Hacker News: throwawayk7h

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware"

throwawayk7h — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:46:11 +0000

That's rather meaningless. The scientists in the Manhattan project initially had less information than what is now available on the internet.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22"

throwawayk7h — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:08:22 +0000

it really should be .gc.ca for us to be sure.

Here's a chain of trust you can follow:

https://parl.gc.ca -> https://parl.ca

https://www.parl.ca/Committees/en/LANG/Contact?parl=37&sessi... -> ourcommons.ca

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22"

throwawayk7h — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:27:27 +0000

in a three-party system, there's provably no optimal voting system. Most people who would normally vote NDP voted strategically in the last election to prevent a conservative majority. While it's true in the literal sense that we got what we voted for -- I mean, that's tautological; whoever wins an election is "voted" for -- it's not really the whole picture.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

throwawayk7h — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:41:49 +0000

Regardless of whether LLMs are conscious or not, they have no known mechanism for experiencing pain and suffering, and there's no reason to believe they have one (such as a limbic system). So why worry about it?

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

throwawayk7h — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:40:30 +0000

maybe the bacteria are conscious. How sure are we that they're not?

The only strong argument I have against it is the anthropic principle -- there are billions of times more bacteria than humans, so it's overwhelmingly unlikely that I'd be a human rather than a bacteria.

Not a very good argument of course.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

throwawayk7h — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:39:07 +0000

why is that obviously false? To a functionalist, a pen and paper and a set of rules is sufficient for consciousness.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

throwawayk7h — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:37:05 +0000

TL;DR, the arguments are:

- If you asked an LLM to imitate somebody, it's not creating a digital consciousness of that person, so if you ask an LLM to pretend to be a helpful chatbot, that persona is also not conscious. - they can't be conscious because they generate one token at a time, - nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious; so therefore LLMs are also not conscious. - you can't have desires or emotions if you don't have (virtual or physical) sensory organs, and those are necessary for consciousness and morals. - because training LLMs doesn't resemble evolution as it happened on earth, it's very unlikely that they're conscious

These are some bold assertions, I don't really see any reason to believe them in particular though.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "How turkey hacked the hair-transplant industry"

throwawayk7h — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:53:05 +0000

Germany's official name is Bundesrepublik Deutschland

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

throwawayk7h — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:31:32 +0000

how would you build memory into the weights? and why is RAG not enough? Our hippocampus is at a bit of a distance from our frontal cortex.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

throwawayk7h — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:45:40 +0000

is remote attestation possible in a web browser already?

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Zig: Build System Reworked"

throwawayk7h — Sun, 31 May 2026 04:18:18 +0000

it's just annoying to have to do that.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion"

throwawayk7h — Sun, 31 May 2026 03:50:22 +0000

It's good legislation. I would love to see this extended to "Stop Killing Software" in general, with the same provisions.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Sharla Boehm, the programmer whose code underpins the Internet"

throwawayk7h — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:36:25 +0000

Many people's code underpins the internet. Some of them are women, yes. I wonder if you've ever heard of Grace Hopper.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

throwawayk7h — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:52 +0000

the bill explicitly doesn't apply to games that are free or are on a subscription system. (I assume free-to-play with microtransactions would be covered by this bill though, unless those microtransactions are subscription-based or time-limited.)

I am indeed worried that this will push games to be subscription-based, so I would advocate making the bill apply even to subscription-based games. Though that would require some thought, of course, as it's not obvious how it should apply to such a game.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "The sigmoids won't save you"

throwawayk7h — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:54:00 +0000

Yeah! And if climate change is so inevitable, why do the people who want to prevent it from happening seem hell-bent on convincing people that climate change is real?

New comment by throwawayk7h in "The sigmoids won't save you"

throwawayk7h — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:51:37 +0000

Closely related is Laplace's Rule of Succession[1], which basically says that (in lieu of other information), the odds of something happening next time go down the more times in a row that it doesn't happen (and vice versa).

So for example, the longer a time bomb ticks, the less likely it is to go off any time soon. (Assuming the timer isn't visible.) :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_succession

New comment by throwawayk7h in "The sigmoids won't save you"

throwawayk7h — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:49:39 +0000

Mind you, he is only personally invested insofar as he's staked his reputation on it. Throughout his writing, he expresses the same point over and over again: desperately wants AI to slow down, advocates for politics that would slow it down, and most likely nothing would bring him greater peace than to see a sigmoid curve appear.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

throwawayk7h — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:44:42 +0000

AI has not been trained on Lojban. And furthermore, this article is almost certainly primarily intended to be read by humans directly.

I understand you're being facetious, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about programming languages in comparison.

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Discord Incident – Resolved"

throwawayk7h — Fri, 08 May 2026 21:26:20 +0000

matrix.org alive and well

New comment by throwawayk7h in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"

throwawayk7h — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:23:29 +0000

I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.