Hacker News: mondrian

New comment by mondrian in "Bill Gates: The turbulent AI era is here"

mondrian — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:14:30 +0000

Switzerland still has parties and a senate but the people can veto any law and the people can amend the constitution. This arguably is a sensible balance as it’s probably not tenable for the people to legislate full-time. Representatives can legislate and the people will override them when they disagree.

New comment by mondrian in "Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)"

mondrian — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:02:19 +0000

Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso were Europeans, and Europe is where art speculation and the "Art Market" was born, and where Art History became equated with Art Market History. Americans showed up with a 20 year lag and kept lagging, with e.g. Pollock imitating Picasso in the 1940s. By then, globally-viral-Picasso was selling paintings for hundreds of thousands of inflation adjusted dollars.

New comment by mondrian in "Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines for a Pretextual Weed Search"

mondrian — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:08:53 +0000

This argument goes too far to the other end. Never name a group, cuz by golly you’re broad stroking. Only specific character assassination is allowed or keep quiet? Like a Cancel Culture Wittgenstein.

New comment by mondrian in "AI makes programming differently difficult"

mondrian — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:57:20 +0000

Sought

New comment by mondrian in "Automation Without Understanding"

mondrian — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:00:28 +0000

It sounds ‘the singularity is near’ not so much because AI is reaching escape velocity forward, but because we’re systematically pushing humans back beyond the threshold where computers are legible?

New comment by mondrian in "Automation Without Understanding"

mondrian — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:51:51 +0000

Key word: perform, i.e. execute. Scale indeed comes by performing more things per unit time, things we understand, on execution engines we understand.

New comment by mondrian in "Computation as a universal and fundamental concept"

mondrian — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:00:06 +0000

Undecidability is a problem of answer-extraction from a process, it doesn’t preclude the process from executing deterministically. The universe could well be the live execution of a deterministic, even basic algorithm, with all kinds of questions about its execution being undecidable.

New comment by mondrian in "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter"

mondrian — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:24:48 +0000

Guy made an account just to post that gem.

New comment by mondrian in "What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots""

mondrian — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:05:03 +0000

One of the key points of that paper is that the body of written works is biased and those biases will be amplified by compressing that body into LLMs, with outlier data, with low coincidence rate, being suppressed as unreliable - data that is structurally dissimilar to the bulk is noise. Similarly to how PageRank suppressed nodes with low number of edges, probably contributing significantly to the homogenous corporate mall-internet we enjoy today.

New comment by mondrian in "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

mondrian — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:28:43 +0000

Structurally speaking, being left and pro-open borders is incoherent. The left is about collective power controlling labor supply and using it to tamp down corporate overreach. Open borders and H1B that allow corporations to side-step local worker bargaining power are squarely antithetical to being Left.

I think 'liberal progressives' that are mainly concerned with identity representation, not working class power, are rhetorically bundled as 'far-left'. To people who buy that, Bernie Sanders (a Leftist) and Kamala Harris (a Third Way liberal progressive) are both far-left. It's incoherent but rhetorically potent.

New comment by mondrian in "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

mondrian — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:51:48 +0000

A better chart: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/f3fb/live/1ca3d...

New comment by mondrian in "πFS"

mondrian — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:21:43 +0000

The index of your 20 line file is <20TB number>

New comment by mondrian in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

mondrian — Sun, 24 May 2026 03:54:53 +0000

Of course native people didn’t call themselves Indian prior to settlers assigning them that name, with legal consequences. But native people usually refer to their tribe identity, like Diné or Lakota, rather than the generic term Indian.

New comment by mondrian in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

mondrian — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:16:20 +0000

The irony in your example is the modern Pentagon is largely a collection of private companies.

New comment by mondrian in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

mondrian — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:59:14 +0000

Let's get back to filling the front page with Web3, DeFi, NFTs. Oh the good ol' days.

New comment by mondrian in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"

mondrian — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 18:56:02 +0000

Sounds like this: https://solidproject.org/about

But yea privacy is a silly thing to propose to a surveillance industry.

New comment by mondrian in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

mondrian — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:49:33 +0000

Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

New comment by mondrian in "Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears"

mondrian — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:05 +0000

I was off by a zero, thanks! He sold about 100M of NVDA on 16B net worth which would be 6.25k on 1M.

New comment by mondrian in "Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears"

mondrian — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:36:18 +0000

So this 'portfolio' is <200M on a net worth of 16B? This is like someone worth 1M selling $600 worth of stock.

New comment by mondrian in "Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears"

mondrian — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 22:28:56 +0000

The parent comment is probably just talking about temporarily timing the bubble pop.