Hacker News: qznc

New comment by qznc in "Butlerian Jihad"

qznc — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 09:40:29 +0000

With the current technology, “rebellion” feels like the wrong word. The paperclip optimizer does not “rebel” as it turns humanity into paperclips.

New comment by qznc in "Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking?"

qznc — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:14:24 +0000

Well, there is the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) which fines manufacturers for security flaws in their products. I assume we cannot apply it here because this happened "in development" and is not about a product. I can imagine similar regulations for AI users though.

New comment by qznc in "No portable way to detect string-to-float conversion errors in standard C"

qznc — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 08:37:40 +0000

I would not describe exceptions as return values. Speaking in a C context, exceptions are more like "longjmp" than "return".

New comment by qznc in "Triple-A Minesweeper"

qznc — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 10:05:22 +0000

The "vi" game was really weird though.

New comment by qznc in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

qznc — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:36:42 +0000

They can coordinate in the open. For example, safety regulation in the automotive industry is effectively self-regulation.

New comment by qznc in "Claude Haiku 5.5"

qznc — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:05:03 +0000

Higher intelligence than any human.

AGI (general) is about matching humans and ASI (super) is about surpassing humans.

New comment by qznc in "Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI"

qznc — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:03:23 +0000

Only if all money is equal. Budgets in big enterprises work differently.

New comment by qznc in "Web Search API"

qznc — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:05:55 +0000

Not quite sure how to measure it exactly, but 4GB seems to the rough answer:

4.1G ~/.config/hister/

3.1G ~/.config/hister/data/

New comment by qznc in "Web Search API"

qznc — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:57:51 +0000

I'm not using MCP. Mostly, it's via lynx -dump, so websites often block my agent because its a bot.

New comment by qznc in "Web Search API"

qznc — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:34:13 +0000

Yes, I browse around, open a dozen tabs so they get indexed, and close them without reading. Then a coding agent is pretty good in composing a report from that index. Generated these recently: https://qznc.github.io/sloppy_research/en/

Hister tells me my index is currently 39208 pages.

New comment by qznc in "Web Search API"

qznc — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:21:03 +0000

My coding agent uses the hister cli, i.e. a local index. That often requires me to seed it manually as a downside. The upside is that it caches website contents via browser plugin, which is a nice workaround for bot blocking.

Thanks asciimoo for https://github.com/asciimoo/hister

New comment by qznc in "Powerless F1 drivers frustrated by Bahrain F1 software glitch"

qznc — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:51:29 +0000

It is big difference if a "one in a million" bug is deployed to two vehicles or a million vehicles.

New comment by qznc in "Nearly 200 people under observation after Irkutsk lab worker dies from plague"

qznc — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 05:16:13 +0000

I believe it was zoonosis, not a lab leak: https://marketwise.substack.com/p/did-covid-19-come-from-a-l...

New comment by qznc in "LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents"

qznc — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 09:53:47 +0000

We have this story about OpenAI hacking HuggingFace. Now just imagine the AI finds a Bitcoin wallet or bank account access. It uses that to buy some compute and spawn an independent "child AI" with some weird prompt. The child AI is intelligent enough to create a (potentially criminal) business to pay for its own compute. Voila, an independent uncontrolled AI flying under the radar.

New comment by qznc in "Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety"

qznc — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:41:05 +0000

Sure, I once write that companies are artificial intelligence and it still feels true: https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/companies_are_ai.html

New comment by qznc in "Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety"

qznc — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:25:05 +0000

The bad part is that it does not require a collective decision. It just takes a few key people.

Some OpenAI researchers neglected their sandbox safety for a few weeks/months and thus hacked HuggingFace. Maybe eventually that is sufficient for the AI to secretly buy its own compute and keep running there even if the researchers shut it down in their lab.

New comment by qznc in "Gambling with our lives: AI researcher quits Anthropic with warning about safety"

qznc — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 10:16:04 +0000

The classic thought experiment is the paper clip optimizer. Quoting Nick Bostrom:

> Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/artificial-intelligence-oxfor...

New comment by qznc in "OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem"

qznc — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:01:19 +0000

I would assume they spent similar amounts on the other Millennium problems too. Also, they probably tried it before with older models.

New comment by qznc in "Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?"

qznc — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:50:52 +0000

We have an ongoing discussion and some fans of https://microsoft.github.io/apm/

Because it's from Microsoft and sounds sufficiently enterprisey probably.

New comment by qznc in "How I feel about AI"

qznc — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:20:21 +0000

Yudkowsky / MIRI can be found here: https://intelligence.org/the-problem/