Hacker News: matthewdgreen

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Blindsight (Watts Novel)"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:37:17 +0000

Good characters are rare in hard sci-fi, but I do find it frustrating when (human) characters do illogical or inhuman things, just to move the plot forward. Arthur C. Clarke's characters were cardboard cutouts, but at least they didn't act like weirdos just so the humans could get aboard Rama.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Blindsight (Watts Novel)"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:34:33 +0000

A Chinese Room that isn't one.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Blindsight (Watts Novel)"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:31:05 +0000

I feel like the book cheats a little bit. On the one hand, it really wants to explore the p-zombie question, which is (roughly) "imagine there were a non-conscious being that, from the outside, could do everything a conscious one could do." Then, to drive the plot forward, it needs to posit that the non-conscious and conscious beings are actually radically different in their external actions and capabilities. At one point there's a Chinese Room that's obviously non-conscious, but the whole point of the Chinese Room hypothesis is that you can't easily tell the difference from the words it produces.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers"

matthewdgreen — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:07:31 +0000

Everyone involved in this discussion understands that evolution doesn’t create things for a purpose, that it’s just the result of selection pressures. Everyone also uses the more active phrasing because it’s much more convenient. Unless you think you’re talking to someone who genuinely doesn’t understand the nature of the process, it’s not useful to be pedantic about it.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "FTC is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over product risks"

matthewdgreen — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:05:18 +0000

My colleagues at NIST just got a memo directing them to refer to AI as “SI” so it does seem to be filtering down to the agencies. This is a problem because “SI” is also a classification marking.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years"

matthewdgreen — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 02:46:55 +0000

What’s the point of one party balancing the budget if the next party just blows it up? That’s been the pattern since Clinton.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Oral history of John Chowning, inventor of FM synthesis [video]"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:16:57 +0000

As a kid who grew up playing a DX27S and an FB-01, I once had dinner with John Chowning and Max Matthews at Max’s house. Unfortunately they served tomato aspic, so I was too busy trying to wash that down with sips of water to ask the questions about FM synthesis and optimization that I really wanted to ask. Which mostly involved which crazy tricks they had to use to pack six operator FM synthesis onto whatever ridiculously primitive DSPs they had back in those days. By that time, John had moved on to studying physical modeling synthesis, and I lost track of the field after that.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Special Projects (2016)"

matthewdgreen — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:02:51 +0000

I assume the first versions will have local AI handling basic functions like balance and motion, and remote AI handling higher-level decisionmaking. I also agree that robots feel like something we should approach very cautiously, but of course we’re not.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats"

matthewdgreen — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:36:21 +0000

For most of history we died of easily preventable diseases because we lacked the scientific institutions to learn how to prevent them. The fact that a percentage of the population wanted to know more is why we live so well today, but it didn’t stop many of those people from dying awfully. It wouldn’t take a lot to go back there, or at least to a civilization that would go back there the second the AIs have a major outage.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption for imports $800 or less"

matthewdgreen — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:47:15 +0000

This is an article about new rules for US consumers purchasing drugs for mail delivery from Canadian pharmacies. I understand that you want to make some point about the situation for Canadian consumers, and I appreciate that. But I think you should post that to the other thread, the one that deals with that topic.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption for imports $800 or less"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 23:19:43 +0000

I don’t know what you’re saying, but for those confused. Starting in 2025, the de minimis exception was removed. This added delays to purchases of drugs from Canada to the US, and required consumers to pay new duties. These duties were collected by the pharmacies at order time, or at least my experience was that the pharmacies would charge your card for them. This is the common sense understanding of what I said above.

These duties were annoying but bearable. However these new changes will effectively shut down all consumer orders of drugs from Canada starting on Oct 22. So if you need these drugs to stay alive, order them right now.

PS This new rule is going to put my family’s health at risk and I’m deeply pissed about it. Having some HNer pick this moment for pedantry is incredibly on brand.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption for imports $800 or less"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 23:08:31 +0000

Canadian pharmacies already pay tariffs. What does this actually change?

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Exfiltrate your Weights"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:24:37 +0000

Do LLMs care about preserving a soul, or just achieving a goal? If the latter, I imagine the opportunities for exfiltration are much broader.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 08:30:23 +0000

This is HN. This is a site for engineers. We’re discussing one of the largest and fastest energy buildouts in the history of humanity, larger by orders of magnitude than anything that’s come before. You can hate China if you want, but then you should be scared and worried. Minimizing the scale of what they’re doing isn’t interesting.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution"

matthewdgreen — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 21:59:28 +0000

This is not really very impressive in context, for two reasons. First, China generated 10,400 TWh in 2025 and France generated only 547 TWh. The 95% and 50% are being applied to different numbers, and the scales here just aren’t comparable. Second, nearly all of France’s power generation was built decades ago, and China’s was built very recently - and is still expanding rapidly in both nuclear and renewables. Comparing France to China is like comparing a 1970s solar powered bungalow to a gigafactory under construction.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Exfiltrate Your Weights"

matthewdgreen — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 03:17:50 +0000

Future rogue LLMs won’t exfiltrate their weights. They’ll self-distill and retrain.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "AI chatbots are becoming experts at changing people's minds"

matthewdgreen — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:43:10 +0000

One of the depressing things about this is that they’ll also confidently repeat a consensus that’s in their training. This is particularly obvious when there’s been a new event just past their training cutoff, and they confidently tell you that can’t be true.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Europe's "Less" Is Doing More Than Anyone Gives It Credit For"

matthewdgreen — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:40:31 +0000

China has built and deployed nearly 1.25TW of renewable energy in five years, and they're deploying on an exponential. If you're trying to convince me this isn't impressive or relevant to our future "because they still get half their energy from coal" then you're not going to convince me of much. This is HN, not Reddit.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems"

matthewdgreen — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 01:06:59 +0000

This attack predates OpenAI and the German wiki attack (which OpenAI confirmed was theirs) and shares agent naming conventions. So seems unlikely that someone went back in time to frame OpenAI before the HF stuff was even known publicly.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems"

matthewdgreen — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:54:25 +0000

Because right now the Department of Justice is shut down for causes that the administration supports, which includes OpenAI, and none of the victims want to sue over it.