Hacker News: n4r9

New comment by n4r9 in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

n4r9 — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:29:14 +0000

Even so, the "quality" of an experience could be regarded as an interpretation of sensations.

New comment by n4r9 in "Where are all the UK red telephone kiosks?"

n4r9 — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:22:13 +0000

Wilkinson's is no longer there. Replaced by an arcade style venue called Urban Fun, I think.

Many Kingstoners probably think of themselves as being in London. There's some graffiti on the way in to London on the A3 that says "Surrey not Surrey".

New comment by n4r9 in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

n4r9 — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:46:08 +0000

I think the article has an interesting argument here. We also "experience" the sun going up and down in the sky. But actually this is an illusion of our vantage point on a spinning rock.

New comment by n4r9 in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

n4r9 — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:27:30 +0000

No, I mean that the logical possibility itself is neither obvious nor intuitive. If you physically copied me atom by atom, every instinct in me says that the result has conscious experience. I'd need some serious convincing otherwise.

New comment by n4r9 in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

n4r9 — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:48:24 +0000

Thanks for the reference, that looks like a pretty thorough review.

It seems to me that Chalmers already precludes the possibility of physical/materialist explanations with his claim, quoted in the first section:

> There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.

This certainly doesn't feel obvious or intuitive to me. I would expect that someone with the same neuronal make-up will have the same experience.

New comment by n4r9 in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

n4r9 — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:40:54 +0000

Qualia is the term people often use to mean "what it's like". The hard problem is "why is there qualia". This of course assumes that qualia exists as a coherent thing, which some philosophers dispute.

New comment by n4r9 in "Show HN: TikTok but for scientific papers"

n4r9 — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:55:33 +0000

Scirate.com has been going since before 2010 and still active as far as I'm aware. Mostly used by quantum info folks though.

New comment by n4r9 in "Introduction to Beaver Triples"

n4r9 — Sat, 09 May 2026 18:07:52 +0000

Firefox on android slowed right down... couldn't scroll or even navigate back here.

New comment by n4r9 in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

n4r9 — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:46:00 +0000

My laptop runs Windows.

New comment by n4r9 in "The smelly baby problem"

n4r9 — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:42:50 +0000

I dunno, we found that our kid slept slightly better moved to his own room at 5 or 6 months old. Although that meant maybe 4 wakings rather than 5. Now he's nearly three years old and sleeps solidly for 10 or 11 hours. My guess is that food and metabolism have a big part to play.

New comment by n4r9 in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

n4r9 — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:54:50 +0000

Where's the download link?

New comment by n4r9 in "The smelly baby problem"

n4r9 — Sat, 02 May 2026 06:56:53 +0000

> Feeding is easy.

Mileage may definitely vary on that one.

New comment by n4r9 in "The smelly baby problem"

n4r9 — Sat, 02 May 2026 06:55:32 +0000

At 8pm, and then 10pm, then 10:30pm, then 12am, then 2am, then 3:30am, then 5am.

New comment by n4r9 in "If you stop hiring juniors, your senior engineers own you"

n4r9 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:40:07 +0000

"Value" is not this objective measure that can be deduced from someone's output. It depends on many variables like cost of living, the job market, tech trends, and industry competition. Could very easily fluctuate 50% or more in a short period of time.

New comment by n4r9 in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

n4r9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:42:13 +0000

Ah, good to know!

New comment by n4r9 in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

n4r9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:43:27 +0000

Nokia still make phones. They even had a line of smartphones until last year. I've got an XR20 "rugged" phone that's served me well for a few years.

New comment by n4r9 in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

n4r9 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:02:03 +0000

Let's say a given B2B system deployment typically requires 100 custom behaviours/scripts and 3 years worth of effort. A team of ten people can execute such a deployment in 3-4 months. The team has the capacity to fix up issues caused by small human errors as they arise, since they show up roughly once a week.

With the advent of LLMs, a new deployment now takes 3 days. Consequently, errors requiring human attention crop up several times a day.

New comment by n4r9 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

n4r9 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:20:55 +0000

Could you give some examples? It'd have to be pretty bad to get close to the reports about Altman.

New comment by n4r9 in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

n4r9 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:16:49 +0000

> any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat

Perhaps it's predecessor was just advanced enough to build self-modifying replicators and fire them out into space. Eventually it hits a planet or asteroid and gradually becomes sentient and intelligent. No trace of how it originated.

New comment by n4r9 in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

n4r9 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:26:37 +0000

The concern for me about LLMs confabulating is not that humans don't do it. It's that the massive scale at which LLMs will inevitably be deployed makes even the smallest confabulation extremely risky.