plastic-enjoyer (u/plastic-enjoyer)

plastic-enjoyer commented on A blog does not need “analytics” thisdaysportion.com/posts... · Posted by u/FromTheArchives

stevage · 4 days ago

You could make the counter-argument: Why would I want to read something written by someone who doesn't care about their audience at all?

Both of those are extreme positions.

plastic-enjoyer · 4 days ago

> Why would I want to read something written by someone who doesn't care about their audience at all?

Uh, because you find the content interesting?

plastic-enjoyer commented on In Search of AI Psychosis astralcodexten.com/p/in-s... · Posted by u/venkii

gherkinnn · 5 days ago

> First, much like LLMs, lots of people don’t really have world models.

This is interesting and something I never considered in a broad sense.

I have noticed how the majority of programmers I worked with do not have a mental model of the code or what it describes – it's basically vibing without an LLM, the result accidental. This is fine and perfectly workable. You need only a fraction of devs to purposefully shape the architecture so that the rest can continue vibing.

But never have I stopped to think whether this extends to the world at large.

plastic-enjoyer · 5 days ago

It's fucking bonkers that people really claim that "lots of people" don't have World models. Can't say I'm surprised to hear this from rationalists like Alexander Scott who are too high on their own farts

plastic-enjoyer commented on We’re Not So Special: A new book challenges human exceptionalism democracyjournal.org/maga... · Posted by u/nobet

joduplessis · 14 days ago

These sorts of (sorry to say, but) dumb articles (+ books) I don't expect to see on HN.

plastic-enjoyer · 14 days ago

You see this stuff everyday here in the form of AI hype. The whole ideology behind the powers that drive AI is that humans are dumb and inefficient and need to be replaced by artificial intelligence as the next stage in human evolution.

plastic-enjoyer commented on Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team annas-archive.org/blog/an... · Posted by u/jerheinze

lolive · 16 days ago

I choose the books I buy, from Anna's Archive. I choose the comics I buy from readComicsOnline. I choose the [european] graphic novels I buy from #WONTTELL.

And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town.

So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY knows it exists.

Am I an exception?

I don't know but those services are great to maintain a freedom of choice.

plastic-enjoyer · 15 days ago

No, I'm the same. A lot of stuff I read is hard-to-get philosophy or from obscure authors, so I first get them from Anna's Archive. Reading them on paper is much better so I try to find a physical copy later.

plastic-enjoyer commented on Brain cells learn faster than machine learning, research reveals techxplore.com/news/2025-... · Posted by u/pseudolus

N_Lens · 16 days ago

We know that biological neural networks learn faster and orders of magnitude more efficiently than synthetic neural nets. The amount of data/stimulus required to teach a growing human language, motor, social and a variety of other skills, is tiny - when compared to the mass amounts of data required to train SOTA models today.

The question is are there techniques we can adopt from bio neural nets that can enhance the training speed and efficiency of synthetic neural nets?

plastic-enjoyer · 15 days ago

> The question is are there techniques we can adopt from bio neural nets that can enhance the training speed and efficiency of synthetic neural nets?

The results seem to indicate that the limiting factor is rather the hardware current-state AI is running on than the algorithms.

plastic-enjoyer commented on The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over fortune.com/2025/08/14/da... · Posted by u/plastic-enjoyer

goda90 · 19 days ago

The much simpler explanation is that our leaders are focused solely on short term gains. They'll grift their way to them gladly, but investing in infrastructure that'll take years to build and won't be useful until they are gone is not interesting to them.

plastic-enjoyer · 19 days ago

> They'll grift their way to them gladly, but investing in infrastructure that'll take years to build and won't be useful until they are gone is not interesting to them.

I think this may have something to do with the professionalisation of politics, or the existence of career politicians. If you want to climb up the ladder in politics, working on short-term goals is probably the best way to do this. Infrastructure projects are high-risk, low-reward. Infrastructure projects may take a long time, may be reversed/aborted by the next government, may piss off potential voters, may require to fight off NIMBYs, or aren't noticed due to the preparedness paradox.

plastic-enjoyer commented on The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over fortune.com/2025/08/14/da... · Posted by u/plastic-enjoyer

el_jay · 19 days ago

While there is certainly an argument to be made that many contemporary “Western” Pseudo-Christian Superempire nations face a crisis of short-termism, there are also ancient bits of “Western” infrastructure like the Roman aqueducts still in use today - off the top of my head, the Aqua Virgo which supplies Rome’s Trevi Fountain, dated either 19BC or 19AD, I forget; Spain’s Segovia Aqueduct from the first century AD; and the Pont du Gard in Nîmes, from the same period.

Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.

plastic-enjoyer · 19 days ago

Good point!

plastic-enjoyer commented on The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over fortune.com/2025/08/14/da... · Posted by u/plastic-enjoyer

ZeroGravitas · 19 days ago

Even in this article, it repeatedly refers to building out infrastructure in advance of an obviously approaching future need as "oversupply".

This is almost a cliche in reporting on China that seems to reflect a serious blindpsot in western media and/or business attitudes.

You can find plenty of articles complaining about "overcapacity" of battery factories in China even as they double in capacity and output each year.

Chinese electricity generation went from 4,000 TWh (the same as the US) in 2010 to double that in 2020. The US was basically the same after 10 years.

So a 100% "oversupply" in 2010 would be a zero percent oversupply within a decade given China's growth.

Most telling to me is that decarbonisation and electrification of transport and heating has long been known to require a doubling(!) of electricity production for developed nations (and a similar increase in developing nations where it gets hidden by other growth).

Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers.

plastic-enjoyer · 19 days ago

> Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers.

I wonder if this is more of a cultural thing, meaning Western cultures being more aligned to short-term gains instead of long-term gains. I mean, look at the Dujiangyan irrigation system that was build 2500 years ago and is still maintained until today. This isn't something the Western world would even consider.

plastic-enjoyer commented on Steam games no longer purchasable with PayPal in most countries tomshardware.com/video-ga... · Posted by u/Shank

plastic-enjoyer · 19 days ago

Wouldn't surprise me if Valve will introduce their own payment processor in the near future