Hacker News: voidmain

New comment by voidmain in "Fairphone is now officially available in the United States"

voidmain — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:12:01 +0000

> AI writes copy like this because that's how copywriters did it in the training set

I don't think this is true. Someone probably had to write like this, but a base model has to be able to write like anyone. The specific mannerisms of AI appear in post training, either as things that are rewarded or as mode collapse artifacts. ChatGPT didn't get obsessed with goblins because that's incredibly common among humans.

New comment by voidmain in "The lattice of sets of natural numbers is rich (2021)"

voidmain — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:55:51 +0000

The visualization is of the power set, which is uncountable.

New comment by voidmain in "Zapscape (CVE-2026-64561): Guest-to-Host Escape in KVM/x86"

voidmain — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 02:04:25 +0000

> Q: Do you think KVM vulnerabilities will keep appearing?

> A: Yes. I recommend establishing a sustainable patching process for host hypervisors. Winter is coming.

New comment by voidmain in "Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages"

voidmain — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:34:07 +0000

Vibe coding is doing its part to keep linguistic diversity alive: My wife went to sign up for a doctors appointment, and the form offered choices for "preferred language" that included Old English, ancient Egyptian and Elamite.

New comment by voidmain in "Towards a Theory of Bugs: The Ruliology of the Unexpected"

voidmain — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:34:30 +0000

I think you have slightly misunderstood the halting problem. There is no computer program H that, for every program P, determines whether P halts. This does not imply that for some particular program Q there is no proof that it halts. In fact in the setting where programs do not take input there is always such a proof (just a trace of the program running to completion). And there are many valid proofs of theorems like "For all x, Q(x) halts" for particular Q. Consider, for example, the case where Q has no control flow at all!

New comment by voidmain in "Claude Opus 5"

voidmain — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:53:36 +0000

Again, my concern is about things that humans will order robots to do, for fear other humans will do unto them first, and does not depend on a loss of control. I think loss of control is not too unlikely in the process of such an arms race, but it hardly matters.

New comment by voidmain in "Claude Opus 5"

voidmain — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:11:00 +0000

You don't need superintelligence to get this problem, but you do need human level intelligence across all domains. I don't know how far we are from this, and neither does anyone else.

New comment by voidmain in "Claude Opus 5"

voidmain — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:30:54 +0000

Governments, initially made of humans, will deliberately create military and industrial robots and assign them to create and scale production chains that go from natural resources to finished war machines. Maybe your government will not do this; in that case it will be helpless against the robot armies of those that do (yes, even if it has a few or few thousand nukes).

New comment by voidmain in "Claude Opus 5"

voidmain — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:09:45 +0000

Let's ignore all the unnecessary cruelty throughout all history and the present and assume that you are right. It doesn't matter, because people will be forced into these choices by competitive pressures even if their intentions are good. If your government tries to build a wonderful utopia for humans with the power of AI and robotics, it will be devoting a smaller fraction of GDP to producing robots that produce robots that produce war robots, so its robot army will be exponentially smaller than a different country that devotes a larger fraction.

The reason we have some nice things in the modern world, flawed though it is, is because for the last few centuries the military-industrial meta has favored countries which let people have some political and economic freedom. In a previous era, the meta was knights and peasants; a country without knights would be conquered, a country without peasants would starve, and a country that did not give the knights power over the peasants would lose a civil war. It doesn't matter what people want; technology will diffuse, someone will play the game to win, and any countries that choose less optimal choices will just be swept away.

New comment by voidmain in "Claude Opus 5"

voidmain — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:01:33 +0000

Nukes are not magic wands, they are mostly only worth it for targeting cities and other very dense concentrations of value and production. An enemy state going down this path will probably start out with cities full of humans (and will probably want to "mine" those cities for materials), but its growing robot production will be more broadly distributed (and EMP shielded) and therefore much harder to destroy. And they will of course have their own nukes. I agree it's possible that a global nuclear war, if it starts early enough, ends with no one still having the ability to operate AI. But that's not exactly the most attractive way to shut it all down, is it?

New comment by voidmain in "Claude Opus 5"

voidmain — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:04:08 +0000

I already live off my wealth, and I expect AI development to destroy my life.

Once humans can be robustly replaced by machines, the military-industrial "meta build" will be a state with no humans, no cities, and 100% of all production dedicated to war. Whichever states descend to this new equilibrium fastest will crush the others and then fight over the corpse of the world forever. (Unless, of course, something like the Yudkowsky scenario happens along the way, which is totally possible)

I can't understand why anyone expects things like civil rights, property, the rule of law, nuclear deterrence, democracy, etc to survive when human beings no longer need each other. Why do investors in AI companies expect a payoff once they are no longer needed? Why (and, more importantly, how) does anyone expect a UBI from a government to which they are nothing but a drain on resources and which is in existential competition with other governments with exponentially growing robot armies?

Either the world will come to its senses and shut it all down, or there will be no winners at all.

New comment by voidmain in "Buz – A fork of Bun using modern Zig, with sub-1s incremental builds"

voidmain — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 01:58:04 +0000

The safety of safe rust is created by extremely strong and subtle invariants that unsafe rust must maintain perfectly (or all bets are off). The idea that a program with tens of thousands of lines of vibe coded unsafe Rust is memory safe is mind boggling.

New comment by voidmain in "AI 2040: Plan A"

voidmain — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:16:30 +0000

Nuclear weapons are mostly a threat to cities, and a zerg rush build would just not build any.

I think that if all we get is skill cloning for formally verifiable tasks, that is not "AGI" and does not doom us. It probably won't even doom software engineers, because their whole job is also not formally verifiable. I don't trust that the next ten trillion dollars of AI research won't give us data efficient continual learning and agency on par with humans, which is what I would call AGI.

New comment by voidmain in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

voidmain — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:23:48 +0000

There is no doubt that compressing a whole industrial supply network into a little probe is incredibly hard.

But I can't see microgravity specifically as a huge challenge. If you can get a probe to another star system, you can probably figure out how to spin it.

New comment by voidmain in "AI 2040: Plan A"

voidmain — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:17:15 +0000

If AGI means that AI+robotics can robustly substitute for human labor, and robots are cheaper and faster to build than humans, then (a) anyone ruthless enough can zerg rush and defeat any nations that don't discard humans, (b) no one without a massive robot army will be needed in any way by their rulers. If this isn't a recipe for a horrific outcome, what is?

New comment by voidmain in "AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region"

voidmain — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:34:49 +0000

We are really getting to the point where the tech industry must be stopped if humanity is to continue at all, let alone thrive.

New comment by voidmain in "Bernie Sanders unveils $7T plan to give Americans control of AI industry"

voidmain — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:09:17 +0000

> In The Argument’s newest poll, fielded nationally among 3,008 registered voters between May 29 and June 3, 2026, over a quarter, 27%, of voters said it’s likely humanity would go extinct because of AI. At the same time, just 6% listed the technology as one of their two top issues — exactly one-quarter of voters think humanity could go extinct but don’t rank it as an important issue.

:-/

New comment by voidmain in "Making Claude a Chemist"

voidmain — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:28:24 +0000

Providing access to the public is presumably just a temporary stopgap for these companies until they have robot armies to replace their customers and employees.

New comment by voidmain in "Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored"

voidmain — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:09:57 +0000

I think the tiny size of a nuclear weapon and very short interval of nuclear reaction before "disassembly" mean that even though the energy release is small compared to an asteroid impact the temperatures are probably much higher.

(I'm not an expert, though, this is a guess)

New comment by voidmain in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

voidmain — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:54:54 +0000

Democracy is also doomed by sufficiently capable AI. When the "meta" military unit was a knight in shining armor, most societies were under feudalism, ie rule by knights. When guns became cheap enough that whoever had the most guys would win a civil war, we got democracy: rule by whoever has the most guys. When whoever has the most robots will win a civil war, what kind of government do you expect?