Hacker News: yubblegum

Adieu aux 'Enfants Rouges': Fire destroys Paris's oldest covered food market

yubblegum — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:28:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20261012-adieu-aux-enfants-rouges-tears-shock-fire-destroys-paris-oldest-covered-food-market

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058791

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by yubblegum in "3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit"

yubblegum — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:55:12 +0000

Commodity hardware may be disposable, but data that is not reproducible is worth it. I suspect most storage will move to secure environments.

New comment by yubblegum in "3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit"

yubblegum — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:50:59 +0000

> The Soviet Union arguably had some of world's finest engineering talent, but many of those [..]

.. were not Russians. USSR itself incorporated besides its native Russian talent 2 talent powerhouses of Ukraine and Armenia. Ukraine was the industrial powerhouse. Armenia was the USSR's silicon valley with hightest per capita of scientists in USSR. There is also Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to consider, all of them active in relative high tech engineering.

New comment by yubblegum in "How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn't"

yubblegum — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:37:07 +0000

Shifting reputational fortunes. He definitely had his issues but this modern geek caricature of him as some sort of opportunistic nasty is not justified by the historic record. The man contributed to human society, unquestionably.

Which is how we ended up with a famous electric car company named after Tesla, whereas Edison was far more involved with the type and contributed to battery technology for EVs of the day.

New comment by yubblegum in "I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities"

yubblegum — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:24:44 +0000

Undoubtedly a fundamental reconsideration of political economy is necessary if we are going to go all in with AI. As of now, this technology will exacerbate the existing 'singularities' and wealth disparity distortions in the socio-economic body. And now, basic fucking income is not the answer. Maybe pitchforks.

New comment by yubblegum in "Why were Victorian elites so effective?"

yubblegum — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:11:42 +0000

(Modulo d'oh because of the industrial revolution and the relatively easy wealth extraction that that enabled;) because the British public had internalized (I would venture to this day) the distinction between upstairs and downstairs and did not present a revolutionary risk to the elite. This then allowed the wise decision of the elite to permit social mobility to those who would work to further the broader cause of the Empire, in all domains including sciences. This is likely a very goldilock moment for any civilization: higher valuation of reason over dogma; a techological and economic production jump that enabled a categorical raising of one nation over many others; a mass population that did not think less of its 'betters' because they were slothful extravagents (as long as they 'acted' superior); and finally the creation of a productive and resourceful middle class that was satisfied to help in the administration and operation of an enterprise that was deemed a national cause: the empire.

New comment by yubblegum in "Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict"

yubblegum — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:26:51 +0000

Interesting! Thanks.

New comment by yubblegum in "Questions for believers in AI consciousness"

yubblegum — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 01:20:22 +0000

Well, what do you know. My friendly LLM agent pointed out my line of thinking has been formalized:

https://arxiv.org/html/2512.12802v1

From the abstract:

The requirements for a falsifiable and non-trivial theory of consciousness significantly constrain such theories. Specifically, recent research on the Unfolding Argument and the Substitution Argument has given us formal tools to analyze requirements for a theory of consciousness. I show via a new Proximity Argument that these requirements especially constrain the potential consciousness of contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) because of their proximity to systems that are equivalent to LLMs in terms of input/output function; yet, for these functionally equivalent systems, there cannot be any non-trivial theory of consciousness that judges them conscious. This forms the basis of a disproof of contemporary LLM consciousness. I then show a positive result, which is that theories of consciousness based on (or requiring) continual learning do satisfy the stringent formal constraints for a theory of consciousness in humans. Intriguingly, this work supports a hypothesis: If continual learning is linked to consciousness in humans, the current limitations of LLMs (which do not continually learn) are intimately tied to their lack of consciousness.

New comment by yubblegum in "Questions for believers in AI consciousness"

yubblegum — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:54:56 +0000

> Trivially yes, the current state of the model and context in latent space is such a world. I don't think it's aware of its own state any more than humans are aware of their own neuronal action potentials.

It's a static world model, so if one accepts that, then LLMs are a 'static mind' but not yet 'conscious'. Once that internal model becomes dynamic and its changes subject to its experinces (like us), then we can revisit this q of whether mechanical minds can achieve consciousness.

tldr; mind =/= consciousness

New comment by yubblegum in "Questions for believers in AI consciousness"

yubblegum — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:10:36 +0000

I find this dualistic idea of "internal world" vs "real world" somewhat like the mind/body dualism. The actual fact (as far any one of us can prove to our own self) is that the world we experience is entirely an internal construct. Yes, there is an objective reality but no sentient can ever claim to have experience of 'objective reality'.

New comment by yubblegum in "Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge"

yubblegum — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:56:36 +0000

duck.ai et al? my chatbot claims its architecture provides some level of privacy yet it is honest enough to point out none of these systems are actually audited and "not stored" and "anonymous" does not mean "not monitored".

Threat modeling and circumvention of Internet censorship (2017) [pdf]

yubblegum — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:00:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2017/Archive/EECS-2017-225.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49953128

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by yubblegum in "Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict"

yubblegum — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:36:45 +0000

> Alexis Fitzjean Ó Cobhthaigh

Completely an aside, but I find that a most unusual name for a Frenchman. AI informs me that Fitzjean is Norman and that last name is obviously Irish.

New comment by yubblegum in "I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken"

yubblegum — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:26:39 +0000

The agents of OpenAI hacking other systems is not remotely the same as e.g. Smith & Wesson selling a product that others use. It is OpenAI, the company, that is commiting these crimes and someone needs to be held accountable. After all, if someone commits murder with a gun, regardless of what happens to Smith & Wesson executive weanies, someone will be charged with a crime.

New comment by yubblegum in "Greg Kroah-Hartman – Security in the LLM Age [video]"

yubblegum — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 11:52:29 +0000

Do containers and VMs provide any defense against this or does the USB handshake happen with or involve the host OS?

New comment by yubblegum in "The AI Race Just Got Awkward"

yubblegum — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 11:29:31 +0000

> What Anthropic is doing requires way more resources than what the Chinese labs are doing. So their complaint is that they do 95% of the work and the Chinese labs do the last 5% and call it their own.

Anthropic: The Chinese have broken the implicit ethical rule of honorable thievery. We did most of the heavy lifting in this global heist, and here they are taking our righteous loot. This is not right.

New comment by yubblegum in "1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide are caused by infections, study finds"

yubblegum — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:35:07 +0000

> it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live. Most people just don't live that long.

Hmm, that actually parses for me as "it is not important to note" since the 100% assertion doesn't apply to most of us as we won't live that long.

What applies to most of us is that certain behaviors can dramatically increase your chances of getting cancer.

New comment by yubblegum in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

yubblegum — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:58:52 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daktulosphaira_vitifoliae#Biol...

This organism is practically hacking the plant in a multiphase process. It is interesting how selection forces are working at every stage, hardening the hack.

New comment by yubblegum in "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS"

yubblegum — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:05:40 +0000

The Dutch have ditched even github. They are thinking ahead.

https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS

New comment by yubblegum in "AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons"

yubblegum — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:30:32 +0000

Aren't you paying attention to all the news? They have announced that this will be regulated. A technology that everyone is told "can kill us all" is going to be treated like WMDs. Enjoy those open source models while they are still legal.