Hacker News: kortex

New comment by kortex in "Artemis II Photo Voter"

kortex — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:51:41 +0000

NASA just dropped 12,000 photos from the Artemis II mission. But which ones are the best ones?

I know Jeff Geerling linked the site a few days ago, but Hank just unveiled the vote feature in response to the big photo drop to sift through.

Artemis II Photo Voter

kortex — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:51:41 +0000

Article URL: https://artemistimeline.com/vote

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008056

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by kortex in "Security through obscurity is not bad"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:27:54 +0000

This should be immediately intuitive to anyone who spends more than 5 minutes looking at firewall traffic of something public. 99.9% of the bots' requests aren't doing sophisticated penetration attacks, they are blasting all the low hanging fruit: the common ports, the common wordpress endpoints, the common bobby tables style sql injections and xss attacks.

New comment by kortex in "Security through obscurity is not bad"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:24:19 +0000

Eh, the problem with that reasoning is one of extreme degree. The "obscurity metric" would be the surprisal associated with discovering the critical piece of info. Using a random port confers brute force resistance of 2^16. At 1ms that's about a minute. Brute forcing at the same rate a 128 bit key takes like 10^28 years.

It's like hiding your key under the mat, vs hanging on a tree limb of a specific tree only you know the gps coordinate of. Both are "obscure". Huge difference in difficulty.

New comment by kortex in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:15:21 +0000

And AI agents reliably-ish do tasks billions of times a day that humans struggle with, namely regurgitating information at incredible rates across wide breadths of topics. I see it as merely a matter of degree, not category.

How do you measure "deeper understanding" in humans? You usually do it by asking them to show their work, show how the dots connect. Reasoning models are getting there, and when they do, I'm sure the goalposts will move yet again.

New comment by kortex in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:10:59 +0000

We don't have a way of measuring "cognitive awareness" though. We have a way of measuring electrical impulses, and how they behave in response to various treatments (eg anaesthetics or magnetic fields), but we can't objectively measure whether the system is aware at all.

We can measure electrical spikes, and we can ask the system to reply what it experiences when various spikes occur. Guess what: we can do that with ANNs now too.

It'd be one thing if this were all a philosophical discussion, but in this thread so many folks are making very firm statements about the nature of reality we have no means to back up.

New comment by kortex in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:05:04 +0000

Ya, I seem to largely agree with your comments on this article. I was replying to brookst, did you mean to reply on a differnt thread?

New comment by kortex in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 03:31:33 +0000

Is someone tripped out on mushrooms experience ego death and total disruption of sense of self still conscious? They may even contend they are more conscious than normal life, what with all the communing with the universe and whatnot.

Trees react to the world around them in many ways.

New comment by kortex in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 03:27:22 +0000

Humans can't reliably subitize more than five-ish objects, while chimps can actually do this task better than us. That's our "cant count the R's in strawberry" (which flagship models can reliably do now, general letter counting).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing

New comment by kortex in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 03:22:34 +0000

They stopped being autocomplete years ago with RLHF

New comment by kortex in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 03:21:18 +0000

How do you know the sensation of a red photon hitting a cone cell, transduced to the optic nerve through ion junctions and processed by pyramidal neurons, is any more or less real than the excitation of electrons in a doped silicon junction activating the latent space of the "red" thought vector? Cause we are made of meat?

New comment by kortex in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

kortex — Sun, 03 May 2026 03:08:05 +0000

I'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 1980s!) sort of reasoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

New comment by kortex in "Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta"

kortex — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:49:43 +0000

They need to make an example out of these companies. If your whole business model is built around handling sensitive data, and you are caught shipping off that data to brokers, you should be liquidated or at least fined to within an inch of bankruptcy, as basically all of your profits are a sham.

New comment by kortex in "Laws of Software Engineering"

kortex — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:55:29 +0000

I actually dont think it's that obvious at all (unless you are a senior engineer). It's like the classic joke:

A QA engineer walks into a bar and orders a beer. She orders 2 beers.

She orders 0 beers.

She orders -1 beers.

She orders a lizard.

She orders a NULLPTR.

She tries to leave without paying.

Satisfied, she declares the bar ready for business. The first customer comes in an orders a beer. They finish their drink, and then ask where the bathroom is.

The bar explodes.

It's usually not obvious when starting to write an API just how malformed the data could be. It's kind of a subconscious bias to sort of assume that the input is going to be well-formed, or at least malformed in predictable ways.

I think the cure for this is another "law"/maxim: "Parse, don't validate." The first step in handling external input is try to squeeze it into as strict of a structure with as many invariants as possible, and failing to do so, return an error.

It's not about perfection, but it is predictable.

New comment by kortex in "Laws of Software Engineering"

kortex — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:41:29 +0000

I go by a philosophy that Liskov Substitution is reeeally about referential transparency. I don't care about parent/child classes, I care about interfaces and implementations, and structural subtyping. Fix that, and it's great.

New comment by kortex in "All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)"

kortex — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:26:30 +0000

Carbon + helium fusion is rather favorable, vs carbon production by the triple alpha process (3He), so it's just reaction kinetics essentially.

New comment by kortex in "Stop Flock"

kortex — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:30:40 +0000

I don't think it's a "weird fetish." It's just most of the things privacy advocates have been warning about - PRISM, warrantless metadata requests, tech companies handing over data - are all largely invisible.

A camera pointing at your child's playground or gymnastics class is much more salient.

New comment by kortex in "Starfling: A one-tap endless orbital slingshot game in a single HTML file"

kortex — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:47:02 +0000

Super fun! But the text does get in the way mid-combo.

New comment by kortex in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

kortex — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:24:42 +0000

Complete hearsay, but I struck up a convo with someone who had spent a few hours drinking around a campfire with him and a few others at burning man, prior to GPT3's popularity. Apparently he was utterly convinced in his pivotal role to shepherd in a new era with AI, to the point where it got really messianic and culty. He didnt recall much else other than just being really weirded out by the dude.

New comment by kortex in "Electrical transformer manufacturing is throttling the electrified future"

kortex — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:26:57 +0000

Not an EE, but if transformers are at all like smaller scale power supplies, the issue with using multiple smaller components is it works right up until it doesn't. If you lose one or it gets overloaded, it puts more strain the rest, increasing the failure risk. Then another one pops, and the load shifts to the smaller pool, in a cascade failure.

To an extent, you can do this, as long as you have systems in place to shed load and prevent the components from failing in quick succession by circuit breaking.

Also i believe transformers are much more graceful handling overcurrent than silicon. But everything has its limits.