Hacker News: kenmorechalfant

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified"

kenmorechalfant — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 20:42:16 +0000

> Copyright is a deal society has made to advance the arts

Corn subsidies are a deal society made to advance the consumption of sugar water.

Who really makes these deals and who benefits from them?

Maybe having so much new content all the time is making us too content while the backroom deal makers laugh their way to the bank and fund more wars.

> and sciences

People en masse want cheaper energy, better machines and better medicine regardless of profitability of the producers. I don't buy into the idea that the only way to incentivize new inventions is with fame and wealth. People like to do good work they are proud of - not enough people, arguably, but they exist.

Some inventions may be too powerful to go without strict regulations like nuclear energy. I'd argue AI is in the same basket. I believe the internet, and by extension internet connected AI, should be considered a public utility and governed by the public.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)"

kenmorechalfant — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 15:53:17 +0000

The brain isn't full developed until 25-30 years old. I changed a lot, mentally, in my late 20's to early 30's. 25 is still a borderline child.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "The secret of Minecraft (2014)"

kenmorechalfant — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 20:50:10 +0000

Oh man, I guess I was so angry about that at some point I blocked it out. My dumb ass actually bought a 2nd account because I couldn't convince my friends to play with me until it was free. After MSFT purchased Minecraft I could never recover either of those accounts!

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "The secret of Minecraft (2014)"

kenmorechalfant — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 20:48:25 +0000

Minecraft STILL doesn't have a lot of stuff Notch was planning on adding. Instead of becoming an actual living breathing world you want to explore more they focus on premium skins and an occasional update with mostly bewildering content. Usually big projects like movies and games have a director(s) with a grand vision. Notch had a vision but he gave up on it for money. Microsoft's only vision for Minecraft has ever been sponsorship deals and merch. Honestly, I feel more betrayed by Notch than by Microsoft.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "Sequential modeling enables scalable learning for large vision models"

kenmorechalfant — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 04:05:07 +0000

It goes back to the old question of whether matter is fundamental and consciousness emerges from it or the other way around. My inclination is the latter, by way of Descartes. "I think therefore I am." If you can think "I am me" then you know with certainty that your first person identity exists but all other information that comes to you through your senses will always be an incomplete picture of the material universe. I think this is the strongest argument why consciousness precedes matter (or pervades through all matter, depending how you look at it). If sentience is a fundamental property of the universe, the way I see it, all matter shares the same soul. That makes it perfectly logical for a machine that mimics the pathways of the brain to behave just like a brain, to me.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "Cops still take more stuff from people than burglars do (2021)"

kenmorechalfant — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 01:09:12 +0000

It doesn't.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "What I Learned at Stripe"

kenmorechalfant — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 16:07:47 +0000

> inability to read and understand > or they have an attitude problem These just sound communication problems. Every failure to understand is also a failure of the explainer.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "Is there a market failure in child care?"

kenmorechalfant — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 17:03:11 +0000

Without a doubt in my mind.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "My favourite 3 lines of CSS"

kenmorechalfant — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 18:45:48 +0000

How is ".stack > * + *" advanced? This is CSS 101.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "Four ways to build web apps"

kenmorechalfant — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 18:10:52 +0000

Sorry, but this advice just sounds really out of date. How is "a cheap server" ever cheaper than free? I don't think you understand just how generous and simple the free static hosting CDNs are. NGINX is fine but it's absolutely not simpler than saying "hey Cloudflare, serve my main branch at this URL" and then it does all the rest automatically.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "Scientists find first observational evidence linking black holes to dark energy"

kenmorechalfant — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 16:49:56 +0000

Have you considered that fun is not always without side effects? The same machine that came up with physics, calculus and evolution came up with God and the MCU. God and the MCU are fun ideas too but just look at how much damage they've done to the world.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "How inevitable is the concept of numbers? (2021)"

kenmorechalfant — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 16:32:42 +0000

tl;skimmed only - but my view is that all lifeforms are computers. The main thesis here seems to be that math evolves naturally as a way to reduce computational load. Makes sense to me.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "The Undying Holiday-Suicide Myth"

kenmorechalfant — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 23:10:36 +0000

> having a family where everyone gets along

To say this is fortunate is an understatement.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web"

kenmorechalfant — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 22:18:40 +0000

Going back to the "sock of independence" example (/u/airstrike's comment for more context), ChatGPT's answer's accuracy is poor - but it's a funny question, and it gave a funny answer. So was it really a poor answer? My interpretation of their use of 'blur' as an analogy is that: it did not simply answer ACCURATELY in the STYLE of the DoC, it merged or "blurred/smudged together" the CONTENT and STYLE of the story and the DoC. It's not good at understanding the question or the context... and therefore, a lot of its answers feel "blurry".

"Wonder why"? Because, human thoughts, opinions and language are inherently blurry, right? That's my view. Plus, humans have a whole nervous system which has a lot of self-correcting systems (e.g. hormones) that ML AI doesn't yet account for if its goal is human-level intelligence.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "How to Beat Stress and Anxiety"

kenmorechalfant — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 18:46:34 +0000

What has helped me a lot: get plenty of sunlight; especially in the morning (very important to our biological clock), started taking probiotics once a day before a meal, I try to eat complex carbohydrates in the morning (fruits, vegetables, beans, seeds); which promotes good gut bacteria and more stable blood glucose levels, exercise every day, no caffeine 8 hours before bed, nothing but water 2-3 hours before bed and I take 10mg of Melatonin most nights before bed (sometimes 20mg).

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "Nostr: Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays"

kenmorechalfant — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 22:41:30 +0000

If your software encrypts user data with a user owned key that you never touch, i.e. everything is encrypted at rest, can you still be liable if it's later proven to be CSAM?

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "Integrate PWAs into Native Sharing UIs with Workbox"

kenmorechalfant — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 08:39:10 +0000

The main thing isn't really about it being preferable, feature-wise - it's that it's the future of cross platform apps. If I could have apps like Photoshop or Ableton on Windows, Linux, Mac, ChromeOS, Android, etc - and they all work the same, that's a huge win all around.

New comment by kenmorechalfant in "Integrate PWAs into Native Sharing UIs with Workbox"

kenmorechalfant — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 08:07:22 +0000

The PWAs of today are the tip of the iceberg. They've already made huge leaps in the last couple years. Google has talked multiple times recently about their internal goals to bridge the gap between web apps and native apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKVZMqpiY7w - In my view, it's just a matter of time before the limits you speak of are non-existent.