Hacker News: trescenzi

New comment by trescenzi in "Whooping Cranes Learned to Migrate by Following Costumed Pilots"

trescenzi — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 18:37:45 +0000

What a throwback. I haven't thought about the movie Fly Away Home since I was a child. Really awesome to see people caring enough about animals to do stuff like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_Away_Home

New comment by trescenzi in "A statement on the Tor Project's relationship with Mullvad"

trescenzi — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:12:34 +0000

That’s not what’s being said. It’s possible to support the freedom of anyone to say anything while excluding those whose beliefs are directly opposed to your goals from your organization.

New comment by trescenzi in "The super intelligence shit is a humiliation ritual for OpenAI"

trescenzi — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:29:43 +0000

The keyword is `regime`. It’s smart if the goal is to run a political regime where you separate your friends and enemies and prove to your friends that you can make them jump when you say jump.

New comment by trescenzi in "DigitalOcean Ends Open Source Credits Program"

trescenzi — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:37:26 +0000

But they are contributing 3M to Omarchy[0]. Makes it very clear where their allegiances lie. I’ve moved my stuff off which is sad since Digital Ocean was a really solid platform.

0: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/digitalocean-joins-as-found...

New comment by trescenzi in "Blindsight (Watts Novel)"

trescenzi — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:26:42 +0000

Yea I took it as consciousness was maladaptive and sort of a local maxima that humans were trapped in which prevented them from gaining higher intelligences.

New comment by trescenzi in "Blindsight (Watts Novel)"

trescenzi — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:52:58 +0000

I felt similar. I finished it but couldn’t finish the sequel. The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes” and I kept reading to get insightful descriptions of these different shapes but they never really came. I don’t disagree with the premise it just didn’t really get across the message very well.

New comment by trescenzi in "10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years"

trescenzi — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 02:19:43 +0000

Right there’s a lot of easy answers mechanically but they are challenging politically. The longer we wait to do anything the better they’ll look though that’s for sure.

New comment by trescenzi in "Who should be held accountable when an AI Agent (accidentally) acts maliciously?"

trescenzi — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:05:43 +0000

What’s the question? Why model output isn’t always what you expect it to be?

Consensus is just populating the model with rationale for different new output.

New comment by trescenzi in "Who should be held accountable when an AI Agent (accidentally) acts maliciously?"

trescenzi — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:00:58 +0000

It shouldn’t be a question but this is where the anthropomorphic language and things like “agent welfare” come in to enable responsibility laundering of some of the most powerful people on earth. How we talk about these models matters because it impacts the public’s understanding of what they are genuinely capable of. The more that they are described as having anything close to free will the easier it is to even ask questions like this.

New comment by trescenzi in "There are no "rogue" AI agents"

trescenzi — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:11:45 +0000

Yes 100%. The language used currently maximizes the ability of those building these models to get off the hook. The anthropomorphizing we do of these things presents them as maximally capable and the companies as helpless to contain them. The way we talk about things impacts how we think about them.

New comment by trescenzi in "Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point"

trescenzi — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:25:23 +0000

If you read the rest of the piece they do argue for more regulation. They aren’t making a personal responsibility argument like other commenters are saying.

The problem with bans is they claim the technology itself is purely bad and the only solution is to keep it from children. Which on its face is nonsensical. It’s ok for a 17 year old but not a 16 year old?

We need genuine regulation tackling the actual problems with this technology. Blanket bans do nothing but make adults feel good about “protecting the children”.

New comment by trescenzi in "The LLMentalist Effect (2023)"

trescenzi — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:59:56 +0000

LLMs can be supremely useful but also not intelligent. It might seem like a pointless distinction but the way we talk about these models matters because it impacts how we interact with and understand their outputs.

For example if there’s a strongly held belief that models are independent intelligent entities we’re more likely to lay blame upon them instead of their user. It’s important for the safety discussion too. If they are a new class of life then safety is going to focus on making sure they don’t do bad things. If we instead see them as statistical models we will instead try to make sure people don’t misuse them.

This distinction is even more important today when some of the most powerful people are looking to absolve their crimes by passing them off on their LLMs.

New comment by trescenzi in "If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious"

trescenzi — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:50:31 +0000

Yea I’m a weirdo who’s willing to claim that a for loop might be conscious. There’s physical state and comparisons happening after all.

But all that actually does is abuse the question being asked and the definition of consciousness. The question isn’t even “does a for loop have qualia” it’s actually “what does it mean if a for loop has qualia”. The individual asking if LLMs are conscious is concerned about the implication of the answer. To which a yes based upon a very improvised definition doesn’t actually resolve.

New comment by trescenzi in "US interest rates raised for first time in three years"

trescenzi — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:10:25 +0000

Or you could, you know, raise taxes. There’s policy solutions to these problems they just happen to be painful in a way that is easier to point to.

New comment by trescenzi in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

trescenzi — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:48:09 +0000

In Connecticut it is only now cheaper to use electric instead of gas in my prius prime. I get 50-53 mpg highway, even over very long distances I drive to family in STL a few times a years, and electric is $0.33/kWh. So even at around 4 miles/kWh I'm paying $0.0825/mile for electric which breaks even right around $4.25/gallon. So it's really going to depend upon where you live.

That's not to say I wouldn't buy an electric car tomorrow if I had the option. My somewhat frequent long drives make gas slightly preferable but these days I'd much prefer electric.

New comment by trescenzi in "The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart"

trescenzi — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:01:43 +0000

I recently heard the term _vice signaling_ and it’s very appropriate for this era. While in the past virtue signaling would be used to identify yourself as the member of an ingroup. It’s now common to signal that by doing things that would previously, and by many still are, considered beyond the pale.

New comment by trescenzi in "Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)"

trescenzi — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:03:21 +0000

Yea how is this comment so low. There was a brief period of time where the military industry complex wasn’t deeply entwined but that period is very much over.

New comment by trescenzi in "Hitachi launches CO2 heat pump water heaters with solar-friendly tariff controls"

trescenzi — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:56:48 +0000

It’s confusingly super common in the US for that usage when talking about trucking and shipping. Where of course the other kind of tariffs are also common.

New comment by trescenzi in "Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn't use their work"

trescenzi — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:32:52 +0000

If I understand correctly OpenAI cannot provide it. Because the models are essentially black boxes, especially this far after the fact, determining if this result built on training data based on conversations about the problem is impossible. So unless they can prove those conversations were never used for training then there’s no way to know.

New comment by trescenzi in "Do people prefer stories written by AI?"

trescenzi — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:52:00 +0000

I think it’s a blind spot to a lot of people not just programmers. If you don’t have experience understanding and not just viewing you’ll almost always prefer the shinier object. I don’t really think this is particularly new even generative AI has just ramped up the speed that shiny objects can be produced. Most people aren't trained to do the understanding part so most media has always been about maximizing the shininess.