HN user

swores

14,485 karma

I do marketing & other business stuff, mostly in gaming & tech.

Email me: islands_message_0v@icloud.com (Apple relay to avoid crawlers pulling my email from here)

Posts33
Comments1,337
View on HN
www.theguardian.com 9mo ago

Magnifying the minuscule: Nikon Small World photomicrography 2025 – in pictures

swores
4pts0
www.theguardian.com 1y ago

Autoimmune disease may almost double risk of mental ill health, study suggests

swores
2pts1
github.com 1y ago

"Frontier Al systems have surpassed the self-replicating red line" [pdf]

swores
4pts0
www.theguardian.com 1y ago

The rapid rise of Russia's powerful darknet drug industry

swores
4pts2
www.theguardian.com 2y ago

Boeing's largest plant in 'panic mode' amid safety crisis, say workers and union

swores
75pts88
www.theguardian.com 2y ago

Herd of 170 bison could help store CO2 equivalent of almost 2M cars (Romania)

swores
7pts3
www.cnn.com 2y ago

Why tonight's solar storm could disrupt communications and GPS systems

swores
4pts0
www.theguardian.com 2y ago

Cost of developing new drugs may be lower than industry claims: trial

swores
275pts282
en.wikipedia.org 2y ago

MENACE - Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (1961 mechanical ML / RL)

swores
2pts5
www.theguardian.com 2y ago

Killer fungi detectives: inside the lab that may be fighting the next pandemic

swores
5pts0
www.theguardian.com 2y ago

Asthma hospitalisations drop 41% in improved air of lockdown, Oxford study finds

swores
2pts1
www.axios.com 2y ago

Unprecedented Microsoft leak reveals plans for new Xbox systems

swores
32pts10
www.bbc.co.uk 2y ago

'This could be the holy grail to replace palm oil' – research team

swores
21pts20
www.theguardian.com 2y ago

British TV ‘allowed monarchy to censor coverage of king’s coronation’

swores
14pts11
www.theguardian.com 2y ago

Live worm found in Australian woman’s brain

swores
228pts153
www.theguardian.com 2y ago

The EU has just clamped down on big tech. Britain, take note. (DSA)

swores
3pts1
www.talkingdrugs.org 2y ago

Ship some cocaine with me (2023)

swores
6pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Ask HN: Is there a marketing-related topic you'd like an article written about?

swores
3pts6
www.theguardian.com 3y ago

More than 850 people (now 30/month) referred to clinic for video game addicts

swores
4pts1
www.theguardian.com 3y ago

Minister orders halt to Cambridgeshire Council’s four-day week trial (UK)

swores
2pts1
www.theguardian.com 3y ago

The truth about emulsifiers: are they destroying our gut health?

swores
8pts0
www.bloomberg.com 3y ago

Meta’s Clegg Invokes Anti-China Rhetoric Against TikTok

swores
4pts2
counter-strike.net 3y ago

Counter-Strike 2 – Limited Test for select CS:GO players

swores
451pts301
ico.org.uk 3y ago

Our Work on Artificial Intelligence (UK Information Commissioner's Office)

swores
2pts1
www.theguardian.com 3y ago

‘Bond villain’ DNA could transform cancer treatment, scientists say

swores
4pts0
www.theguardian.com 3y ago

EU unveils plans to cut Europe’s plastic and packaging waste

swores
7pts0
www.cnn.com 3y ago

Solar-powered electric car cleans carbon from the air as it drives

swores
2pts1
www.sciencedirect.com 3y ago

Increased risk of death after discharge from compulsory care for substance abuse

swores
1pts0
www.sciencedaily.com 3y ago

Study demonstrates universal human ability for logarithmic spacing of numbers

swores
19pts2
www.nature.com 4y ago

Food-seeking behavior is triggered by skin ultraviolet exposure in males

swores
2pts0

I think it depends on context.

If the private subsidiary was doing semi-unrelated stuff to the goals of the non-profit, and using it to fund the non-profit, then your logic could make sense - for example if a cancer research charity owned a profitable business and funnelled the profits up to spend on research, great.

But in OpenAI's case, the claimed goals of the non-profit were essentially "do AI in a way that puts safety above profits". And whether or not one agrees with their previous approach to safety, or even whether safety needs to be cared about, it's undeniable that the for-profit business isn't acting as useful fundraising for the non-profit's goals, it's literally acting in the opposite direction.

Well, you don't know if they do, or if they were just capitalising the start of their sentence while not feeing that the word needs a capital letter in and of itself.

(But yeah, personally I would capitalised both counties regardless of spelling/which name used.)

It partly depends on whether "time spent on screens" is counting time where a person's attention is primarily on the screen, or time when a screen is actively directed at a person.

As a few examples from my life (I'm sure there are plenty of other such scenarios too):

- There are quite a few hours in a typical week where my phone screen is showing a video, but just because I can't have it playing in the background (eg YouTube without premium, although actually I've just installed a third party app to get around that for YT). I'm actually just listening with a wireless earpiece or two while doing something else.

- Time spent with a friend where we're sort of watching TV, but more than half the time our attention is on our conversation not on the screen.

- Time spent multitasking, whether that's doing a hobby while also watching TV, or texting people while also eating, or whatever.

Those types of things can make the difference between a certain amount of screen time being a much smaller or much bigger part of a person's day.

"more than 6 in 10 people declare they already use AI for mental health questions. 42% of them almost always follow the advice it gives them."

If these numbers were "of people who regularly use GenAI chat tools" then I'd be surprised it was quite so high already, but not shocked and would find it completely believable.

But this seems to be "of all people surveyed", which I'm rather skeptical of - unless their sample was very biased (as an extreme example, if they recruited people to the survey only by linking to it in ChatGPT ads, but there are plenty of less extreme ways to get a sample group that's way more likely to use AI than a genuinely random sample of the whole population).

It's also worth noting (and perhaps somewhat explains numbers seeming so unrealistically high to me) that, unless I've misunderstood, "turn to AI for psychological support" isn't necessarily "using AI as a therapist", it could be uses as minor as asking "Can exercise help with my depression?" or "If I think I am having a nervous breakdown, should I talk to a doctor?"

MAI-Code-1-Flash 2 months ago

Sorry, what do you mean by "To not own the model is not viable in 2026."

I assume I'm misunderstanding you (likely my fault), because the way I read that is that you're saying nobody should currently be using models owned & hosted by companies like OpenAI and Antheopic, while clearly a huge number of people are using those in 2026 despite not owning them.

Pedantic correction that doesn't change anything other than accuracy: it was reported over a year ago to be closer to 14% than 15%.

https://www.theverge.com/news/627849/auto-draft

But I believe since then Anthropic have raised more money, almost certainly diluting Google's stake (I could be wrong and misremembering that Google didn't partake in the additional fundraising). I have in the back of my head that Google is down to something like 10% now, but don't have time to go and find details to fact check that, sorry!

"LLM's don't offer you an advert."

Some already do, and some of the ones that don't will in the future.

See for example https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt

Of course that's not to say that the advertising situation will be identical to that of pre-LLM search engines, and the differences may lead to radically different economic models and user experiences. But I was just correcting your statement.

Life insurance doesn't pay out for suicide.

This may vary by country, it isn't a subject I'm particularly familiar with, but at least in the UK that isn't true - many, I think most, life insurance policies here do pay out for suicide. There's just a period of years between the start of the policy and when suicide starts to be covered, to prevent people who are planning on killing themselves from being able to take out insurance just before doing so.

There definitely are ways that publishers could have avoided falling foul of anti-Cartel legislation (my question was about where the line is, ie if they did it legally would it actually benefit them), but...

Spotify and Netflix aren't owned or created by a syndicate of all the major publishers, so that's not actually a counter point. There's a huge difference legally speaking between a company negotiating with lots of rights holders to offer customers all of their content in one place, vs. those rights holders co-creating that platform and running it themselves.

(Not that the distributor has to be owned by a cartel of the rights holders to still abuse their position illegally, eg https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/e-book-retailers-d... - it's just that the cartel aspect is the bit I had been talking about.)

I'm not very familiar with anti-cartel laws (in any country), but I wonder if there would be legal issues preventing publishing companies from working together in such a way even if they otherwise had wanted to?

(Though even if that is the case, I'd still think they could have at least agreed on open standards to use, to prevent anyone like Amazon from creating vendor lock-in.)

But Amazon had advantages from its size. In terms of economies of scale for device manufacturing, publishers could have somewhat caught up if they pooled money to invest in a co-owned company that made devices (though still wouldn't have had such an advantage as Amazon, who could share R&D and production costs with any overlaps to other devices such as smart home speakers, Android tablets, etc.) But Amazon was also able to take a bigger picture approach, using cheap Kindles/ebooks to attract people into their ecosystem and then converting a not-insignificant amount of them to buying other stuff on Amazon.

There have been quite a few punctuations proposed for indicating sarcasm, but interrobang not one of them - that (‽) is literally a combined ? and !, and is (per wikipedia) for "a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement, disbelief, or confusion in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question".

This page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation - has sarcasm ones (but I don't think any are as well known as the interrobang, which itself isn't exactly universally used... though personally I'm weird enough to have a keyboard shortcut to type it on my phone)

In a similar vein to cobbzilla, I have a couple of family members (and to a lesser extent myself too) who would be keen on such an app for their iOS devices if you ever need some testers for that :)

(iPhones 15 Pro, 11 Pro, SE-2nd; and an iPad of some kind)

Personally I find the formatting used by the Gutenberg one to be a lot nicer/easier to read, despite (or perhaps because of) being simpler, more plain.

At least for the first few pages of content that I looked at on both versions.

Very much depends on the site - certainly there's plenty that are annoying in the way you describe, but there's also plenty (I wouldn't be surprised if either side were the majority) that will take you to the exact same content on the more local version of the site.

"That feels likely everyone is failing at sleep, not just parents."

This doesn't really mean anything for comparing parents with non-parents, since it's self-reported so "failing" could mean "missing several hours of needed sleep each night" to one person and "failing to hit higher-than-needed sleep target twice a week" to another.

"just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years."

One problem I've heard about this idea in the past is that cars and their batteries are expensive, and people won't want to run down the lifetime of their car battery more quickly by also using it as a home battery rather than just for driving.

Obviously this can be solved either by making it so cheap to replace car batteries that nobody cares, or by legislating that people have to use their cars this way. But is either of these solutions easy to happen any time soon?

Despite the official bug bounty page for OpenAI having "accounts and billing" as a valid category, when I reported a bug that lets anyone subscribing to ChatGPT a) choose any country, that doesn't have to match billing address, to pay a lower price (since some countries they charge considerably less than the equivalent US price), and b) set the sales tax to 0%, even if both the country selected for price AND the country of the billing address both have legally mandated sales tax / VAT - and their response was that it was considered out of scope and not valid for any bounty.

To be fair, I suspect real life is a bit like that too - there will be a big enough % of potential customers who want one of "the classics" for where you are (margherita etc in Italy, pepperoni etc in the UK, whatever) that basically every place that serves pizza will have the same first few options even if they get creative with the rest of the menu.

Sorry but that's bullshit.

It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose.

But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.

I agree with your thinking in the context of "keeping drug policy broadly the same but improving policing of it".

But fuck current drug policy. If someone is high on cannabis, or MDMA, or even "harder" drugs like cocaine and heroin, as long as it's not causing them to be violent or to commit other crimes such as theft then why should that become a legal problem for them any more than if they were intoxicated from spending a few hours drinking beers? And with the odd exception like keeping existing "driving under the influence" laws, we don't need dedicated "violent because of drugs" or "theft because of drugs" legislation, those crime should be treated the same regardless of whether drugs were involved or not.

The current "war on drugs" has been a failure at preventing people from buying and using recreational drugs, and it's been a failure at protecting society and members of society from themselves and from others, because evidence and experts all points towards better results coming from investing in being able to offer medical treatment services (rehab, therapy, etc) than policing and prison services.

I very much think there will come a time in the future, if we haven't accidentally killed our species by then, that we look back on this time the same way as most of us currently look at historic types of slavery, or stoning homosexuals to death, as both idiotic and incredible immoral. I hope we reach that point in the coming years/decades, rather than needing centuries.

(To be clear, I wrote "historic slavery" not to imply there are some forms of modern slavery that I think are OK; but because sadly there is still modern slavery ongoing all around the world, so we can't say that it's a universally condemned thing of the past. Hopefully one day it will be, too.)

Thanks! I figured the orbital paths not being exact circles meant they'd be slight variance in the difference, just wasn't sure if it was enough to matter or if they could treat it as if it was exactly the same all the way around without it mattering.