Hacker News: space_fountain

New comment by space_fountain in "Stop Advertising in Your Commits"

space_fountain — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:16:10 +0000

I see this really confidently stated, but when I looked into it the exact line is very blurry. It is still possible that writing a prompt is enough creative input for copyright to be granted. What has been decided is you can't have your artwork copyrighted by the AI that produced it, but that isn't quite the same as AI writing not being copyrighted

https://sites.usc.edu/iptls/2025/02/04/ai-copyright-and-the-...

New comment by space_fountain in "OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool"

space_fountain — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:01:34 +0000

This isn't DRM right? This is metadata attached to the image that makes it clear it was synthetically generated. The public has a huge incentive to know when images are AI generated and the harm to legitimate users seems pretty small: aka someone might complain online that you use AI

New comment by space_fountain in "F-35 is built for the wrong war"

space_fountain — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:15:01 +0000

I mean we haven't had major power conflict in 50 years and they haven't seemed very useful in Ukraine

New comment by space_fountain in "F-35 is built for the wrong war"

space_fountain — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:14:20 +0000

Yes, I am interested in understanding why this is hard

New comment by space_fountain in "F-35 is built for the wrong war"

space_fountain — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:36:52 +0000

Why not? It's not exactly hard? The exact capabilities aren't public, but there are companies that provide daily synthetic radar captures for the whole globe and similarly companies that do this for imagery. It would take ages but I think you and I could both right an algorithm to classify if an image or high map has an aircraft carrier in it? Even if you can't get data for the whole globe taking a photo of a 10 mile of ocean every 10 minutes and shifting the center based on where a boat isn't hard. There aren't that many aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers and tanks are both capable machines built and designed for a different environment than we have now. They can still be useful. Most countries don't have the ability to image the whole globe or lob weapons across an ocean, but I'm pretty skeptical they'd survive long in a war with say China

New comment by space_fountain in "F-35 is built for the wrong war"

space_fountain — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:22:21 +0000

Some quick Googling implies China has satellites capable of tracking shipping via radar from geostationary orbit. I'm not really convinced that aircraft carriers can hide these days?

New comment by space_fountain in "The beginning of scarcity in AI"

space_fountain — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:57:49 +0000

I just mean is the claim that the open source models where the closed models were 12 to 6 months ago true? They do seem to be for some specific tasks which is cool, but they seem even more uneven in skills than the frontier model. They're definitely useful tools, but I'm not sure if they're a match for frontier models from a year ago?

New comment by space_fountain in "The beginning of scarcity in AI"

space_fountain — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:06:28 +0000

I've seen this claimed, but I'm not sure it's been true for my use cases? I should try a more involved analysis but so far open models seem much less even in their skills. I think this makes sense if a lot of them are built based on distillations of larger models. It seems likely that with task specific fine tuning this is true?

New comment by space_fountain in "Got kicked out of uni and had the cops called for a social media website I made"

space_fountain — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:16:42 +0000

I don't think this person belongs in prison, but the internet also isn't the place it was in 2004? You do bear responsibility for what you do online, and this was irresponsible. We should encourage kids and others to experiment and make mistakes, but the kid shouldn't have put up this website and should have taken it down as a responsible member of the community

New comment by space_fountain in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

space_fountain — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:59:13 +0000

I've tried to use langchain. It seemed to force code into their way of doing things and was deeply opinionated about things that didn't matter like prompt templating. Maybe it's improved since then, but I've sort of used people who think langchain is good as a proxy for people who haven't used much ai?

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:38:21 +0000

My view is that testosterone is a reasonable thing to discriminate on because:

1. It is causally connected to primary and secondary sex characteristics

2. It has a large impact on performance in many sports

3. It's easy to explain to most people and somewhat matches people's intuitions around fairness

But, yes, it is true that there are cis women with high T levels and it is somewhat unfair and arbitrary to include them when not excluding other random advantages that people have. I'm just not sure if I have a better solution

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 03:54:55 +0000

I said "Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt"

That was trying to elaborate on citruscomputing's argument where they said "Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care."

I'm rephrasing those two points. Apologies if I initially described that badly, but I'm just restating the perverse incentive they were talking about

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 03:03:38 +0000

Nope, I’m consistently saying the same thing. When have I said something else?

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:56:52 +0000

Again I don’t take it be saying that. It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic so we should require hrt so that elite sport doesn’t require trans women to skip hrt

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:53:41 +0000

No, but that’s not what the statement is saying. It’s arguing that we should add the minimum restrictions we can to the women’s sports category and that hormones might be a reasonable one

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:52:35 +0000

I’m not defending this definition, but I will point out that gender has never been about the chromosomes you were born with. It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.

Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.

I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:17:06 +0000

I think not many people are arguing that we shouldn’t exclude people based on testosterone in elite events, but none of these were trans women, these were all women who lived their entire lives as women from the moment they were born

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:14:20 +0000

It’s interesting how the evidence based analysis switched as soon as the republicans came into power. Maybe this is less about evidence and more about opinion actually?

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:13:09 +0000

When I’ve researched this it’s turned out that among elite athletes it tended to be a bit higher since some of these intersex conditions can confer benefits

New comment by space_fountain in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

space_fountain — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:10:14 +0000

I read the statement as follows:

There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.

Sports should only be segregated by this category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt

I’m unclear on what you find absurd about this?