Hacker News: ninjanomnom

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Wikenigma – an Encyclopedia of Unknowns"

ninjanomnom — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 22:40:15 +0000

You could get permission from the parents to install the recording devices, but until the child is grown up the data could be kept locked away somewhere completely inaccessible. Then when the child is old enough to grant permission you unlock that data for use. This sort of pattern should work for all studies involving children.

Honestly though, most of these kinds of studies would probably just stop at getting permission from the parents.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Wikenigma – an Encyclopedia of Unknowns"

ninjanomnom — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 10:01:59 +0000

Get a large enough population and you'll be able to get volunteers for any conceivable experiment.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community"

ninjanomnom — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 16:45:12 +0000

Personally, when I'm in this situation, my phone is out and face down on the table to avoid the discomfort of it digging into me from my pocket. I've also noticed that other people use their phone less when I explicitly take it out and put it to the side. Also, even though I take it out, I never use it unless the conversation has asked for it, like searching an answer for something.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Show HN: I am using AI to measure how well cats sit like bread"

ninjanomnom — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 08:30:52 +0000

Cruel of you to say you have cat pictures on the internet but then not share them.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Third-party cookies have got to go"

ninjanomnom — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 14:27:57 +0000

I assumed they were saying that they'd received an email ad, not that google served an ad. I could be wrong though. I wouldn't trust what meta says here considering their past history, but there are reasonable alternate sources in this case. Keyboard replacements on phones are notorious for logging, or either participant could have an app logging screenshots.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Radar evidence of accessible Moon cave conduit below Mare Tranquillitatis pit"

ninjanomnom — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 16:23:04 +0000

The moon has helium-3 which would be useful for fusion. Getting it back to earth would be easier than getting off earth, you have the possibility of cargo rail guns which only needs materials to fire which you can source on the moon.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "AI speech generator 'reaches human parity' – but it's too dangerous to release"

ninjanomnom — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 15:24:03 +0000

At least one good use is for video games where the text of some dialogue is determined when you run the game. For example in a game I work on player chat is local and voiced by tts configured by the player for their character.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications"

ninjanomnom — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 06:25:56 +0000

Taking this as true, wouldn't that mean that a lack of published papers on this topic is light evidence of being in a simulation? Also that it would be fairly dangerous to bring the subject to the public's attention.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness"

ninjanomnom — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 10:20:17 +0000

That's due to a lack of theory and useful abstractions in the tools used to modify genes. We're so early on in the development of that field that if this were computers, we'd still be assembling devices by arranging logic gates by hand. Custom cosmetic gene therapy is a great way to incentivize the better tools.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Cow Magnets"

ninjanomnom — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 04:53:49 +0000

The alternatives then are self service, or private businesses providing assistance? If we want to endorse the former then educating people on the best way to painlessly end their life might be a good idea, the latter though seems like a bad idea with some very badly aligned incentives.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Florida Passes Law Banning Social Media for Minors Under 14"

ninjanomnom — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 02:50:05 +0000

Ignoring the entire discussion of whether young children should use social media for the moment, this is hilariously unenforceable, which in an odd way makes me in favor of it. Telling children they "can't" do something, and then not doing anything to stop them from doing it is a great way to ensure they learn how to get around these kinds of barriers.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "EPA bans asbestos, a deadly carcinogen still in use decades after partial ban"

ninjanomnom — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 07:58:29 +0000

I'd wager the majority inside the US knows that it's behind in many fields but don't know exactly which ones. We learn to disregard people speaking blanket praise but don't learn enough about other countries from our media and schooling to argue against them. From the outside then this looks like most of our population thinks we're the best in every respect, but on the inside there's a very large and growing sentiment of dissatisfaction and pessimism.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond"

ninjanomnom — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 07:59:24 +0000

I've spent no small amount of time thinking about my own mind and thought patterns, but I've never thought I was special. When I work to understand myself and others, it feels like putting together rules for some slowly changing system with complex enough inner workings to be nearly random in some cases. Even so, I can understand people entirely different to myself so I can empathize and work with them.

Honestly the more I see from LLMs the more it makes me think that we are much the same. Imagine a network of many different LLMs each given different capabilities and prompts, each able to communicate with others. Now imagine splitting this network in half, wouldn't the resulting adjustment look similar to a split brain patient in humans? Are "you" possibly just the LLM that has been given control over the speech and other intentional body actions?

New comment by ninjanomnom in "SpaceX punched a hole in the ionosphere"

ninjanomnom — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:38:20 +0000

Higher orbits are slower, not faster. Very low orbits as you say though are less an issue due to atmospheric drag deorbiting debris. A bit higher and debris will stay up much longer, even higher up though and there's so much room we can't possibly put out enough material to fill the orbits yet. The mid point of that scale is the dangerous region.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "The Webb telescope just offered a revelatory view of humanity’s distant past"

ninjanomnom — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 13:22:03 +0000

Using gravitational lensing I imagine it's possible to get an image of the earth from the distant past, though difficult to get everything lined up right. In a more trivial sense, you could take a mirror to the moon then take a picture of it from earth and you would have an image of earth from the mysterious past of a few seconds ago.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "I Am Leaving"

ninjanomnom — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 12:54:57 +0000

Every additional form of communication you take part in is a burden to some degree, and depending on the person they may only have the capacity for a handful before it becomes overwhelming. Personally I can handle like 4 forms of primary communication before either further forms become mostly ignored or it starts hurting my ability to communicate with anyone on anything. I can understand that someone, no matter how much they may want to stay in touch, may just be unable to through some forms of communication.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "I Am Leaving"

ninjanomnom — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 12:42:16 +0000

I made accounts at one point or another and will look at the thing someone links at me on twitter or whatever but I've just never been interested enough to browse these sites or post anything myself. Never felt like I was missing anything either.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”"

ninjanomnom — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 07:44:54 +0000

There are all kinds of parks. I would argue you should probably not be letting a 5 year old loose on a biking path which would seem to me to mean it is an inappropriate place for (some) children.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "ELO Everything"

ninjanomnom — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 01:17:04 +0000

ELO in most contexts is a sort of "strength" rating so I decided when doing a few dozen that I would choose whichever had more impact on history. Or to put it another way, I was choosing the thing that would cause the most differences if it didn't exist. In my case I got Hitler vs Electricity so the latter is the obvious choice but anyone else using the same criteria as me has perfectly good reason to choose Hitler over some random sport team or most other individuals.

Though yes it's the internet, so it's probably mostly people doing it for the funny.

New comment by ninjanomnom in "Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood"

ninjanomnom — Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:36:03 +0000

There's so many people on earth that someone is going to be turned on from everything, but is getting turned on by your own hand actually common? I have never heard this one before.