Hacker News: quirkot

New comment by quirkot in "Cambodia unveils a statue of famous landmine-sniffing rat Magawa"

quirkot — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:14:34 +0000

Magawa cleared 1,517,711 sq.ft of land. He could work at a pace of 2,808 sq.ft (a doubles tennis court) every 20 minutes. If he maintained that pace, he worked 180.2 hours. Let's assume, with hazardous terrain, he worked 25% that speed on average. If that's the case he worked ~720 hours during a 5-6 year career. A different rat, Ronin, that found more stuff found a total of 124 explosive devices. So Magawa found no more than 1 explosive for every 5 hours and 45 minutes of searching. Or approximately one device every 17.25 tennis courts of searching.

Real needle in a haystack stuff, wow

New comment by quirkot in "“Collaboration” is bullshit"

quirkot — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:06:43 +0000

Money is the sledgehammer of incentives. Above a reasonable amount of pay, it's overkill and makes lots of collateral problems. The really effective incentives are status based and situational to the group dynamic

New comment by quirkot in "Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"

quirkot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:23:28 +0000

i just actually read that and it is possibly the most morally abominable screed I've come across in a long time. Shocking that its acceptable to share in polite company

New comment by quirkot in "Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"

quirkot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:12:47 +0000

observation a: Document title is about a minority's rightful supremacy

observation b: document says "this is not political" then dives into persuasive speech

conclusion: this document was written by the bad guys

New comment by quirkot in "Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"

quirkot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:35:17 +0000

You're limiting the frame to an employment situation. Higher quality sources of knowledge are free: Wikipedia, public libraries, etc. Similar quality sources of information are also free: human relationships.

New comment by quirkot in "Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"

quirkot — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:44:07 +0000

counterpoint: if I have to treat the computer like a person, what's the point of talking to a computer in the first place? Particularly when there are so many other systems that can provide answers without the runaround

New comment by quirkot in "The political effects of X's feed algorithm"

quirkot — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:46:32 +0000

Train the algorithm so that you can be the sort of product you want to see in the world

New comment by quirkot in "The political effects of X's feed algorithm"

quirkot — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:45:21 +0000

the issue brought up in the article isn't that "the algorithm is biased" but that "the algorithm causes bias". A feed could perfectly alternate between position A and position B and show no bias at all, but still select more incendiary content on topic A and drive bias towards or away from it.

New comment by quirkot in "AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it"

quirkot — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:50:15 +0000

Sounds a lot like Marx's theory of alienation

New comment by quirkot in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

quirkot — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 03:59:48 +0000

What? A pump and dump scheme? I am shocked I tell you, shocked

New comment by quirkot in "Parental controls aren't for parents"

quirkot — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 20:07:51 +0000

>> Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?

Yes, absolutely. 29 separate overlapping settings likely match up precisely to arguments in various APIs that are used. On the other hand, what does local only even mean? No wifi? No hardwired connection? LAN only? Connection to the internet for system updates but not marketplace? Something else? All with a specified outcome that requires different implementation depending on hardware version and needs to be tweaked everytime dependencies change.

New comment by quirkot in "I am just sooo sick of AI prediction content, let's kill it already"

quirkot — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:36:22 +0000

I think he's trying to differentiate himself from all the people who are not AI engineers

New comment by quirkot in "Microplastics: No longer a "maybe""

quirkot — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 21:35:46 +0000

it took me a minute to parse that sentence also. They are saying that health tissue makes up < 100% of the body, but that microplastics can be found in a full 100% of the body (healthy and non-healthy). Therefore microplastic prevalence > healthy tissue. It's saying that there is no part of the body that isn't impacted

New comment by quirkot in "What if hard work felt easier?"

quirkot — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:06:06 +0000

I'm not trying to throw shade, but the approach as described is very short sighted.

> That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build

Well, yes. That's the fun part. The hard part is the "bug fixes on that community library site you built 8 years ago, has 2k loyal users, and will never make you a dime."

This approach, as liberating as it feels, only makes the "who fixes the toilets for the utopia" problem harder.

New comment by quirkot in "The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership"

quirkot — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:35:14 +0000

The "G" part of AGI implies it should be able to hit all the arbitrary yard sticks

New comment by quirkot in "I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'"

quirkot — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 19:13:35 +0000

Not to be rude, but... uh... did your step mom steal your identity and use it for stuff? Minors are huge targets for that sort of stuff because generally no one is checking a 10 year old's credit

New comment by quirkot in "They Don't Have the Money: OpenAI Edition"

quirkot — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:58:33 +0000

Anyone with a Bloomberg terminal able to run how much free cash the top X companies in the fortune 500 generate? The amount of capital OpenAI is describing have to be a material % of all cash generated each year over the next 5 years.

New comment by quirkot in "Calculator Forensics (2002)"

quirkot — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:12:39 +0000

I always wonder... if there was an AGI and it's chipset gave the wrong answer, how would it ever know?

New comment by quirkot in "AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser"

quirkot — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 20:38:08 +0000

I'd never buy anything as overt as an advertisement in an AI tool. I just want to buy influence. Just coincidentally use my product as the example. Just suggest my preferred technology when asked a few % more often than my competitors. I'd never want someone to observe me pulling the strings

New comment by quirkot in "Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions"

quirkot — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 21:27:56 +0000

> In principle, good looks, oratory eloquence, a charming personality, well-connectedness, and personal wealth are not particularly useful to creating and executing government policy.

This ignores the fact that "getting people to agree to the policy" is, in fact, extremely important and highly dependent on charisma, eloquence, and the ability to identify and form influential connections. This position imagines human politics devoid of politics and humans.