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Mouvelie commented on I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me   marcusolang.substack.com/... · Posted by u/florian_s
lo_zamoyski · 4 hours ago
> the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences

Language is like clothing.

Those with no taste - but enough money - will dress in gaudy ways to show off their wealth. The clothing is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a piece of jewelry only if it contributes to the ensemble. Oh, no. They’ll drape themselves with gold chains and festoon their fingers with chunky diamond rings. Brand names will litter their clothing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly.

By analogy, those with no taste - but enough vocabulary - will use words in flashy ways to show off their knowledge. Language is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a word only if it contributes to the prose. Oh, no. They’ll drape their phrases with unnecessarily unusual terms and festoon their sentences with clumsy grammar. Obfuscation, rather than clarity, will define their writing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly.

As you can see, the first difference is one of purpose: the vulgarian aims for the wrong thing.

You might also say that the vulgarian also lacks a kind of temperance in speech.

Mouvelie · 41 minutes ago
A nice metaphor, really. I always compared it to food but clothing works more in that case, it seems.
Mouvelie commented on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges   news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/nreece
cyp0633 · an hour ago
US-designed iPhones have at least 2 cameras, some microphones, and biometric sensors. From this point, everyone outside the US should stop using iPhones to prevent surveillance from the American empire.

From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more.

You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.

Mouvelie · an hour ago
How does it work then ? Explain us how the US, China, and India don't abuse of surveillance on whoever they can, please.
Mouvelie commented on New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books   reactormag.com/new-kindle... · Posted by u/mindracer
charcircuit · 3 days ago
This sounds useful for when you forget something that happened chapters earlier or when you space out and need to figure out what's happening. This feature should work for the user, author's shouldn't be able to deprive me of this tool.
Mouvelie · 3 days ago
Good lord, at this point just drone off in front of a Netflix show. How bad has it gotten that you even suggest that one can "forget what happened chapters earlier" ? This is not normal.
Mouvelie commented on New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books   reactormag.com/new-kindle... · Posted by u/mindracer
savanaly · 3 days ago
If they're not using the book text to train models (keeping the focus on this particular new Kindle feature), where's the room for objection? My device, my content, it's none of the author's business how I read it, in my view.

Edit: Given I've been a reader of HN for some time, I am perfectly aware that on Kindle you don't own the content, just a license to the content. Don't need any more people pointing this out! Lol. In my house we still call owning a license to something that is not likely to be revoked "owning it".

Mouvelie · 3 days ago
"Amazon DID NOT answer PubLunch’s questions about “what rights the company was relying upon to execute the new feature was not answered, nor did they elaborate on the technical details of the service and any protections involved (whether to prevent against hallucinations, or to protect the text from AI training).”
Mouvelie commented on New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books   reactormag.com/new-kindle... · Posted by u/mindracer
Mouvelie · 3 days ago
So...Are all Amazon books available on Kindle ? So...All books are content for the LLM behind it, I suppose ?

Welp. Seems perfect for a poison data effort !

Mouvelie commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto   twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84
alphazard · 7 days ago
It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies.

Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility. Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.

That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers. It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address. The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions. These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before. Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers. It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.

If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

Mouvelie · 7 days ago
I'll do you one better in your prediction : there will be a global decentralized 24/7 multi assets marketplace built on something like Hedera in the next 10 years.
Mouvelie commented on The New AI Consciousness Paper   astralcodexten.com/p/the-... · Posted by u/rbanffy
breckinloggins · 24 days ago
Let's say a genie hands you a magic wand.

The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at."

"You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??"

"Yes", the genie responds.

"And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?"

"Absolutely."

"Awesome! I'm going to try it on my dog first. It won't hurt her, will it?"

"No, but I'd be careful if I were you", the genie replies solemnly.

"Why?"

"Because if you flick the magic wand at anything that isn't sentient, you will vanish."

"Vanish?! Where?" you reply incredulously.

"I'm not sure. Probably nowhere. Where do you vanish to when you die? You'll go wherever that is. So yeah. You probably die."

So: what - if anything - do you point the wand at?

A fly? Your best friend? A chair? Literally anyone? (If no, congratulations! You're a genuine solipsist.) Everything and anything? (Whoa... a genuine panpsychist!)

Probably your dog, though. Surely she IS a good girl and feels like one.

Whatever property you've decided that some things in the universe have and other things do not such that you "know" what you can flick your magic wand at and still live...

That's phenomenal consciousness. That's the hard problem.

Everything else? "Mere" engineering.

Mouvelie · 24 days ago
My first start would be something like Earth itself or the Sun. Imagine the payoff if you survive !
Mouvelie commented on Why aren't smart people happier?   theseedsofscience.pub/p/w... · Posted by u/zdw
Mouvelie · a month ago
Are smart people even fulfilled ? How many smart people work on industries they can't wait to quit ? On problems they don't even care ?

I feel like everyone within 2-standard division of the IQ mean is still susceptible to the never-ending that being rich and having money is all that matters instead of, I don't know, supporting life on the only habitable planet we know.

Mouvelie commented on ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web   anildash.com//2025/10/22/... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker
TeMPOraL · 2 months ago
More serious take: look up "Meditations on Moloch". It gets into why we keep happily building Nexuses of Torment.
Mouvelie · a month ago
Many thanks for that suggestion. I did not know the blog/article, and really, it was the most interesting hour of rabbithole I found in a while.
Mouvelie commented on Claude Skills   anthropic.com/news/skills... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
mousetree · 2 months ago
I'm perplexed why they would use such a silly example in their demo video (rotating an image of a dog upside down and cropping). Surely they can find more compelling examples of where these skills could be used?

u/Mouvelie

KarmaCake day45June 26, 2025View Original