Hacker News: jaybrendansmith

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day"

jaybrendansmith — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 13:52:03 +0000

This post is 100% relevant to hacker news. Why is it flagged? Who is flagging these posts? Do we have a Russian bot problem?

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution"

jaybrendansmith — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 23:23:38 +0000

Yup. The best thing Trump did for Climate Change was to start a war with Iran.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Jimmy Kimmel Interviews James Talarico"

jaybrendansmith — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:19:28 +0000

An excellent interview. Perhaps scripture can save us yet.

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

jaybrendansmith — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:16:49 +0000

If we want to solve the alignment problem with AI, I think we need to first solve the alignment problem with Humans.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Why So Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill Everyone"

jaybrendansmith — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 14:06:33 +0000

100% agree. All of these stories seem off the mark...with the increased ability to create agentic hacking swarms, mass surveillance, killer AI drones, virus engineering, etc. it seems to me that we should all be most concerned with humans, enabled by AI, destroying everything. AI is the least of our concerns.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All"

jaybrendansmith — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:48:39 +0000

when AI can call someone and sound like someone they know, we are completely screwed.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Why are European countries moving their gold out of North America?"

jaybrendansmith — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 18:30:10 +0000

We are all in this together. As goes the US, so does the rest of the world. You can pretend otherwise, but wait until he takes Greenland, then Canada, and then god knows what else. He's going to bring it all down around us if we don't stop it.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "VC isn't VC anymore"

jaybrendansmith — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:39:05 +0000

My absolute regret is that I used to look up to Marc and Ben, in the sense that I felt we were on the same team, trying to build cool new technology. That was a long time ago. It appears now that they've completely lost their way, or they never had a moral compass in the first place. Having met some of the people in those circles, I've never come away with the thought that they were nefarious cartoonishly evil, but this incident with Penny certainly seems to confirm that they in fact, are. What a world. I will now burn their books in my campfire out back, and continue my hopeless search for tech people who have a shred of humanity and compassion.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?"

jaybrendansmith — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:18:55 +0000

This is why I love Hacker News. Come for the AI system outage root cause, get a treatise on the power of the spacing guild in Dune.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Why are European countries moving their gold out of North America?"

jaybrendansmith — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:03:23 +0000

The Democratic party needs to call the Netherlands and Europe and say "Give us please until November to fix this. If we fail to do that, trust your instincts!"

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Never Forget How Eagerly Apple and Google Coddled Fascism"

jaybrendansmith — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:00:51 +0000

A breakdown of modern American society lies on our failure to maintain old fashioned ideals such as honor, integrity, bravery. These ideals used to matter more than money, and were based on the idea that we would be measured by the supreme being someday and found wanting, versus measured simply by our fellow humans on the earth. These ideas remain essential to democracy in a way that is not clearly understood.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Banned Words List"

jaybrendansmith — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:17:04 +0000

And that is flat ignorance of all the other context of destruction of data going on right now. Ignoring that research data is being maintained by private citizens to protect it doesn't support your point. Censorship of government websites is just a small piece of this, ignoring it doesn't help anyone but a rank partisan, which you clearly are.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He's Approaching 300 Days"

jaybrendansmith — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:10:49 +0000

It's called the survivorship bias. But you can go ahead and ask all the dead liberals in Chile if you want confirmation of that.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "The Iran War Is a Whole New Level of Quagmire for the US"

jaybrendansmith — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:45:27 +0000

This "Strait of Hormuz War" is the "Suez Crisis of 1956" for the US Empire. You know, the one that ended the British Empire.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Banned Words List"

jaybrendansmith — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:28:41 +0000

Yes, it definitely is censorship, because scientists employed by the government may not report findings, existing government information is being erased, and the public cannot access it. So studies about racial concerns are cancelled, programs measuring the rate of climate change are being cancelled and the data and even the data collecting instrumentation is destroyed. This list of banned words is just one aspect of the censorship ... taken as a whole, this is an unconstitutional censorship of data that has public health and public safety implications. Does it qualify as Hacker News? Well, does Hacker News even exist when we no longer have access to critical data? Is that not topical? And does this kind of post suddenly become relevant when the government starts censoring the website directly? And how would we know when that starts to happen? Are you going to magically send us all letters in the mail? Or will you just silently acquiesce?

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Depleted strategic oil reserve nears level that raises concerns about damage"

jaybrendansmith — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:15:28 +0000

This is the only explanation that makes sense to me. It must be endlessly amusing to Putin that he has been successful in achieving a true 'Manchurian Candidate', and is now sitting back and eating popcorn as he watches the complete destruction of the United States of America. Why is this so hard for people to accept?

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Your key to success isn't more luck or hard work"

jaybrendansmith — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:52:34 +0000

Yes. The definition of 'luck' stated in the article is just ... wrong. Luck as random, sure, but you become more 'lucky' by knowing more people but mostly being open to new opportunities, ideas, friendships. So yes, it is luck, but luck is (opportunity + preparedness + hard work + social skills) X iteration.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "ICE to Pay LexisNexis Millions for Data to Feed to Palantir"

jaybrendansmith — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:21:49 +0000

This is terrible, horrible stuff. This is exactly what so many have feared; a database held by an unaccountable central government group that can identify your address based on your social media and cell phone traffic. Your local police don't even have this information, because to have this is an invasion of your privacy and your freedoms. This is the exact opposite of "sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid". We all should be very, very afraid of this, and we need to seriously vote this out of existence as fast as possible. This is a call to action, and no I am not being a Cassandra here; the sky is starting to fall.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate"

jaybrendansmith — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:31:38 +0000

Stop voting for Republicans. That's a good start.

New comment by jaybrendansmith in "Humans Will Never Leave the Solar System"

jaybrendansmith — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:51:17 +0000

Yes, there are challenges. But a 'Rendezvous with Rama' approach, combined with humans in cryosleep? There's no scientific barrier with this kind of approach. Yes, it won't happen soon, nor will it take a reasonable amount of time, but it IS possible.