<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: patrickscoleman</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patrickscoleman</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:51:49 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=patrickscoleman" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've been digging into Thomas Metzinger[1] recently and here's a tentative component by component definition of human consciousness based on his ideas:<p>- a model of your environment
- desires
- a process for modeling yourself in that environment (in time & space)
- the ability to take action
- the perception of yourself having agency
- persistence of these processes even without input
- unawareness of these processes (i.e. naive realism)<p>If you consider these LLM-based agents, they:<p>- are aware of their chat environment
- have programmed desires
- are aware of themselves acting in their environment
- can take actions like search, tool calling, etc.
- understand they can take these actions
- DO NOT persist after they stop getting user input
- DO NOT believe they are conscious (or at least they are programmed to deny it)<p>This is a functionalist take (and you may disagree with my definition), but while I don't think these current AI agents are conscious, I feel like there's conceptually no reason someone couldn't build a conscious AI very soon.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/thomas-metzinger/the-ego-tunnel/9780465020690/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/thomas-metzinger/th...</a> & <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262633086/being-no-one/" rel="nofollow">https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262633086/being-no-one/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:40:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394446</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394446</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394446</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Windows 3.1 tiled background .bmp archive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>we have a crt tv with built in vhs in our office and have a bunch of old tapes<p>one is “Mastering Windows 3.1”<p>it’s fun to run in the background while working<p>for your enjoyment, here’s a similar 3.1 tutorial video from that era uploaded to YouTube<p><a href="https://youtu.be/KRi5mjMgORk?si=OFH7UhOQif5EUCtg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/KRi5mjMgORk?si=OFH7UhOQif5EUCtg</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:58:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47496832</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47496832</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47496832</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Meta acquires Moltbook"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Acquisition as marketing</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:53:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325815</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325815</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325815</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I really love how Kosho Uchiyama describes meditation with the metaphor "opening the hand of thought"<p><a href="https://wisdomexperience.org/product/opening-hand-thought/" rel="nofollow">https://wisdomexperience.org/product/opening-hand-thought/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:40:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46534204</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46534204</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46534204</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Neopets.com changed my life (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'll jump in too. Also started coding with HTML in Neopets and then joined the middle school's programming club! We were playing around with C++ and Visual Basic. Love seeing these updates!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:31:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46041050</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46041050</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46041050</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you haven't already, you can turn off your YouTube watch history, which stops all recommendations. It makes it way less addicting.<p><a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2025 23:29:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986774</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986774</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986774</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "I only use Google Sheets"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The worst customer support experiences of my life have been from Google, both while using Google Fi personally and GCP while working at Replit in its early days. Thankfully I'm no longer using either of those products now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2025 14:29:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438144</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438144</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438144</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "I only use Google Sheets"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Only tangentially on-topic, but I do all the financial modeling for the past several (early stage) startups I've worked for in Google Sheets.<p>The ease, collaboration/sharing, and array formulas win out over the faster speed for calculations, better shortcuts, cross-workbook linking, and customization in Excel.<p>That said, it's been a few years since I've tried Excel so would love to hear someone convince me to try it again.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 01 Oct 2025 14:27:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438125</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438125</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45438125</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Check out the work from the meditation research lab at Harvard [1] for more<p>[1] <a href="https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/" rel="nofollow">https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:41:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45128516</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45128516</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45128516</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Building AI products in the probabilistic era"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Great read. We've been seeing some wild emergent behavior at Rime (tts voice ai) too, e.g. training the model to <laugh> and it being able to <sigh>.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Aug 2025 22:04:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978658</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978658</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978658</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I recently picked up Mirrorshades and The Big Book of Cyberpunk (edited by Jared Shurin) [1]<p>Will check this one out too!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700576/the-big-book-of-cyberpunk-by-jared-shurin/" rel="nofollow">https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700576/the-big-book...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 Aug 2025 15:34:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962882</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962882</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962882</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Came here to say this, thanks.<p>Only thing to add is that I like the "inbox" feature in Todoist (plus a single catchall project). I get overeager during the day and add a bunch of stuff. The inbox makes it easy for me to mostly just remove things I won't actually do but then file away the stuff I might for later.<p>I've put weekly chores into a single recurring task and do them on Sundays or kick back another day or two (or just skip) if I'm busy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 Aug 2025 02:47:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44871788</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44871788</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44871788</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Happy BuyNothing Day"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I do this with just an ever expanding notes file. Works!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 10 Aug 2025 01:47:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44852119</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44852119</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44852119</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Sign in with Google in Chrome"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>their "private" is not private. about a month ago, i searched for some health-related stuff in a chrome incognito window and then immediately afterwards got related sponsored product ads on amazon in a logged in normal window.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2025 01:08:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717796</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717796</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717796</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "How I Use Kagi"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ads are coming to ChatGPT too at some point [1]. Agree that ChatGPT has less spam than Google for now, but this won't always be the case.<p>There are ChatGPT alternatives too (including Kagi's), so AI may end up taking a lot of search market share, but I still find myself searching most of the time. I've had enough hallucinations to still prefer searching for and reading primary sources. As always I keep monitoring and trying new things.<p>[1] <a href="https://mashable.com/article/openai-ceo-sam-altman-open-to-ads-on-chatgpt-one-day" rel="nofollow">https://mashable.com/article/openai-ceo-sam-altman-open-to-a...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:41:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44597968</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44597968</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44597968</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Overtourism in Japan, and how it hurts small businesses"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even as a foreigner who speaks Japanese, I frequently got the "we're closed" and crossing the hands in an X response while locals continued eating. Sometime they'd laugh and I'd hear "gaijin" (rude slang for foreigner) as I walked out.<p>But plenty of places were super warm and friendly after the initial apprehension if you speak Japanese and read some kanji. Worth the effort!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:10:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535291</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535291</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535291</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Perplexity Comet"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You should check out kagi then<p><a href="http://kagi.com/" rel="nofollow">http://kagi.com/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:05:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515957</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515957</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515957</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Terpstra Keyboard"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Highly recommend King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard for microtonal music too!<p>For example: <a href="https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com/album/flying-microtonal-banana" rel="nofollow">https://kinggizzard.bandcamp.com/album/flying-microtonal-ban...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Jun 2025 20:05:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312898</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312898</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312898</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "Yes I Will Read Ulysses Yes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Finally read it this year and so happy that I did!<p>Although a lot of that reading was skimming haha. I think that's good for a first reading though. You get a really good idea of the overall pacing and chapter-to-chapter variety that way.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Jun 2025 20:03:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312878</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312878</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312878</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by patrickscoleman in "AGI is not multimodal"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It feels like some of the comments are responding to the title, not the contents of the article.<p>Maybe a more descriptive but longer title would be: AGI will work with multimodal inputs and outputs embedded in a physical environment rather than a frankenstein combination of single-modal models (what today is called multimodal) and throwing more computational resources at the problem (scale maximalism) will be improved with thoughtful theoretical approaches to data and training.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2025 16:53:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182794</link><dc:creator>patrickscoleman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182794</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44182794</guid></item></channel></rss>