esperent (u/esperent)

esperent commented on If a Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why wouldn't the brain? 1393.xyz/writing/if-a-met... · Posted by u/rdgthree

krackers · 4 hours ago

Hmm this leads me to recall a bunch of ancient pseudoscientific sounding beliefs and see whether or not they might be plausibly explained by this mechanism:

* Is it possible for humans to get a vague impression of other humans' thoughts via this mechanism? Not via body language, but "telepathy" (it'd obviously only work over very short ranges). If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"

* Some animals have a preference for sleeping direction in alignment with magnetic pole, are some sleeping directions "healthier" than others for humans?

That aside, I didn't follow the part about how this is an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Why couldn't the brain achieve global summarization via another mechanism, and why does having this "global summarization" result in qualia?

esperent · 4 hours ago

> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"

I've always held two complementary beliefs regarding auras and similar senses:

1. It's plausible that some humans can sense subtle information about things like emotional states or reactions in other humans using non standard sensing mechanisms (so maybe electric fields rather than sight, for example).

2. I'm very certain that for overwhelmingly most humans who claim they can see auras, it's one of: bullshit, fakery, self delusion, wishful thinking, charlatanism, a scam.

esperent commented on RemoveWindowsAI github.com/zoicware/Remov... · Posted by u/hansmayer

charcircuit · 8 hours ago

>Does nobody remember Embrace Extend Extinguish any more?

EEE was something a single Microsoft employee allegedly came up with 0 evidence of it being used internally within Microsoft.

esperent · 7 hours ago

Internally, it was Embrace, Extend, Innovate, used in an executive memo from 1994 [0].

But it doesn't matter where it originated or who first said it. The reason this phrase gained so much popularity is that outside observers could see that's their strategy was (and still is).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

esperent commented on Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy

esperent · 9 hours ago

I've had a thought in my mind recently. There's been a sudden push in Western countries towards "think-of-the-children" online age gating, and hence online verification tools, and any age verification tool that works can verify other things, like whether the user is a real person or not. The "that works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but we should assume that the politicians pushing for this at least believe it's possible.

Of course, any push for new legislation like this has many factions, and I'm sure there's a large faction who genuinely want better CSAM scanning tools, and another large faction who want to spy on and control what people can say online.

But those factions have always existed. Why is this push coming so strongly now in so many countries, and getting so much traction, when it previously failed?

Perhaps it's because politicians have recognized this existential threat. If they can't control what fake AI accounts say online to their real citizens, and the cost of running those fake accounts is trending down to the point where they'll vastly outnumber real people, then western civilization is lost. Democracy only works when there's a reasonable amount of signal in the noise. When it's basically all noise, and the noise is specifically created to destroy the system, the system is dead.

So perhaps there's another faction for whom this think-of-the-children stuff is a way to get verification normalized, and that's a way to get real humans verified online. This would not be accepted if it was done directly (or at least, politicians believe that people wouldn't accept it, and I tend to agree).

I personally react strongly again almost any kind of online control. But for the first time in my life, where we're no longer faced with troll centers that required real humans to work, but we're instead facing millions or billions of AI agents that are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from real humans, and are specifically designed to fight a hidden war against western civilization, I don't really see any other good option either.

Small forums with strong moderation like HN are great, but they don't scale. At best they'll be small enclaves of resistance, but most people will be using larger services that are overrun by fake accounts. And realistically, if we fast forward ten years where I can spin up a few thousand (or million) fake accounts for $1000, that are indistinguishable from real humans and tell them to target any small forum of my choice, I don't think any moderation team can survive that.

esperent commented on OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

esperent · a day ago

It seems to me that skills are:

1. A top level agent/custom prompt

2. Subagents that the main agent knows about via short descriptions

3. Subagents have reference files

4. Subagents have scripts

Anthropic specific implementation:

1. Skills are defined in a filesystem in a /skills folder with a specific subfolder structure of /references and /scripts.

2. Mostly designed to be run via their CLI tool, although there's a clunky way of uploading them to the web interface via zip files.

I don't think the folder structure is a necessary part of skills. I predict that if we stop looking at that, we'll see a lot of "skills-like" implementations. The scripting part is only useful for people who need to run scripts, which, aside from the now built in document manipulating scripts, isn't most people.

For example, I've been testing out Gemini Enterprise for use by staff in various (non-technical) positions at my business.

It's got the best implementation of a "skills-like" agent tool I've seen. Basically a visual tree builder, currently only one level deep. So I've set up the "<my company name> agent" and then it has subagents/skills for thing like marketing/supply chain research/sysadmin/translation etc., each with a separate description, prompt, and knowledge base, although no custom scripts.

Unfortunately, everything else about Gemini Enterprise screams "early alpha, why the hell are you selling this as an actual finished product?".

For example, after I put half a day into setting up an agent and subagents, then went to share this with the other people helping me to test it, I found that... I can't. Literally no way to share agents in a tool that is supposedly for teams to use. I found one of the devs saying that sharing agents would be released in "about two weeks". That was two months ago.

Mini rant over... But my point is that skills are just "agents + auto-selecting sub-agents via a short description" and we'll see this pattern everywhere soon. Claude Skills have some additional sandboxing but that's mostly only interesting for coders.

esperent commented on Japan law opening phone app stores to go into effect www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/e... · Posted by u/shlip

linuxhansl · 2 days ago

Nice. Someone is doing something. Apple's app store monopoly together with a 30% commission is a modern form of way-laying.

Meanwhile Google is trying to go the opposite way with mandatory developer registration/verification. In the US we will likely let them. Who needs freedom if there is money to make (and Google is just making a fake security argument.)

It shouldn't be that hard to do with my phone what I want, including accepting the consequences of my actions.

esperent · a day ago

> a modern form of way-laying.

The best phrase I've heard used to describe this is "techno feudalism".

esperent commented on Oldest attestation of Austronesian language: Đông Yên Châu inscription en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4... · Posted by u/teleforce

esperent · 2 days ago

Interesting, this is about a 45 minute drive away from me and I've never heard about it until now.

I can't find the exact location though, I wonder if it's open to the public to visit?

esperent commented on If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books? newyorker.com/news/fault-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

ekjhgkejhgk · 3 days ago

Regardless of whether I consider HN social media or not, the point of my response is exactly the same.

But if you want to have the (less interesting) conversation about definition, I don't call HN social media, because there's no media. It's just talking to other people.

You say

> or most people, it's the opposite - 90% of time chatting with people in the comments

Exactly! I didn't even read the article. I'm just here talking to people. So I don't call it social media for the same reason that I don't call whatsapp social media. It's just social.

esperent · 2 days ago

Media is shared information, including text. Traditional media is created by institutions like newspapers and mass broadcast. Social media changed that so that anyone can create the information. When we write comments here, we are creating short pieces of media and sending them out to be read.

I find this conversation, about what social media is, and whether some kinds of social media can be healthy, highly interesting, important even.

I also think it's important that we on HN are aware that we're engaging in social media because any time this conversation comes up, there's lots of people saying that they don't use social media, they only use HN, which leads to feeling superior to people on other forms of social media. I don't think that's valid or healthy.

If you or I use HN for 30-60 minutes everyday and we find utility in that, there's no difference to a teenager using TikTok for the same time, we don't get to feel superior or talk about social media addiction without being aware that includes us.

Tiktok has a bad rep but it has some pretty great content too, informative, well produced. Same with YouTube.

esperent commented on If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books? newyorker.com/news/fault-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

dgb23 · 3 days ago

This might sound stupid or obvious to some, but I found a way to read books more frequently: Read multiple books at once.

For some reason, I read more often and am more motivated when I can switch between books. When I tried to focus on just one, I always got the feeling that I sort of have to read it and that turned me off.

Another issue is that I read very slowly and think a lot when reading books, but that's apparently just how my brain works.

esperent · 3 days ago

That works for me with nonfiction books that I'm actively or casually studying. Not for novels though, and if I'm reading a few nonfiction books then start a (good) novel, all the nonfiction takes a backseat until I'm finished.

So I tend to cycle - a good novel, or two, followed by some time with everything fictional removed from my ereader.

This also depends on my personal and work life - fiction is usually much less effort than nonfiction, so when work or personal life gets busy, I find some good novels to enjoy, then when things calm down I'll go back to cycling between several nonfiction books.

Things don't always sync up perfectly of course - the trick is to avoid huge multi-book series, otherwise I'll end up reading them far into the time when I'd be better served by learning something new.

esperent commented on If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books? newyorker.com/news/fault-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

ekjhgkejhgk · 3 days ago

To me, yes.

Well, I've never been on "social media", but e.g. at night before bed some times I scroll on HN for a long time before falling asleep (30min-1hr). If I commit myself not to, I read instead.

The thing we should be talking about is forms of entertainment, and social media is just one type of entertainment. We should be discussing pros and cons of different forms of entertainment. Instead the discussion is "social media bad", which is a great starting point, but has the problem that allows us to avoid having to talk about the underlying mechanisms.

For example, one of the people responding here says "if I don't go on social media I go on youtube instead." If you try and think past "social media bad", what is actually going on?

esperent · 3 days ago

I believe that reddit and HN are social media. They're a different form than Facebook or TikTok, but we come here to be social just the same.

If someone used HN to find interesting articles, then spends 90% of their time reading the articles and only comes to the comments briefly to see that other people think, then it would be fair to call HN a news aggregator site for that person.

But realistically, for most people, it's the opposite - 90% of time chatting with people in the comments, with the actual articles (or even just their titles) mostly just used as conversation starters, with the conversation often veering into wildly different threads that barely relate to the original topic. That's social media.