Hacker News: khafra

New comment by khafra in "Dune's Butlerian Jihad and the Future of AI"

khafra — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:50:45 +0000

When "guess with some magic" can solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to, it seems fair to ask whether it's approaching risky levels of intelligence.

New comment by khafra in "Backpressure is all you need"

khafra — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:48:27 +0000

This is not a contradiction; it's an augmentation. As an operations guy, I can tell you that well-constructed automation to reduce the amount of manual checking a human has to do almost always increases the quality of the overall process's output.

New comment by khafra in "Magnifica Humanitas"

khafra — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:04:39 +0000

If you want to talk about ends, you're talking Axiology, not strictly Ethics. By "ceteris paribus correct," I mean that if you were programming a superintelligent AI--and you knew exactly what you were doing, rather than structuring a learning schedule and feeding that a corpus--you would want a consequentialist.

Deontology and Virtue Ethics are patches for flaws in human morality. For example, the deontological rule "never kill the leader of the group and take over, even for the good of the group" is there because power is instrumentally useful enough that evolved social animals will deceive themselves about why they want power, so naive consequentialism doesn't work for them.

New comment by khafra in "Magnifica Humanitas"

khafra — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:52:30 +0000

Neither Deontology, Virtue Ethics, nor Consequentialism describe the ends; only the tradeoffs. You could have a deontological commitment to never giving a sucker an even break. You could have a virtue ethicist who considers the Joker a paragon--I think some of them are in politics. Consequentialism just says that deontology is too myopic, and locally following the correct rules is sometimes less good than maximizing long-term gains. Consequentialism is ceteris paribus correct; but ceteris is often not paribus for humans, so pure consequentialism has a lot of footguns in it.

New comment by khafra in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

khafra — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:03:32 +0000

The death toll per heat wave can easily hit 5 figures in just france. A hybrid portable-minisplit that will cool a 100m^2 apartment is under a thousand euros, and draw just under a Mwh per year. A portable to cool one small bedroom is much less power-efficient, but can often be found between 200 and 300. That's not cheap, per se, but funerals aren't much less expensive in Europe than in America. Many EU countries allow some limited cooling in public buildings, but I still sweat in most grocery stores, malls, libraries, museums, etc. during hot weather--they just don't take air conditioning to a comfortable temperature as worth the power bill, the way America does.

New comment by khafra in "Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track"

khafra — Wed, 13 May 2026 11:32:14 +0000

If power is so cheap mid-day, why don't european buildings have sufficient air conditioning not to kill the elderly during heat waves? The laws restricting AC all have power conservation as their rationale.

New comment by khafra in "I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night"

khafra — Tue, 12 May 2026 10:19:26 +0000

Are you sure they're not the same thing? I'm quite certain I've heard people talk about "beef curtains."

New comment by khafra in "I let AI build a tool to help me figure out what was waking me up at night"

khafra — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:37:18 +0000

What about your rouladen? Articulated steel blinds block quite a lot of light, don't they?

New comment by khafra in "They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker"

khafra — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:34:59 +0000

Should be able to use the local LLM to generate a short "They Live" style phrase based on the content of the ad.

New comment by khafra in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

khafra — Wed, 06 May 2026 04:48:00 +0000

The other scary part is when they have a fantastic negotiating position; because all of commerce depends on their continuing to work, and they can easily coordinate with each other because they're mostly copied from the same few templates.

New comment by khafra in "Men who stare at walls"

khafra — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:37:14 +0000

A wise man once noted that the word "amusement" has the same structure as "deforestation."

(@stevenkaas on twitter).

New comment by khafra in "All your agents are going async"

khafra — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:52:33 +0000

"Did the vehicle just crash" has a short feedback loop, very amenable to RL. "Did this product strategy tank our earnings/reputation/compliance/etc" can have a much longer, harder to RL feedback loop.

But maybe not that much longer; METR task length improvement is still straight lines on log graphs.

New comment by khafra in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

khafra — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:37:10 +0000

One bad possibility is that AI & robotics advance to the point where they can do every job better and more cheaply than humans; and then humans are no longer employable and all die if they have insufficient capital to survive the period between unemployment and post-scarcity.

Another possibility is that, once AI exceeds human performance in all economically useful activities, including high-level planning, governance, law enforcement, and military actions, it discovers that the benefits of keeping humans around aren't worth the costs and risks.

New comment by khafra in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

khafra — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:31:20 +0000

> what does Anthropic do to prevent malicious use of its software by its own government?

Anthropic has ameliorated that danger by being designated a supply-chain risk by the DoW, preventing the USG from using it.

New comment by khafra in "Missile defense is NP-complete"

khafra — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:57:18 +0000

George Lucas vindicated once again.

Of course, once loitering, intelligent munitions make it too dangerous to be an economically valuable human outside of a bunker, we'll need robots running the robot factories, then we get Philip K. Dick's scenario in The Second Variety.

New comment by khafra in "Book: The Emerging Science of Machine Learning Benchmarks"

khafra — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:12:25 +0000

xkcd 1053, my friend.

New comment by khafra in "LLM Architecture Gallery"

khafra — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 11:59:45 +0000

Nice! Last time I had a custom temporary tattoo made, I had to copy and paste from Attention is All You Need; this provides a much cleaner and more varied source.

New comment by khafra in "Grief and the AI split"

khafra — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 06:06:48 +0000

Oh, for sure, the capital "owners" get ganked either simultaneously with the rest of us, or shortly after. But that's not a factor in their decisions; because if they didn't build it, China would; and there's obviously nothing we can do about that. (and to some degree, they're right; international treaties to limit the development of world-ending technology is something that requires minimally competent governments, with an interest in preserving the world, on the majority of the sides of the treaty).

New comment by khafra in "Grief and the AI split"

khafra — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:59:00 +0000

Ok, but when the looms can autonomously analyze the market, design the products, organize purchasing and sales channel, run production, and deliver the products, the workers will not be squeezed. We will be discarded.

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

khafra — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:38:16 +0000

We're all going to have to use service accounts created on Windows Server 2003 or RHEL 4, otherwise they won't be old enough and will require manual login from an of-age administrator