Hacker News: neffy

New comment by neffy in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

neffy — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:36:38 +0000

Time? He´s busy starting a company, taking the time to drag out decade old emails and digging out the meta data for a journalist who is borderline stalking (assuming he even has them somewhere). I wouldn´t give that the time of day either.

New comment by neffy in "I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me"

neffy — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 13:26:38 +0000

There are a lot of very distinctive versions of English floating around after the British Empire, Indian newspapers are particularly delightful that way - but there is as the author says, an inherited common educational system dating back to the colonial period, which has probably created a fairly common "educated dialect" abroad, just as it has between all the local accents and dialects back in the motherland.

New comment by neffy in "I know we're in an AI bubble because nobody wants me"

neffy — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 11:39:31 +0000

If they optimize though - and this is coming at some point - local AI becomes possible, and their entire business case as a cloud monopoly evaporates. I think they know they're in a race between centralized control, and widespread use and control, and that is what is really driving this.

New comment by neffy in "F5 says hackers stole undisclosed BIG-IP flaws, source code"

neffy — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:06:52 +0000

Well honestly, this security person thinks its a terrible idea - but needless to say the people selling those systems disagree - and for non-technical management, it ticks the compliance box and they get back to their jobs.

New comment by neffy in "Matrices can be your friends (2002)"

neffy — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:00:57 +0000

And since the economist's main skill at math is fitting a very short ruler to a very large curve... i wouldn't put them ahead of lawyers...

New comment by neffy in "The murky economics of the data-centre investment boom"

neffy — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:05:07 +0000

Feedback loops. Always with the feedback loops.

New comment by neffy in "It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead"

neffy — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 10:14:23 +0000

It´s not just the legal system. A lot of US Doctors are typically paid on a piece rate basis, and the medical records systems are extremely fragmented, so there is an incentive to order repeat tests (as you get passed around from specialist to specialist), and no incentive to put the systems in to make that unnecessary.

New comment by neffy in "Hackers strike Harrods in latest UK cyberattack"

neffy — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 16:34:36 +0000

There is a fair bit of grooming going on out there on the private discord channels and similar.

New comment by neffy in "The story of DOGE, as told by federal workers"

neffy — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 23:57:59 +0000

No, it does make sense. Most of the purported growth in government spending is just using raw figures, and not correcting for either inflation or monetary expansion. It is a convenient mistake.

New comment by neffy in "An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations"

neffy — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 16:31:27 +0000

It´s also a lot of assumptions. This probably is an attacker - or wannabe at least. But you could be a student or researcher working on a cyber security course looking and for some projects your search flow would look a lot like this.

New comment by neffy in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"

neffy — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 02:06:01 +0000

No, it´s really not - it's exactly what they are. Multi-dimensional pattern matching machines, using massive databases put together from resources like stack overflow, Clegg's (every cheaters go to for assignment answers, massive copyright theft etc.). If that wasn´t the case, there wouldn't be jobs right now writing answers to feed into the databases.

And that´s actually quite useful - given that most of this material is paywalled or blocked from search engines. It´s less useful when you look at code examples that mix different versions of python, and have comments referring to figures on the previous page. I´m afraid it becomes very obvious when you look under the hood at the training sets themselves, just how this is all being achieved.

New comment by neffy in "Tipping point in Gulf Stream may be reached as early as mid-century"

neffy — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 18:45:40 +0000

Ok, but this happens pretty regularly on a planetary scale (at least every 110,000 years or so) - why hasn´t it been so disastrous before - say at the end of the last interglacial?

New comment by neffy in "Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery"

neffy — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:55:59 +0000

When I looked into it last year, it´s still an under-acknowledged issue. The impression I formed was that it was a bit of a crapshoot - along with some bad practitioners, there didn´t seem to be much information on when and why it would or would not occur.

New comment by neffy in "I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class"

neffy — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 12:42:00 +0000

I do the same in my classes, and it´s common practice in many courses my dept which may help, as the students know what is expected of them. I don´t think it's wasting time. It motivates the students to know that they have to present in front of their peers, helps the shy ones get practice, and yes the quality varies, but it´s a very good way to share information within the class about different projects, even with a not so good presentation.

New comment by neffy in "John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025"

neffy — Fri, 23 May 2025 11:16:10 +0000

This is exactly it. Biology is making massive use of hacked real time local network communication in ways we haven´t begun to explore.

New comment by neffy in "How are cyber criminals rolling in 2025?"

neffy — Mon, 05 May 2025 18:40:16 +0000

Sure. Corporations commit ransomware attacks all the time.

New comment by neffy in "In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants"

neffy — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 10:29:42 +0000

But I don´t want to "consume" more than Americans. I want to eat healthy food in reasonable quantities and maintain a sensible weight.

I don´t want to own a car and drive 2 hours to work every day, and consume more car ownership - I want to cycle or walk, and stay fit and enjoy the sun.

You see the mistake you're making?

I lived in the US for 6 years, and could have stayed. It was an easy decision to go back to Europe.

New comment by neffy in "In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants"

neffy — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:39:16 +0000

We're really not. Just the health care issues, which can be directly seen in the life expectancy figures, make us materially richer, never mind anything else.

And I much prefer not needing to exercise my rights to self-defence in the first place, than to have to worry about carrying a gun around all the time, and whether or not a child might get accidentally get access to it. See also gun shooting figures.

New comment by neffy in "The Demoralization is just Beginning"

neffy — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 15:49:25 +0000

Not actually the case. The gold standard linked the expansion of the money supply to the price of gold, not the actual supply. So as the money supply expanded, every time gold was bought or sold through direct bank transfer, the price was influenced by the expanding deposit supply, not by the asset gold supply, and slowly increased, creating a nice little feedback loop. If you look at the figures for the gold standard period in the 19th-20th century, otherwise known as the British Monetary Orthodoxy, you will see a slow and steady expansion in the deposit supply in all countries using it. Trouble was, the expansion was a different rates in different countries, and so by the 1910´s the differences were tearing the invisible financial fabric apart. The rest as they say is history.

Banking systems being somewhat unstable and prone to credit crises is actually an entirely different problem, and unrelated to how the expansion is being regulated.

New comment by neffy in "The Demoralization is just Beginning"

neffy — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 15:44:11 +0000

If that, as @acatton says. It is certainly not happening all the time. There are laws around libel and slander, which are more aimed at civility than anything else, but its rare that they make it to actual court. In Britain at least there is a long held tradition, and some rightly infamous accompanying libel cases, where 1 farthing/penny/pound damages (inflation has had some effect I guess) were awarded in an ok, you win but the moral case was with the defendant signal. One of the more recent:

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/judge-right-to-award-lying-...