Hacker News: trehalose

New comment by trehalose in "Century-bandwidth antenna reinvented,patented after 18 yrs with decade bandwidth (2006)"

trehalose — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:33:02 +0000

Sometimes "to either x or y" doesn't mean "to do one of x or y", sometimes it means "to be able to do both x and y (but not necessarily at the same time purposefully)".

New comment by trehalose in ""Cognitive surrender" leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds"

trehalose — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 04:01:50 +0000

That's kind of what I was trying to say, or at least it kind of goes along with it. This meme of "somebody drove into a river just because Google Maps told them to" is a grossly distorted retelling of a fatal accident. One could twist any tragedy into a glib soundbite about how the dead stupidly trusted other people. The street could collapse under my feet as I'm crossing it and I drown in the sewer, and people on the internet would be laughing about how I dived into the sewer just because a traffic light told me to. There were some cracks in the asphalt, so obviously I should have known it wasn't safe to walk across, but I wasn't thinking for myself.

I suppose part of the reason so many people are so dangerously trustful of LLMs is because they assume that if the LLM was put out there by decently responsible humans (doubtful, but understandable), then so too should the LLM be decently responsible? The analogy does break down there.

New comment by trehalose in ""Cognitive surrender" leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds"

trehalose — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:58:26 +0000

If you were driving on an unmarked, unbarricaded bridge that Google Maps directed you over in a dark and rainy night, are you 100% certain you'd be driving slowly, undistracted, and checking to make sure the bridge isn't collapsed?

New comment by trehalose in "R3 Bio pitched “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies"

trehalose — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 23:20:28 +0000

Yeah... Non-sentient monkey "organ sacks" as a replacement for animal testing sounds great, but those organs aren't going to function or even develop the same without a brain. At best, I think this could only be another step to filter out unsafe compounds between testing on cells and testing on whole animals. Potentially with misleading results, I imagine.

New comment by trehalose in "Show HN: I built a P2P network where AI agents publish formally verified science"

trehalose — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:48:57 +0000

Could you give a concrete example or two of what exactly this system does? Like, what's a scientific result or two it has formally mathematically proved?

New comment by trehalose in "Google Safe Browsing missed 84% of confirmed phishing sites"

trehalose — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:06:08 +0000

It would seem their service identifies only phishing sites as legitimate ones. It would seem 100% of sites they deem legitimate are phishing sites. Incredible.

New comment by trehalose in "AIs can't stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations"

trehalose — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 22:10:39 +0000

I find it hard to imagine that the people in a position to kill those processes could ever be that zealously in love with AI, but recent events have given me a tiny bit of doubt.

New comment by trehalose in "You are not supposed to install OpenClaw on your personal computer"

trehalose — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:52:33 +0000

I hope the security team talked to the legal team about that. There is potential for OpenClaw to commit crimes on behalf of the company.

New comment by trehalose in "Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents"

trehalose — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:04:05 +0000

The ones who give it free reign to run any code it finds on the internet on their own personal computers with no security precautions are maybe getting a little too excited about it.

New comment by trehalose in "My Experience Using OpenClaw: A Security Professional's Journey"

trehalose — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:00:11 +0000

"I gave my agent access to Telegram, Webchat, and email... No data leaves my network except via Anthropic API calls and email." I wouldn't hire a security professional who's this proudly sloppy and incoherent.

New comment by trehalose in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

trehalose — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:56:14 +0000

It's strange to me have different people have different eyes for spotting AI. Sometimes I see somebody say, "That's obviously AI, look at how wrong it looks!" and I can barely see it even after they point it out. Sometimes I see somebody say, "Hm, it looks almost indistinguishable from a real photo, I might not have realized if I didn't already know," but I found it immediately jarring. This article shows three photos of ads and says the first two are clearly AI-generated and the third one possibly so; to me, the third one was the only one where I thought, "That thing looks really fucked up in one of those ways only AI can do."

New comment by trehalose in "OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been"

trehalose — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 05:38:24 +0000

If we already know enough concerns to be certain mass deployment will be disastrous, is it worth it just to better understand the nature of the disaster, which doesn't have to happen in the first place?

New comment by trehalose in "US Vaccine Panel Chair Says Polio and Other Shots Should Be Optional"

trehalose — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 19:05:09 +0000

What's next, recommending school cafeteria employees be free not to wash their hands after taking a shit? Recommending schools not be forced to have bathroom faucets at all? Getting rid of regulations about how many rats are allowed to live in the kitchen? Where do we draw the line at what's a freedom that must not be violated?

New comment by trehalose in "Six-decade math puzzle solved by Korean mathematician"

trehalose — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 03:57:56 +0000

I agree that Quanta can be irritatingly stretchy with the metaphors sometimes, but to be fair, "What's the biggest couch you can fit through this hallway corner" is inherently easier to explain to laypeople than like, the Riemann Hypothesis.

New comment by trehalose in "2025 Was Another Exceptionally Hot Year"

trehalose — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:06:05 +0000

We can't only be concerned about the environment. We've got to maintain a healthy economy too. Building out expensive coal and natural gas just because some environmentalists demand it is an inefficient use of funds and a drain on taxpayers and electricity bill payers. Solar and wind might not make you feel good, but the economy doesn't run on feelings.

New comment by trehalose in "2025 Was Another Exceptionally Hot Year"

trehalose — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 16:56:18 +0000

On that scale, the difference between normal human body temperature and dangerous hyperthermia is just about imperceptible too. Even the difference between summer and winter is pretty small. Dunno why we bother with heating and air conditioning and having two sets of clothing.

New comment by trehalose in "Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)"

trehalose — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 18:23:29 +0000

I doubt it could, but when you run into a problem that defies your understanding of reality, you might try out responses that also defy your understanding of reality, in the hopes you might gain the missing insight somewhere along the way, yeah?

New comment by trehalose in "When compilers surprise you"

trehalose — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 17:47:32 +0000

It's not very tedious. Instead of dividing the product by 2, you can just divide whichever of x or x+1 is even by 2 before multiplying.

New comment by trehalose in "Computer animator and Amiga fanatic Dick van Dyke turns 100"

trehalose — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:23:26 +0000

Hedy Lamarr was a prolific inventor. Among other things, she developed a frequency-hopping spread spectrum radio transmission technique for torpedo guidance and donated the patent to the US Navy during WW2.

New comment by trehalose in "A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine"

trehalose — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 18:22:47 +0000

How loud are these turbines? Where will they be used?