Hacker News: sriram_malhar

New comment by sriram_malhar in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

sriram_malhar — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:15:18 +0000

No. Quite the contrary. We are the 'tools' and we have been used skillfully.

The few AI companies have slurped up so much of human textual and artistic creation without attribution. They have taken enormous amounts of money from the public directly or indirectly and funneled it upwards to a few dangerous individuals.

When you say AI, learn to say "AI companies".

New comment by sriram_malhar in "AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons"

sriram_malhar — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:54:27 +0000

"Fame only has utility so long as it gets you paid"

Fame can have many good reasons. Just feeling the warm glow of adulation is plenty enough for some.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Seeing Circles, Sines, and Signals"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:16:39 +0000

Beautiful presentation!

New comment by sriram_malhar in "AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:24:28 +0000

There was a level of patent/copyright protection, there was a level of awareness of stealing, a company could be taken to a court of law. A writer of a PhD thesis could show that someone lifted huge parts of a dissertation without attribution. All that is gone.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:17:22 +0000

Why do we need more? Why is that not a big enough reason.

If a modern-day Beethoven were told that his work will be slurped in by a machine and he will remain unknown to the world, would it be acceptable to him? To you?

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Chopping up books when they're physically too big"

sriram_malhar — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 03:10:57 +0000

I just did this for the first time.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:20:05 +0000

C'mon, you know better than to invoke a slippery slope.

My best move is to influence the people I care about to reduce dependence on these things and seek happiness in non-tech things (where tech is defined as those controlled by corporations), from community, live life from first principles. You are forcing me to answer a strange binary ... propose a fix for the world at large, or let me continue with all this shit. The world isn't as black and white.

Anyway, I'm done with this thread.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:35:29 +0000

Constraints are a good thing. I'll get creative with what I have, instead of having to rely on a supply chain that makes everything available to everybody all the time. I don't have to have apples grown on the other side of the planet.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:15:59 +0000

It isn't just AI. I would like a world without the poison of social media, without guns & bombs, without dangerous chemicals. Yes, in many many ways we'd be better off. We are accelerating the destruction of our planet.

I don't have a better plan for humanity. I only have fear.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:08:56 +0000

You can look up laws all night long. Check out all the laws broken by Potus, ICE (just to name a few) on a daily basis.

The peasantry is not on the side that enforces the law. AI is. AI is a force multiplier. The more force you have, the more multiples of it you en up with. Flock uses AI to do surveillance at scale. Every cloud service has NSA backdoors.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:08:20 +0000

You do realize that the same powers that have bred fascism and mandatory id requirement are hand in glove with the AI oligarchs, no? They gain with rampant use of AI disproportionately more than the peasant.

The peasantry stands no chance. Unless there is a French Revolution style uprising

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:57:06 +0000

> Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle? Does your ability to cook good food ...

Pushing that analogy, AI is the equivalent of automating everything from tilling, growing, all the way to cooking. It is as if the human is involved at the beginning in specifying what they want, and at the end, in plating up the food and consuming the product. The next generation will have no clue about the entire farm-to-table chain.

It's not there yet, but rapidly making it a reality.

Also, there is no one "tech". Different pieces of technology have different levels of effect on the world, and different timelines in which the world can come to terms with it. AI is the thermonuclear weapon introduced to a musket world ... it came upon us suddenly, and instantly flattened the talent/merit based economy. Now everyone has access to the same exoskeleton; the difference between muscles is not important.

The second huge difference between AI (and ordinary tech) is that a literal handful of people are in control of its economics. That kind of power breeds fascism.

> That's a problem with society, not technology.

Semantics. The tech directly enables the incredible power imbalance, and helps seize the means of consensus and debate and reporting. There is no incentive/mechanism left to fix society. An advanced society like the US is weaponized against vaccines, and social media and AI are to blame.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 04:08:28 +0000

Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of having worked without AI. They have been schooled in the basics. Enough of us know about data structures, concurrency, networks, language design etc. from the ground up that the knowledge is passed on. I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Given the attendance rates at various educational institutions, I fear that day is already here.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Robot writes in languages it has never seen before (2019)"

sriram_malhar — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:31:32 +0000

Can it scale without pixelating?

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Virtual Threads for a scripting language in Java 8 without Loom"

sriram_malhar — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:26:32 +0000

Ah, I had virtual threads in Java 8 back in the day. I believe it still works.

Check Kilim: https://github.com/kilim/kilim

New comment by sriram_malhar in "200 Milliseconds"

sriram_malhar — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:42:20 +0000

If you check "jealousy" (instead of "jealous") on MW, you get this editorial note:

Depending on who you ask, jealousy and envy are either exact synonyms, totally different words, or near-synonyms with some degree of semantic overlap and some differences. It is difficult to make the case, based on the evidence of usage that we have, for either of the first two possibilities. Both jealousy and envy are often used to indicate that a person is covetous of something that someone else has, but jealousy carries the particular sense of “zealous vigilance” and tends to be applied more exclusively to feelings of protectiveness regarding one’s own advantages or attachments. In the domain of romance, it is more commonly found than envy. If you were to say “your salt-shaker collection fills me with jealousy,” most people would take it to mean much the same thing as “your salt-shaker collection fills me with envy.” But if someone made a flirtatious comment to your partner, you would likely say that it caused you jealousy, not envy.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jealousy

New comment by sriram_malhar in "In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years"

sriram_malhar — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:04:07 +0000

An aged uncle of mine (who loved his wife very much) once said, "I hope she goes before me. I'd never want her to face the pain of my leaving". Such love.

New comment by sriram_malhar in "200 Milliseconds"

sriram_malhar — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 02:00:54 +0000

They may be equivalent in common parlance, but that’s a bit like saying it is ok to use ‘your’ instead of “you’re” just because it is so common.

We say “jealously guarded’ not ‘enviously guarded’ for a reason. Jealousy is about being protective of your own possessions and relationships; you feel jealousy if your spouse responds well to a coworker’s flirtations. Envy is when you find think of the coworker’s luck in having a good looking spouse

New comment by sriram_malhar in "We got California to intervene about OpenAI's corporate switch from nonprofit"

sriram_malhar — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:06:00 +0000

Is it easier to say 'non-profit' compared to 'not making profits'?

But seriously, can someone explain why openai went this route?

New comment by sriram_malhar in "Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring"

sriram_malhar — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 15:22:55 +0000

Vint had an interview?!! Who had the gall to suggest he needs to come in and be evaluated?