Hacker News: skygazer

New comment by skygazer in "Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'"

skygazer — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 23:12:00 +0000

Your text may well have been in the training corpus, but not searchable with whatever terms and search engine that LLM used after you prompted it. It doesn’t have recall of sources of documents comprising its training corpus, unless the source is widely cited in other of its training documents. Sourcing and provenance aren’t currently an intentional part of LLM training.

That may already have been obvious, and central to the complaint, but I was just knee-jerking to the anthropomorphic language.

New comment by skygazer in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"

skygazer — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:13:34 +0000

Do you mind excerpting the valid two paragraphs?

New comment by skygazer in "Trey Parker and Matt Stone Are Changing the Name of South Park to South America"

skygazer — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:43:59 +0000

Well, in fairness, both sides were bad, and still are -- although, now, one side is spectacularly worse. Dems can't ever agree on a candidate or position or message, and intentionally run candidates the otherside would abhore, and Republicans would happily vote in unison for an old shoe as long as it was sufficiently dog-whistley.

New comment by skygazer in "Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message"

skygazer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 19:23:20 +0000

It may be turtles all the way down, but we don't want to need to visit each tier, wading through obvious slop engineered for engagement as we go. The sloppiness reveals the low effort machinery meant to sap our vital attention and time. It's probably best to build a growing resistance to it.

New comment by skygazer in "Yes/No/Cancel causes Aspirin sales to soar (2007)"

skygazer — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 22:12:15 +0000

… but, a power power user would know that it was transparently saved every several keystrokes, even while named Untitled and ostensibly unsaved, ready for immediate transparent recovery on relaunch, after an app or system crash -- so they might again be okay with it.

New comment by skygazer in "I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me"

skygazer — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:30:32 +0000

Like an idiot, I once wrote a simple, internal, in memory chat room via web page at work. Because it let you pick a nickname, co-workers immediately gave themselves names of other employees and started sexually harassing each other and being asses. I pulled it down immediately before they got me fired. Anonymity does something to some people. They lurk among us biding their time, looking for any opportunity to be reputationally unrestrained.

New comment by skygazer in "Karpathy’s Pelican"

skygazer — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:42:09 +0000

You’re right. Modern frontier models are now multimodal. I used often as weak a hedge, because I know at least his gpt3.5 turbo and llama3.1 generated pelicans were from text only models without image training. The chinese models are interesting, because before their vision models existed they may have been distilling text only models from text output of American vision models, so they could have benefited from the teacher model’s vision capability without being vision models themselves.

New comment by skygazer in "Karpathy’s Pelican"

skygazer — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:19:54 +0000

At that rate you could use an image model, which was designed for the task. Thats the absurdity of this test. It’s often a text only generation model that has never seen a pelican, coerced into creating an xml graphical representation that a human might recognize. That it does anything passable is already astounding.

New comment by skygazer in "UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions"

skygazer — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:43:05 +0000

I think the evil part is the [at any cost] part, the incentives are irrelevant. An AI that only wants to make paperclips isn't evil because of the paperclips.

New comment by skygazer in "VMs can't boot with Network Mode set to Bridged on Apple M5 Pro machines"

skygazer — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:28:34 +0000

But, they were wrong ... in assuming what they were saying was at all relevant. And they were so sure they knew what they were talking about and that it applied that they dismissed all the ample evidence to the contrary and also dismissed the, they assumed, delusional people pointing out the contradictions. Their initial misunderstanding was understandable given the overloaded terms but their confidence was poorly calibrated to their weakness detecting the misunderstanding.

New comment by skygazer in "GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN"

skygazer — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:05:43 +0000

Wait, so it would have, ironically, been safer to allow microsoft telemetry to bypass the VPN entirely and remain associated only with their home network, because it's the phone home to microsoft tunneled through the VPN that tied together all their IP addresses to a single microsoft account. The GDID itself is almost a red herring, as it could have been a session id or username or something only long lived enough to appear comming from several ip addresses to windows update request?

New comment by skygazer in "Apple winding down iPhone Upgrade Program: report"

skygazer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:00:03 +0000

Oh, good. Maybe I can stop myself from mindlessly upgrading yearly which being on the original iPhone upgrade program makes too tempting and easy. I should be keeping phones two years so they can be family hand-me-downs, anyway.

New comment by skygazer in "CO2 overload in blood suggests toxic atmosphere within 50 years"

skygazer — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:43:59 +0000

It’s not clear if you’re commiserating with the comment you’re replying to, or lambasting its author.

New comment by skygazer in "The Doom Justifies the Valuation"

skygazer — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:25:57 +0000

https://archive.ph/UTcTa

New comment by skygazer in "Google workspace threatening to block Firefox access"

skygazer — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:41:58 +0000

Unrelated to Google Workspace and Firefox, but I just noticed today that Google’s YouTube now says my iPhone’s Safari browser is incapable of playing full screen videos, which it’s not ever claimed before. I’m also getting sick of them pushing Chrome anytime I use a Google service like search or Gmail. I keep dismissing the prompts, but they are relentless. It all seems so sleezy and desperate.

New comment by skygazer in "Apple unveils new accessibility features"

skygazer — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:02:54 +0000

I think their intent is actually safety. They employ two touch interaction models: Flexible while not moving and simplified while driving. For instance, keyboard input becomes unavailable while moving and you must rely on Siri. I personally find it irritating, particularly when I am a passenger, but I get it.

New comment by skygazer in "What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI?"

skygazer — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:36:42 +0000

People confabulate. The setup further invites it. We mindlessly fill voids and call it opinion, and occassionally even believe ourselves. "Plausibility" is a really low bar. Rigor is tiring and we'd rather not invest as no one demands it, anyway.

New comment by skygazer in "Is my blue your blue?"

skygazer — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:06:10 +0000

I'm not sure what's going on, but in Chrome my median point is heavily on the blue side but in Safari it's on the Green side. Also, at least in Safari, reset leads to a series of perceptually unchanging turquois screens -- it seems a bug. Refreshing fixes it for the next run.

New comment by skygazer in "Apple Store Union Staff at Closing Location Accuse Company of Retaliation"

skygazer — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:51:29 +0000

Not paywalled for me: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/apple-store...

New comment by skygazer in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

skygazer — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 23:51:32 +0000

Paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald? "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Holding contradictory ideas isn't the laudable skill. Any uncritical person can believe conflicting things without being troubled by them. The genius is holding such ideas in disbelief long enough to let evidence alter or evict them.