn't useful.

Maybe that is the limits of my imagination, but it seems unwise to take humans completely out of the loop. Having mathematicians around that can understand what it is doing so that we can utilize that knowledge in a way that we can have some confidence in seems important.

New comment by izzydata in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

izzydata — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:57:35 +0000

I don't see how its output possibilities could be infinite given a finite set of data. Taken to the extreme if you give an LLM only a single piece of information then that is going to be the only thing it can produce. Given it two pieces of information and maybe it can produce every combination of those two things. Given all of the worlds knowledge I'm sure its possible outputs are incomprehensibly large, but still not infinite. Then having its outputs match a set of really specific instructions is going to be a small subset of that.

New comment by izzydata in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

izzydata — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:17:30 +0000

I still think mathematicians are going to be as important as ever. The LLMs are only finding what was technically possible given our current breadth of knowledge after brute force solving problems. Eventually it will run out of things that it can do with its training and the only way to get it to do more will be training it on new human found knowledge.

Finding that new knowledge may be exponentially more difficult, but it will be much more valuable.

New comment by izzydata in "Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'"

izzydata — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 14:44:45 +0000

You would think any investor would prefer to be informed that the numbers don't match expectations even if they then decide to go ahead anyway. People like to gamble sometimes even though the likelihood of losing money is very high.

New comment by izzydata in "A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs"

izzydata — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 14:58:25 +0000

A coffee shop is more than just the coffee though. There are other considerations to be made such as location and the environment. I'm not sure you can really be a "bad customer". The customer wants whatever they want.

New comment by izzydata in "A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs"

izzydata — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:43:31 +0000

Threatening people is unwarranted, but of course people are allowed to choose where they buy coffee for whatever reasons they see fit. If the market decides that stores with AI posters aren't the place to be then the business has to adapt.

New comment by izzydata in "Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature"

izzydata — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 19:00:14 +0000

I agree that probably won't happen that way. There also won't be much in the way of regulation until society slowly realizes the dangers.

I think we are currently in the process of finding out now that there have been people on social media from birth and are now adult members of society.

New comment by izzydata in "People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination"

izzydata — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:28:01 +0000

I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability.

It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems like there would be more obvious giveaways in human behavior.

New comment by izzydata in "Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature"

izzydata — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:07:39 +0000

5 years old is crazy, but by the time they are 15-16 it becomes difficult to restrict them from things their peers all do. There needs to be a wider push from all parents or more of a consensus from society that these platforms are dangerous.

New comment by izzydata in "List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games"

izzydata — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:22:47 +0000

Especially not full price. The value of buying a license for a digital download can't be $60 if the value of owning the physical version is also $60.

Personally to me the value of a temporary license to a game is at best $10. Why would I rent a game for $60?

New comment by izzydata in "Introducing Ad Blocker for Firefox on iOS"

izzydata — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:17:37 +0000

I inherently disagree with the ad model of business. Intentionally worsening a product with ads to convince people to pay to remove them is just rewarding them for enshitification.

So on that front I'd prefer YouTube go out of business so that something like Nebula can take its place. Or the only videos left at\re the ones doing it as a hobby and not as a job.

New comment by izzydata in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

izzydata — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:08:59 +0000

The fact that they sometimes can't means you can't have someone who is not a software engineer. Otherwise there is no way to verify whether the LLM wrote correct code or not.

New comment by izzydata in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

izzydata — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:40:50 +0000

I am going to start calling the reduction or removal of minor things that helped society "micro regressions".

New comment by izzydata in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

izzydata — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:02:37 +0000

In the sense that a website could just ask your OS if you are over a certain age and that age was self declared? That seems fine to me, but why can't the websites just ask me for my self declared age?

That's how things used to be and that makes more sense in my opinion because an OS isn't the thing displaying content. It just run whatever it is told to run.

New comment by izzydata in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

izzydata — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:35:48 +0000

This is why I only purchase digital games at high discounts. It might be worth $60 to own a piece of physical media that can be played at any time without internet. However, to me the value of a DRM license that can possibly be taken away at any moment is very little. It is ridiculous that they attempt to sell digital games at the same price as a physical game.

New comment by izzydata in "A graph that should be front-page news"

izzydata — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:43:46 +0000

At that point it will be a self correcting issue when huge swaths of the human population dies from starvation due to not being able to produce enough food. It is preferable to do something prior to then.

New comment by izzydata in "Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion"

izzydata — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:03:29 +0000

The tools can definitely go away. They could get exponentially more expensive to where it is no longer financially possible to keep it subsidized. The bubble could pop and most of the companies could go bankrupt. It's not exactly like a calculator because it requires such an astronomical amount of resources to keep running.

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

izzydata — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:03:49 +0000

Better than if it weren't illegal I'm sure. Also I think it is that it is illegal to sell kids vapes. It's not illegal for the kids to vape.