billiam

Joined 14 years ago

Karma

1,747

Submissions

342

Member since

Oct 25

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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 days ago

I think the level of interaction on forums like HN is a great example of the still-yawning gulf between LLMs and humans when it comes to encoding reasoning into language. Even with the self-selection that comes with posting here, think of how many times it is almost impossible to tell if posters are shit-posting, serious, angry, sock puppets, or just weird.

Comment · 2 months ago

This is a completely inhuman and unamerican take. Money buys secrecy, it always has. Money is a tool, exercising speech is a right. For the Supreme Court to equate them is ahistorical, plutocratic, and terrible. You sound like you support giving corporations the right to vote as well,

Comment · 2 months ago

"you don't want to get flagged"

Ding!

Comment · 2 months ago

The vision of the automated stove is partly fulfilled, at least around San Francisco, by the astounding number of people who get all their meals delivered, for the moment by humans but soon robots.

Comment · 2 months ago

Quaint? We are the closest we've ever been to nuclear annihilation, according to the experts: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/

Comment · 4 months ago

I sure hope the community is working on these APIs now for Linux, with pressure to come on M$ and Apple.

Comment · 4 months ago

Maybe you should be asking yourself what you did to piss of this corvid? They have been shown to recognize faces.

Comment · 5 months ago

Straw man argument. Teachers are important but don’t have impunity to use deadly force.

Comment · 5 months ago

Exhibit A for why we need to rewrite sovereign immunity laws and get them out of union contracts, at the same time professionalizing how DUI is enforced. If we made the punishments like they have in Europe, the incidence would go way down.

Comment · 6 months ago

these dramatic and colorful massive specimens are perfect for an art museum, but as a recovering mineralogist I feel like the true beauty of the world of minerals in Earth is shown on the microscopic level, where you can see both the incredible order and incredible randomness of the (mostly) crystalline solids that make up minerals. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_section

There is an idea that minerals are these inorganic substances but fully two thirds of all minerals identified were originated from direct or indirect interaction with living things on Earth. In fact a recent hypothesis holds that minerals have evolved since the formation of the solar system very much like living things, getting more and more complex via selective processes. See https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/research/mineral-evolution

Comment · 7 months ago

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically any societal function for decades without any actual data.

Comment · 7 months ago

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically anything for decades.

Comment · 1 year ago

Just pointing out that this silly exercise was mostly powered by nuclear reactors in France that (besides fission) transmute Uranium into Plutonium.

Comment · 1 year ago

This site is becoming the Buzzfeed of tech. Better moderation please.

Comment · 1 year ago

Clown take. The use of Signal or any app on a non-secure device by SecDef for what we know he messaged about in his office is absolutely a primary national security threat. Firing offense for any senior Pentagon official dealing with highly classified traffic. Nothing to do with politics.