<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: nosuchthing</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nosuchthing</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 22:37:51 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=nosuchthing" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "A psychedelic medicine performs well against depression"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This paper is an incredible read: <i>TESCREAL hallucinations: Psychedelic and AI hype as inequality engines</i><p><a href="https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/7/S1/article-p22.xml" rel="nofollow">https://akjournals.com/view/journals/2054/7/S1/article-p22.x...</a><p><pre><code>  > "Researchers have called attention to the ways that the hype promoting psychedelics as miracle cures 
  replicates preceding claims about the efficacy of SSRIs and other antidepressants in prior decades. 
  As the drug historian David Herzberg articulated in conversation with UC Berkeley's The Microdose:

    There’s been an enormous amount of money invested in psychedelics as people hope that they 
    can be the real Prozac in the same way that Prozac hoped it would be the real Valium and 
    Valium would be the real barbiturates, which would be the real morphine. 
    There’s a long history of hoping that maybe this time, it’s not so complicated; 
    maybe there is a simple switch to change people without having to change any [other] aspect of their [lives].

  While others have noted similarities between the earlier SSRI hype and the ongoing hype for psychedelic medications,
   the rhetoric of psychedelic hype is tinged with utopian and magico-religious aspirations that have no parallel 
   in the discourse surrounding SSRIs or other antidepressants. I argue that this utopian discourse provides insight 
   into the ways that global financial and tech elites are instrumentalizing psychedelics as one tool 
   in a broader world-building project that justifies increasing material inequality. 
   This elite project reveals how medicalized psychedelics can potentially undermine the very prosocial and 
   pro-environmental outcomes that the field's funders insist psychedelics will promote. 
   To understand the envisioned role of psychedelics within this elite project, this paper analyzes a different 
   parallel hype, revealing correspondences between the psychedelic industry hype and the concurrent 
   hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), including the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT. 
   The presence of these parallels is understandable when one considers their underlying affinities, 
   like two blooms from one plant: the same Silicon Valley and venture capital forces are investing 
   enormous amounts of capital to develop both as cultivars in their own image, 
   selecting for desired traits that further the existing socioeconomic order.</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:43:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47080742</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47080742</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47080742</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LLMs can't access the training data that's less than the statistically most common token, so they use a random jitter.<p>With that randomness comes statistically irrelevant results.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:23:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041706</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041706</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041706</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a type of cognitive bias not much different than an addict or indoctrinated cult follower. A subset of them might actually genuinely fear Roko's basilisk the exact same way colonial religion leveraged the fear of eternal damnation in hell as a reason to be subservient to the church leaders.<p>hyperstitions from TESCREAL <a href="https://www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dair-institute.org/tescreal/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:17:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041646</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041646</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041646</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "I’m joining OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It looks like most of Peter's projects are just simple API wrappers.<p>Peter's been running agents overnight 24/7 for almost a year using free tokens from his influencer payments to promote AI startups and multiple subscription accounts.<p><pre><code>  Hi, my name is Peter and I’m a Claudoholic. I’m addicted to agentic engineering. And sometimes I just vibe-code. ...  I currently have 4 OpenAI subs and 1 Anthropic sub, so my overall costs are around 1k/month for basically unlimited tokens. If I’d use API calls, that’d cost my around 10x more. Don’t nail me on this math, I used some token counting tools like ccusage and it’s all somewhat imprecise, but even if it’s just 5x it’s a damn good deal.

  ...  Sometimes [GPT-5-Codex] refactors for half an hour and then panics and reverts everything, and you need to re-run and soothen it like a child to tell it that it has enough time. Sometimes it forgets that it can do bash commands and it requires some encouragement. Sometimes it replies in russian or korean. Sometimes the monster slips and sends raw thinking to bash.</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:36:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040002</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040002</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040002</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "I’m joining OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Peter has been running agents overnight for months using free tokens from his influencer payments to promote AI startups and multiple subscription accounts:<p><pre><code>  Hi, my name is Peter and I’m a Claudoholic. I’m addicted to agentic engineering. And sometimes I just vibe-code. ...  I currently have 4 OpenAI subs and 1 Anthropic sub, so my overall costs are around 1k/month for basically unlimited tokens. If I’d use API calls, that’d cost my around 10x more. Don’t nail me on this math, I used some token counting tools like ccusage and it’s all somewhat imprecise, but even if it’s just 5x it’s a damn good deal.

  ...  Sometimes [GPT-5-Codex] refactors for half an hour and then panics and reverts everything, and you need to re-run and soothen it like a child to tell it that it has enough time. Sometimes it forgets that it can do bash commands and it requires some encouragement. Sometimes it replies in russian or korean. Sometimes the monster slips and sends raw thinking to bash.

</code></pre>
<a href="https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2483b84cd805b5d1accf3d0013dd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:58:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030380</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030380</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030380</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "I’m joining OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><p><pre><code>  OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission (November 2025)
</code></pre>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/openai-has-deleted-the-word-safely-from-its-mission-and-its-new-structure-is-a-test-for-whether-ai-serves-society-or-shareholders-274467" rel="nofollow">https://theconversation.com/openai-has-deleted-the-word-safe...</a><p>Thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008560">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008560</a><p>Other words removed:<p><pre><code>   responsibly
   unconstrained
   safe
   positive</code></pre></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:44:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030301</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030301</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030301</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "I’m joining OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>either way there's a lot of money pumping the agentic hype train with not much to show for it other than Peter's blog edit history showing he's a paid influencer and even the little obscure AI startups are trying to pay ( <a href="https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2483b84cd805b5d1accf3d0013dd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2...</a> ) for these sorts of promotional pump and dump style marketing efforts on social media.<p>In Peter's blog he mentions paying upwards of $1000's a month in subscription fees to run agentic tasks non-stop for months and it seems like no real software is coming out of it aside from pretty basic web gui interfaces for API plugins. is that what people are genuinely excited about?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:37:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030283</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030283</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030283</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "I’m joining OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can you elaborate on this more or point a link for some context?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:53:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029546</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029546</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029546</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not actually research though. The LLM API is only requesting a few of the top search results from a search engine and then adding those web pages to its context window.<p>That might work for simple tasks, but it's easily susceptible to prompt injection attacks and there's no way to validate the quality if it's statistically novel enough and outside of the core training data.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:17:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028237</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028237</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028237</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Is curing patients a sustainable busines model?" - Goldman 2018<p><a href="https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/goldman-sachs-asks-in-biotech-research-report-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model/" rel="nofollow">https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/goldman-sachs-asks-in-bi...</a><p>Many of the biggest medical innovations have come from publicly funded university researchers, which then license or give away their findings to private businesses.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:13:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028192</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028192</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028192</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "A review of M Disc archival capability with long term testing results (2016)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LTO9 is only 18TB.<p>The LTO compression ratio is theoretical and most peoples data will be incompatible with native LTO compression method used.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Feb 2026 03:26:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020777</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020777</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020777</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "How did the Maya survive?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber is a great, more recent alternative with a lot more context around the non-linear trajectory of history - the modern myths of linear progressive societal progress from savages, to agriculture, to cities and centralized technological futurism.<p>Graeber also explores the question what defines a society, and how at certain points some groups of people identified their culture through "schismogenesis" more so in oppositional context to against other group(s)<p>It's a massive book, but really refreshing and full of delightful little anecdotes and footnotes all through out.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:10:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009107</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009107</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009107</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Manipulating the The Keynesian Beauty Contest is the metagame, especially after the era of /r/Wall-street bets swelled up. What do you think Jim Kramer gets paid to do, report facts?<p>By 2017 teenagers were running quantitative trading algorithms and semantic analysis trading bots they found from influencers and github. Around that time private subscription fee telegram and discord "whale" insider trading groups often had multiple levels of insider trading market manipulation running pump and dump schemes. Marks would pay to join the private chat group and at a certain time of day a ticket symbol would be released for "insiders" to buy before it's promoted in public channels. The outer circle was just providing liquidity for the deeper insiders to exit with easy profit.<p>Most VC gambits are not much different. Sell the news. Unleash the rumors.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:20:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982640</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982640</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982640</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor.<p>In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable.<p>How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further <i>Accelerate</i> their returns?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:56:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966792</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966792</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966792</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>upwards of 60% of the ethanol used in combustion engines is completely wasted.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Feb 2026 06:48:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46931899</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46931899</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46931899</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Mass layoffs and the wellness camp industry will easily account for $600+ billion a year in contracts, for at least a few years.<p><a href="https://www.teenvogue.com/story/rfk-wellness-farms-us-disabilities" rel="nofollow">https://www.teenvogue.com/story/rfk-wellness-farms-us-disabi...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Feb 2026 23:59:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929716</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929716</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929716</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "Software factories and the agentic moment"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Slop influencers like Peter Steinberger get paid to promote AI vibe coding startups and the agentic token burning hype. Ironically they're so deep into the impulsivity of it all that they can't even hide it. The latest frontier models all continue to suffer from hallucinations and slop at scale.<p><pre><code>  - Factory, unconvinced. Their marketing videos are just too cringe, and any company that tries to get my attentions with free tokens in my DMs reduce my respect for them. If you're that good, you don't need to convince me by giving me free stuff. Additionally, some posts on Twitter about it have this paid influencer smell. If you use claude code tho, you'll feel right at home with the [signature flicker](https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/1977103325192667323).


  + Factory, unconvinced. Their videos are a bit cringe, I do hear good things in my timeline about it tho, even if images aren't supported (yet) and they have the [signature flicker](https://x.com/badlogicgames/status/1977103325192667323).
</code></pre>
<a href="https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2483b84cd805b5d1accf3d0013dd" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/steipete/steipete.me/commit/725a3cb372bc2...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Feb 2026 21:57:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46928547</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46928547</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46928547</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>New York City had hybrid in-person and remote as an option, so only about 4 months were remote for most students. Seems like a perfect A/B test case to test the theory that a remote learning was actually associated with cognitive decline 5 years later. Meanwhile every year since 2020 there have been studies published from nearly every country on the neurological and cognitive damage from mild covid cases. Seems to be more of a cognitive dissonance issue, that people don't want to confront the elephant in the room. 100 years ago when TB and Polio were taken more seriously than today, the common solution was fresh air. Schools today are even more sealed off to the point where a simple lack of oxygen starts to noticeably reduce cognitive ability after a few minutes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Feb 2026 05:08:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921496</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921496</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921496</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Funding for schools is often based on Average Daily Attendance.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Feb 2026 01:07:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920257</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920257</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920257</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by nosuchthing in "Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Most studies are showing children with neurological damage from continued exposure to covid outbreaks in schools multiple times a year.<p>Lockdowns did not last more than a few months for the vast majority of school districts in the US.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:58:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919342</link><dc:creator>nosuchthing</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919342</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919342</guid></item></channel></rss>