jawon (u/jawon) - Readit News

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

dehrmann · 4 days ago

When Citizens United was a big deal, I was torn over the premise of the concern for election integrity. Ideally, voters would make rational, informed decisions. They'd see ads, but know they all have an agenda, so they'd do their own research and come to a conclusion. Worrying about biased or inaccurate noise influencing elections means you think people can't be trusted to vote. Which might be true, and if it is, it's a bigger problem than corporate speech and fake accounts.

jawon · 4 days ago

This is “why are we going to space when we haven’t cured cancer” reasoning.

jawon commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025) · Posted by u/david927

jawon · a month ago

I'm building my take on a low-touch task completion assistant designed to counter distraction and hyper-habituation.

It's starting off as a MacOS app because that's the machine I have. I didn't know Swift or SwiftUI when I started. I now know them somewhat, but the entire app has been vibe-coded. This has made it slow going. Very "1 step forward 2 steps back" until I switched from Claude Code to Codex and GPT-5.

I'm hoping to start an initial beta within the family in the next week or two, and then a wider round in January.

jawon commented on Internet Archive's legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/thinkcontext

alt187 · a month ago

You might be glad to learn a number of studies (mostly commissioked by the European Union) agree on the fact that piracy doesn't hurt sales.

The main consensus is that people who illegally access content wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and that they still advertise it (thus, still driving up sales).

These studies have then been systematically strong-armed into silence by the EU and constituent countries' anti-piracy organisms.

This is probably because the war on piracy, too, is a billion-dollar industry. I'd be glad to blow it all up and give it all to the starving artists and their families.

jawon · a month ago

Piracy might not hurt sales, but 1000 publishers putting out their own copies of your book/game/song/poster/miniature once it hits the market will.

That's why I can accept copyright even thought it's not perfect.

jawon commented on The great decoupling of labor and capital mbi-deepdives.com/the-gre... · Posted by u/walterbell

jawon · a month ago

Are these numbers full time employees only or total FTEs? Because it mentions Walmart: "Walmart’s full-time employees number remained relatively constant for the last 10 years".

Would revenue / person-hour show a different trend? Because there are a lot of part-time and contract workers out there.

jawon commented on Notes on Managing ADHD borretti.me/article/notes... · Posted by u/amrrs

xianwen · 4 months ago

I read at one place regarding an ADHD drug that is non-stimulant and makes people a little drowsy, which is why it is good to take before going to bed. I don't remember what the drug is called. Does someone know?

jawon · 4 months ago

Guanfacine.

jawon commented on Notes on Managing ADHD borretti.me/article/notes... · Posted by u/amrrs

coldblues · 4 months ago

For those who cannot be prescribed amphetamines, I recommend seeking out Modafinil. It works really well and a regular psychiatrist should be able to prescribe it.

jawon · 4 months ago

I found it made me think and act sleep deprived even though I didn't feel it and also increased anxiety.

Guanfacine is also an alternative, and it's method of action also makes it anxiety reducing.

jawon commented on Notes on Managing ADHD borretti.me/article/notes... · Posted by u/amrrs

bumblehean · 4 months ago

I really wish my body could tolerate stimulants.

I tried the major ones (Adderall, Ritalin, Vyvanse, Concerta, etc.). They all made dealing with ADHD significantly easier, but even at the lowest doses they turned me into an extremely anxious and irritable person. I had never experienced anything close to a panic attack or nervous breakdown in my 30+ years of being alive until I started taking stimulant medication.

I decided that living with untreated ADHD was the better alternative, so now I'm back to copious amounts of coffee to deal.

jawon · 4 months ago

You might be how surprised how low a dose you need for an effect. 5-10ug of Ritalin noticeably reduces the "noise floor" for me.

How do you take 5-10ug? Dissolve 10mg in a litre of something. Get a 1ml dosing syringe. It has 0.1ml markings.

You could start there and increase it until you find what works. Also, if you take very little you can have a break on weekends and not suffer too much while remaining sensitive to lower dosages.

jawon commented on US Copyright Office: Generative AI Training [pdf] copyright.gov/ai/Copyrigh... · Posted by u/dave1629

yieldcrv · 7 months ago

So many issues with that, the copyright office doesn’t police access, which involves consuming, the copyright office polices distributing.

So then for them to determine fair use, they need the department of justice involved to say the access was illegal? since when. just to highlight the absurdity. “Illegal” meaning a terms of service violation despite the fact that everyone using the service can consume copyrighted works? This circles back to the now paradoxical issue about it not being copyright infringement to consume, but requires policing the terms of service by the copyright office which is impossible.

This is too paradoxical to even entertain, but thats why the office led with “current law”, because it is completely unaccommodating to a real social problem. A lot of artists and people are uncomfortable with the current law, and generative AI. New law could patch this except:

Artists don't actually like the generative AI that isn't trained on copyrighted works either.

The laws are going to change too slow and there are already models that fulfill the high bar that detractors started with.

New works that were specifically licensed for use in AI training and compensated.

The outcome is still the same. More people can express themselves. People with years of discipline are no longer needed.

By the time any law could actually address noncompliant models - to this new imagined standard - compliant models will already have obsoleted the same trade.

jawon · 7 months ago

This is a standard book copyright notice:

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

“Reproduced” and “electronic” are the relevant terms here.

I remember when gpt-3 came out and you could get it to spit out chunks of Harry Potter and I wondered why no-one was being sued.

The models are built on copyright infringement. Authors and publishers of any kind should be able to opt out of being included in training data and ideally opt-in should be the default.

And I hope one day someone trains a model without the use of works of fiction and we find a qualitative difference in their performance. Does a coding model really need to encode the customs, mores and concerns of Victorian era fictional characters to write a python function?

jawon commented on Roo or Cline? We're building a superset blog.kilocode.ai/p/roo-or... · Posted by u/boleary-gl

ach9l · 8 months ago

yep, this is the way, i guess. as somebody who has taken this very same exercise of cloning cline using cline for my own cline, a cline that compiles itself, i’ve also learned to steal* things over the years. i’ve seen your extension, but i was reluctant to give it a try just because it looked just like any other clone, but i guess i’ll do the same thing again. i’ve started to see the value when i decided to fork and declutter again, this time roo code. actually i’ve perfected forking cline and derivatives with my own framework. when you know what you’re doing, these tools don’t put you in the flow. vibe coding done right is another level of progress. i’ve got a cs major though, so i’m a bit biased, also helps that i’ve done masters in theoretical computing, theoretical linguistics and machine learning, so i’ve always been attracted to these toys and frameworks, not so much to javascript or web development however. this whole exercise, or should i say automation? now, takes me back to the days i wrote compilers. this is just as fun as code that can compile itself in the end. same shit all over again.

so i gave roo code a try, set a few test cases, and proceeded to declutter, refactor, rewrite the whole thing. i’ve never really written long apps in javascript nor typescript for that matter, and man, i just think 3k lines of code in a single file is just bad code, and i’ve been proven right. 3k lines fucks your context really good. you can’t use cline to code cline because it will ruin you financially one way or another. jesus fuckin’ christ the old cline.ts file was like responsible for the whole damn extension, over 3k lines, the kind of code i would write 10 years ago as an intern. anyway, i’ve added (and learned in the process) react.js components to have an interface to easily collect the data for my own loras. honestly if you are looking to integrate large local models into kilo, i’d love to collaborate. my forks mostly provide data analysis for the fine-tuning of my own personal repositories, using years of commit history as training data, even bash history. i’ve benchmarked several tasks. i can basically fork roo code or cline, declutter it, refactor it, with a gemma or qwq running in a mac studio for a few watts. i’ve been logging everything that i do ever since we were granted api access to gpt3 at a lab i coordinated about 5 years ago. so i’ve mastered the filtering of the completions api, reconstruction of streams, all using airflow and python scripts. i added a couple buttons such as the download task you’ve also added, but more along the lines of “send this to the batch in the datacenter so we train a new gemma” filtering good solutions vs not so good, the old thumbs up thumbs down situation, helps a lot, adding a couple of mcp integrations for applying quick loras locally, plus the addition of test driven development, aiming for reinforcement learning based loras. i built myself a very nice toy, or should i say, i bootstrapped a very nice tool that creates itself? anyway, thanks for sharing this.

i think the next major thing that is gonna happen with these tools is that it gets free at home as new chips become cheaper. llama 4 running in mac studios or dgx stations is as fast as you can get today and it is already good enough (if prepared correctly) to build any yc startup codebase from before covid, or even from before chatgpt, in a weekend. it will definitely happen. i’m wrapping fixing llama4 scout, allow me to mention the fact that it has a tendency to fix bugs by commenting code and adding TODOs, fucking great architecture though, just what we needed, i mean for optimal local development. i’ll try to publish results soon enough, optimized for the top mac studio though, haven’t got a dgx yet. i’ll prepare macbook versions too. the world needs more of this, a cline that fixes itself just on battery power...

jawon · 8 months ago

What size gemma are you using? Is the refactoring running independently or managed by you?

jawon commented on Learning fast and accurate absolute pitch judgment in adulthood link.springer.com/article... · Posted by u/dr_dshiv

2c2c2c · 10 months ago

i made https://perfectpitch.study a week or so ago. i am old and musically untrained and wanted to see if rote practice makes a difference (it clearly does).

most of the sites of this type i found annoying as you can't just use a midi keyboard, so you just get RSI clicking around for 10 minutes.

I tried getting adsense on it, but they seem to have vague content requirements. Apparently tools don't count as real websites :-(. I couldn't even fool it with fake content. what's the best banner ad company to use in this situation?

jawon · 10 months ago

Gave it a try. After a few minutes I felt more like I was recognising the samples than I was recognising the notes. Not sure what you can do about that short of physically modeling an instrument.