Hacker News: portmanteur

New comment by portmanteur in "Cursor Camp"

portmanteur — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:32:07 +0000

Kamala Harris bragged about enforcing this law against parents in California. That’s the only way that I know that it’s an actual law that gets enforced because I had never heard of laws like this before, and I grew up in US public schools in the South.

New comment by portmanteur in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

portmanteur — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:43:52 +0000

Not sure what this is implying, but aspiring priests are required to have a Bachelor’s degree before entering Seminary, or it tacks at least two years onto a very rigorous six-year seminary program. The seminary program is on par with getting a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Theology. Further, only 30-50% of seminarians ultimately become ordained as priests, due to the rigorous vetting program and “discerning out.”

New comment by portmanteur in "Show HN: A real time AI video agent with under 1 second of latency"

portmanteur — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 14:24:36 +0000

Perhaps use a small, fast LLM to maintain a rolling "disposition" state, and for each of perhaps a handful of dispositions, have a handful of bridging emotes/gestures. You can have the small LLM use the next-to-last/second-most-recent user input to control the disposition async'ly, and in moments where it's not clear just say "That's a good question," "Let me think about that," or "I think that..." etc.

New comment by portmanteur in "Show HN: A real time AI video agent with under 1 second of latency"

portmanteur — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 04:20:33 +0000

Have you considered giving your digital twin a jolly aspect? I've wondered if an AI video agent could be made to appear real time, despite a real processing latency, if the AI were to give a hearty laugh before all of its' responses. >So Carter, what did you do this weekend? >Hohoho, you know! I spent some time working on my pet AI projects!

I wonder if some standard set of personable mannerisms could be used to bridge the gap from 250ms to 1000ms. You don't need to think about what the user has said before you realize they've stopped talking. Make the AI Agent laugh or hum or just say "yes!" before beginning its' response.

New comment by portmanteur in "GPT-4 Update: 32K Context Window Now for All Users"

portmanteur — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 18:30:39 +0000

A cutoff date of April 2023 means the AI also presumably has access to about a month's worth of blogs that have been written since GPT4 was released on March 14th. So perhaps a few "Best Practices" or "Prompt Engineering" guides might have made it into the training set.

Chat GPT can probably help users better optimize their conversations with it.

New comment by portmanteur in "The Great Train Robbery: Everything We Know So Far"

portmanteur — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 20:07:06 +0000

This article is so bereft of specific details that it could easily pass as a dystopian science fiction short story. Fortunately, it’s just marketing PR for a global logistics company.

New comment by portmanteur in "Transcript of taped conversations among German nuclear physicists (1945)"

portmanteur — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 15:45:39 +0000

Besides large scale immigration, what changed in America? Complacency during peacetime?

New comment by portmanteur in "Run Llama 2 uncensored locally"

portmanteur — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 15:33:12 +0000

If you don't release a censored model for the casual observer to tinker with, you could end up with a model that says something embarrassing or problematic. Then the news media hype cycle would be all about how you're not a responsible AI company, etc. So releasing a censored AI model seems like it should mitigate those criticisms. Anyone technical enough to need an uncensored version will be technical enough to access the uncensored version.

Besides, censoring a model is probably also a useful industry skill which can be practiced and improved, and best methods published. Some of these censorship regimes appear to have gone to far, at least in some folks' minds, so clearly there's a wrong way to do it, too. By practicing the censorship we can probably arrive at a spot almost everyone is comfortable with.

New comment by portmanteur in "Cities with their own psychological disorders"

portmanteur — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 15:18:22 +0000

I can think of a few examples over the past 3-8 years where this would be a useful syndrome to have named and in the popular memory.

Oh well, Stockholm Syndrome is catchier.

New comment by portmanteur in "No one wants to talk to your chatbot"

portmanteur — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 21:24:40 +0000

Who chooses to stop at McDonald's instead of a fancy restaurant, just to save $5?

New comment by portmanteur in "Full Text of the Federalist Papers"

portmanteur — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 16:12:57 +0000

Weren't they describing a Senate that was appointed by state legislators? They weren't describing what a government with Direct Election of Senators would look like.

Or, if that's not what you're talking about, why not just quote a relevant portion of the FP instead of being so deliberately cryptic?

New comment by portmanteur in "BuzzFeed News is shutting down"

portmanteur — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 15:35:09 +0000

Buzzfeed News _was_ tabloid journalism. They published demonstrably fake news, most notably the infamous Steele Dossier. Buzzfeed News claimed the document was "unverified," when in reality it was verifiably false. Every other major media outlet had access to this document and refused to publish it because its claims were unsubstantiated. But not Buzzfeed News -- skepticism of this outlet's seriousness was completely warranted.

New comment by portmanteur in "Avoidance Speech"

portmanteur — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 14:22:39 +0000

My brother's rule for his kids regarding swearing and other NSFW words is: "You'll probably hear adults use these words from time to time, but you can't repeat these words until you start paying taxes."

New comment by portmanteur in "Life expectancy in the U.S. varies greatly by region"

portmanteur — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 03:02:27 +0000

These sorts of charts are meaningless without being broken down by race.

I did a quick search for "US Mortality Rate by Race" and I found CDC documents showing that African Americans have roughly 35% higher age-adjusted mortality than non-Hispanic Whites [0], and have on average 7 year shorter life expectancy at birth [1].

When people show maps where the American South has seemingly worse outcomes than the rest of the country, it's important to remember that the demographic makeup is totally different.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db456.pdf page 2 [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr71/nvsr71-01.pdf page 2

New comment by portmanteur in "DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot"

portmanteur — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:36:42 +0000

Is this news or is this a blog post? I understand it's very informed, and I don't necessarily mind opinionated journalism, but this seems to be speculating as to the motives of the FBI.

To me, this seems like only one very passionate side of an important debate. A big question I have is, "how likely is this legislation to actually become law?" UK and Australia passed similar laws, sure, but they also banned guns and that's not gonna happen here.