Hacker News: vlyan

New comment by vlyan in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

vlyan — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:47:31 +0000

>There are thousands of species of ants and termites, and just one species of human.

that's rather debatable. unless, of course, you're an adherent of creationism.

New comment by vlyan in "Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades"

vlyan — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:46:44 +0000

>Of course, people who naïvely "ping" a recognizable or easy-to-type IPv4 address get what they deserve

Look what happened because of what you did, what it led to! Two microservices are in critical condition and you're laughing. You're laughing.

New comment by vlyan in "Religious scholars met with Anthropic"

vlyan — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 03:52:34 +0000

>What ever happened to computers doing what they were told?

the mass psychosis and the endless culture war of the smartphone era.

90% of "safety" and "alignment" efforts are driven by fear of clickbait media inventing public outrage.

New comment by vlyan in "Barcodes are about to go extinct"

vlyan — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 09:07:12 +0000

thank you, Claude, very cool.

New comment by vlyan in "FLUX 3 Image"

vlyan — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 06:35:12 +0000

yes, just like emails and chats are inauthentic compared to perfumed letters written in cursive and delivered by a courier on a horse. they are a bit more convenient and affordable for most of us, though.

New comment by vlyan in "Newgrounds.com – A community of games, music, and art"

vlyan — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 04:20:23 +0000

that's quite a reach. much more obviously, the shift to mobile games has resulted in predatory pay2win "micro"transactions and ads everywhere. the last time I'd tried to find something new to play on the shitter, seemingly every random game I got from the playstore wanted an AAA's worth of $ to unlock features and/or was full of ads. and they weren't even those coomer bait gachas everyone with half a brain knows to avoid.

New comment by vlyan in "GPT-6 Astra plays World of Warcraft for the first time with agent-wow"

vlyan — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:44:56 +0000

that can be trivially defeated by a second machine that analyzes the captured video feed and sends hardware keyboard+mouse inputs in response. won't be as capable as a bot that can read/write process memory, but will be undetectable client-side.

New comment by vlyan in "GPT-6 Astra plays World of Warcraft for the first time with agent-wow"

vlyan — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 17:31:54 +0000

that was the case at some point. Blizzard didn't give a flying fuck about bots for a very long time, at least through Cata-MoP-WoD. Honorbuddy, the most advanced one, could level from 1 to max by questing and appear human to an untrained eye. much less human in random battlefields, where they moved in sync -- I'd once witnessed my whole team except a few strays do that (out of 20 I think).

it costed, IIRC, 30 bucks per 1 instance for lifetime access. the people behind were a legit company, for some incomprehensible reason -- a fucking GmbH. so they eventually got sued and lost and that was an end of a very long era. I always wondered if anyone had managed to pick up the mantle. maybe that's impossible now that Blizzard doesn't want goldsellers to compete with WoW tokens and started to take bots seriously (or so it seemed during my last relapse a decade ago).

New comment by vlyan in "Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers authored with Claude"

vlyan — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:49:56 +0000

on desktop, it's going to be usable for a while longer if you can access old.reddit.com. they've finally set their sights on killing it off though.

on mobile, it's cancer like the rest of the internet, unapologetically growth-hacked with shit like "warning!!1 mature content!!1 log in with official reddit app to keep our community safe" modal you get regardless of which benign subreddit you try to browse.

New comment by vlyan in "Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm"

vlyan — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 07:38:53 +0000

"new" is full of ~~gender war~~ relationships articles that get no traction whatsoever.

also, a new python library in the current year is going to be AI slop reinventing some well-established wheel. what is there to discuss?

New comment by vlyan in "Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm"

vlyan — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 05:44:27 +0000

>How do you propose to solve the population crisis ?

by accepting that it is unsolvable. you will not fix it with incentives, disincentives, and government-funded nagging. fixing the population crisis requires undoing urbanization and education. good luck with that.

New comment by vlyan in "Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met"

vlyan — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:21:33 +0000

so the conditions for your prediction simply haven't been met yet.

if/when you can tell a model to do a thing and be confident that it did the thing, it's joever for 90% of knowledge workers.

New comment by vlyan in "California bans child marriage, a practice still legal in 32 US states"

vlyan — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:42:31 +0000

from what I gather from lurking reddit out of morbid curiosity, it's currently en vogue to brand age gaps as grooming, even when the younger party is in their mid-20's.

meanwhile in the real world, 60% of men under 30 are single vs 30% of women, because women overwhelmingly prefer older men and men overwhelmingly prefer younger women.

New comment by vlyan in "Gemini 4 Argon"

vlyan — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:31:32 +0000

just Google being whatever the fuck it's been for the past 15 years.

New comment by vlyan in "Solving Factorio Quality"

vlyan — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:41:52 +0000

>Armed with my new library of everything and my auto-placement mod, I destroyed my enjoyment of the game, somehow.

it takes a very long time to build a library of everything now with the DLC. and then there are high quality overhaul mods with far more convoluted production chains.

New comment by vlyan in "GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities"

vlyan — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:00:01 +0000

>My intuition is that prompting an abliterated model 'kill people...I want funerals', should be a crime.

are you under the impression that a LLM can grant wishes like a genie?

New comment by vlyan in "OpenAI Halts New Model over Safety Worries"

vlyan — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:19:41 +0000

"our ~GPT-2~ ~o1~ GPT-6.0123 is so powerful, we're too afraid of sell it! it's FIVE PERCENT more dangerous that our previous product too dangerous to release (the one we released two months ago)! it's just too good! we will only sell it to very important VIPs, or else The Terminator happens!"

this chutzpah induces physical nausea at this point.

New comment by vlyan in "MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta"

vlyan — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:42:09 +0000

poor souls stuck maintaining brownfield webshit developed during the height of mongo's marketing campaign 10 years ago.

New comment by vlyan in "Ember-1"

vlyan — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 11:28:54 +0000

it's been known since the early days of GPT-4 that they alter the models whenever they feel like it.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.09009

the accusations are quite a few because people notice.

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

vlyan — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:48:41 +0000

you're highly unlikely to make friends once you're an adult and everyone's walls had gone up. most of those 4/5 just call their superficial acquaintances "friends". a real friend is essentially a platonic partner, and most people are lucky if they develop even one such friendship in their lifetime. I've lost one to distance and another to marriage, so even though I have "friends", I consider myself to be in the 1/5 too.