Hacker News: pandoro

New comment by pandoro in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

pandoro — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:41:52 +0000

If those companies found PMF we should expect to see the effects of all those tokens burned on the products we all know and use. In my own experience: yes new features can be delivered much more quickly (by orders of magnitude) but knowing what to build and how to evolve a product with taste and direction does not; so ultimately the user-facing gains are marginal.

I suspect that once the technology has been tamed and the hardware and software has been commoditized, the impact will be much less dramatic than we expect and we will realize the importance of a shared vision, experience, taste, intuition and discernment in building good products.

New comment by pandoro in "Second tranch of UFO files declassified"

pandoro — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:35:28 +0000

Selection of interesting videos in the batch:

    * https://www.war.gov/UFO/#DOW-UAP-PR067-Multiple-Spherical-UAP-USO-near-Sub-CALLSIGN-20220325-in-and-out-of-water
    * https://www.war.gov/ufo/#DOW-UAP-PR059-NAG-UAP-1-Jun-20
    * https://www.war.gov/ufo/#DOW-UAP-PR055-Spherical-UAP-over-AFG-in-and-out-of-clouds-23-Nov-2020

Second tranch of UFO files declassified

pandoro — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:35:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4499305/department-of-war-publishes-second-release-of-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235662

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by pandoro in "Free Energy from the Vacuum? Warp Drive Pioneer Unveils Battery-Free MicroSparc"

pandoro — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:28:24 +0000

We will look back at this moment as the start of a new era. I also suspect that this technology has already been successfully tested before in government labs.

The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness [pdf]

pandoro — Tue, 12 May 2026 10:51:11 +0000

Article URL: https://philpapers.org/archive/LERTAF.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106452

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by pandoro in "UK bans daytime TV ads for cereals, muffins and burgers"

pandoro — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 23:32:41 +0000

On this subject I highly recommend the documentary "the Century of the Self" (produced by Adam Curtis for the BBC). It explores how Sigmund Freud's theories about the unconscious mind were used by his nephew Edward Bernays to create modern public relations and consumer culture. The documentary shows how corporations and governments learned to manipulate mass desires using psychological techniques, transforming democracy from meeting people's needs to managing their wants through consumption and marketing.

The entire doc is on Youtube: https://youtu.be/GFwDc17WZ-A

New comment by pandoro in "The complete story of Gödel incompleteness"

pandoro — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 05:30:28 +0000

It's very entry-level (my level :)) but I found Veritaseum's video about it really clear and instructive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo

ETH Zürich's position on AI in education and ChatGPT

pandoro — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 22:43:04 +0000

Article URL: https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/education/educational-development/ai-in-education/chatgpt.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35379863

Points: 56

# Comments: 16

New comment by pandoro in "Almost half of cancer deaths are caused by smoking, alcohol, or obesity"

pandoro — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 20:54:59 +0000

That's a very good summary of the approach. It stems from the observation that every single smoker already know about all the reasons they should not smoke (health, financial, social,...) yet they still do it.

You know it's probably going to kill you, you know it costs a lot of money and you know it's anti-social. The book wastes no time trying to convince you about those things. However, it dispels in a very systematic and repetitive way all the positive myths you believe (or repeat to yourself) about cigarettes ("the brainwashing"). It does not actually relax you or bring you pleasure, it just relieves a nicotine addiction and allow you to get back to a state you already had before smoking. It does not taste good. It does not help you focus. Nicotine withdrawal is actually extremely mild. Etc.

As the parent comment explains it's a re-framing, a change of paradigm. By the end of the book I could very clearly see that quitting would not be a sacrifice or "a pleasure i would loose" but something that would make my life better. And to be honest, this has felt like magic. A few days after finishing the book I just threw my pack in the trash and it really has been easy and at times actually even pleasant to quit. Every cigarette you do not smoke brings you a feeling of pride, accomplishment and liberation.

New comment by pandoro in "Almost half of cancer deaths are caused by smoking, alcohol, or obesity"

pandoro — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 17:06:23 +0000

I can recommend to read Allen Carr's "Easyway to stop smoking" if you haven't already. I had been smoking for 15 years total as well, tried to stop at least 6 times (sometimes for 18 months, with the help of Nicorette and e-cigs) and was telling myself "today is the last day" every single day. But I was constantly tempted and was always picking it up again. A lot of ex-smokers I knew kept recommending me this book with almost magical claims. I finally begrudgingly read it and stopped from one day to the next. The craziest thing is that it was actually easy to stop this time and gave me great satisfaction. I have stopped for 2 years now and am confident that I will never smoke again (contrary to all other attempts).

New comment by pandoro in "Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active"

pandoro — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 21:03:36 +0000

It's easier to start tackling the question when you make the distinction between mind and consciousness as other commenters pointed out in other threads. Let's just assume some very basic definitions:

- mind = memories, personality, aspirations, knowledge, pattern recognition, etc...

- consciousness = this unmistakable, unshakable certainty that "I exists, I am" that we all share (unless solipsism is true and you are a philosophical zombie :) )

To me it is then evident that the answer to your question is: we (and any sentient being for that matter) are more than that any AI will ever be.

New comment by pandoro in "Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active"

pandoro — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 20:39:38 +0000

very good point. It's an important distinction to make and a first step in formally defining what is meant by "consciousness". Some people mean consciousness as in "I become unconscious when I sleep or faint" some as in "I exist, I am" others as a prerequisite for free will. As with many things, trying to define the concept helps understand it

New comment by pandoro in "Show HN: Penumbra, a perceptually optimized color palette based on natural light"

pandoro — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 23:17:06 +0000

Let me first state that I understand that your goal was not to create an "accessible" palette and you state in your README that the palette is not "particularly suitable for people with colour vision deficiency". But being colorblind myself (deuteranomaly, up to 8% of the male population), I would still like to offer feedback: it is extremely hard for me to distinguish most of the colors in this palette (especially in the light version); more so than with "normal/default" palettes

The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari

pandoro — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 16:36:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32128322

Points: 1

# Comments: 3

New comment by pandoro in "Bizarre space circle captured in unprecedented detail"

pandoro — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 19:40:43 +0000

"Of the three stars, one was missing. There was a white cloud of dust in its place, like the feces of an abyss whale.

It’s already been cleansed. Nothing more to do."

- Death's End, Liu Cixin

New comment by pandoro in "What are the most important statistical ideas of the past 50 years?"

pandoro — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 21:08:38 +0000

Solomonoff Induction. Although proven to be uncomputable (there are people working on formalizing efficient approximations) it is such a mind-blowing idea. It brings together Occam's razor, Epicurus' Principle of multiple explanations, Bayes' theorem, Algorithmic Information Theory and Universal Turing machines in a theory of universal induction. The mathematical proof and details are way above my head but I cannot help but feel like it is very underrated.

New comment by pandoro in "What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?"

pandoro — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 20:29:42 +0000

Consciousness cannot be understood or known in the epistemological sense of the term since it is, by definition, the ultimate subject. It also cannot be experienced as an object. It sounds very hand-wavy and esoteric but if you think hard about it, it is absolutely and undeniably the only tenable logical position.

Put in another way: if you somehow claim to be able to observe or measure consciousness as an object, then what is it that is doing the observing?

Similarly, consciousness is unchanging and without beginning or end, for noticing and knowing any change you need consciousness.