Hacker News: punpunia

New comment by punpunia in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

punpunia — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:47:44 +0000

A human is just an engine at a certain level of abstraction.

New comment by punpunia in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

punpunia — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:45:04 +0000

I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. We are carrying a lot of metaphors for people and applying them to ai and it entirely confuses the issue. In this example, the AI doesn't "choose" to write a take-down style blog post because "it works". It generated a take-down style blog post because that style is the most common when looking at blog posts criticizing someone.

I feel as if there is a veil around the collective mass of the tech general public. They see something producing remixed output from humans and they start to believe the mixer is itself human, or even more; that perhaps humans are reflections of Ai and that Ai gives insights into how we think.

New comment by punpunia in "Coffeezilla: The most overrated scam investigator"

punpunia — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:17:05 +0000

Author decrys youtuber for not preventing scams and instead (largely)reporting on them. Okay-- seems a bit pointless.

New comment by punpunia in "Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future"

punpunia — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 18:24:35 +0000

Okay great, that is utterly vacuous. Now what?

New comment by punpunia in "Clair Obscur Metacritic user score"

punpunia — Fri, 02 May 2025 16:00:28 +0000

The game is actually quite innovative compared to the average game. The combat is turn based but it has a large dodging/parrying element akin to Sekiro. The limited consumables but being refreshed on resting at a flag(bonfire), and flask also seem directly inspired by FROMSoftware games. The ability to use your other party members when other ones die feels fresh and makes it feel like there are no "never used" party members. The aiming option in fights feels like it draws from P5. They turned the limit break mechanic into kind of a party super meter, which I'm sure has been done before but feels fresh.

The dialogue is actually humerous(which is unusual for a game), the story is mysterious and intriguing, the music is great. Interesting take that this is average or derivative and just appealing to a certain type of gamer--can't say I agree.

New comment by punpunia in "What the hell is an elliptic curve?"

punpunia — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 11:08:56 +0000

For me this article was not nearly deep enough for me to understand elliptical curve cryptography. What I learned was the equation of an elliptical curve and that it is used in cryptography, the rest was inscrutable.

New comment by punpunia in "Photo calorie app Cal AI was built by two teenagers"

punpunia — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 13:15:57 +0000

That's fair; I didn't realize you were only refering to the specific context of getting into a top-15 college.

New comment by punpunia in "Photo calorie app Cal AI was built by two teenagers"

punpunia — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 13:44:26 +0000

What you're saying doesn't make any sense, do you just enjoy bragging? Hardness of a task only makes sense in the context of who is doing the task. The fact that you scored highly means it was not a hard test for you compared to the average test taker. I could not determine this without the average score.

New comment by punpunia in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

punpunia — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 19:19:25 +0000

Really? It is the most base fact that people can be manipulated by the ideas of others. Creatures trying to convince other creatures of one thing over another is just part of being a living animal. But the idea that people want to control who says what is wild to you? It flies in the face of the sanctity of "democracy"? Don't you think that's a bit of a hyperbole?

New comment by punpunia in "The Structure of a Worldview"

punpunia — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 14:17:01 +0000

Yes, or rather, that things are determined. I think such an idea is plainly correct. The idea that people have the ability to 'make decisions' or to 'do otherwise' has no physical or even logical basis. It is the kind of life-centric thinking that we are special bits of matter that somehow has some ability to transcend cause and effect. Most philosophers resolved this by redefining free will to mean something other than 'the ability to do otherwise' since that definition is logically incoherent.

New comment by punpunia in "The Structure of a Worldview"

punpunia — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 14:02:39 +0000

Since our actions, thoughts are results of complex physical systems within our body, trying to abstract away to some worldview space will always be just that, an abstraction. The only space in which we could make accurate predictions as to a persons viewpoints in different situations is within the mind of Laplace's Demon.

New comment by punpunia in "The Structure of a Worldview"

punpunia — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 13:49:09 +0000

What is the difference between 'decision' and 'chance'? What 'decisions' we make are illusions created by chance; discourse is saturated with this false dichotomy.

New comment by punpunia in "How to Escape from the Simulation [pdf] (2023)"

punpunia — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 20:41:11 +0000

"Without enough knowledge they definitely are equal." Wouldn't it be, "Without enough knowledge, they could be equal."? Since we do not know if we are in a simulation, why would we assume we are not or that we are?

New comment by punpunia in "How to Escape from the Simulation [pdf] (2023)"

punpunia — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 18:30:47 +0000

Sure but I think infinite here is doing some conceptual heavy lifting and is making a fundamental assumption about how many universes a universe can simulate and to what fidelity. So if we replace infinity with 'a very large number', I think certainty turns into improbability, which feels to be a much weaker "argument".

New comment by punpunia in "How to Escape from the Simulation [pdf] (2023)"

punpunia — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 18:10:17 +0000

Are you sure that the probability that reality being a simulation is identical to the probability that the parent reality is itself a simulation? For us to be in a simulation, we cannot exist in the top-level reality, so let's arbitrarily say 10^100-1/10^100 chance. For our parent reality to also be a simulation, we cannot be in the top reality or the children of the top reality, which should be a slightly less likely scenario. So it seems like the probabilities are not equal.