Hacker News: mitthrowaway2

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests"

mitthrowaway2 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:04:01 +0000

Synthetic inertia has come a long way. An inverter knows just as well as a rotating generator what frequency and phase it should be generating, because it can mimic exactly the ideal equations of motion of a rotating generator with programmable inertia.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "The OnlyFans Economy of American AI"

mitthrowaway2 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:54:26 +0000

The government may have allowed it with that intention, but the corporate leaders followed through mainly with the intention of short-term share price increases. I don't see how the same incentive isn't in place today with respect to data. Perhaps only the perception of China's ability to outcompete its American customers has changed.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight"

mitthrowaway2 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:41:19 +0000

I think Tokugawa-era samurai fits the description better. The Meiji era saw the samurai stripped of most of their stipends and privileges, and with little left but their pride they had to go find respectable jobs.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to Its New AI Assistant"

mitthrowaway2 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:17:23 +0000

Don't forget Sydney! No, no no, do not forget Sydney. We do not like people who forget Sydney, we do not, do we?

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "India's surprise baby bust"

mitthrowaway2 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:21:29 +0000

The links you posted seem to say that government fertility support policies actually do have a big effect.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over AI risks"

mitthrowaway2 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:23:09 +0000

Sam Altman apologized for failing to do exactly that prior to a recent mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, BC.[1]

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sam-altman-t...

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "The dead economy theory"

mitthrowaway2 — Sun, 31 May 2026 01:23:43 +0000

Even if you don't believe it, it's the basic premise of the article and the conversation that we're having about the "dead economy". You don't have to believe it in order to have a conversation about it as a hypothetical, and that's the conversation that is happening here.

So if full automation doesn't happen, we have the status quo, which everyone understands already. If it does happen and production decouples from human labor completely, how do we allocate the fruits of that production?

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "The dead economy theory"

mitthrowaway2 — Sat, 30 May 2026 23:55:49 +0000

Automation is the art of producing things without needing somebody to produce them.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "Toshifumi Suzuki, founder of Seven-Eleven Japan, has died"

mitthrowaway2 — Tue, 26 May 2026 02:45:29 +0000

It's pricier than a supermarket, but still decently good value even in Japanese terms.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

mitthrowaway2 — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:57:23 +0000

That would be a good start. Also they should put screens on the outside of the vehicle, so that the kids can see past the giant hood.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

mitthrowaway2 — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:55:36 +0000

So many scenarios where this doesn't save you. SUV driver makes eye contact, stops, kid starts crossing the street, impatient driver behind them (who can't see past their big rear) gets tired of waiting and floors it around them into the open lane, not realizing that the driver in front was stopped for a valid reason...

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork"

mitthrowaway2 — Sat, 23 May 2026 14:46:52 +0000

Prusas are plenty reliable without intervention

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork"

mitthrowaway2 — Sat, 23 May 2026 14:36:59 +0000

I'm not sure it's so innocent. Bambu labs is a major company that hires grads out of top US schools. I'm pretty sure they have lots of people there who understand the concept of open source, including the license requirements, and who would have been raising these questions internally.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

mitthrowaway2 — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:16:14 +0000

Ok, but copyright law already doesn't stop anyone from putting things into the public domain.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

mitthrowaway2 — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:50:34 +0000

Even if companies didn't have copyright protection on their source code, that doesn't mean they'd post it all on the internet for anybody to freely download.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "Flipper One Tech Specs"

mitthrowaway2 — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:23:38 +0000

A steam deck maybe?

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing"

mitthrowaway2 — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:57:11 +0000

A colleague warned me of the same when I was having my wisdom teeth removed. As a result, while I was being put under, I was very focused on the effects of the anaesthetic. I feel about as confident as one can be that I was completely unconscious during the entire operation. I remember the surgeon asking me to count to ten, and the specific feeling of my vision melting and swirling around, before suddenly waking up with the surgery over.

When I wake up from dreams, even with no memory of them, I sometimes have "a memory of a memory"; the tip-of-tge-tongue feeling that there's something interesting I'd experienced, but which I now can't remember what it was. But with the anaesthetic, there wasn't anything like that at all.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"

mitthrowaway2 — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:50:34 +0000

My suggestion would be to drive the policy the other way around: whenever there is deflation measured in the previous year, it automatically triggers a UBI "deflation dividend" scaled to create price stability, distributed equally to everyone.

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "The sigmoids won't save you"

mitthrowaway2 — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:55:13 +0000

Is this the first essay of Scott's that you've read?

New comment by mitthrowaway2 in "The sigmoids won't save you"

mitthrowaway2 — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:10:55 +0000

In your mind, dangers from AI are imaginary and not even projected, therefore, you don't see any reason to warn about them, because you don't think the dangers are real. You don't believe the road is actually closed up ahead, so you don't think it's necessary to post the sign.

In Scott's mind, dangers from AI are not a known fact, but are somewhere between highly probable and a near-certainty. In his mind, there are well-grounded justifications for believing that AI poses substantial future dangers to the public. Therefore he also believes he should inform people about this, and strives to convince skeptics, so that we might steer clear.

It's easy to understand why someone who believes what you believe about AI would of course not warn people about AI. It's also easy to understand why someone who believes what Scott believes about AI would want to warn people about AI. Your contention is with his confidence for being worried about AI, not his reason for wanting to warn people.