Hacker News: rel_ic

New comment by rel_ic in "Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms"

rel_ic — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:56:06 +0000

Being on "social media" is a fundamentally unsocial activity: you do it alone, it makes you lonely, and it separates you from others. Some people manage to bootstrap a social layer on top of the base medium, but most are being driven apart for profit.

I call it _anti_social media.

New comment by rel_ic in "We might all be AI engineers now"

rel_ic — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:39:42 +0000

This is kind of like saying a kid can never become a better programmer than the average of his teachers.

IMHO, the reasons not to use AI are social, not logical.

New comment by rel_ic in "I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported"

rel_ic — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:11:00 +0000

Ditto. AI has the power to make you believe stuff without you noticing, why would they bother with garish ads when they could make you think it was YOUR idea to buy Chlorox?

I guess maybe the garish colors could increase your suggestibility indirectly maybe?

New comment by rel_ic in "LLM=True"

rel_ic — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:57:47 +0000

> The environment wins (less tokens burned = less energy consumed)

This is understandable logic, but at a systemic level it's not how things always go. Increasing efficiency can lead to increased consumption overall. You might save 50% in energy for your workload, but maybe now you can run it 3 times as much, or maybe 3 times more people will use it, because it's cheaper. The result might be a 50% INCREASE in energy consumed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

New comment by rel_ic in "Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986"

rel_ic — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:27:47 +0000

What I want is for THIS to stop. "Listen, no one wants to hear about your moral issues, just stfu."

Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.

New comment by rel_ic in "Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL"

rel_ic — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:00:31 +0000

We need your help! Can you please use your creativity to build resilience to climate change in your community instead of experimenting with more ways to spend computing power?

New comment by rel_ic in "To AI or not to AI"

rel_ic — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 15:27:55 +0000

Using AI to improve facebook ads... y'all are the breakers from the Dark Tower series.

New comment by rel_ic in "I got the highest score on ARC-AGI again swapping Python for English"

rel_ic — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:23:17 +0000

People who know alcohol is bad for them and don't want to keep being drunks but keep drinking, people who believe phones are bad for their kids but still buy them, people who understand AI will significantly degrade the environment if it becomes ubiquitous but still work to help it become ubiquitous...

Mathematicians who publish proofs that are later proven inconsistent!

I suspect we have fundamentally different views of how humans work. I see our behavior and beliefs as _mostly_ irrational, with only a few "reasoning live-zones" where, with great effort, we can achieve logical thought.

New comment by rel_ic in "I got the highest score on ARC-AGI again swapping Python for English"

rel_ic — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 11:11:32 +0000

> we can apply the rule, "-A cannot follow from A", etc. regardless of the A

You can't think of any domains where we are unable to apply this rule? I feel like I'm surrounded by people claiming "A, therefore -A!!"

And if I'm one of them, and this were a reasoning dead-zone for me, I wouldn't be able to tell!

New comment by rel_ic in "The future is not self-hosted"

rel_ic — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 22:45:26 +0000

You should go talk to your librarians, you can totally influence all these things!

New comment by rel_ic in "The future is not self-hosted"

rel_ic — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 21:10:53 +0000

I totally agree. I see this "people don't want to do hard stuff" argument used all over - completely disregarding tens of thousands of years of people doing hard stuff.

It comes off to me as the author not wanting to do the hard stuff of working towards their values. Just kind of defeatist and trying to make a splash but leaning on a pretty weak premise.

New comment by rel_ic in "The future is not self-hosted"

rel_ic — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 21:07:19 +0000

> Either you own and control something, or you do not, there's no third option.

I think there's a full spectrum you're missing. You can own something with other people, and your level of control can be continuous, not discrete & binary. For example, my public library is funded by my local government, which I can influence with lobbying and voting. I can join the board of the library, and I can just go and talk to the librarians in charge to influence their decisions.

In an individualist consumerist mindset things are pretty stark : full self-hosting or full submission. If you reject that mindset there are many more options.

New comment by rel_ic in "An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education"

rel_ic — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:00:27 +0000

Energy doesn't disappear, but obviously it moves from useful forms to unuseful forms. Same with water. Your sarcasm just comes off as naive arrogance.

New comment by rel_ic in "Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system"

rel_ic — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 13:39:17 +0000

Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment.

Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.

https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...

New comment by rel_ic in "Meta: Shut down your invasive AI Discover feed"

rel_ic — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:21:35 +0000

Yeah, it's a tradeoff. I don't mean to be glib, but on one side we have a loneliness epidemic, mass misinformation campaigns, and centralized control, and on the other side we have better information about restaurants, easier after-school arrangements, and community blogs. I really don't mean to say that the benefits are not real benefits - they are! I just think their price is way too high.

New comment by rel_ic in "Meta: Shut Down Your Invasive AI Discover Feed. Now"

rel_ic — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:19:08 +0000

People in my community are bragging about getting off social media - it's like a new status symbol around here.

New comment by rel_ic in "Meta: Shut down your invasive AI Discover feed"

rel_ic — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 16:18:20 +0000

I want to push back on this narrative - I got off facebook and now my friends just text me instead. A few of my friends also got off facebook. Sometimes I can't see a facebook event so I text a friend asking for details. It's fine.

New comment by rel_ic in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

rel_ic — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:56:46 +0000

This mindset is cancerous

New comment by rel_ic in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

rel_ic — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:55:41 +0000

Thanks for posting this! I was also flabbergasted and it's nice to see at least one mention of the huge environmental impact!

New comment by rel_ic in "What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours"

rel_ic — Thu, 29 May 2025 15:42:04 +0000

I assume that we are neurons in a bigger brain that already exists!

I started down this belief system with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach