Hacker News: randcraw

New comment by randcraw in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

randcraw — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:48:44 +0000

I'm reading Paul Theroux's "True North", on his recent tour of Canada, the country of his birth. Now 84, he claims it will be his last travel book.

Just finished Jill Lepore's "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" -- a history of the popular fascination (esp. among idealistic tech types) for ending human-based governance and replacing it with computer automation (esp. via AI). I appreciated her coverage of the rise more than her case for the fall.

New comment by randcraw in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

randcraw — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:20:33 +0000

IMHO, audiobooks <--> podcasts. The act of reading is unique, unlike any other medium.

New comment by randcraw in "Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'"

randcraw — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:19:02 +0000

Don't agree. If you know no facts, you'll be unable to think even the most basic thoughts. The more you know, the deeper your thinking can be as well as the more subtle.

For every fact you learn there is a necessary context and numerous exceptions when it's applied in other contexts. If you expect AI to spit all relevant facts at you every time you're clueless, you will have no idea when AI is wrong or lying. You will have to trust everything AI (or its owner) tells you.

The Frontier Act Is Congress' Best AI Regulation Bill Yet

randcraw — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:13:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thefai.org/posts/the-frontier-act-is-congress-s-best-ai-bill-yet

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727358

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

AI Safety Requires More Than Just Slowing Our Pace – Stuart Russell

randcraw — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:56:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/15/ai-safety-requirements

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715382

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by randcraw in "Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?"

randcraw — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:49:11 +0000

I get reCaptchaed-to-death all the time in iOS and MacOS using both Firefox and Brave. I use a big name VPN which probably makes it worse, since I'm routinely blocked outright by Cloudfare services, assuming cluelessly that I'm a bot.

New comment by randcraw in "A mysterious kidney disease has arrived in Texas"

randcraw — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 11:52:47 +0000

It turns out that some foods counteract the formation of kidney stones. If you drink milk when you eat oxalates, the oxalates will not fuse into stones and will be excreted normally in your urine.

Oxalates are present in tea too, though not coffee, IIRC.

New comment by randcraw in "The turbulent AI era is here"

randcraw — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:23:44 +0000

And there were an unimaginable number of tax loopholes available back then that ultimately reduced the individual tax rate enormously. You just had to reinvest your income in a multitude of increasingly bizarre tax dodges devised by increasingly byzantine tax laws.

New comment by randcraw in "To become a better writer, read as much as you can"

randcraw — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:54:23 +0000

I think reading short stories is a great way to develop both writing and storytelling skills. A SS compresses the storyline and character development into a more palatable and succinct morsel than can a full-sized book. And the brevity of SSs should make them more digestible.

Classic literature was written in an era when readers had more patience and fewer distractions than today. But classic short stories should offer the best of those, IMO, better-written times: more thoughtful exposition in fewer words.

New comment by randcraw in "Digging the grave of my skills: Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs"

randcraw — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 16:22:49 +0000

AI-cloned shows will suffer on day #1 what the original show suffered after the 5th year or so -- the plausible and original plot lines have been used up. So the AI-gen story lines will be implausible or derivative copies of familiar plots from the original series or other shows.

New comment by randcraw in "Digging the grave of my skills: Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs"

randcraw — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 16:09:31 +0000

"The Machine-Made Muse" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM4xISBsUcY

Only Data looks and sounds fully 'natural' in this 10 minute clip of STTNG, but it nicely demonstrates the imminent plausibility of synthetic TV / film. And its affordability.

Feed it a handful of short stories and you can automate the creation of an entire TV series.

New comment by randcraw in "Don't Paste the AI, please"

randcraw — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:36:57 +0000

> Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy.

I can't imagine why. You have become a robot. You've automated yourself out of existence. And due to your consistently mindless replies, everyone now knows there's no point in talking to you ever again.

How is that healthy?

New comment by randcraw in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

randcraw — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:18:38 +0000

Agreed. When tools evolve significantly the old production process has to be reworked into a new process and that takes time. In complex production lines that will include changes to subcontracting, supply chains, and even finance models. The changes arising in software production today will take years to stabilize into a new normal, even longer if the tools continue to advance in capability as LLMs are doing. And many software-dependent companies will fail in that time for moving either too fast, too slow, or most likely, too short-sightedly.

New comment by randcraw in "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"

randcraw — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:39:17 +0000

Or you could just submit a photo of someone else's poodle.

New comment by randcraw in "US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers"

randcraw — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:08:10 +0000

In the late 1960s daily TV news coverage revealed the horrors of war to the American public as never before (just as Brady's photos had done in the Civil War). That palpable gruesomeness was instrumental in the rising tide of unpopularity enjoyed by the war (and Johnson) by the elections of 1968.

New comment by randcraw in "US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers"

randcraw — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:57:56 +0000

Emergency is the mother of making exceptions. During both US gulf wars, the army broke from its long tradition of over-regulating new systems before they could be fielded, especially for small semi-autonomous platforms like flying drones and robots. Entirely new systems as well as major updates to fielded system were routinely prototyped in-country / on-the-battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan. The demand for new capabilities and fixes was simply too great not to ship ASAP.

New comment by randcraw in "Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google"

randcraw — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:48:47 +0000

I look forward to following this issue. We're at an inflection point in AI adoption where, for some uses, it _must_ be trustworthy. Failure to stick to the facts must doom it for such uses until its wild hair reliably and accountably can be tamed.

New comment by randcraw in "U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators"

randcraw — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:44:08 +0000

I think you would most certainly NOT prefer any Constitution, nor especially any Bill of Rights, that was rewritten by today's version of "We the People".

New comment by randcraw in "Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation"

randcraw — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:19:51 +0000

> It’s crazy how much worse Google search results are now than they used to be.

I could not agree more. Each time I do a google search, I feel like I've stepped into a severe reality distortion field. The results are simply WORTHLESS. It's not just that the AI summary at the top answers the wrong question, but the sequence of hits thereafter wander off into the weeds almost immediately. I routinely have to constrain the search in multiple ways (time bounds, specific word rejection, etc) just to get one or two relevant hits.

Frankly, I think I'm going to have to MOVE AWAY FROM GOOGLE to a subscription-based search service just to get any useful search results again.

New comment by randcraw in "Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation"

randcraw — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:06:09 +0000

Present generations see the primary role for AI as being identical to the biggest disruption to US business in the past century — namely the gigantic sucking sound from the outsourcing of millions of US jobs in order to reduce labor costs. Of course they're terrified of it. By singing its praises AND IGNORING THAT CONCERN, Schmidt showed that he couldn't be more out of touch with the top priority of this generation — WILL AI TAKE MY JOB?

It's like Steve Forbes cluelessly joking that rise of Private Equity will make it easier for the unemployed to buy another racehorse. WTF?