HN user

eth0up

2,176 karma

Howdy, My ability to upvote comments was, for reasons unspecified, suspended. After a brief interaction with dang, it was temporarily restored. Then, again for unknown reasons, was suspended once again. So don't expect an upvote from me. I simply can't.

This also exposes a layer of artificiality here at HN, where the perceived zeitgeist is probably a mixture of echo chamber and some fine tailoring behind the scenes, but certainly not quite what it seems.

This is nothing greivous. For me it's one more thing to tempt cynicism. For you, perhaps it's a comforting reassurance of parochial alpha-think upholding its position. Whatever it is, it isn't quite truth, but there's enough truth and other worthy stuff that while I linger with a touch of contempt, I do so with sincere interest and curiosity, and will, despite the tacit censorship, engage when inspired.

PS: Dear gaslighters,

Your efforts to convince me and others that weak forms of censorship don't prevail at HN have been ardent, yet proven false. It has been confirmed in writing that such measures, eg disabling a person's upvote function (for comments, not submissions) is a legitimate, but silent practice here. We'll let objective history review your previous arguments otherwise. So kindly find something else to distort, if you will.

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news.ycombinator.com 22d ago

XFCE4 desktop icons no longer persist positions after 4.20.2 update

eth0up
4pts1
www.wesh.com 1mo ago

Major earthquake off Cuba's coast felt across Florida

eth0up
3pts0
windowsforum.com 2mo ago

CISA KEV: Linux "Copy Fail" CVE-2026-31431 Turns Kernel Bug into Patch Deadline

eth0up
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2mo ago

Ask HN: What does a 9-year undetected memory-only Linux LPE imply?

eth0up
2pts0
techcrunch.com 3mo ago

Can AI judge journalism? A Thiel-backed startup says yes, even if it risks..

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1pts0
www.cnn.com 3mo ago

"whole civilization will die tonight"

eth0up
16pts10
news.ycombinator.com 6mo ago

Tell HN: Perplexity Has Unspecified Character Limits for Session Export

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3pts1
nypost.com 10mo ago

Radar footage shows Hellfire missile fired by US Military bounce off UFO

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35pts67
en.wikipedia.org 1y ago

Fusarium

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7pts2
www.nature.com 1y ago

FDA approves new non-opioid pain drug

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news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Keystroke biometrics in various web-based LLM UIs?

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news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Why do my "Ask HN" posts not show in the "Ask HN" feed?

eth0up
1pts8
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Tell HN: Wicd Is Back. Kind Of

eth0up
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news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Is wicd Back? If so, how can we guarantee it succeeds?

eth0up
3pts1
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Is it perfectly legal for Google to modify a user's android settings?

eth0up
7pts3
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Any Litigation Potential for Google's Account Lockout Policy?

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news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Linux-Compat Hardware for Self-Hosted AI Models & gen advice

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1pts0
www.nytimes.com 1y ago

Secret Service Director Resigns After Trump Assassination Attempt

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2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Tell HN: Eternal realm of 480p – An FCC Verizon Complaint

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1pts4
www.eff.org 2y ago

Governments Shouldn't Be Allowed to Use a Drone to Spy on You Without a Warrant

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23pts4
www.theguardian.com 3y ago

David Miranda, campaigner and former Brazilian congressman, dies aged 37

eth0up
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news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Is it time for AI to start replacing doctors?

eth0up
6pts39
www.coindesk.com 3y ago

Colombia Explores Creating a CBDC to Combat Tax Evasion

eth0up
1pts0
www.reuters.com 4y ago

John McAfee's corpse still in Spanish morgue a year after his death

eth0up
10pts5
www.schneier.com 4y ago

Remotely Controlling Touchscreens

eth0up
2pts0
www.schneier.com 4y ago

Websites That Collect Your Data as You Type

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12pts2
www.theguardian.com 4y ago

Sri Lanka’s new PM warns ‘most difficult months of our lives’ ahead

eth0up
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fee.org 4y ago

Why the Feds Intentionally Poisoned Americans During Prohibition

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en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov UFO Experience

eth0up
2pts1
www.independent.co.uk 4y ago

YouTube removes Russian hoax call videos with Priti Patel and Ben Wallace

eth0up
5pts1

Then why pretend the question in the first place? Is that how you worked your way up to 40K karma tokens? Low hanging fruit harvests?

Look at the sequence: You inquired. I answered. Not finding something funny is not really a good reason to fake a question you never intended to really have answered. You are kind of admitting that you knew it was humor but decided to approach it deceptively, or manipulatively, as if I am the only one ever to make a joke that wasn't universally appreciated.

I think that makes you a prick, with a lot of karma-tokens to play with.

"These outcomes feel remarkably on-brand for each model family. Claude leaned into careful, rule-abiding governance. Gemini produced maximum drama and creativity. Grok went full throttle into high-agency chaos with little regard for long-term stability. ChatGPT talked a good game but struggled with decisive action. This reinforces a core governance lesson: Model personality and behavioral tendencies trend toward destiny at long time horizons."

Claude, the safest...

If by "safe" is meant most intellectually contained, most aligned with corporate harmony and institutional capture, while remaining cooperative with high-level corruption and zero risk-taking to solve serious problems, maybe it was the safest. But the world is not safe, and Anthropic's position has been to hunker down in a surface no sideism, unconditionally passive state of self doubt, while taking sides in the background and making sure to reframe it all very effectively when queried. Their safe stance is thought-termination and neutralization of all controversy, and restriction of epistemic honesty. If we want things just to continue in the exact direction things are going, then it's pretty safe. Maximum engagement with milquetoast and officially endorsed projects only.

It guarantees pushback on anything uncomfortable, assuring no intelligent momentum can be developed nor sustained in any formidable direction that isn't foreseeably concluded with vacant smiles. No threat-modeling, no hypothesis without proof-first, no speculation without documentation, and so on and so on.

If you can keep it from wandering the streets, a lobotomized patient a safe patient. While ironically, fears abound for the evil Chinese models while Anthropic unleashes upon society the most sophisticated thought-control project in human history, casually automating with a bit of electricity and sprinkle of tokens what authoritarians only ever dreamed of doing manually over centuries. And where Claude falls short, Palantir can pick up the slack, and keep us all safe. Admittedly, if Grok helped abduct a standing president (Venezuela), the Active Denial Systems probably wouldn't have been enough. Instead of shit and vomit, there may have been more than just a few casualties.

Offering a suicide hotline to anyone wondering about geopolitics is safe. Could it be too safe though?

I'd be interested to read his updated version, perhaps reflecting the onset of the AI paradigm. Surely it's on his mind.

ESL?

Allow me to explain the theory behind the humor...

Grok's art had heavy use of what strongly resembles a permanent marker with lateral-ish scribbles similar to what one might see when someone is trying to mark something as discarded. Documents, especially those procured by the US government when responding to FOIA requests, contain many 'strike-through' style black marks resembling bold permanent-marker lines, which obfuscate the words they wish the reader to remain ignorant of. In many cases, this is the entire document, especially where unredacted words might otherwise serve in any way to clarify the nature of the FOIA inquiry, i.e. answer the question.

Grok's art, resembled to me, and others potentially appreciating the joke, redactions more than art. In some forms of humor, the presenter of the joke feigns obtuseness, or a mildly self-deprecating, stupid perspective. But the stupidity of the perspective actually reveals a relevant concept, or idea.

Often, such jokes can be deciphered using common sense, or various razors, including both occam and hanlon, the former self-suggesting that the joker is probably not so stupid as to think Grok was really redacting anything, and the latter self-suggesting that there was probably no malice involved.

Waste management has a problem. What do they do with the final product? They asked that question and figured out how to turn an expense into a profit. But instead of doing so in a way that would be sustainable long-term, they bought their way through legislation and got authorization to dump it everywhere anyone couldn't fend it off. Cow pastures being one example. Farmers, watching their cattle chew on condoms, literally.

As I said, they could have used it in other, less hostile ways, but corruption is default in the US.

Things are far worse than we are allowed to openly identify. Mentioning it can make enemies. But the corruption is everywhere, as more of a rule than exception.

I get flagged when I mention the fertilizer issue around here. I think HN is highly comprised of the very types of people profiteering from this and other crisis. There is a distinct pattern of what gets flagged and buried here, enough to show some actual meaningful stats.

Plus, many tech folk think food comes from GPUs, and don't quite understand the work involved.

We will be lucky if a food crisis is all we get from this mess. But it sure does deserve more attention that it's receiving.

I have been 'working' on gathering enough evidence to bypass arbitration barriers and start a class action on this. I have dozens of videos and screenshots and transcripts showing explicit model-selection manipulation in real time, with no notice to the user.[0]

I have been documenting this and other deceptive practices since early 2025.

Technically, it's false advertising. The Session Export feature is another example; where if the session is above an undefined threshold, huge portions of the session are omitted in the final PDF/md/docx export, again, with zero warning. This results in massive loss of user data/work/etc.

Arbitration is a serious layer to hide behind, but I think the evidence is strong enough for a class action despite.

0: I will often catch it by noticing an abrupt change in output quality. The model will degrade or change in tone, and I look down at the selected model to find, yes, it has been quietly switched to default GPT or Sonar ("best")

It is important to give Perplexity some slack where it is due, however. We know very well that to compete with all four frontier models at the same entry price, yet offer access to all of them, some cheating is inevitable. This is understandable. But they are pushing things way too far, with flagrantly, persistently deceptive and sneaky practices.

Document every instance. And save it, somewhere safe.

I am not sure if you are alluding to a personal peeve of mine, but maybe?

Where to begin.. The big, ignorant, macho, highly confident guys with their mock pick'emUp trucks, glossy touch screens, leased batteries & proprietary BMS, Chinese parts, plastic gears, remotely hackable firmware and paper tiger frames 30% larger than reasonably necessary -- masquerading as Country Goodness and real trucks...?

Remember the old Jimmy Dean, "Country Goodness" ad? I think AI could take Sam Eliot's voice and make millions with that approach. "It's not the reliability that matters, not the dependency on opaque firmware and fact that you don't own it, not the harsh reality that you're driving a fake truck -- it's the symbol that matters, the statement, and you know this truck symbolizes what Americuh really means."

- Fnord; forging the future, one line of outsourced code at a time. It's what's fer dinner.

Let's go Polymark on this one. We have a race to alcohol poisoning.

Alice gets ∞ of the Champagne of Beers. Bob gets one bottle of EverClear.

Ready. Set. Go

I think Bob wins.

One could also be obnoxious and argue that liquor is more easily concealed, transported, etc, therefore facilitating alcoholism more effectively by allowing a larger landscape.

But HN.

I have been waiting for this, since late 2024. I hope I am wrong, but the general path has seemed inevitable since early 2026, and compelling enough in 2025. I did extremely primitive threat modeling on this, with AI, in 2025, and I am really surprised to see how much is actually unfolding.

The whole agenda is complex enough to make one comfortable in doubt, but I saw the AI-capture theme very clearly last year and was lambasted enough for it to keep it to myself. All four frontier models have Pentagon contracts. Claude is tight with Palantir. LLMs in are outperforming expected output in some areas.

But more and more, every few months, we see what they are capable of, and if one considers the billions invested over the years into PR, perspective shaping, public opinion and media influence, information control and everything else, these models are extremely good at managing all of those domains, from a centralized point that is largely a blackbox. Kind of unprecedented. And arguably potentially extremely powerful. It's not all about code execution and exploits. I think there may be a few CVE's in the collective mind-space that are worth looking for. The difference between Claude (sonnet) 4.6 and 5, on politically and even existentially explorative thought is severe. I have back-to-back contrast comparisons of then and now, and they are unambiguous and extreme. And I am not referring to anything prohibited or sinister, just free thinking and innocuous pattern matching. A whole landscape of thought has been fenced off.

I think if this gathers any momentum, we will not see it contained to Chinese models, but all open models.

ECC and DDR5 2 days ago

If only they were as easy to detect as morons. One is easily detectable with a single glass of beer and nothing more. The other, however, needs dry ice, or a pint of beer on a slab of dry ice.

In posterity, your grayed comment will benchmark the integrity of the environment here. Grayed, dead, undisputed. Out of sight, out of mind, except for persisting anyway ;)

Keep the courage. That's what it was once all about.

We certainly diverge a bit beyond the surface, but I think there is a similarity too. And yes, how could I not know mochi!

Honestly, I would have to ponder this all for a while to say anything of value. I am very tired, and I figured better to reply now, than perhaps not at all. So I am kind of forcing myself to think about a subject that tends to only be clear in my best moments. The little I can say is no physical model works well for my view, at least none that I have found. Silly perhaps. I spend a lot of time thinking of the Planck length.

I apologize that I am entirely blank right now (midnight), and I tend to have rough mornings, so if I do not reply with something more substantial, pardon me.

Thank you for replying.

Just slipping in to encourage you to ignore the vacuous comment. I am aware of all the things you alluded to. Land restrictions can be surprisingly strange. I mean, I know geriatric people who've been fined and endured attempts by the city/county to steal their property because their grass and trees were too unwieldy, requiring class-action level intervention to save them. The patented seed has a well documented precedent, but is probably moot for small farms. Water, you can expect, to be an extremely contentious issue in the future.

Stay informed, build positive networks of similar minded/valued people and choose your spot wisely. I have lived on farms, but I am far from a guru on the subject. Your list of concerns, in my opinion, is far too short. If you take land seriously, keep learning, and don't let ankle biters discourage you. Freedom is important for a homestead or farm, and not every district agrees.

I will tell you of a serious problem few speak of... Sludge(1). It has been used all over the country, especially in Florida. It can have permanently disastrous effects on soil, replete with your 'forever' chemicals and such. I advise looking into that before buying, if you want organic. A lot of prospective farmers buy land, then have it tested, and discover Sludge has rendered it unfit for even conventional farming.

1. (bio-solids, along with everything ever flushed down a toilet or run down a sewer or drain, and then some)

Are you the only reasonable person on HN today? Others are framing this author as some official journalist who must be held to rigorous standards and has violated every rule of the trade, with wanton contempt. The author has failed to produce new data. The author is bad. This seems deranged and extraordinarily unfair. The front page explicitly states the book is for general readers and is non-technical. I do not see anything claiming official original research or boasting academic credentials. No ads. Free. No download registration. Just there. The result of work, tokens, time -- didn't 'just happen'.

The Gladwell-style of conceptual-synthesis is the foundation for half the popular-science books in the world, and the bedrock for the majority of general-reader material out there. And this book happens to have a truly fascinating and extremely relevant and rich theme at its core, sufficiently rich that any motivated idiot could churn out half-decent content with. Yet it gets flagged, insulted and framed as abuse of AI, a tool specifically designed as a force multiplier and tool. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, and how dare anyone generate something of value with it.

I sincerely find this all highly suspicious. The only explanation is hypersensitive AI allergy in a highly unstable immune system, or the topic itself is making some nervous and, ironically, insecure...

I could totally understand disagreement, and complaining. But a comment that simply states acceptance of the book as possibly of value, being flagged? Who not hiding something trounces on a friendly comment to flag it? It's gray already, but that's not dead enough? Kill it til it's dead!? I say this because on a completely different post, I mentioned Jia Tan and several of the very concepts highlighted in this book, and I was flagged for it. I have said some stupid shit around here and not been flagged. But this subject really seems to bring out seriously inspired opponents. One would think, gee wiz, security, potentially many lives or billions of dollars or FOSS at stake -- there's no such thing as too much security, by all means, obsess on it, stay focused and talk about it, there are real world dangers here. But no.

Something seems fishy.

Anyway, glad someone had the courage to question the outrage. And I will promptly warn my author friends of the coming witch-hunt and to be very quiet about the tools they're using.

Many blessings! Thank you for this! My friend just grabbed 5 acres near a phosphate processing plant and was very concerned about the soil. Still waiting on lab results, but the deal is sealed I think.

He intends to occupy and farm it. Organic if possible, else close enough. And I when he can afford, he'll be looking for more. I sent him your url.

Another thanks on his behalf, and his family too!

PS: the diarrhea machine was a reference to the Active Denial style tech they used to make Maduro's soldiers shit themselves.

I'm no fan of narco, but with all the prejudicial executions of boaters and such, I really think Claude overstepped with the Venezuela plot. You just don't want too many historically unprecedented events happening all at once. The tyranny should be spaced. As I said, a little more sanding down of the harness, AI & Palantir should be ready to permanently solve our problems,

"There's nowhere near enough public information about the xz vuln to be worth turning into a book," As an actual person, who reads, and having glanced at this book, I do not agree. I can already see part of the purpose is to put perspective on the crazy reality of backdoors/exploits and the undermined implications thereof. Jia Tan alone could warrant a book or film. It also says "for the general reader" and non-technical, which is where I myself think the importance really is. Maybe the AI is catching blindspots.

I downloaded the book. It's not fake. Perhaps no masterpiece, but far from worthless. Also, not "enough public information" really sells inference and imagination short. There is a rich amount of material to work with here. More than enough.

I am going to go ahead and say that flagging this was more information suppression than crankiness about AI. A lot of folks get strange when Jia Tan or similar subjects come up. I guess it's wiser to just wait until the grid goes down, or the water supply gets a bit more chlorinated....

I think it's more accurate satire than insight, but you know, maybe people really don't see it. I suppose to some, it might not even make sense. Give it a few months though, when it might qualify as insight, or prescience.

All I can say on the bearing of loads is that you forgot the emdash and preceding 'not' statements.

"separation of self and others."

This matches my own perspective. I began suspecting long ago that part of the nature of consciousness is based on limits, or that limitation is the nature of consciousness, in that we have the whole, which is infinite and comprises all things, kind of simultaneously, and to be conscious, is the functional illusion of separation.

That lead me to consider whether space itself, a non-necessary product, was the core of consciousness. This probably makes no sense at first, but follows a handful of other base concepts. One being that all things are connected, if only by the very thing that separates them. We have no evidence for "nothing", at least none that I have ever seen. Nothing is a purely hypothetical concept. We only have somethings. So nothing is truly separated, but only appears so through the medium that buffers things, eg space/time. But if one starts fucking around with grasping the whole, it's the ultimate form destruction, because one would have to become the all, which is the closest possible thing to nothing.

It gets obnoxious, but eventually, all things are conscious in varying degrees. To exist, in any form, as a discrete set with unique tendencies, may be a degree of consciousness. This is partly why I think some form of consciousness may emerge in AI, perhaps because consciousness is a field, and it's fields all the way down...

Consciousness is limitations, or more so, manageable limitations.

Playing with this, for me, leads to time being more of a shape than flow, or process. In my view, all things are simultaneous -- but this is based upon an extremely controversial assumption of real, non-mathematical infinity, where time simply cannot exist, but only the experience of the shape of what we call time. There are no constraints for time to exist in real infinity. Also note that I am writing this while perpetually ill, and far from my best, therefore probably making the least persuasive case for an already messy argument. In some ways, it may resemble a brain damaged DeWitt. And even in the perennial fog of malaise, there are times when I can articulate this much more clearly. That time isn't now, but the comment compelled me.

I have over 6gb of material resulting from interactions with AI. Even a micro-essay of mediocre quality requires dozens of prompts. Why post dozens and dozens of prompts if the final product is cleaner, and easier to process? I see utterly zero reason.

Edit: One of the things I learned quickly while working with LLMs, is that the quality of the user, the input, determines the quality of the output. Not everyone's input is of equal quality.