Hacker News: ssnistfajen

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Layoffs at Block"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:07:53 +0000

You are trying to see employees as more than just statistics which is not what CEOs are doing. They are not empathising with 4k employees because they are not seeing 4k human beings through multiple layers of abstraction. To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to simultaneously comprehend the complex needs and emotions of 4000 other human beings without burning out.

Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Layoffs at Block"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:20:13 +0000

It was a 100% intentional act. These people simply don't care and they want that be known. It's in their ego.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly"

ssnistfajen — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 07:50:46 +0000

If they didn't have to answer for iPad babies then unfortunately they won't have to answer for this either.

I've resolved to accepting the fact that most people are just content with any form of brain rot because the alternatives are too mentally taxing. Technology has just enabled brain rot to distill into its current form, but the demand has always been there.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray"

ssnistfajen — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 07:53:41 +0000

This is what I've been leaning towards after initially renouncing the experiment for its arbitrary nature. "Alpha" behaviour emerge in zero-sum/artificial scarcity situations, yet contemporary society is full of zero-sum situations and artificial scarcity due to market inefficiency and gatekeeping. It's not just Western society either. If anything, Western-aligned industrialized societies experience far less scarcity. So the behavioural pattern shouldn't be entirely dismissed as pseudoscience, but worthy of critical inspection and reference.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Why Canada should join the EU"

ssnistfajen — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 23:25:55 +0000

Wrong. Cyprus is in Asia and has been successfully admitted to the EU.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Why Canada Should Join the EU"

ssnistfajen — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 22:11:19 +0000

Geopolitical thought experiments pop up from time to time but rarely come to fruition. There will be enough domestic opposition from both sides that this will never happen. The idea may become more compelling if Canada completely loses freedom of movement and free trade with the U.S., but that means the Canadian economy would have to crater first, which weakens the benefit EU would receive from accepting such a member country.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Why Canada Should Join the EU"

ssnistfajen — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 22:08:32 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_criteria#Geographic...

Cyprus is geographically located in Asia but has been successfully been admitted to the EU after satisfying other (non-geographical) conditions for EU membership.

Armenia and Georgia have also been determined by the EU to be eligible for membership despite being entirely located in Asia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenia%E2%80%93European_Union...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Georgia_to_the_Eu...

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Salmon return to lay eggs in historic habitat after dam removal project"

ssnistfajen — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 18:26:12 +0000

My 100% speculation is emergent behaviour from the brain itself. Same way human interactions have remained largely the same over thousands of years. Also, we don't notice the salmon that swam up dead ends elsewhere.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Mira Murati leaves OpenAI"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 06:25:42 +0000

Only if you have runaway expenditures due to the lack of self-control and discipline.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Mira Murati leaves OpenAI"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 06:22:52 +0000

FSD isn't getting "solved" without outlawing human drivers, period. Otherwise you are trying to solve a non-deterministic system with deterministic software under a 0% error tolerance rate. Even without human drivers you still have to deal with all the non-vehicle entities that pop onto the road from time to time. Jaywalkers alone is almost as complex to deal with as human drivers.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Mira Murati leaves OpenAI"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 06:17:43 +0000

It solves problems because it was trained with the solutions to these problems that have been written down a thousand times before. A lot of people don't even consider the ability to solve problems to be a reliable indicator of human intelligence, see the constantly evolving discourse regarding standardized tests.

Attempts at autonomous AI agents are still failing spectacularly because the models don't actually have any thought or memory. Context is provided to them via prefixing the prompt with all previous prompts which obviously causes significant info loss after a few interaction loops. The level of intellectual complexity at play here is on par with nematodes in a lab (which btw still can't be digitally emulated after decades of research). This isn't a diss on all the smart people working in AI today, bc I'm not talking about the quality of any specific model available today.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Mira Murati leaves OpenAI"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 06:00:23 +0000

Probably off-topic for this thread but my own rather fatalist view is alignment/safety is a waste of effort if AGI will happen. True AGI will be able to self-modify at a pace beyond human comprehension, and won't be obligated to comply with whatever values we've set for it. If it can be reined in with human-set rules like a magical spell, then it is not AGI. If humans have free will, then AGI will have it too. Humans frequently go rogue and reject value systems that took decades to be baked into them. There is no reason to believe AGI won't do the same.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Mira Murati leaves OpenAI"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 05:50:18 +0000

People, including East Asians, frequently claim "face" is an East Asian cultural concept despite the fact that it is omnipresent in all cultures. It doesn't matter if outsiders have figured out what's actually going on. The only thing that matters is saving face.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 03:23:03 +0000

And? Where is the threshold? Science is not based on vibes. Starting a movement without evidence is called mass hysteria.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 03:08:06 +0000

Why do you accuse me of being against addressing these issues? I am merely pointing out these are not existential crises because there is currently no evidence supporting such claims. It may change in the future, but until then I'm not jumping on this ship.

Ultraprocessed foods are already poison and most of us, probably including you, are consuming them regularly. Are you OK with that? And what is this talk about caloric reservoirs? Humans 8000 years ago had far fewer options and they still survived long enough to pass cultural lineages down to us. Most of your "caloric reservoirs" did not exist before the 20th century because the science and industry that created them did not exist.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 03:04:23 +0000

Because there is no apparent acute symptom of microplastic contamination inside our bodies that have been identified yet. If microplastics have even a fraction of the harm of actual carcinogens like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (which can lodge in DNA strands), we'd be witnessing mass illness events already.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 02:57:01 +0000

Good news is tuna is not the only form of seafood you can eat! Perhaps you can try channeling that outrage into real tangible activism, any minute now.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 02:33:39 +0000

And? That span is within an individual's lifetime, which is not very long in the context of human history. As of now there's zero sign any entity with regulatory power is doing anything about microplastics.

Also, why are you trying to deliver a point without looking up most of the examples I've listed? Do you expect that to be a convincing argument?

New comment by ssnistfajen in "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"

ssnistfajen — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 02:07:11 +0000

If microplastics are directly causing illnesses and birth defects then we would've found out already. Past cases of mass illness caused by pollutants (lead gasoline, asbestos, minamata disease, thalidomide, chimney sweep's carcinoma, etc.) were uncovered quickly and usually addressed not long after. The fact we still can't pinpoint exactly how microplastics are harming us beyond that they are in places where they are not supposed to be, The one reassuring thing about this whole ordeal is plastics are largely inert, that's why they take forever to degrade.

New comment by ssnistfajen in "British Museum gems for sale on eBay – how a theft was exposed"

ssnistfajen — Mon, 27 May 2024 20:03:32 +0000

How much time does it take to move a specific piece of artefact in/out of storage? What are the dimensions of the artefact? Are they sensitive to light? Are special equipments required to handle them? Every piece is different, not to mention the mandatory planning involved before moving every item. It's not the same as a retail store photographing their merchandise.