Hacker News: shoubidouwah

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts"

shoubidouwah — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:53:58 +0000

The fun thing is that IRL my elderly neighbour keeps sheep: he keeps adding higher fences, electric bands, a second dog... Every day he messages me about how this time he guarantees the beasties will stay in his pastures; and every morning I find them grazing in my arbour, having found yet another hole in the fence.

This is a true story, but may also be a fable.

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts"

shoubidouwah — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:08:27 +0000

"your sheep haven't escaped, you just built too low a fence"

New comment by shoubidouwah in "At least 10 people tied to sensitive US research have died or disappeared"

shoubidouwah — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:52:13 +0000

Nice writeup on the whole thing basically being hyped politically with actual nothing behind it https://unherd.com/2026/04/behind-the-disappearing-scientist...

Also ~10 in a year, modal age of established scientists + collaboration with us gov, the background rate is basically that... Basically a conspiracy theory at that point, and not even a good one.

New comment by shoubidouwah in "The universal weight subspace hypothesis"

shoubidouwah — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 10:40:58 +0000

and hope for a president that can do both

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Eating stinging nettles"

shoubidouwah — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 12:10:12 +0000

I eat them fairly often, but tend to get "nettle fatigue" quite early on due to their strong fishy smell - ammonia-like. Anyone got a recipe / way of getting past it, or masking it efficiently?

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists"

shoubidouwah — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 12:11:00 +0000

I am actually advacating for something different: I am not taking your money, I am saying after some level, what you accumulate is not - your kids - money. It realigns incentives (do something with it before you die), helps your kids (unearned weath corrupts, enormous unearned wealth corrupts enormously), and actually enables opportunities through investment and redistribution at a time when most people need something like a downpayment or school debt clearing.

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists"

shoubidouwah — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 12:06:36 +0000

I am talking inheritance, not weatlth tax, and have actually written I'm for reducing said taxes. you truly do not need the extra million when you're dead. Maybe read my comment again with more charity and re-engage?

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists"

shoubidouwah — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 12:04:23 +0000

it is already more or less the case, but I argue that it's for the benefit of the living holder, not the heirs. A lot of the incentives to have huge, untouched inheritances revolve around dynasty effects, exactly the kind of behaviour we want to curb.

I'd go further and say that "unearned wealth corrupts" is a well known effect, and (apart from the small subset of rich people who do not care about their kids corruption and intrinsic worth apart from them being the vehicle of their dinasty) we see that divestment into charity / foundations are the modern preferred way for inheritance management, both sparing the kids somewhat (being downgraded to a multimillionaire is not a hellish situation) and gifting them cultural influence. A sovereign fund could scratch that itch somewhat.

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists"

shoubidouwah — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 11:56:52 +0000

incentives. It's okay to be successful and enjoy the fruits of your wealth, and you want people to strive towards wealth. but transmission across generations is a true societal poison.

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists"

shoubidouwah — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 11:53:01 +0000

> I would also not trust the government or any political body to handle income from the inheritance taxes

thus the importance of the sovereign fund.

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists"

shoubidouwah — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:29:18 +0000

1) set a generous threshold over which your inheritance gets taxed, inflation adjusted (e.g, 2M not including the principal residence) 2) tax 100% above it. (should only concern a fraction of a fraction of cases) 3) put all this tax's proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund 4) at 21, a citizen gets access to her redistributed generational wealth 5) profit

New comment by shoubidouwah in "German government comes out against Chat Control"

shoubidouwah — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 18:55:35 +0000

This is actually one of my own fears for efficient organization at state level and above: - any new technology, any new opportunity either has checks and balances or gets exploited by smart optimizers with no regards for the commons or human flourishing - checks and balances are as you say a constant drain on public attention and resources: you need smart people doing the checking (finite resource), and receptive eyeballs (finite also) - it is thus an optimization problem. attack_surface - check_capacity = societal_explots I worry that the check_capacity term is constrained, but that the attack_surface keeps aexpanding with new technologies. At some point, we started playing whack a mole, frantically jumping from one check to another, and we're holding the fray stochastically. but at some point it's going to become extremely adversarial.

New comment by shoubidouwah in "David Lynch LA House"

shoubidouwah — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:37:13 +0000

> Too much land to manually manicure a lawn on top of > too little land for john deere to be of any practical help I feel you.

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Gene drive modified mosquitoes offer new tool for malaria elimination efforts"

shoubidouwah — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 12:12:08 +0000

Mosquito nets are best: put some as canopies above beds and enjoy sleeping without the dreaded ear buzz. If you live in a badly infested area, put them around doors / windows (there's retractable ones, you can fit them yourself). And finally, the superpower of just doing things: do some door to door / enlist your neighbors and hunt down the neighborhood stagnant waters.

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Ogres Are Cool"

shoubidouwah — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 21:04:58 +0000

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart is definitely one, as well as a bunch of the "big epics" like the Malazan empire / The annals of the Black Company?

It may be less common than "high castles", but that is either because of opportunity cost (non-special characters do not survive well this kind of world, so their stories are either short or picaresque) or feature creep if they start from the bottom: if you want an uplifting tale, upwards mobility is needed and at some point only the king is up...

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Discworld Rules"

shoubidouwah — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 13:23:57 +0000

A good refresher on deterrence seems necessary here. https://www.ndc.nato.int/news/news.php?icode=1570 There's a very real, game theoretic reason why nuclear riposte is fully automated with no way for even commanders to cancel. A rogue actor _menacing_ nuclear attack as a tool of invasion and war of aggression is an obvious case study for this.

And finally: "We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Ukraine win the war" is foremost in russian minds, no?

New comment by shoubidouwah in "Cautious Optimizers: Improving Training with One Line of Code"

shoubidouwah — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 21:17:51 +0000

I wonder if there mioght not be an opportunity for a warmup based mask inversion: for the first few epoches, only apply the momentum agreeing with instantaneous - after that, invert it since the momentum would technically have more info?

In any case, good idea - reminds me of the "apply same gradient multiple times" trick from a few years ago. May have weird behaviours at low batch sizes though...

New comment by shoubidouwah in "GPT-4.5"

shoubidouwah — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 22:00:59 +0000

TBH, with the safety/alignment paradigm we have, workforce replacement was not my top concern when we hit AGI. A pause / lull in capabilities would be hugely helpful so that we can figure how not to die along with the lightcone...

New comment by shoubidouwah in "The internet is already over (2022)"

shoubidouwah — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 21:39:14 +0000

I think you're right on the crux, with a qualification: every argument has already been made in one form or another - the underlying universal concepts are not that complex. the talent of a writer is to present it in a manner congruent with the geography/times. Isn't vacuity when speaking in pure style, but in a style that itself acts as a mirror to the zeitgeist, a valuable tool for thinkers? A frame, a kind of meta-thought?

New comment by shoubidouwah in "The internet is already over (2022)"

shoubidouwah — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 20:59:04 +0000

It also was how N. saw his thoughts at times. An evidence, disgraced for being explained. And stylistic flamboyance around a theme is hardly foreign to philosophers, this one in particular (any chapter of Zarathustra can be read as a blog post in the same way).

I still advocate that style - and being drunk with style - can lead the writer to singularly original and contemporaneous ideas. Language is a dynamic object, filled with the spirit of the age, and very high sensitivity to it within a philosophical context can act as a catalyst.