Hacker News: timmytokyo

New comment by timmytokyo in "X Is Bad, Though"

timmytokyo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 21:53:20 +0000

Some people just enjoy writing and reading racials slurs, I guess. X is a nice home for them.

New comment by timmytokyo in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

timmytokyo — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:25:23 +0000

This is how you end up with a big ball of mud [1]. If the argument is that LLMs are just as capable as humans at building big balls of mud, then I'm not sure it's much of an endorsement of their use.

[1] https://www.laputan.org/mud/

New comment by timmytokyo in "Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours"

timmytokyo — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:47:51 +0000

I hate to break it to you, but about those elections...

New comment by timmytokyo in "From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4"

timmytokyo — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 04:02:04 +0000

Here's a sample of the site's headers. Note the heavy reliance on slop marketing-speak (rule of 3, X not Y, etc.).

"Compressed, not lobotomized."

"Dense, resident, yours."

"Local frontier inference, narrow on purpose."

"ds4 hardware fit: local, streamed and distributed."

The whole site says nothing with so many words. It's also got all the hallmarks of a typical vibe-coded web site (small all-caps text, highly sectioned content, silly animations). Why do people do this? It doesn't impress. In a few years, we'll look back on sites like this like we look at geocities sites today.

New comment by timmytokyo in "When did Google get so weird?"

timmytokyo — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:38:22 +0000

Since you're here, can you comment on the problem of SEO spam and what DDG is doing about it? Just today I was looking for instructions on how to replace the cushions on my headphones. I typed into DDG the query "instructions to replace bose headphone pads" and it came up with pages and pages of links to SEO slop. The link to the actual Bose website containing accurate instructions was near the bottom of the second page of results.

New comment by timmytokyo in "Silicon Valley 'sex assault list' with 'over 100' names circulated"

timmytokyo — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:13:55 +0000

The New York Times had a similar article a couple days ago [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/technology/agi-house-ai-c...

New comment by timmytokyo in "Why is Hacker News like that?"

timmytokyo — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 22:50:40 +0000

In a real tug-of-war, the teams are balanced. In the HN tug-of-war, flaggers have an advantage because flagged posts are invisible to people who might otherwise upvote them.

The AI Party House Where Networking Has a Dark Side

timmytokyo — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:15:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/technology/agi-house-ai-culture.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803695

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by timmytokyo in "Qwen Image 2.1"

timmytokyo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:36:23 +0000

Not sure there's a better avatar for the absurdity of AI slop imagery than the "cowboy on horseback". That's a pony with a child's saddle on it, and they've composited a grown man on top of it.

New comment by timmytokyo in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"

timmytokyo — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 22:12:10 +0000

The Venn diagram has huge overlap.

New comment by timmytokyo in "Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse"

timmytokyo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:10:16 +0000

Exactly. And companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are disproportionately populated by people deeply connected to Effective Altruism or the Bay Area rationalist movement.

New comment by timmytokyo in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"

timmytokyo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:45:10 +0000

War and Peace is shorter than HPMOR.

Anyone who knows anything about Harry Potter fandom in those years knows that its readers were always thirsty for something new in the Potterverse to read or be exposed to. By latching onto that universe's incredible popularity, Yudkowsky exposed a large number of young, inquisitive people to the ideas of rationalism. It was essentially a recruitment mechanism, one that was wildly successful. Many rationalists freely admit that their first exposure to rationalism was via HPMOR.

New comment by timmytokyo in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"

timmytokyo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:42:42 +0000

I don't think the argument is that their sexual practices inherently make them part of a cult. Rather, the argument is that it's very common for cults to include communal sexual practices that fall outside typical social norms.

Common signifiers of cults include:

1. Apocalyptic world view.

2. Charismatic and/or exploitative leader.

3. Insularity.

4. Esoteric jargon.

5. Lack of transparency or accountability (often about finances or governance).

6. Communal living arrangements.

7. Sexual mores outside social norms, especially around the leader.

8. Schismatic offshoots.

9. Outsized appeal and/or outreach to the socially vulnerable.

Rationalism checks most of these boxes.

New comment by timmytokyo in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"

timmytokyo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:36:17 +0000

Is it really a satire if the same woman in the photo (Aella) went on to have a "birthday gangbang" with numerous men, some of whom are present in the photo?

New comment by timmytokyo in "Bernie's AI bill proposes to sentence AI developers to 20 years in prison"

timmytokyo — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 20:14:12 +0000

Ok, iPhone.

New comment by timmytokyo in "One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire"

timmytokyo — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:08:13 +0000

Effective Altruism. Also the related Bay Area group known as the "rationalists". Effective accelerationism, while seemingly opposed to EA, is in fact the flip side of the same coin. Look up the term TESCREAL.

Members of these groups are deeply embedded and heavily represented within top AI companies. Anthropic is particularly impacted, as its leadership is almost entirely made up of EAs. One of EA's goals has been to get EAs hired at the major AI labs so that they can influence AI's development. If you ever hear people discussing their personal P(doom), you're listening to a discussion topic originated by rationalists.

New comment by timmytokyo in "More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math"

timmytokyo — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 06:19:10 +0000

The problem with your counter-hypothetical is that not only is it unrealistic, it's utterly impossible. No human would be able to do in such a short timeframe what the LLM did. Part of what makes the OpenAI move so egregious is how bullying it was. It was the big guy coming along with their nearly infinite resources and squashing the little guy who's devoted a good chunk of his career to the problem.

New comment by timmytokyo in "Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one"

timmytokyo — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:05:23 +0000

A shortcut that isn't visible in any of Finder's menus. Which makes it virtually undiscoverable.

Finder is full of these kinds of hidden secrets.

New comment by timmytokyo in "METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack"

timmytokyo — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:58:12 +0000

One must also consider the well-known biases and motives of the authors. They are going to do everything they can to create hype around threats posed by AI.

METR is a cog in the effective altruism machine. It was spun off from Paul Christiano's Alignment Research Center. Christiano is a well-known longtermist and AI doomer, who predicts a 50% chance that AI will end humanity once it reaches human capacity [1].

The author of this piece is also a well-known member of the Bay Area rationalist cult.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-researcher-ai-doom-50...

New comment by timmytokyo in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

timmytokyo — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:51:11 +0000

You forgot [INCOMPETENCE]