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mrshadowgoose commented on Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline   tidyfirst.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/KentBeck
tough · 2 months ago
why not try to cure alzheimer or other mental diseases that show up on the elderly instead?
mrshadowgoose · 2 months ago
Do you genuinely believe that this is a binary decision, or is this just anti-euthanasia rhetoric disguised as concern trolling?

Offering humane end-of-life options to people suffering today does not prohibit ongoing disease research towards potentially helping people in the future.

mrshadowgoose commented on VPN providers in France ordered to block pirate sports IPTV   torrentfreak.com/major-vp... · Posted by u/gasull
AnthonyMouse · 3 months ago
You're talking about two different things.

One is, you want to install Linux on your PS5. A PS5 is basically just a PC, so what are you getting out of that when you could much more easily just install Linux on a normal PC? The incentive to find a way to do it is low. Meanwhile the PS5 is manufactured by a company that doesn't want you to do it, so they make it take effort to do it.

The other is, people want to watch sports. Huge incentive. And they can use any device or service they want, not just one made by an adversarial company. Preventing this is basically having an effective censorship apparatus. The internet is an effective anti-censorship apparatus, because it connects everybody to everybody, and any single path through the network is enough to defeat censorship.

"We'll just block this path they're using over here" is like installing a single fence post in the middle of the ocean. Or worse than that, because that single fence post causes collateral damage to random innocent people (e.g. blocking Cloudflare IPs) which then gives those innocent third parties the incentive to start developing better anti-censorship tech.

mrshadowgoose · 3 months ago
> You're talking about two different things.

No, you've actually missed his point entirely.

He is alluding to the fact that over the last decade or so, consumers have unwittingly slid down the slope of "not having true control over personal electronic devices". Iphones are already there, Android devices are a few years behind, as are most desktop PCs.

Once there's critical mass, it would not be a stretch for ISPs to only deliver internet to endpoints that have a secure element that attests to the integrity of the internet-con ected device. This will of course be done under the guise of "fighting the spread of malware" and such.

Piracy effectively ends at that point.

mrshadowgoose commented on Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart   space.com/astronomy/solar... · Posted by u/spchampion2
jsbisviewtiful · 4 months ago
Why useful? Considering how hard of a time astronomers are having to simply find it it’s hard to imagine it being easy to study.
mrshadowgoose · 4 months ago
A black hole in our solar system is basically "in our backyard" in relation to typical interstellar distances.

Sure, we wouldn't be able to get there for many decades, but "within a century" would be feasible.

There are so many unknowns surrounding the nature of black holes. Having one in our backyard would give us a chance to test our guesses.

mrshadowgoose commented on We know a little more about Amazon's satellites   arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus
croes · 4 months ago
Space based telescopes have limits Earth bound telescopes don’t have and they are easier to maintain
mrshadowgoose · 4 months ago
Yes, I am quite aware that the current generation of space-based telescopes are quite limited. And it's solely due to the historically extreme cost of mass to orbit.

The largest proposed ground observatories already use segmented mirrors. One can use the same approach in space, it's only a matter of launch cost.

mrshadowgoose commented on We know a little more about Amazon's satellites   arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus
timewizard · 4 months ago
> fleets of space-based telescopes.

Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?

> people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".

You've constructed a strawman for the purposes of gatekeeping; meanwhile, there very much is a reason to have a rational conversation about the trade offs of these large commercial ventures that impact literally the entire planet.

mrshadowgoose · 4 months ago
> Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?

It doesn't, and admittedly I don't really care that much.

I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet, one of the most transformative and enabling technologies in existence, than niche hobbyists being mildly encumbered. And most people likely fall into the same camp.

As already mentioned, I find it really hard to believe that the common person whining about "the poor amateur astronomers" are being sincere. Some of them likely are, but "finding any reason possible to whine about billionaires" seems to be vogue these days.

mrshadowgoose commented on The future of solar doesn't track the sun   terraformindustries.wordp... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
mchannon · 4 months ago
I've been in solar energy as my primary vocation since the 1990's.

I've built solar cars, I've built solar panels, I've installed solar panels, I've designed solar trackers. I know this industry inside and out.

I'd never heard of an east-west array before (though I did experiment with one-cell-wide "crinolations" at 60 degree angles, did not find any value to using them but it was a different application where low-angle light wasn't a factor). I'd never thought of such an array on this scale, at this low angle, before.

I don't think most of the people reading this article quite understand that this is a completely different kind of array topology to flat-plate fixed-tilt, or tracking-based systems. Do yourself a favor, if you consider yourself intellectually curious, and if you came away from skimming this article thinking there's nothing new under the sun, read it again with a keener eye toward the novelty of it.

mrshadowgoose · 4 months ago
I actually use this exact example when encouraging careful attention to paradigms where a fundamental variable is slowly but consistently changing.

It's essentially equivalent to a boundary on a phase diagram: Cost/Watt has fallen past a critical threshold, and suddenly this dramatically different approach just makes more sense.

mrshadowgoose commented on We know a little more about Amazon's satellites   arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus
croes · 4 months ago
So more satellites to block the view for astronomers.
mrshadowgoose · 4 months ago
I am entirely convinced that absent LEO comsat constellations, people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".

If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of space-based telescopes.

mrshadowgoose commented on Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment   waymo.com/blog/2025/04/wa... · Posted by u/ra7
zumu · 4 months ago
> If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.

So like a train?

mrshadowgoose · 4 months ago
Trains don't have guaranteed personal space, nor do they proceed from one's origin directly to their destination.

You might not value that, but lots of other people do.

mrshadowgoose commented on Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after   oneusefulthing.org/p/on-j... · Posted by u/ctoth
mellosouls · 4 months ago
The capabilities of AI post gpt3 have become extraordinary and clearly in many cases superhuman.

However (as the article admits) there is still no general agreement of what AGI is, or how we (or even if we can) get there from here.

What there is is a growing and often naïve excitement that anticipates it as coming into view, and unfortunately that will be accompanied by the hype-merchants desperate to be first to "call it".

This article seems reasonable in some ways but unfortunately falls into the latter category with its title and sloganeering.

"AGI" in the title of any article should be seen as a cautionary flag. On HN - if anywhere - we need to be on the alert for this.

mrshadowgoose · 4 months ago
I've always felt that trying to pin down the precise definition of AGI is as useless as trying to pin down "what it means to truly understand". It's a mental trap for smart people, that distracts them from focusing on the impacts of hard-to-define concepts like AGI.

AGI doesn't need to be "called", and there is no need for anyone to come to an agreement as to what its precise definition is. But at some point, we will cross that hard-to-define threshold, and the economic effects will be felt almost immediately.

We should probably be focusing on how to prepare society for those changes, and not on academic bullshit.

mrshadowgoose commented on Arc-AGI-2 and ARC Prize 2025   arcprize.org/blog/announc... · Posted by u/gkamradt
artninja1988 · 5 months ago
I think a lot of people got discouraged, seeing how openai solved arc agi 1 by what seems like brute forcing and throwing money at it. Do you believe arc was solved in the "spirit" of the challenge? Also all the open sourced solutions seem super specific to solving arc. Is this really leading us to human level AI at open ended tasks?
mrshadowgoose · 5 months ago
Strong emphasis on "seems".

I'd encourage you to review the definition of "brute force", and then consider the absolutely immense combinatoric space represented by the grids these puzzles use.

"Brute force" simply cannot touch these puzzles. An amount of understanding and pattern recognition is strictly required, even with the large quantities of test-time compute that were used against arc-agi-1.

u/mrshadowgoose

KarmaCake day1000June 12, 2020View Original