justonenote (u/justonenote)

justonenote commented on Data brokers are selling flight information to CBP and ICE eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07... · Posted by u/exiguus

charcircuit · 8 months ago

You can justify almost anything as "progressing society" Tech companies can be "making the world a better place", but that shouldn't give then permission to break laws.

justonenote · 8 months ago

The mental model of how the law works that most people have is wrong.

The law does not, by default, prosecute all crimes. There is no country in the world that has even close to the law enforcement capacity to investigate and prosecute all crimes. What tends to happen instead is crimes that to put it colliquially, "piss off the wrong people" get prosecuted. ie, crimes that draw attention of either the general public or specific people in power.

A reasonable approximation is single digit or less of crimes get investigated and prosecuted, with it obviously being high for violent and visible crimes like murder and lower for less violent and visible crimes like stealing the office paperclips.

Another way of looking at this is, in the current system, if your house get burgled, you need to report it to the police if you expect anything to happen, whereas one could imagine another system where the police already know your house has been burgled and you don't need to report it.

justonenote commented on Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows seattletimes.com/seattle-... · Posted by u/blondie9x

pfdietz · a year ago

A mandate would be only one way to reach that state, and I don't think it would be a good way. Better would be a situation where female children become desired over male children, for example because they have better career prospects. In a female dominated society, discrimination against men could be a thing. Today, already, female students on average outperform male students in school and university.

justonenote · a year ago

my comment was tounge-in-cheek, pointing out that its essentially eugenics which is a controversial topic. although apparently less so when its applied to "Y chromosome holders" as you can see in a sibling reply where this particular group of people are deemed problematic and something that should be got rid of.

justonenote commented on Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows seattletimes.com/seattle-... · Posted by u/blondie9x

pfdietz · a year ago

I've come to a conclusion that the solution may be somewhat radical.

If coupling is reduced, it should become the norm for women to have and raise children alone, or at least without a male partner. This increases the burden on women, so at the same time the number of children they must support would have to decrease.

This could be achieved technologically, by filtering sperm to remove Y chromosome carrying gametes. As a result, the female/male ratio of newborns would dramatically increase. At the US TFR of 1.66, a 2:1 female to male ratio would be more than enough to maintain the population. Even higher ratios could be imagined, leading to an almost entirely female population.

Social engineering to reach this state is left as an exercise to the science fiction writer.

justonenote · a year ago

cool idea. once we have mandated ivf as the only way of conception we can probably start selecting sperm from populations with higher than average iq too.

justonenote commented on Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows seattletimes.com/seattle-... · Posted by u/blondie9x

siffl · a year ago

Perhaps even more interesting in the near-future is the prospect of creating sperm, through technological means, from female cells.

The research to do this seems to be close to succeeding - see e.g. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11601-bone-stem-cells...

When researchers perfect this technique for humans, which they almost certainly will eventually, there will be no need for men at all. Women will be able to obtain lab-grown sperm from other women, and use this for fertilization.

All of these female-originating sperms will be X-chromosomed, and so in the much longer term we will see the eradication of the Y chromosome - and all the problems that arise from it.

justonenote · a year ago

gawd this is so misogynistic, some women like having men around, for whatever reason. perhaps we can keep a few around for women into that.

justonenote commented on Reasoning models don't always say what they think anthropic.com/research/re... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

TimorousBestie · a year ago

No, you don’t need to reach for non-materialistic views in order to conclude that we don’t have a mathematical model (in the sense that we do for an LLM) for how the human brain thinks.

We understand neuron activation, kind of, but there’s so much more going on inside the skull-neurotransmitter concentrations, hormonal signals, bundles with specialized architecture-that doesn’t neatly fit into a similar mathematical framework, but clearly contributes in a significant way to whatever we call human intelligence.

justonenote · a year ago

> it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information.

This was the statement I was responding to, it is stating that because it's built on simple mathematics it _cannot_ reason.

Yes we don't have a complete mathematical model of human intelligence, but the idea that because it's built on mathematics that we have modelled, that it cannot reason is nonsensical, unless you subscribe to a non-materialist view.

In a way, he is saying (not really but close) that if we did model human intelligence with complete fidelity, it would no longer be intelligence.

justonenote commented on Reasoning models don't always say what they think anthropic.com/research/re... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

no_wizard · a year ago

Because whats inside our minds is more than mathematics, or we would be able to explain human behavior with the purity of mathematics, and so far, we can't.

We can prove the behavior of LLMs with mathematics, because its foundations are constructed. That also means it has the same limits of anything else we use applied mathematics for. Is the broad market analysis that HFT firms use software for to make automated trades also intelligent?

justonenote · a year ago

I mean some people have a definition of intelligence that includes a light switch, it has an internal state, it reacts to external stimuli to affect the world around it, so a light switch is more intelligent than a rock.

Leaving aside where you draw the line of what classifies as intelligence or not , you seem to be invoking some kind of non-materialist view of the human mind, that there is some other 'essence' that is not based on fundamental physics and that is what gives rise to intelligence.

If you subscribe to a materialist world view, that the mind is essentially a biological machine then it has to follow that you can replicate it in software and math. To state otherwise is, as I said, invoking a non-materialistic view that there is something non-physical that gives rise to intelligence.

justonenote commented on Reasoning models don't always say what they think anthropic.com/research/re... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

hnuser123456 · a year ago

When we get to the point where a LLM can say "oh, I made that mistake because I saw this in my training data, which caused these specific weights to be suboptimal, let me update it", that'll be AGI.

But as you say, currently, they have zero "self awareness".

justonenote · a year ago

We have messed up the terms.

We already have AGI, artificial general intelligence. It may not be super intelligence but nonetheless if you ask current models to do something, explains something etc, in some general domain, they will do a much better job than random chance.

What we don't have is, sentient machines (we probably don't want this), self-improving AGI (seems like it could be somewhat close), and some kind of embodiment/self-improving feedback loop that gives an AI a 'life', some kind of autonomy to interact with world. Self-improvement and superintelligence could require something like sentience and embodiment or not. But these are all separate issues.

justonenote commented on Reasoning models don't always say what they think anthropic.com/research/re... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

no_wizard · a year ago

It’s easy to attribute intelligence these systems. They have a flexibility and unpredictability that hasn't typically been associated with computers, but it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information. The corpus of work is huge - and that allows the results to be pretty striking - but once you do hit a corner with any of this tech, it can't simply reason about the unknown. If its not in the training data - or the training data is outdated - it will not be able to course correct at all. Thus, it lacks reasoning capability, which is a fundamental attribute of any form of intelligence.

justonenote · a year ago

> it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information.

What do you imagine is happening inside biological minds that enables reasoning that is something different to, a lot of, "simple mathematics"?

You state that because it is built up of simple mathematics it cannot be reasoning, but this does not follow at all, unless you can posit some other mechanism that gives rise to intelligence and reasoning that is not able to be modelled mathematically.

justonenote commented on Everyone knows all the apps on your phone peabee.substack.com/p/eve... · Posted by u/gniting

facile3232 · a year ago

Are you essentially discussing like a keylogger? I can't imagine windows intentionally keeps the plaintext password anywhere longer than it needs to be.

justonenote · a year ago

ita disconcerting to see such naivety around security issues on hn.

not that windows is keeping passwords in plaintext, but that it's not immediately obvious that un-sandboxed apps that run on your windows/linux/mac desktop have virtually unlimited other avenues to capture passwords given they can read the entire state of other windows at the very least.

I dunno maybe macos is slightly better, and wayland definitely has some things which are better about this, but desktop os and $locally_installed_app means $locally_installed_app basically has root, there is just an exploding amount of vectors.

I'd like to see a linux based distrubution use some of the sandboxing in Android, it would be a order of magnitude improvement over what is going on now.

justonenote commented on Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/jbegley

dgfitz · a year ago

Welp, in this specific instance, your insults are a microcosm of the election results.

Stinks, huh?

justonenote · a year ago

Things are very black and white these days, no room for shades.