Hacker News: vivekd

New comment by vivekd in "Glassworm is back: A new wave of invisible Unicode attacks hits repositories"

vivekd — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:58:26 +0000

Sure, but looking at this from a purely business perspective - I wonder how many customers would panic or jump ship rather than be grateful when notified of an attack. But I think it could work as an optional feature for paid accounts if it was marketed properly

New comment by vivekd in "Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure"

vivekd — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:58:00 +0000

I don't think any system can do much if things have degraded to the point where armed gangs are running around with impunity. I think systems (paper or otherwise) presuppose a certain level of functional civil society

New comment by vivekd in "I was interviewed by an AI bot for a job"

vivekd — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:03:16 +0000

I think the benefit here is that bias is easier to identify in an AI and if it's easier to identify it's easier to control and implement bias reduction mechanisms. Humans are much less upfront about their biases

New comment by vivekd in "Demand for UK Food Bank Up 15% Year on Year"

vivekd — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 14:41:05 +0000

I believe your statement can be 100% true without affecting the truth of the parents statement. It's possible for a government to charge high taxes and have high social spending while also funneling larger and larger amounts from the poor to the rich through regulations and government agencies that favor and act for the interests of the rich.

110k Yo Discovery Suggests Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens Worked Together

vivekd — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 19:54:38 +0000

Article URL: https://scitechdaily.com/rewriting-human-history-110000-year-old-discovery-suggests-neanderthals-and-homo-sapiens-worked-together/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43509309

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Lunar far side samples bolster theory that the moon was once covered in magma

vivekd — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 16:38:51 +0000

Article URL: https://phys.org/news/2025-03-lunar-side-samples-bolster-theory.amp

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43425506

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by vivekd in "Why AI is still dumb and not scary at all (pt. 1)"

vivekd — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 22:55:19 +0000

My issue with this line of thinking is not that it's wrong but it's being manipulated by silicon valley.

Open AI is not arguing that AI is harmless they are agreeing it's dangerous. They are using that to promote their product and hype it up as world changing. But more worrying they're advocating for regulations, presumably the sort that would make it more difficult for competition to come in.

I think we can talk about the potential dangers of AI. But that should include a discussion on how to best deal with that and consciousness of how fear of AI might be manipulated by silicon valley.

Especially when that fear involves misrepresentation - eg. AI being presented to the public as self directed artificial consciousness rather than algorithms that mimic certain reasoning capabilities

New comment by vivekd in "Write to Escape Your Default Setting"

vivekd — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 15:59:12 +0000

I also find it's a great sanity check. Ideas that seem good in my head often fail when I put them into words. Especially when I outline it in step by step format

New comment by vivekd in "It's still worth blogging in the age of AI"

vivekd — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 03:30:40 +0000

I wonder if there is a practical test of this question? Are there any moderately successful blogs written purely by an LLM with a human just doing the prompts.

As far as I know there aren't any but I look forward to being corrected

New comment by vivekd in "It Took Trump Only Twenty-Four Days to Sell Out Ukraine"

vivekd — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 22:03:48 +0000

That would be a reasonable I objection if it looked as if there was a risk of that. Everything I've heard from Zelynski so far tells me that Ukraine will be involved and they will have the final say

New comment by vivekd in "It Took Trump Only Twenty-Four Days to Sell Out Ukraine"

vivekd — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 21:11:51 +0000

I think we can have peace talks - like what is happening. Or if we believe Russia is too great a threat we can have all out war against Russia involving NATO. Both those outcomes would be acceptable.

What is not acceptable to me is the current status quo of Ukraine and only Ukrainian lives being lost while the rest of the world funds it with money and weapons while insisting there must be no peace talks

New comment by vivekd in "Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries"

vivekd — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 23:38:21 +0000

I donno I like AI, I don't use it often but when I do I've found it useful and impressive. It's really improved quality of life when it comes to having something to read over my work or help with finding small bits of info. I also like self checkout because this it reduced wait times at the store.

I think people are always resistant to change. People didn't like ATMs when they first came out either. I think it's improved things.

New comment by vivekd in "Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024)"

vivekd — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 17:36:58 +0000

chat GPT and Gemini both provide advice on how to care for babies. I think in the end you have to have faith in people to also use their common sense, discretion and not blindly believe or act on everything a bot tells them.

I think the same is true for an AI giving religious advice - you have to exercise a bit of faith in the readership and, perhaps in this case , also faith in the ultimate guidance of the divine. Faith that they're not going to make serious mortal or religious decision by unquestioningly following a chatbot

If we take this thinking to its logical conclusion we should put all our efforts as a civilization to getting rid of all misinformation that may harm babies whether online or spoken. And every religious person should do nothing but have flame wars and censorship campaigns about any flase religious information that has any chance of affecting a person's salvation.

The author seems to be in a purity spiral and seems to be taking an overly hardline interpretation of the religion

New comment by vivekd in "Should We Use AI and LLMs for Christian Apologetics?"

vivekd — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 17:27:02 +0000

you can just google scrupulosity or scrupulouness and find writing on it by various apologetics.

New comment by vivekd in "Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024)"

vivekd — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 17:01:01 +0000

In religious communities we would call such an attitude scrupulosity. It refers to a sort of religious OCD, a paralyzing fixation on the rules and a demand for unrealistic standards of perfection.

According to Christian teaching, such an attitude comes from a lack of faith. A lack of belief that God is ultimately in control, and an understanding that for all the imperfections and flaws that we as humans inevitably bring to the table, god can still work through those imperfections.

New comment by vivekd in "Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024)"

vivekd — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:38:53 +0000

I mean if a book or a peice of writing can be divinely inspired I don't see why am llm can't. Both are pieces of technology at the end of the day

New comment by vivekd in "Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024)"

vivekd — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 16:27:27 +0000

I understand the author's conserns but I wonder of his standard of "true" is a bit unrealistic. Maybe the standard should be "less false than the average human produced work."

Yes a human expert who is devoted to uncovering and communicating truth will do much better than an llm. But that is not what most of the content in the world consists of.

Most content is written by people with questionable expertise who write with goals like fame or viewership numbers or advertising dollars. Most content on the internet or in the world does not seem to be written with the goal of uncovering truth.

To create a more truthful world AI doesn't have to be as accurate as an expert. It just has to be more accurate than average. And in many areas, that's a very low bar.

To choose a less controversial area than religion, I think adding AI to nutrition advice on the internet will be an improvement. It's true you will inevitably get inaccurate advice communicated with confidence, but any AI trained on any kind of credible scholarship for will still be miles ahead of Internet nutritional advice that is often filled with zany pseudoscience.

Yes it will produce inaccurate results but on average the information will be more accurate than what already exists and what is currently being perpetuated

New comment by vivekd in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

vivekd — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 01:19:13 +0000

you're right, my statement is an extreme oversimplification and there are situations where the constitution does apply to noncitizens (like due process during deportation) or places where things are unclear (if speech of foreign nationals were being regulated). But this case where we are talking about a foreign media platform's right to operate in the US without any reference to the content they are broadcasting... this seems to be one of those rare clear cut cases. I mean no one saw any issue with America effectively banning RT.

There were some people on here saying that national security is just a pretense and the government is actually doing this because they dislike some of the content being posted on TikTok. I don't know if that's the case but if it were then I would concede there is a first amendment issue. But absent that I think it's safe to say that this case doesn't raise the first amendment.

New comment by vivekd in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

vivekd — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 01:11:16 +0000

That's true and that's actually something the courts consider. The standard is unreasonable burden. So it's not necessarily anything that makes speech harder, but if it does make speech unreasonably burdensome then it would run afoul of the first amendment.

So if the alternative places where such speech could be hosted were extremely limited, expensive or very difficult to use then the law banning a platform could create an unreasonable burden.

New comment by vivekd in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

vivekd — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 22:42:00 +0000

> after certain kinds of talks became popular congress would tell them that they are no longer allowed to let Americans in,

I think if that were the situation then yes the first amendment would be in issue. But I don't think anyone is saying that this is happening here. As I understand it this has nothing to do with what anyone is saying on TikTok and there are no social or protest movements gaining ground on TikTok that the government is trying to suppress. The only issue here is the foreign ownership and how that ownership is used. I don't think anyone is saying the government is doing this to silence any TikTok users