Hacker News: zaphar

New comment by zaphar in "The Price of Intelligence Is Falling Rapidly"

zaphar — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:10:28 +0000

I have been searching for a good term or name for what we are actually buying. A "probabilistic search for a reasoning chain through a semantic space" is about as close as I've gotten and I have a feeling it's not exactly accurate either.

New comment by zaphar in "Good people refuse to do bad things"

zaphar — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:07:01 +0000

I was not referring to corporations.

New comment by zaphar in "Good people refuse to do bad things"

zaphar — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:54:00 +0000

Personal responsibility leads to corporate responsibility which is the solve for structural problems. You can never impose a new structure to fix it unless you embrace some form of corporate responsibility which requires personal responsibility.

New comment by zaphar in "What we have learned at OpenShell applying formal methods to control AI agents"

zaphar — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:58:05 +0000

I don't really feel like permissions is the hard bit here. The hard bit is that for an agent to do any kind of useful work it needs access to a lot of stuff. Further, the stuff it needs access to probably has vulnerabilities the agent can do. We have not exactly designed our environments for a use case like this. I've gone through the sandboxing exercise for an agent and by the time I had given it enough permissions to do anything useful my sandbox looked like swiss cheese.

New comment by zaphar in "Global bond yields hit 2008 highs, raising stakes for big borrowers"

zaphar — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:33:59 +0000

There are really just two ways to avoid the inflationary spiral. You can either increase income (i.e. grow gdp) or you can decrease spending (i.e. cut entitlements).

This is as close as it can be to clearly explain. The problem is that most of our politicians are not explaining it and instead ignoring it. As an individual the only thing you can do is vote for candidates who are willing to have that hard conversation with the public. Unfortunately it looks like that would require voting for a third party candidate and a vanishingly small minority of the electorate is willing to do that. So given all of that context I'm not really sure that the term "Catastrophically indebted" is wrong.

New comment by zaphar in "Show HN: Pelican-bicycle alternatives"

zaphar — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:13:59 +0000

I notice none of the octopi seem to be actually facing the organ.

New comment by zaphar in "Who People Talk to When They're Struggling"

zaphar — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:08:37 +0000

That sucks and I'm sure it feels hopeless. But there are ways forward you can investigate. Look for a local community you can plug into. Ease into them and after some time you will be able to make the kind of connections you need.

My personal preference is a local church but there are other options out there. Club's around a shared interest you have. Community center events in your area. It's won't be quick and it won't be easy but you can reverse this.

New comment by zaphar in "This Month in Ladybird – August 2026"

zaphar — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 23:30:42 +0000

The value of a feature or a bugfix is not calculated from the effort required but from the need or desire for said feature or bugfix. So whether or not the barrier to entry has been lowered by llm's is irrelevant. What matters as to it's value is the result.

New comment by zaphar in "Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal"

zaphar — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:37:03 +0000

This is completely missing the point. Structurally I don't believe either party is set up to allow truly quality candidates to succeed. They optimize for all the wrong things in their candidates. Candidates who are quality that get through tend to be exceptions. Picking the worst of either side is just furthering the "We can't vote for good candidates because they might lose to whoever we believe is the worst candidate on the other side" narrative. The only way out is to stop buying into that narrative in a large enough number.

New comment by zaphar in "Zohran and the Short Link"

zaphar — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:12:31 +0000

At no point in this thread have I made a value judgement about Socialism. He got elected claiming to be a socialist which is fine. My point is that getting upset when someone says he's a socialist when he actually claims to be one is silly. It worked for him and he communicated to his electorate what he needed to. New York elected a socialist because they wanted one. They don't get to say "don't label him a socialist" after the fact.

New comment by zaphar in "Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal"

zaphar — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:21:16 +0000

This is impossible until a critical mass of voters across every state starts putting competence and integrity ahead of their pet issue and populism. If you actually want to start making headway in this direction you have to stop voting for candidates in either of the main parties. The parties are probably not salvageable. Find a third party candidate with these qualities and vote for them and convince as many people as you can to vote for them.

If we can't do that then we are just stuck as a body politic.

New comment by zaphar in "Zohran and the Short Link"

zaphar — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:38:55 +0000

Not by me. By the rest of the world along with me.

New comment by zaphar in "Zohran and the Short Link"

zaphar — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:52:48 +0000

Yeah, no. I am neither left or right these days and I see just as many attempts to coopt terms to have a different meaning from each side. My solve is to refuse to participate. If you want to communicate to me then you are going to have use the accepted definition not the definition you want me to believe instead. If you say you are a socialist then I will believe you. If you say you are a christian nationalist then I will believe you. I'm not interested in what your enemies want me to believe the term means. I'm only interested in the fact that you used it and it has real definition.

Any other road leads to madness and an absence of shared meaning. I will hold you to the standard of your own language and actions. Use the words correctly or be misunderstood. That's on you not me.

New comment by zaphar in "Zohran and the Short Link"

zaphar — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:27:41 +0000

This line of thought bugs me. We use labels for a reason. Socialism has a well accepted definition and has for decades. We haven't modified it's meaning. I think it's fine to take someone at their word if they use a label. It's not on me to interrogate whether they mean something else when they use the label. It's on them to use the label correctly if they want to communicate. Especially if they are a politician where the entire job is to communicate and persuade.

New comment by zaphar in "Zohran and the Short Link"

zaphar — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:40:42 +0000

To be fair Mamdani has stated that he is a "socialist" numerous times. So I don't think that the characterization is wrong necessarily.

New comment by zaphar in "When str.lower() is a security vulnerability in Python – Seth Larson"

zaphar — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:47:43 +0000

I'm too lazy to investigate further but my guess is that if there is a vulnerability here it has something to do with dns name spoofing.

New comment by zaphar in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

zaphar — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:33:38 +0000

So they did not in fact build more, by any definition that a reasonable person would use.

New comment by zaphar in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

zaphar — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:56:36 +0000

What did they build more of then?

New comment by zaphar in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

zaphar — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:17:54 +0000

It is my understanding that they didn't in fact "Just build more" so how would they know it was or wasn't working?

New comment by zaphar in "Hello, me. It's been a while"

zaphar — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:09:38 +0000

This is a pretty well studied and researched area. It is in the research almost universally accepted that silence or white-noise is the most conducive environmental soundscape for introspective thought across all groups.