Hacker News: svieira

New comment by svieira in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

svieira — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:16:45 +0000

> I do think a Reddit with identity would be a much less toxic place.

Do you remember the days of "Real name" requirements on YouTube and "Google+"? The experiment was tried, it didn't change things. (Also, see Facebook for an ongoing version of the same experiment).

New comment by svieira in "Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)"

svieira — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:53:16 +0000

Ah contraire, mon ami, I am currently in the process of doing just that in many places in my current codebase.

New comment by svieira in "Magnifica Humanitas"

svieira — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:20:44 +0000

"The affliction" in his case is skin overgrowth, in the other its the dysphoria, right? But which is the moral way to cure either?

New comment by svieira in "Magnifica Humanitas"

svieira — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:59:48 +0000

> If ones appearance contradicts ones inner sense of personhood, how can that person ever truly connect with other people?

https://woforgmedia.wordonfire.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/0...

https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/pope-francis-and-the-ele...

New comment by svieira in "Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs"

svieira — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:39:48 +0000

> reliably catches >99% of bugs

In what scope?

New comment by svieira in "Magnifica Humanitas"

svieira — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:23:33 +0000

Humans are not "reduced" to biology. Their biology is presumed to "reveal" something about their personhood. And no matter how they feel about their hair, their hips, their eyes, etc. they ought to receive them as a gift from God and enter into a dialog with Him about how they ought to make use of the gifts He has given them.

New comment by svieira in "Magnifica Humanitas"

svieira — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:20:45 +0000

Well, he was an honored guest of the Pope for a while. Then he made fun of his host in a published book while claiming that he had a proof when he just had a theory and was told to please stop claiming that his theory required a change in theological interpretations of the book of Joshua (but he might continue teaching his theory about terrestrial movements without claiming that they were necessarily true).

https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-galileo-controversy

New comment by svieira in "Magnifica Humanitas"

svieira — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:55:13 +0000

> Certainly, the decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about those souls to whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed.

Edith Stine

New comment by svieira in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

svieira — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:29:37 +0000

> Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up.

Aren't there stories about certain car companies where their self-driving-at-some-level cars got worse after an OTA update?

New comment by svieira in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

svieira — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:14:00 +0000

The particularly worrying thing here is that they're now going to be gathering training data for a conversational model on _how to influence people effectively even when they already know they are being influenced_. Even more than RLFH already does. "We had to build the Torment Nexus so our children could eat" is not a good reason to build the Torment Nexus. The fact that they are not committing to not doing this tells me that either no one thought about what else this could be used for, or the short term gains are all they are thinking about.

New comment by svieira in "We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot"

svieira — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:09:47 +0000

The wild thing is how much faster it is to load. I'd almost forgotten how fast Google's default search used to be. Thank you!

New comment by svieira in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

svieira — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:25:28 +0000

> The measure of our success is whether what we do enables people to understand and think more clearly and effectively about mathematics.

I just wanted to highlight this very correct human-centric thought about the purpose of intellection.

New comment by svieira in "Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)"

svieira — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:02:50 +0000

> you're just a next action generator controlled by trillions of cells and subconscious dna-based behavior.

With moral agency and the ability to learn (even if we presume you are correct, which I don't think you are).

New comment by svieira in "Gemini Omni"

svieira — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:14:00 +0000

And the fact that a transformer model can't distinguish between the two in the context of the sentence given is a point against the general nature of the intelligence.

New comment by svieira in "Gemini Omni"

svieira — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:55:49 +0000

Now that they've broken the ability to trust video, they're looking to build it back, as long as you're allowed to use the tools:

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/identifying-a...

(and the previous SynthID: https://deepmind.google/blog/identifying-ai-generated-images...)

But it very much is "close the barn door after the horse has bolted and the barn has otherwise burned down".

New comment by svieira in "Google changes its search box"

svieira — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:42:57 +0000

Anthropic was talking about this as a "oh nifty, look at this" back in 2024: https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

The fact that steering one of these things is trivial nowadays and the vectors are close-to-free-to-store (since you don't need anything large to influence the space, see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahtbcExEKng) means that this is very likely already happening.

New comment by svieira in "Google changes its search box"

svieira — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:15:03 +0000

The problem is that it amazingly easy to bias the weights and the actual size of the bias is tiny. So maintaining a per-user ad biased profile is cheap and profitable. I doubt that "paying directly" will keep out the ad men (after all, Cable TV cost money. Netflix too. Both have ads.)

New comment by svieira in "Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25"

svieira — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:11:38 +0000

> Religions’ primary purpose is to facilitate tribal bonds

That's what religion does, but so does "working in Silicon Valley for a tech company". What religion is is another matter entirely.

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12748a.htm

New comment by svieira in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"

svieira — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:50:11 +0000

> The kind that has incentives for companies to appeal to consumers, and consumers that have money to spend on goods and services.

Note that this presumes a functioning market (free or otherwise). The company store knows it is the only game in town, so it doesn't have to appeal to anyone.

New comment by svieira in "Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged"

svieira — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:09:30 +0000

We actually have a constant in our codebase to mark such bugs. You found one? Put it inside an:

    if (PREFER_EXISTING_BUGS_TO_NEW_ONES) { theOldBehavior(); }
    else { theNewBehavior(); }

Then, if we ever go to do a v2 of the thing, we can review these existing "load bearing bugs" and see if they make sense to change.