Hacker News: nativeit

New comment by nativeit in "It may soon be possible to create "mirror life""

nativeit — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:00:51 +0000

The primary proposed benefit of creating mirror-image organisms is as a means to mass-produce mirror-image forms of molecules that are produced by normal life. Mirror-image molecules have been studied for several decades and may offer a range of potential applications. There is broad agreement among scientists that it is important to distinguish between mirror-image molecules and whole mirror-image organisms. Some scientists argue that chemical synthesis methods are sufficient for creating mirror-image molecules without posing the potentially catastrophic risks of mirror-image organisms.

Potential applications of mirror-image molecules include:

Enantiopure drugs: Some pharmaceuticals show different activity depending on enantiomeric form.

L-ribonucleic acid aptamers: Artificial oligonucleotides that are constructed from the mirror-image versions of their natural forms. L-RNA aptamers are highly resistant to degradation by nucleases and are currently being tested in clinical trials.

L-glucose, enantiomer of standard glucose: Tests showed that it tastes likes standard sugar, but is not metabolized the same way. However, it was never marketed due to excessive manufacturing costs. More recent research allows cheap production with high yields; however the authors state that it is not usable as a sweetener due to laxative effects.

[From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life]

New comment by nativeit in ""I'm Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry""

nativeit — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:50:19 +0000

I’d lean into the adjacent technology that allows me to find another place to eat.

New comment by nativeit in "FOSS Alternative to Nextcloud"

nativeit — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 02:36:44 +0000

This looks like it's maybe one very particular configuration of Nextcloud, but that certainly wouldn't be the first thing that comes to mind. It seems pretty specific to personal organization, rather than a cloud app infrastructure.

Ask HN: My agent went haywire, does this output mean anything?

nativeit — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 01:55:42 +0000

I have a relatively fresh Hermes agent that I just provisioned (the text below is from its 3-4 chat session ever) running on a headless Debian server. It's using Z.ai's GLM 5.3 Flash model, and I asked it to print details about its local environment and $PATH. After firing off a few relevant terminal commands, it seems to spiral off into some kind of LLM trance-like state. I have included the contents of the "Thinking for 1m36s..." block, which contained a long string of ostensibly random words and characters.

But when I started reading through them, I got the distinct impression that although the words weren't relevant to anything in my chat, they also didn't seem purely random. Several different themes kept reoccurring, things like politics, chemistry, sociopolitical advocacy/resistance, sexuality and sex, reproduction...

So I was wondering if this wasn't perhaps an unintentional (and garbled) peek under the hood of Z.ai's GLM5.3?

Also, this may/may not be relevant, but directly after this it 100% hallucinated its operating environment, claiming to be Claude Code (it's Hermes) running on "Chris Kelly's Macbook" (I am not Chris Kelly, and it's on a headless Debian server), and including a bunch of real-looking Macbook/Claude environment details. I've been experimenting with Hermes agents for the last few weeks, and it's the first time it's gone off the rails like this, and it's the first time it's very clearly hallucinated part of its response.

I'm not sure if there's anything meaningful or significant to glean here, but I couldn't help but wonder what someone with a more informed opinion might think about it?

Transcript: https://pastebin.com/5F35qrRg

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49916751

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by nativeit in "Good people refuse to do bad things"

nativeit — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:24:55 +0000

These kinds of discussions very quickly arrive at the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” line of thinking. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, some activity or product you engage with will have been the result of some kind of exploitation.

New comment by nativeit in "Heretic removes restrictions from language models"

nativeit — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:18:25 +0000

Aggressive enforcement tactics certainly haven’t won the war on drugs.

Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy

nativeit — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:23:42 +0000

Article URL: https://theconversation.com/learning-another-language-may-be-one-of-the-best-ways-to-keep-your-brain-healthy-as-you-age-291951

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766821

Points: 140

# Comments: 120

New comment by nativeit in "HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?"

nativeit — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:46:37 +0000

I’m still baffled as to where these 100x valuations came from. Amazon’s market cap is $2.65T, and I don’t see how any AI company comes within a faint whiff of that sort of value.

New comment by nativeit in "HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?"

nativeit — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:39:18 +0000

I’m not really a dev, so hefty pinch of salt with this take, but doesn’t this feel like we’re just inventing new “fuzzy” regex with much more required compute?

New comment by nativeit in "OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior"

nativeit — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:37:32 +0000

I think I heard that we’ll be fracking with nuclear materials soon so we can harvest the tritium water as a byproduct. Does anyone know if that’s just a wild, stupid theory that will never work, or an actual idea being explored? Sounds horrifying.

New comment by nativeit in "OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior"

nativeit — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:35:07 +0000

Recycling plastics is a huge lie that’s caused society to perform rituals that absolve them of the horrible impact they’re inflicting on the planet.

I don’t think this kind of gaslighting is unique or new, but the AI company’s specific melange of fear-mongering, disingenuous helplessness, ethics-washing, with a handy wildcard of regulatory capture is perhaps uniquely optimized and (so far) effective.

New comment by nativeit in "Pangram – AI detector for text and images"

nativeit — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:26:07 +0000

> …if you see an emdash it’s probably AI generated…

Or, and—hear me out—the writer typed two successive hyphens on their iDevice.

New comment by nativeit in "Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)"

nativeit — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:21:11 +0000

This brings back some memories. I was an admin for “Millions Against Monsanto”, a group on the still-nascent Facebook. I ultimately left because the org was overtaken by conspiracy theorists who couldn’t stop yelling about aspartame and antivax nonsense long enough to focus on the very real, and very alarming, actions of Monsanto. At this point in time it was still not considered “normal” to patent biological materials. I’m a bit more pragmatic, since I’ve grown past my college idealism, but I still don’t believe seeds should be considered patentable.

New comment by nativeit in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

nativeit — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:39:52 +0000

That assumes the people who need XCancel most are aware of its existence, but from what I can tell only folks like us are.

New comment by nativeit in "Everyone should slow down AI development except for me"

nativeit — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 02:17:20 +0000

It’s really unfortunate how much public trust they burnt along the way, maybe this wouldn’t be such a hard sell now?

New comment by nativeit in "Everyone should slow down AI development except for me"

nativeit — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 02:15:56 +0000

The company is valued over $950B. It remains to be seen how much it’s worth.

New comment by nativeit in "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026"

nativeit — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 21:24:14 +0000

The average life cycle is 20 days, during which time a female can lay ~3000 eggs and travel up to 200km. In 1971 there were 473 confirmed cases in the United States, in 1972 migrating flies breached the sterile fly barrier, and by 1973 it spiked to more than 100,000 US cases.

New comment by nativeit in "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026"

nativeit — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:44:31 +0000

Viva Mayor Gunderson!

New comment by nativeit in "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026"

nativeit — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:36:38 +0000

“Containment” doesn’t really work when you leave the lid off.

New comment by nativeit in "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026"

nativeit — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:09:40 +0000

Aren’t American AI companies drawing billions in federal contracts? Not to mention the federally-sponsored pushback on foreign competitors?