Hacker News: panta

New comment by panta in "DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order"

panta — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 06:26:20 +0000

No need to do that, they can also choose to continue to be spied by the US. Is it better to be spied by the US or by China?

New comment by panta in "Why are we even doing all this?"

panta — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 07:59:31 +0000

We're "solving" manual labour too. Those people could find themselves liberated from physical work in the next few years, unless some corrective force/action intervene.

New comment by panta in "I know why the mathematicians weep"

panta — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:25:00 +0000

That they can afford only while the cost is subsidized. Then the well-in-a-bottle bubble will explode because everyone will realize that the business has never been sustainable, nobody really believed in it after all. But the well now has been damaged beyond repair.

New comment by panta in "The Download: why AI's latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than rea"

panta — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:09:49 +0000

Since we are using analogies, a parent is responsible for the actions of a child, if minor. If the child is left unsupervised with access to guns and munitions, and kills someone, the responsibility is entirely on the irresponsible parents.

New comment by panta in "AI models don't kill people – people kill people"

panta — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:40:33 +0000

What if there are already (possibly hidden) loops somewhere, maybe even ultra-slow ones at the inter-generation level? What if some AIs could do that not with so explicit and dramatic actions, but much more subtly, through undetected manipulation at a vast scale level? What if (when) they reached ASI and through billions of micro-decisions manipulated people to do apparently minor choices that appeared innocent in isolation but whose collective outcomes lead to an earlier extinction of the human being (if at some point was determined to be an obstacle)? How could we (as a species) not be outsmarted by an ASI?

New comment by panta in "Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says"

panta — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 16:07:35 +0000

Neoliberism is not the only possible system, it is very well possible to change the boundaries of what enterprises can do. Technology-will-save-us is a quasi-religious belief, not supported by evidence. Also if it was true that we can't convince politicians and enterprises to change their course now, why should they do later when costs will be much higher?

Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me. We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.

New comment by panta in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

panta — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:26:02 +0000

The problem is money, but at a different level. When you deal with the homeless it's too late. That money must be spent before someone becomes homeless, on welfare: unemployment benefits, accessible healthcare and housing. A minor cut taken care of immediately is nothing, but let it turn into gangrene and you won't be able to fix it at all.

New comment by panta in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

panta — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:19:29 +0000

Then the question becomes why US has such a huge problem with mental health and drugs that most other countries don't have with this scale. Maybe it's easier to develop mental health and/or drug issues when there are no societal safety nets, like accessible healthcare, decent affordable housing, unemployment benefits, ...

New comment by panta in "Everything I own, owned"

panta — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 09:46:47 +0000

Why is your job to make the reverse engineer harder? When the user buys a product, it should be theirs to do whatever they want, even brick it. Your job should be creating the product the user wants to use, not building obstacles, otherwise you are creating something actively user-hostile. What if your company goes out of business and the user ends up with a device that can't be updated, that depends on cloud services that don't exist anymore, or worse with security vulnerabilities?

New comment by panta in "New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health"

panta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:38:28 +0000

I guess the question could be: "how much Meta did by directly or indirectly damaging people mental health in New Mexico?". Note that the damage could be more or less subtle: someone could have been affected in great measure and become, for instance, depressed, while someone else could have been only mildly affected and just become a doom scroller. Is there a level of reasonable damage that could be tolerated? In my personal view, no, there isn't, and in theory all the earnings deriving from that person should be confiscated (and only after that you can apply the sanction). Unfortunately this won't be practical, and the only remaining option would be to heavily regulate or ban platforms that are engineered on people psychological weaknesses, and when tolerated they should be taxed to the sky (like tobacco and alcohol, or even more)

New comment by panta in "The myth of Snow Leopard"

panta — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:57:39 +0000

I'd gladly pay for the OS if this guaranteed abstaining from unnecessary changes and/or from removing useful features (eg 2d Spaces in Leopard and Snow Leopard, replaced by the inferior abomination that is Mission Control)

New comment by panta in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

panta — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:03:17 +0000

Those living the longest are those born 75-85 years ago. Later generations will have to wait to assess how it ended for them.

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

panta — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:15:54 +0000

I think that to sum things up, we will have to wait until we can evaluate the cost of the mistakes. You could be lucky but you could also end up with a very negative output value in the longer time frame.

New comment by panta in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

panta — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:45:29 +0000

I've been a paying customer since their early days. Their value, at least in my view, lies precisely in that they are just a file storage SaaS. They are focused on doing one thing and doing it well. The day this will change they'll lose me as a customer.

New comment by panta in "UK Biobank leak: Health details of 500k people offered for sale on Alibaba"

panta — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:20:03 +0000

no, they should not, since we already know that the contract won't stop them from using that data for other purposes and other governments. A government should act in the interest of its own citizens, first and foremost, and not pretending to believe a pinky swear by a notoriously bad actor.

New comment by panta in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"

panta — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:22:05 +0000

Maybe it's borderline because it's coming from the other direction. Corruption presumes some kind of "covertness", when you break all the rules without even trying to be discreet can you still talk of corruption?

New comment by panta in "Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’"

panta — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:11:02 +0000

> Choosing OpenAI does not harm the republic

if we consider AIs as "force multipliers" as we do with coding agents, it's easy to see how any AI company can harm the republic if the government they are serving is unethical and amoral.

New comment by panta in "Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love"

panta — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:42:53 +0000

Not everyone shares this view. Some have a different definition of winners and losers.

New comment by panta in "Vibe coding kills open source"

panta — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:00:50 +0000

StanLLM-generated hammer: "Dear valued customer, our automated systems have flagged activity on your StanLLM account that appears to be non-compliant with our Acceptable Use Policy. As a precautionary measure your account has been suspended. If you believe this suspension is in error, feel free to contact our customer support at /dev/null^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsupport@..."

New comment by panta in "Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content"

panta — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:03:35 +0000

It is actively working to make the world a worse place and to degrade the fabric of society that makes them an enemy.