Hacker News: stonyrubbish

New comment by stonyrubbish in "I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore"

stonyrubbish — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:04:23 +0000

I am 23 years old. I studied hard, went to college, got good grades, etc-- "did everything right," as far as older people in my life told me. At 19 I became disabled from a sudden rare condition such that I am now very ill and mostly housebound. I thought exactly as you did before becoming disabled. Everyone thinks sudden, rare, lightning-strike style things just happen to others until one day they happen to you.

I don't agree with railing against capitalism either-- it's not clear to me that there's any other system I would do better in, given my disability-- but the idea of, "if you do everything right, nothing bad will happen to you" is basically a comforting lie people tell themselves to feel safe. I believe in the value of hard work, and I am trying my best to better my situation-- switching my entire career from humanities to IT-- but I still am not fully sure how I am going to be able to support myself, and I don't think that's my fault.

New comment by stonyrubbish in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

stonyrubbish — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:16:21 +0000

They aren't so vague that you would argue the parrot is thinking.

New comment by stonyrubbish in "Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear""

stonyrubbish — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:14:16 +0000

AI is probably in need of far more legal safeguards than we have now, but I am sort of tired of the "everyone will lose their jobs" narrative. There are so few jobs LLMs can fully automate. I think what will actually happen is that corporate CEOs will try to cut staff, it won't work, people will be rehired, and AI will largely make people's jobs easier and less labor-intensive.

New comment by stonyrubbish in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

stonyrubbish — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:04:24 +0000

> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is ".

It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin to believe the stochastic parrot is actually wise.

New comment by stonyrubbish in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

stonyrubbish — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:00:25 +0000

Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many parenthesis are balanced here ((((()))))) (you can test this), it doesn't have any kind of genuine cognition.