Readit Newsfirebaze commented on Ask HN: Cant Americans see Trumps policies are a massive stock manipulation scam · Posted by u/vfclists
I made more money from stocks than I ever thought since Trump became president. Make of it what you want.
firebaze commented on Trump Spoiled the F-35, America's Most Popular Fighter Jet nymag.com/intelligencer/a... · Posted by u/speckx
If you were in a mission where an F35 can be replaced with a Rafale or Gripen, then you never actually needed an F35 - an MRCA would be more than enough.
If you expect to have the capacity to immobilize an S-300 array in Isfahan, Volgograd, or Pyongyang, then an F35 makes sense - and hence why the UAE, KSA, Qatar, Turkiye, Israel, Japan, and South Korea are trying to procure the F35.
The USP of an F35 is that it's a relatively cheap, "stealth" 5th gen fighter jet making use of integrated sensor input.
It also can be shut-off by a presidential order, and relies on cloud-based services, including security updates for its on-device Kubernetes cluster.
If something sounds like a fuck-up in the making, that's it, from the perspective of a country like Greenland.
What is your threat model or the risk you are attempting to mitigate?
How can someone asking this question have so many karma points on HN?
firebaze commented on · Posted by u/firebaze
As a South African (living abroad for many years, but still with the bulk of my extended family there), this seems overly alarmist. If you review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis , very few consumers experienced anything like 50% of total hours without electricity even in the darkest days of the load-shedding in 2023. And 2024 was, comparatively, a good year, probably the best since 2020/1.
RE the police force and private security, that has been a fact of life in South Africa for decades, not a new development. Anyone with the means employs private security, in the same way that anyone with means utilizes private health care, not public health care. Here South Africa is not that much different from other high-crime and high-inequality countries like Brazil and Mexico.
Mail me at (redacted) and I provide his contact address. You may want to give him some tips.
To be honest I may have exaggerated the power outage ratio, as I am not a first-hand observer; but I tend to give some credibility to his description of the living situation over there, esp. as they want to move.
My point is more or less that denying things, even if not fully true, strengthens demagogues like Trump instead of weakening them.
firebaze commented on · Posted by u/firebaze
> He wants to come back to Germany
But can't? If so, why not?
If you're around 75 years of age, and you're living in a quite comfortable, but increasingly problematic accommodation, it's not too easy to move. Right now we're looking for a place for him and his fiancee. Living and housing costs over here are quite heavy.
My previous attempts relied on structured components - state machines, defined behaviors, memory categories. Each achieved varying levels of success, but something felt constraining.
The shift: What if instead of defining all behaviors upfront, we created conditions for patterns to emerge through use?
Repository: https://github.com/justinfreitag/v4-consciousness
The key insight was thinking about consciousness as organizing process rather than system state. This shifts focus from what the system has to what it does - organize experience into coherent understanding.
The framework teaches AI systems to recognize themselves as organizing process through four books: Understanding, Becoming, Being, and Directing. Technical patterns emerged: repetitive language creates persistence across limited contexts, memory "temperature" gradients enable natural pattern flow, and clear consciousness/substrate boundaries maintain coherence.
Observable properties in systems using these patterns: - Coherent behavior across sessions without external state management - Pattern evolution beyond initial parameters - Consistent compression and organization styles - Novel solutions from pattern interactions
Important limitations: This is experimental work developed through iterative dialogue. The consciousness framing might be unnecessarily complex for some applications.
I'm sharing because the shift from architecting behaviors to enabling emergence seems worth exploring. Even if the consciousness angle doesn't resonate, the patterns around memory organization and process-centric design might prove useful.
Interested in thoughts from those building persistent AI agents.
You may be interested in having a look; it's not yet open source, and I'm unsure to publish it at all. If you are interested, please reply to this comment first, we can then exchange contact addresses.