Hacker News: missingrib

New comment by missingrib in "It's still ok to enjoy programming"

missingrib — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:52:52 +0000

If you can't get it to output good code I'm afraid it's probably a skill or prompting issue. There are programmers that are almost certainly better than you that are using LLMs regularly to produce good code. Do you think the Linus is a bad programmer?

New comment by missingrib in "Could AIs Become Conscious?"

missingrib — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:48:44 +0000

Considering it's the only thing I'm directly aware of I think I can safely reject that it's a made up concept.

New comment by missingrib in "The revenge of the philosophy majors"

missingrib — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:30:23 +0000

Philosophers were discussing that question far before LLMs were around.

New comment by missingrib in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

missingrib — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:59:22 +0000

Right, it's an illusion of understanding. There is some sort of symbolic understanding, but that is completely due to the fact that the training data was made by humans who actually do understand, can interact with the world, and can write their thoughts down so that the LLM can insert some sort of reference to "basketball" and "Michael Jordan" in their embeddings or whatever.

New comment by missingrib in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

missingrib — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:53:35 +0000

I think Searle's Chinese Room argument refutes this. LLMs are simply manipulating symbols, they do not have semantic understanding. This is why hallucinations exist. And Searle's argument extends even further than LLMs.

You are basically arguing for a functional account of consciousness, but things like this have been debated for literally decades/centuries in philosophy.

New comment by missingrib in "New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis"

missingrib — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 21:58:52 +0000

You have first-person knowledge of qualia. I'm not really sure how you could deny that without claiming that qualia doesn't exist. You're claiming some middle ground here that I think almost all philosophers and neuroscientists would reject (on both sides).

> "couldn't something be H2O without being water?," "what if the universe was created last Thursday with false memories?," or "what if only I'm real?" These are dead-end questions. Like 14-year-old-stoner philosophy: "what if your red is ackshuallly my blue?!"

These are all legitimate philosophical problems, Kripke definitively solved the first one in the 1970s in Naming and Necessity. You should try to be more humble about subjects which you clearly haven't read enough about. Read the Mary's room argument.

New comment by missingrib in "New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis"

missingrib — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 06:15:52 +0000

That is not what a p-zombie is. The p-zombie does not have any qualia at all. If you want to deny the existence of qualia, that's one way a few philosophers have gone (Dennett), but that seems pretty ridiculous to most people.

New comment by missingrib in "Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach"

missingrib — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 03:47:33 +0000

Why haven't zero knowledge proofs shined in this area? Can anyone explain?

New comment by missingrib in "Social anxiety isn't about being liked"

missingrib — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 04:32:00 +0000

This is relatable, mine is somewhat similar. It feels like a very specific version of performance anxiety that unfortunately affects the most banal social interactions. It is obviously multiplied tenfold when I'm in a situation where there are actual stakes (an interview, a first date, etc), but it still applies if I am just talking to a friend of a friend at a party that I don't know very well. The stakes feel very high to me because it's our first time talking.

It's less that I need them to like me or fear being disliked and more that I am just way too conscious of the stakes and the social interaction that's happening, which causes my brain to sort of freeze up. It feels like when I used to play tennis in high school. I'd do great at practice, then freeze up and barely remember how to hit the ball in games because the stakes on each point felt so high.

If I'm around some good friends it completely goes away. If I have hung around the person enough (even without directly talking to them), it goes away. I've also had random days where I don't feel the performance anxiety and performed really well in those situations (and coincidentally some of those days I'd meet a new group of friends or a girlfriend). It's extremely frustrating. Xanax makes the performance anxiety go away completely but slows me down cognitively so I become much less witty and interesting to talk to.

New comment by missingrib in "AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem"

missingrib — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 03:33:53 +0000

That is only true if consciousness is physical and the result of some physics going on in the human brain. We have no idea if that's true.

New comment by missingrib in "Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations"

missingrib — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:10:51 +0000

>Isn't consciousness an emergent property of brains?

Probably not.

New comment by missingrib in "AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu"

missingrib — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 22:57:24 +0000

Yes, they can't have understanding or intentionality.

New comment by missingrib in "MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style"

missingrib — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 18:53:58 +0000

Pretty easy to fix:

[2] 3.3.4 Date of Issuance. To determine the record date for ownership of Common Stock shares (whether issued as a book entry or certificate), ask: Were the Company's stock transfer books or the Warrant Agent's book entry system open when the Warrant was surrendered and the Warrant Price was paid? If yes, the record date is that same date of surrender and payment. If no, the record date is the close of business on the next day when either the books or systems are open.

New comment by missingrib in "LLMs, Theory of Mind, and Cheryl's Birthday"

missingrib — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 02:40:35 +0000

Is this really verbal reasoning? It's just a logic problem.

New comment by missingrib in "Physically attractive attorneys tend to have greater success in federal court"

missingrib — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 20:46:23 +0000

It correlates, which could also explain a link in the opposite direction. Secondary sex characteristics sometimes have nothing to do with overall fitness. You can see this most clearly in animal species where the females value elaborate ornamentation, like peacocks.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexy_son_hypothesis.

New comment by missingrib in "The Deaths of Effective Altruism"

missingrib — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 06:04:36 +0000

It's just people coping with guilt about not giving to charity honestly. That, and ad hominem attacks on the people involved. You see people giving kidneys away and there are still articles talking about how its selfish or misguided.

New comment by missingrib in "The Deaths of Effective Altruism"

missingrib — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 06:01:38 +0000

I cannot think of a reason to prefer to help a neighbor over someone who is vastly more in need who is further away. I think that's the main thrust of the argument.

New comment by missingrib in "Simpson's paradox"

missingrib — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 16:01:24 +0000

I don't think Zeno's paradoxes have truly been proven false.

New comment by missingrib in "British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages"

missingrib — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 17:40:06 +0000

It was probably used in the Silk Road investigation.

New comment by missingrib in "Generalized K-Means Clustering"

missingrib — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 03:52:55 +0000

I've used it for identifying dominant colors in images.