Hacker News: zetalyrae

New comment by zetalyrae in "Human Routers of Machine Words"

zetalyrae — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:38:47 +0000

It's a joke, c.f. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ-8IuUkJJc

New comment by zetalyrae in "Human Routers of Machine Words"

zetalyrae — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:41:51 +0000

Maybe you're right.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Human Routers of Machine Words"

zetalyrae — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 02:55:49 +0000

But the problem is people are not just delegating formulaic procedural prose to AI. They're using AI to write entire scientific papers, so now reviewers have to use Pangram[0] to screen submissions. Literary magazines have the same problem[1]. Maybe those people should know that their behaviour is bad.

[0]: https://blog.neurips.cc/2026/06/02/ai-generated-papers-in-th...

[1]: https://neil-clarke.com/a-concerning-trend/

New comment by zetalyrae in "Human Routers of Machine Words"

zetalyrae — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 02:18:08 +0000

> This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…)

We have reached the point where you have college professors who defend[0] using AI to write scientific papers (in a seemingly AI-written tweet). Everywhere I go online, I see spam written with the exact same voice. Scientific journals and literary magazines are inundated with AI-written submissions. Software projects have shut contributions because maintainers are tired of reading AI-written slop pull requests.

What's the right tone to take here? "Please stop defecting"? "I wish you would kindly stop ruining the commons"? I don't know. Maybe, if we raise the reputational cost of slop, we get less of it.

[0]: https://x.com/harryjwang/status/2062710375884148945

New comment by zetalyrae in "Human Routers of Machine Words"

zetalyrae — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 02:05:19 +0000

But writing, calculators, search engines etc. are specific tools, you drop a skill to gain effectiveness in another. While AI is a general tool whose builders intend it to be able to perform all cognitive work. Past a certain point, what is left of the human?

New comment by zetalyrae in "Human Routers of Machine Words"

zetalyrae — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 02:02:28 +0000

> The reason why people use AI to manifest their ideas is probably because they have no other way communicate otherwise.

Isn't this a bit circular? They're not communicating to the AI through a BCI.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Human Routers of Machine Words"

zetalyrae — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 01:57:38 +0000

Translation is fine.

New comment by zetalyrae in "[dead]"

zetalyrae — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:07:29 +0000

If you can't even be bothered to write the README without AI, why should I read it?

The History of Neural Networks, 1900-1990 [video]

zetalyrae — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:13:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab44IusdINA

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48469560

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)

zetalyrae — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:45:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm#prelude

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48455145

Points: 142

# Comments: 64

The Weather Machine (2008)

zetalyrae — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 01:45:11 +0000

Article URL: https://events.foresight.org/the-weather-machine/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407000

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929)

zetalyrae — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:44:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48396753

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by zetalyrae in "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

zetalyrae — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:38:32 +0000

Author says he likes his boss and calls him genuine. Maybe he's more able to look on the good side than I. But I can't imagine working with someone like this and having positive thoughts about them. This:

    A month or two into his tenure, we were 45 minutes into a call about the product roadmap and a possible customer announcement. Abruptly, he said, "Hold on a sec-" and began sharing his screen. The familiar MacOS desktop, browser with Claude open, filled the display. He copied the transcript of our call up to that point (he records transcripts of every call in order to feed the text into AI), and opened a new chat with the prompt: "Say where Charlie's right, and where he's wrong. Say where I'm right and where I'm wrong."

Is incredibly insulting and dehumanizing.

I don't know if there's a term for it, but it's a type you see everywhere: people using AI to become worse versions of themselves. Students cheating, "knowledge" workers outsourcing thinking. It's pathetic and contemptible.

What, exactly, is the value of this boss? Why shouldn't they be replaced with a Git repo of Markdown files?

New comment by zetalyrae in "Can we have the day off?"

zetalyrae — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:42:12 +0000

Arguably this is what retirement is, no? Productivity gains did create extra leisure time. It's just we save all the leisure for retirement.

New comment by zetalyrae in "Human Bottlenecks"

zetalyrae — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:22:44 +0000

> no level of AI-enabled automation will help me with my inherent ADD

I have another post you might find useful :)

https://borretti.me/article/notes-on-managing-adhd

New comment by zetalyrae in "Human Bottlenecks"

zetalyrae — Thu, 28 May 2026 01:22:04 +0000

This may be some saltiness on my part. I wish I could curate the wiki of late Soviet military hardware!

New comment by zetalyrae in "Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart"

zetalyrae — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:50:42 +0000

The font looks like the same font in every AI-generated visualization like this.

New comment by zetalyrae in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

zetalyrae — Mon, 18 May 2026 04:33:33 +0000

Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

As I wrote elsethread: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?

New comment by zetalyrae in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

zetalyrae — Mon, 18 May 2026 04:24:49 +0000

Very well explained.

New comment by zetalyrae in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

zetalyrae — Mon, 18 May 2026 04:21:57 +0000

For two reasons:

1. This requires explaining why only some kinds of information processing are privileged to be conscious, which seems rather arbitrary.

2. There's the question of levels of abstraction. Which information processor is conscious? The physical CPU, the zeroth VM, the first VM, the second VM, etc.

3. And there's the question of interpretation. What is computation? A CPU is "just" electrons moving about. Who says the motion of these 10^12 electrons represents arithmetic, or string concatenation, or anything else? The idea of abstract information processing above the bare causality of particles and fields is in itself a kind of dualism (or n-alism, because Turing completeness lets you emulate machines inside machines).