Hacker News: treetalker

New comment by treetalker in "AI ran into the cold hard reality of the legal profession"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:06:22 +0000

Apparently The Register changed the title of this article. Someone posted it 10 hours before this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47749485

New comment by treetalker in "Why Context Switching Kills Deep Work and How to Fix It on Mac"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:38:19 +0000

This writing makes more sense when you mentally add back in the LLM's em-dashes that were removed to make it look less like a nonhuman-generated marketing article.

New comment by treetalker in "After Criticizing Pope, Trump Posts Image of Himself as a Jesus-Like Figure"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:34:49 +0000

On the left of the photo you'll surely recognize the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man in the World.

After Criticizing Pope, Trump Posts Image of Himself as a Jesus-Like Figure

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:33:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/us/politics/trump-jesus-pope-leo-truth-social-post.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754540

Points: 9

# Comments: 7

New comment by treetalker in "I Quit Drinking for a Year"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:21:09 +0000

Having a personal zero-tolerance policy for certain things is one of the best hacks ever.

New comment by treetalker in "Can AI be a 'child of God'? Inside Anthropic's meeting with Christian leaders"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:08:14 +0000

ChatINRI, how do I move the goalposts when we retake Jerusalem but I'm not raptured?

New comment by treetalker in "Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:02:46 +0000

Unsatisfied with automating programming, Meta has successfully automated comedy.

New comment by treetalker in "Show HN: Species.app – A visual spaced-repetition engine for taxonomy"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:27:10 +0000

Great offering, thanks!

Ideas for your feature pipeline: geographic filtering (e.g., learn to identify plant/bird species in southern Florida); temporal filtering (explore extinct species --> currently endangered species); audio to learn calls/songs.

New comment by treetalker in "Beyond Karpathy's LLM-Wiki: The Necessity of Cognitive Governance"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:21:37 +0000

One approach might be to set up two adversarial summarizers and a judge (like common-law litigation). Instead of using one model to identify and resolve all claims, a first model (plaintiff) seeks out the most supportive arguments for, and evidence of, claims across all nodes; then a second model (defendant) antagonizes the first by seeking out only disconfirming evidence and the best counter-arguments; the parties may get one or more replies or sur-replies; and then a third model (judge) evaluates the previous two against one another. The idea could be extended to incorporate appellate models that ensure compliance with the rules and propose changes to rules or addition/subtraction of rules. Appellate decisions could be maintained in a separate directory and accessed by the adversarial models.

More promising food for thought: developing and employing rules of evidence and procedure. For example, evidence may be taken only from immutable files; the first level nodes present issues, not summaries or syntheses; each issue has separate plaintiff, defendant, judge, and appellate nodes, from which a summary or explanation is ultimately created.

New comment by treetalker in "Gen Z fearful AI will take their job they're sabotaging company's AI rollout"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:41:47 +0000

Claim:

> Gen Z workers are so fearful AI will take their job they’re intentionally sabotaging their company’s AI rollout

What is "sabotage"?

> The sabotage entails entering proprietary information into public AI tools, or using unapproved AI tools. Some employees report outright refusing to use AI tools. Others have even admitted to tampering with performance reviews or intentionally generating low-output work to make AI appear less effective.

Wow, so "sabotage" means using "AI tools" (LLMs?) in a way management doesn't want; or using AI tools other than the ones management mandates; or not using any AI tools at all!

How fearful are the members of Gen Z surveyed? The journalistic report of a commercial report of a commissioned study that is not available for review … doesn't say. But how many Gen Z members "admit" to "sabotaging" their employers' "AI" strategy in the defined way? Of those surveyed in the dubious study: a minority of

> 44%[.]

Were those surveyed asked directly if they were literally "sabotaging" AI rollouts? Again, the report of a commercial report of a commissioned and unavailable study doesn't say. But I doubt it.

And the journalism's coming from Fortune doesn't exactly help its credibility.

New comment by treetalker in "Trump attacks Pope over criticism of Iran war"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:01:46 +0000

Apparently the convicted felon also accused His Holiness of being "weak on crime."

But notably Trump offered no criticism of the Church's history of the sexual abuse of children.

New comment by treetalker in "AI went viral among attorneys. We have the numbers on what happened next"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:25:46 +0000

I never use LLMs for research or drafting. But I do use them to roll my own local semantic search; to whip up reusable regexes; to create small deterministic programs that, say, convert my set of paraphrased facts' citations to discrete documents into citations to the compiled appellate record; and to quickly code a Google Docs plugin that will automate away the repeated corrections to my co-counsel's bad typing and citation style (she'll never change).

For these uses, LLMs are wonderful — and Kagi Assistant is plenty good enough.

New comment by treetalker in "Gen Z fearful AI will take their job they're sabotaging company's AI rollout"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:07:30 +0000

I tend to think it equally likely that the same corporations that cannot justify their LLM spending[1] need to shift the blame, and (unsurprisingly) the old, crotchety, and sociopathic who claw their way to positions of ownership, management, and other power find it both easy and convenient to target the younger generations, especially Gen Z.

(In short: the Principal Skinner "the children are wrong" meme.)

[1]: See the panoply of HN posts in recent months about how LLMs are great for eliminating workers' idiosyncratic drudgery, but workers cannot or do not reinvest that saved time/effort for non-software companies' benefit, hence non-software companies see no positive impact to their bottom lines.

New comment by treetalker in "The AI Layoff Trap"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:21:22 +0000

n = 1 …

Go to Miami, Florida, and see how virtually all public projects magically go to Cuban-American-owned companies — even huge multinationals with far greater skill, capacity, and efficiencies can't seem to land the good work.

New comment by treetalker in "The AI Layoff Trap"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:16:22 +0000

Agents everywhere!!

Do you like what I've done with the place?

New comment by treetalker in "Apple's accidental moat: How the "AI Loser" may end up winning"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:54:33 +0000

Depending on price I would or would not buy an Apple car; but I am quite interested in options for a car that (1) is electric; (2) doesn't spy on me and sell my data; (3) doesn't take video of me and my passengers and do weird things with it; and (4) doesn't support Republicans / white supremacists / Elon Musk.

And I imagine that like-minded consumers are a pretty large market.

New comment by treetalker in "Artificial Intelligence and Human Legal Reasoning"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:27:32 +0000

Just pointing out that there are worlds of difference between real-world litigation and law-school assignments; between involuntary law-school assignments and voluntary ones; and between open-universe voluntary assignments and closed-universe ones.

I also think that, at a minimum, the designers should have had a neutral evaluator (one not involved with or even aware of the study) to grade the work.

New comment by treetalker in "Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack"

treetalker — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:03:39 +0000

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Overview: https://eu.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/13/fl...

New comment by treetalker in "Tell HN: OpenAI silently removed Study Mode from ChatGPT"

treetalker — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:32:57 +0000

FWIW, Kagi Assistant still has a Study mode / custom assistant. It works well and I use it a few times per week.

New comment by treetalker in "Ask HN: How do you retain what you learn from podcasts?"

treetalker — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:35:40 +0000

I like Mochi (www.mochi.cards) even more than Anki for this because it has a "notebook" mode. Often new information is not in digestible or flashcard-ready form. Notebook mode allows the user to type up or dump in the received information and gradually work with it (valuable in itself!) en route to creating flashcards to incorporate into the SRS once the material is analyzed and learned.

But +1 to all the commenters (such as parent) who urge (hand-)writing the material (taking notes), active processing, real-world use of the information, and SRS to rehearse retrieval.