Hacker News: sbdaman

Ontario university sues YouTube prankster for viral videos filmed on campus

sbdaman — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:28:28 +0000

Article URL: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/ontario-university-going-after-youtube-prankster-for-viral-videos-filmed-on-campus

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48208457

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by sbdaman in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

sbdaman — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:05:44 +0000

It's because he's not a philosopher and is wading into a long-standing philosophical debate and hand-waving away all the actual issues in contention.

New comment by sbdaman in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

sbdaman — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:04:48 +0000

Physicist writing on the hard problem of consciousness. It's like a caricature of annoying physicists.

New comment by sbdaman in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

sbdaman — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:55:35 +0000

It predicts what you are going to type as you type. It has a tendency to add words to the end of a message when you hit send.

New comment by sbdaman in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

sbdaman — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:20:28 +0000

Keep autocorrect on and turn off predictive text. Makes the experience way better.

New comment by sbdaman in "Ask HN: Weird archive.today behavior?"

sbdaman — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 04:36:30 +0000

Given it's set to generate random pages on the site, is there even any possible explanation for this that isn't sketchy?

The American Kitchen: How It Became What It Is Today (Gift Article)

sbdaman — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:55:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/21/realestate/kitchen-design-trends-history.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024989

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by sbdaman in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

sbdaman — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:21:20 +0000

I've shared this on YN before but I'm a big fan of this piece by Kenneth Taylor (well, an essay pieced together from his lectures).

The Robots Are Coming

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/kenneth-taylor-robots-...

"However exactly you divide up the AI landscape, it is important to distinguish what I call AI-as-engineering from what I call AI-as-cognitive-science. AI-as-engineering isn’t particularly concerned with mimicking the precise way in which the human mind-brain does distinctively human things. The strategy of engineering machines that do things that are in some sense intelligent, even if they do what they do in their own way, is a perfectly fine way to pursue artificial intelligence. AI-as-cognitive science, on the other hand, takes as its primary goal that of understanding and perhaps reverse engineering the human mind.

[...]

One reason for my own skepticism is the fact that in recent years the AI landscape has come to be progressively more dominated by AI of the newfangled 'deep learning' variety [...] But if it’s really AI-as-cognitive science that you are interested in, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that it may take a bit more than our cool new deep learning hammer to build a humanlike mind.

[...]

If I am right that there are many mysteries about the human mind that currently dominant approaches to AI are ill-equipped to help us solve, then to the extent that such approaches continue to dominate AI into the future, we are very unlikely to be inundated anytime soon with a race of thinking robots—at least not if we mean by “thinking” that peculiar thing that we humans do, done in precisely the way that we humans do it."

New comment by sbdaman in "How to Firefox"

sbdaman — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 13:52:05 +0000

>but when you multiply it, it becomes significant.

Does it?

New comment by sbdaman in "Bangladesh imposes curfew after dozens killed in anti-government protests"

sbdaman — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 16:02:52 +0000

There is also a widespread cellular outage. It's very, very difficult (near impossible) to reach anyone in the country right now.

Anatomy of a Murder

sbdaman — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 13:18:18 +0000

Article URL: https://magazine.atavist.com/anatomy-of-a-murder-grand-marais-minnesota-larry-scully-levi-axtell/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40865695

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

We Are Who We Eat With: Food, Distinction, and Commensality

sbdaman — Tue, 21 May 2024 18:20:47 +0000

Article URL: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/we-are-who-we-eat-with/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431915

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by sbdaman in "Amazon's "Just Walk Out" checkout turns out to be 1000 workers watching you shop"

sbdaman — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 20:10:38 +0000

The title here suggests they're watching you shop and entering items into a list as you go (which would be ridiculous). It seems to actually just be low-paid workers spot checking to ensure the "algorithm" got it right?

New comment by sbdaman in "For Car Thieves, Toronto Is a 'Candy Store,' and Drivers Are Fed Up"

sbdaman — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 14:27:27 +0000

Sorry?

New comment by sbdaman in "Small biz owners scale back their office space or go remote altogether"

sbdaman — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 21:25:12 +0000

Never thought I'd see CP24 on HN

New comment by sbdaman in "Show HN: Bernard – a link checker for your website"

sbdaman — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 19:23:43 +0000

For fun: run your local government's site through this.

New comment by sbdaman in "Flipper Zero: Multi-Tool Device for Geeks"

sbdaman — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 15:48:43 +0000

You can buy a Roku remote for like $5.

New comment by sbdaman in "The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)"

sbdaman — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 16:47:13 +0000

Surprisingly nice website.

New comment by sbdaman in "Every single Onewheel is being recalled after four deaths"

sbdaman — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 21:23:07 +0000

What the hell is a Chief Evangelist?

New comment by sbdaman in "Hackers can get your IP through Skype by just sending a link, no click required"

sbdaman — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 16:03:41 +0000

Yeah. If you were decently high ranked in any popular video game at the time, you had to make sure you didn't share a username between Skype/the game, or you'd be DDOSed endlessly.