Hacker News: xwdv

New comment by xwdv in "Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?"

xwdv — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 04:40:34 +0000

True, I didn’t read the whole comment.

New comment by xwdv in "Ilya Sutskever "at the center" of Altman firing?"

xwdv — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 03:52:45 +0000

Altman was pushing that narrative because he’s a ladder kicker.

He doesn’t give a shit about “safety”. He just wants regulation that will make it much harder for new AI upstarts to reach or even surpass the level of OpenAI’s success, thereby cementing OpenAI’s dominance in the market for a very long time, perhaps forever.

He’s using a moral high ground as a cover for more selfish objectives, beware of this tactic in the real world.

New comment by xwdv in "Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue"

xwdv — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 03:24:46 +0000

Take another look at the cast of FF6 and you’ll realize a lot of them aren’t really good people… Locke is a thief, Shadow is a straight up killer for hire, Setzer a degenerate gambler and rapist, Edgar a creepy womanizer, and Celes was gleefully killing people for the empire before changing sides (imagine a Nazi general just deciding she’ll join the Allies instead).

New comment by xwdv in "Meta's head of augmented reality software stepping down"

xwdv — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 23:53:56 +0000

More like an AI tech Legion of Doom.

New comment by xwdv in "I wrote in June 2021 how Sam Altman's departure from YC had been under explored"

xwdv — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 23:09:17 +0000

Knowing what I know, I personally wouldn’t advise doing any kind of business with Sam Altman.

New comment by xwdv in "A game about staring into the eyes of a stranger"

xwdv — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 21:45:15 +0000

A human blink is 100ms, it would be amazing if in half that time a blink could be detected and the feed immediately switch to someone new once you open your eyes again.

New comment by xwdv in "OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman"

xwdv — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 21:36:43 +0000

I don’t know Sam Altman well but I do not think he’s a particularly good person, so there’s some counter-evidence.

Personally I welcome this shake up. Some of the things I’ve seen Altman write about are troubling.

New comment by xwdv in "Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue"

xwdv — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 20:15:05 +0000

Chrono trigger is a great game, but I don’t think the story actually holds up that well. For one the time travel mechanic is fairly juvenile, and from what I remember the game is missing one of the most important elements of a good time travel story: when you see effects happen before the cause (which presumably is the work of future versions of characters traveling back in time), so you never reach that satisfying loop back where you meet the past version of yourself and realize it was actually yourself that you saw at that point in time. Instead you just do stuff in the past and it results in some changes in the future, but those changes should have actually always been there in the first place if you would have been successful. It employs an alternate timeline type of time travel which is easy to understand but not particularly accurate or mentally stimulating.

New comment by xwdv in "Amazon cuts 'several hundred' jobs in Alexa division"

xwdv — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 17:38:29 +0000

People named Alexa will be thrilled that this shit never caught on, and will be on its way out soon.

New comment by xwdv in "Putting the "J" in the RPG, Part 1: Dorakue"

xwdv — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 17:31:51 +0000

I still feel Final Fantasy 6 was the best JRPG of the retro era. At the time it had heavy themes you wouldn’t expect a child to grapple with: the ideas that the good guys can just straight up lose and having to live with the consequences, characters whose arcs may never truly be redeemed (because they can fucking die), and even complex issues like the passing of loved ones, committing suicide when all hope is lost, gambling addictions, slitting your own mothers throat for some money, rape and genocide, interspecies relationships, racism, speciesism, the rise of fascism and the use of technology to enslave the masses. It should be a required play through for a young child, and a seasoned adult should provoke conversations about events in the game.

New comment by xwdv in "The night train revolution has been hailed as an alternative to airplanes"

xwdv — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 13:55:53 +0000

In Europe these night trains are useless IMO.

Air travel within Europe is cheap and easy, night trains are far more expensive, slow and run unreliable schedules sometimes, and they often don’t even take you to places you want to go.

In America though, night trains would be awesome, since air travel is expensive, hellish, and the country is built in a way that the destinations most people will want to go to are already laid out in an efficient layout due to the car focused culture.

New comment by xwdv in "I spent 3 years working on a coat hanger [video]"

xwdv — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 04:30:27 +0000

For me the killer app for a coat hanger would be one that allows you to remove the shirt easily with one hand and without stretching out the shirt or possibly breaking the hanger, just pull to remove the shirt right off the hanger. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to come up with this design, and I’m getting close, the secret is spheres

New comment by xwdv in "The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'"

xwdv — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 17:38:12 +0000

My children would simply not be in the way.

New comment by xwdv in "The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'"

xwdv — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 14:27:26 +0000

No, I’m saying terrorists are the intended targets and children just happen to be in the way.

New comment by xwdv in "'No one else is saving it': the fight to protect a historic music collection"

xwdv — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 14:15:53 +0000

Fruits are made to be eaten.

New comment by xwdv in "The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'"

xwdv — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 14:02:42 +0000

There’s no alternative, the terrorists hide amongst the civilians.

New comment by xwdv in "The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'"

xwdv — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 03:11:05 +0000

Intent matters. If you are trying to destroy terrorists, it can be a messy job that results in innocent bystanders also dying, but that alone doesn’t make you a terrorist.

When you specifically target innocent civilians just to make some kind of point, you are a terrorist.

New comment by xwdv in "The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'"

xwdv — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 02:36:11 +0000

No it doesn’t. Terrorists target civilians and incite terror to further their cause.

Hunters of terrorists target the terrorists, and stop them from furthering their cause.

Seems like a pretty clear difference to me.

New comment by xwdv in "The Guardian Deletes Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to America'"

xwdv — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 02:07:56 +0000

And there we go again with a live example of what I’m talking about.

New comment by xwdv in "Confessions of a Startup Founder's Wife"

xwdv — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 01:03:38 +0000

Not sure I’ll make it. Usually a flurry of downvotes come in and drags me back.