Hacker News: m_fayer

New comment by m_fayer in "AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity"

m_fayer — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:03:59 +0000

I really struggle with the contrast between what seems to me to be a formidable and ground-breaking technology, and the deep unseriousness of the leadership of the leading companies developing that technology. If the behavior was coming from, say, uber - I’d be less surprised.

New comment by m_fayer in "Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe"

m_fayer — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 22:17:26 +0000

In Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children Of Time", there's a generation ship wandering space that's a marvel of human engineering, whose inhabitants are getting dumber every generation and losing the capacity to maintain or even respect the incredible environment into which they were born. Certainly rings a bell.

New comment by m_fayer in "Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe"

m_fayer — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 21:21:13 +0000

I don't know why this is even a tiny bit controversial. The idea that the media you consume in formative years has a huge effect on mental development seems extremely obvious.

I grew up in the 90s. Its not like all our media was Tolstoy. But for my cohort it was very normal to read young adult literature - which meant books with 100s of pages, or video games that were elaborate, challenging, and demanded imagination and focus. The shortest media we consumed was 30 minute sitcoms. We got aesthetics, narrative structure, problem solving, focus - and maybe even some semblance of values.

Today, and I can hardly believe it, it really seems to be the case that the average teenager has read zero books cover to cover, or even fully watched a movie as difficult as ET. What she has done, is consumed hundreds of hours of twitchy bizarre quasi-algorithmic video content through a blaring handheld terminal thats held more intimately than any friend or pet. Far from being content made with artistic integrity or true dedication to the fostering of the young, this stuff is more akin to direct neural stimulation.

What I don't understand, is why anyone would think that such a shift would result in anything other than marked mental deterioration.

New comment by m_fayer in "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"

m_fayer — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 22:22:37 +0000

I didn't think we'd get neurodivergent models until at least 2028.

New comment by m_fayer in "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"

m_fayer — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:42:52 +0000

I also get good mileage out of Terra when I need a diligent workhorse. That's a good way to describe it. We should start using character archetypes when we describe models, it'll do more good than the dubious numbers and cherry-picked quotes. Maybe RPG character-type cliches? Myers Briggs?

New comment by m_fayer in "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"

m_fayer — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 18:18:51 +0000

I've been working with agents all year, but 5.6 Sol was some sort of sweet spot for me. Something about how it communicated verbally and its engineering instincts just clicked for me, and I was able to somehow predict it and jam with it. Like a colleague you click with. It's the first model I've gotten attached to. I'm concerned that whatever model supercedes it, while technically better, just won't feel quite as natural to work with. And this makes me feel very professionally vulnerable to the labs. I miss the days when my crucial tooling came from companies as reliable and predictable as, say, Jetbrains.

New comment by m_fayer in "Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route"

m_fayer — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:34:16 +0000

The purges haven’t reached too deep into the rank and file yet, which is why the walls are still standing. But they’ve hit the top of the pyramid hard, which is why nothing makes sense.

New comment by m_fayer in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

m_fayer — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:43:22 +0000

There’s a wonderful Ted Chiang short story called “Anxiety is The Dizziness Of Freedom” that explores how people become enmeshed and addicted to alternate versions of how their life could have gone. It’s reminiscent of what you’re describing.

New comment by m_fayer in "ChatGPT Images 2.5"

m_fayer — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:38:52 +0000

Because elderly people who never had a connection to tech or sci-fi will have no feel for, and therefore no resistance to the kind of trickery that seems fun but is ultimately corrosive. Cheerfully meddling with the artifacts of memory at that life stage is corrosive.

The Summer the Ticks Took Over

m_fayer — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:15:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/magazine/tick-season-lone-star-alpha-gal-syndrome-lyme.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49377416

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by m_fayer in "GPT‑Live"

m_fayer — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:24:02 +0000

Potentially corrosive. Emphasis on potentially.

Powerful and uncanny are morally neutral traits.

At root an LLM is a different kind of mind that thinks different kinds of thoughts. (I’m making no claims about consciousness here.)

It’s a novel object for us humans, and we’ll need decades to come to grips with it. In the meantime I think a bit of humility is due.

New comment by m_fayer in "GPT-5.6"

m_fayer — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:13:45 +0000

And I know this is petty but the CC cli/harness just grates. It’s overcomplicated, performatively cutesy, and buggy. It’s in my way. The codex harness gives me what I need and gets out of the way.

New comment by m_fayer in "GPT‑Live"

m_fayer — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:10:06 +0000

There’s something phenomenally powerful, uncanny, and potentially deeply corrosive about current AI. Dismissing it as “evil” is pat, and prevents any full encounter with something that now irrevocably exists and deserves and demands the consideration of thinking people.

New comment by m_fayer in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

m_fayer — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:25:14 +0000

Hit the nail on the head. These bureaucratic obstacles are also a manifestation of a culture. A culture that will, in a subconscious and subtle manner, sneer bristle and balk at you, who dared to start a company. What’s wrong with you and who do you think you are, comes the message. Why isn’t what we all do good enough for you, comes the demand.

Germany rail network briefly halted nationwide due to IT malfunction

m_fayer — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:16:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm0ek4z7ggo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661258

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by m_fayer in "What the Fuck Happened to Nerds"

m_fayer — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:03:24 +0000

Fandom-as-identity was a niche thing even within nerddom until quite recently.

Also a lot of those properties had a lot of substance there decades ago and have since been watered down and turned into memeable cliches.

New comment by m_fayer in "What the Fuck Happened to Nerds"

m_fayer — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:24:48 +0000

Not necessarily no - but sustainably doing good work while shoulder-to-shoulder with human frailty and confounding diversity does raise the chances.

New comment by m_fayer in "What happened to nerds?"

m_fayer — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:22:56 +0000

Nerd-dom has also somehow merged with the world of fantasy and fandom. These are subcultures obsessed with hero journeys, morality tales, escapism, and cartoonish black-and-white ethical systems. I don't expect such people to handle fame and wealth well at all.

New comment by m_fayer in "India's surprise baby bust"

m_fayer — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:08:02 +0000

We need a whole new generation of fertility medicine aimed not just at conception but the rest of it as well.

New comment by m_fayer in "India's surprise baby bust"

m_fayer — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:03:10 +0000

That or go "one and done" after having enough fun with:

- Stress on the relationship of trying and failing for a long time - Stress of fertility treatments, if needed - Likelihood of dealing with inevitable miscarriages on the way to a birth - Overall "medicalization" of pregnancy in middle age, and the stress of all that contact with the medical system