Hacker News: ksenzee

New comment by ksenzee in "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain"

ksenzee — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 07:19:49 +0000

The really exciting thing in this article is that this research led them to a new technique for growing brain stem cells in vitro, which has been very difficult until now. If that isn't being oversold, it's big news. That's going to make future research into diseases like ALS a lot easier.

New comment by ksenzee in "Amazon pilots ad services in ChatGPT"

ksenzee — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:03:51 +0000

I regret to inform you that the equivalent has been around for some time already. They're calling it "GEO," for Generative Engine Optimization.

New comment by ksenzee in "Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence"

ksenzee — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 04:30:36 +0000

He had a perfectly good example of how to do that productively. His friend Dries Buytaert over in Drupal land has had a commit credit system going for years that has worked well enough that people are constantly trying to game it. Instead he went for the jugular. I really don’t think he’s okay.

New comment by ksenzee in "Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns"

ksenzee — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 05:52:14 +0000

Eh. It was pretty great in 2008, when I used my spotty cell service to tweet road trip updates by texting 40404. O tempora, o mores, etc. etc.

New comment by ksenzee in "Hang on to Your Firefox"

ksenzee — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 02:19:21 +0000

You can start typing words that were in either the title or the URL of some thing you vaguely remember visiting last month, or last year, and the Awesome Bar will reliably surface it for you. I hardly even use bookmarks; I just count on the Awesome Bar finding everything for me. If I had to choose between it and uBlock Origin, I wouldn't even have to think twice. Ads I can deal with, if I have to. I've been outsourcing my memory for the web to the Awesome Bar for decades. It's part of my brain.

New comment by ksenzee in "GitHub Outage Tracker: Is GitHub Cooked?"

ksenzee — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:47:00 +0000

No, you hire more of them, you give them what they need to do their jobs, and you actually listen to their recommendations. It's not even complicated. It just takes time and money, neither of which companies want to spend on reliability until their customers scream very loud en masse.

New comment by ksenzee in "Fable and the end of the free lunch"

ksenzee — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:58:08 +0000

Superhuman intelligence? Really? These leading-edge advances indicate intelligence beyond the level of humanity?

New comment by ksenzee in "Fable and the end of the free lunch"

ksenzee — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:53:20 +0000

To clarify: We are not training LLMs on any information that humanity does not already have access to.

New comment by ksenzee in "Fable and the end of the free lunch"

ksenzee — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:33:44 +0000

Are you making a serious argument that superhuman intelligence is a plausible outcome of training LLMs on everything humanity knows so far? Or are you making the generic assertion that AGI is theoretically possible via means other than emulating the human brain? Because the latter is a strawman (nobody has asserted anything to the contrary), and I have seen no evidence at all to support the former.

New comment by ksenzee in "Fable and the end of the free lunch"

ksenzee — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:08:23 +0000

LLMs are not emulating the human brain. Somebody may well be able to do that someday, but right now nobody is even trying to.

New comment by ksenzee in "Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause"

ksenzee — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 02:43:55 +0000

They were buying a home and a yearly family vacation on two modest incomes, though. Try doing that now.

New comment by ksenzee in "Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks about the cause"

ksenzee — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 02:42:03 +0000

Housing is not more expensive because people have granite countertops. If anything it's the other way around. The land houses sit on has grown exponentially in value regardless of the quality of the building itself. Take any modest US suburban house that's been around since the 70s, and check its value over time. Even if the house is still the same building, same square footage, its current value will be much more than its initial value in today's dollars. If you're paying $700k for a house that was worth half that in today's dollars a generation ago, you might as well spend the extra few thousand it takes to get the nice countertops; their value relative to the rest of the house has gone down considerably.

New comment by ksenzee in "Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed"

ksenzee — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:38:35 +0000

"You will be annoyed" and "you will be served malware" are two different classes of need. The first is enough to get me running Firefox/uBlock Origin on my own devices. The second is what got me to run it at work.

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

ksenzee — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:35:09 +0000

yeah good idea, I'll just pop it into my xbox -- oh.

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:56:46 +0000

This was Washington, D.C. during the Bush years. I could more easily have admitted to an ongoing affair or a cocaine habit.

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:50:21 +0000

There's a large middle ground between saying nothing in the face of bigotry and proceeding immediately from "oh you're a member of ?" to an itemized list of hypocrisies, without stopping to find out what the individual person in front of you actually thinks about said hypocrisies. All I'm advocating for is that last: talk to people like they're people, not like they're mindless members of .

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:02:30 +0000

Having previously been a member of such a religion, and having left it specifically over human rights issues, I am delighted to inform you that there are many individuals who identify as members of such religions but who are not personally bigoted, and who in fact may privately be uncomfortable about that aspect of their religious belief. If you already know someone, and you have reason to believe they're not bigoted, but then they out themselves as a member of some such group, you don't have to assume the worst.

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:46:56 +0000

Of course people know how to hide things that aren't safe to tell everyone. I do, however, genuinely mean what I'm saying. I worked somewhere once where the nature of the work meant almost everyone was of a particular political persuasion. I was of the opposite political persuasion. I was also one of the most junior employees there. It was a good enough bunch of people that I felt safe mentioning it in passing one day, and it led to a really great conversation. I was not afraid of being fired for it, but more importantly, I was not afraid of being ostracized for it.

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:41:57 +0000

I don't own a company, and nobody reports to me. I simply said I want my coworkers to feel safe being themselves. I've had jobs where that was true, and they were better places to work all around, probably because "I feel safe talking about my transition/mental health/divorce" also translates to "I feel safe telling my boss this release needs to be delayed" and "I feel safe admitting I need some help writing this code."

New comment by ksenzee in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ksenzee — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:34:32 +0000

Maybe not your whole self, but I'd like the people I work with to feel safe talking about their family, their disabilities, their religion, their culture or subculture, the things they love doing, whatever makes them human.