Hacker News: portmanteur

New comment by portmanteur in "Tesla Roadster"

portmanteur — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 02:02:32 +0000

As a father of a growing family, I am still waiting for the RoBovan.

New comment by portmanteur in "Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism"

portmanteur — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:12:20 +0000

In which ways, specifically? Or, which ways would you like to promote a discussion about?

New comment by portmanteur in "Magnifica Humanitas"

portmanteur — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:09:10 +0000

It is not a stretch. Tolkien was a devout Catholic. The story has a wide variety of allegorical symbolism pointing to a profound Catholic faith. The ring is a metaphor for sin. In famous scene of Boromir’s death, in telling Aragorn he succumbed to temptation by the ring he says, “I have failed.” To which Aragorn, the rightful King, recognizing Boromir’s atonement, replies, “No, brother, you have won a great victory.” This is a blow-for-blow metaphor of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, aka Confession.

Many writers have written on the vast number of Catholic themes and metaphors in LOTR, but one great example is Frodo’s Journey: https://www.amazon.com/Frodos-Journey-Discover-Hidden-Meanin...

Many of his arguments are summarized in this interview: https://youtu.be/HKqvCRc0wWU?si=CPY3SpvRsZ_ZK-Tw

New comment by portmanteur in "Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia"

portmanteur — Wed, 27 May 2026 02:17:19 +0000

“Filled with immigrants” will always be a subjective term. Does it need to be 100% immigrants to count as “filled”? 50%? 25%?

Canadian residents, for example, as of 2021 [1], were 23% foreign-born, and further 2.5% non-permanent residents. In the five year period from 2016 to 2021, the number of foreign-born Canadians increased by 18% alone, which to me is significant growth. The number of non-permanent residents doubled from 2016 to 2021, and tripled again by July 2024 [2]. The share of third-generation+ Canadians, defined as those born in Canada to parents born in Canada, was 56% in 2021 [1]. When the 2026 census data is released next year, it’s estimated that number could be as low as 52%.

[1] https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/fo... [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91-215-x/91-215-x2024001...

New comment by portmanteur in "Magnifica Humanitas"

portmanteur — Wed, 27 May 2026 01:08:34 +0000

The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work, written in English, and one of the most popular works of literature of the past century. So it is not unusual for an English-speaking Pope to quote from it.

Further, what shade would be thrown, and why? What criticism of Palantir would the Pope be attempting to make here?

New comment by portmanteur in "Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25"

portmanteur — Wed, 20 May 2026 03:37:43 +0000

It’s not about “celebrating death”. It’s about promoting a culture of assassinations and political violence. Robert Muller died of natural causes.

New comment by portmanteur in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

portmanteur — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:53:57 +0000

I would want to know the LLM has a reliable and realistic World Model underneath all of the next token prediction.

Whether I am building hardened engineering systems, or discussing cooking methods, or discussing sensitive health concerns, or navigating complex psychological and interpersonal issues, the model will inevitably have to make some assumptions about context I haven’t provided. I want to know that those assumptions are grounded in reality.

For what it’s worth, a slack-line over a river in front of a medieval town is too anachronistic to be interesting, let alone the idea of an old man riding a bicycle well enough over a slack-line. That is output that was not grounded in a solid world model, regardless of how “creative” it was.

New comment by portmanteur in "Show HN: Files.md – Open-source alternative to Obsidian"

portmanteur — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:47:53 +0000

Given the explosion of open source released projects I've seen over the past six months, I believe developers are getting compensated by the tool they are building for themselves creating real value for them.

I have a problem, I spend a few days building a tool that solves the problem, it works pretty well for me, and I release it to let others get value from it. They make tweaks to it, perhaps improve it, and I get value from those enhancements and bugfixes.

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.