rachofsunshine (u/rachofsunshine)

rachofsunshine commented on How Scientific Empires End theatlantic.com/science/a... · Posted by u/mooreds

bell-cot · a month ago

Kinda like reading a long, moralizing screed against a proposed law declaring pi to be 3.00.

Perhaps I know the subject too well. Or should quietly accept that The Atlantic needs a lot of click-fodder to pay the bills.

rachofsunshine · a month ago

Sometimes simple points are important, especially when those simple points are not generally agreed-upon. A proposed law declaring pi to be 3.00 would indeed be bad, and the simplicity of its badness would not make it any less bad.

rachofsunshine commented on OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through "I am not a robot" verification arstechnica.com/informati... · Posted by u/joak

SecretDreams · a month ago

The most intrusive, yet simplest, protection would be a double blind token unique to every human. Basically an ID key you use to show yourself as a person.

There are some very real and obvious downsides to this approach, of course. Primarily, the risk of privacy and anonymity. That said, I feel like the average person doesn't seem to care about those traits in the social media era.

rachofsunshine · a month ago

Zero-knowledge proofs allow unique consumable tokens that don't reveal the individual who holds them. I believe Ecosia already uses this approach (though I can't speak to its cryptographic security).

That, to me, seems like it could be the foundation of a new web. Something like:

* User-agent sends request for such-and-such a URL.

* Server says "okay, that'll be 5 tokens for our computational resources please".

* User decides, either automatically or not, whether to pay the 5 tokens. If they do, they submit a request with the tokens attached.

* Server responds.

People have been trying to get this sort of thing to work for years, but there's never been an incentive to make such a fundamental change to the way the internet operates. Maybe we're approaching the point where there is one.

rachofsunshine commented on PanamaPlaylists – Leaked Tech CEOs Spotify Profiles panamaplaylists.com/... · Posted by u/aadillpickle

joshdavham · a month ago

Not to be too sarcastic, but it always kills me when people who pride themselves as being original and contrarian turn out to be total conformists. This seems to be very common among founders/vc’s as of late.

rachofsunshine · a month ago

Everyone's just playing a bunch of investor signaling games, because founders/VCs by nature are living in the world of finance, not the world of decision-making (at least in their public personas). It's part of why I opted out of that whole world when founding my own company. Not literally so that I can listen to my angsty 13-year-old Christian rock without answering to anyone (although I certainly do do that), but because I feel like that fear colors a whole lot of what gets done in tech these days.

Engineers very often tell me something like "well I have this idea but I don't think anyone will fund it" and - well, just build it, man! Your idea takes like two grand of startup capital, and I know for a fact you made 240k last year. There's this whole mythologized idea of founders as a separate breed, encouraged in no small amount by founders themselves, but...founding a company is literally just building a thing people want and selling it to them. You can wear clown shoes and do that.

rachofsunshine commented on Study mode openai.com/index/chatgpt-... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

jacobedawson · a month ago

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream.

I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience.

Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook.

Personally I'm over the moon to be living at a time where we have access to incredible tools like this, and I'm impressed with the speed at which they're improving.

rachofsunshine · a month ago

> Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process.

People who are learning a new topic are precisely the people least able to do this.

A friend of mine used chatgpt to try to learn calculus. It gave her an example...with constants changed in such a way that the problem was completely different (in the way that 1/x^2 is a totally different integration problem than 1/(x^2 + 1)). It then proceeded to work the problem incorrectly (ironically enough, in exactly the way that I'd expect a calculus student who doesn't really understand algebra to do it incorrectly), produced a wrong answer, and merrily went on to explain to her how to arrive at that wrong answer.

The last time I tried to use an LLM to analyze a question I didn't know the answer to (analyze a list of states to which I couldn't detect an obvious pattern), it gave me an incorrect answer that (a) did not apply to six of the listed states, (b) DID apply to six states that were NOT listed, even though I asked it for an exclusive property, (c) miscounted the elements of the list, and (d) provided no less than eight consecutive completely-false explanations on followup, only four of which it caught itself, before finally giving up.

I'm all for expanding your horizons and having new interfaces to information, but reliability is especially important when you're learning (because otherwise you build on broken foundations). If it fails at problems this simple, I certainly don't trust it to teach me anything in fields where I can't easily dissect bullshit. In principle, I don't think it's impossible for AI to get there; in practice, it doesn't seem to be.

rachofsunshine commented on Show HN: Companies use AI to take your calls. I built AI to make them for you pipervoice.com/... · Posted by u/michaelphi

Sanctor · a month ago

This is nice and all but I can't help think the current situation is pretty grim. Computers talking to computers using natural language and speech synthesis. What a complete waste of resources. Perhaps in the future we won't have APIs at all, just LLMs talking to LLMs.

rachofsunshine · a month ago

New networks always start on top of old ones - presumably someone will, at some point, standardize an agent interface for these sorts of systems.

Funnily enough, we already have a precedent for computers communicating by phone: the modem! The more things change...

rachofsunshine commented on Quantitative AI progress needs accurate and transparent evaluation mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11491... · Posted by u/bertman

NitpickLawyer · a month ago

The problem with benchmarks is that they are really useful for honest researchers, but extremely toxic if used for marketing, clout, etc. Something something, every measure that becomes a target sucks.

It's really hard to trust anything public (for obvious reasons of dataset contamination), but also some private ones (for the obvious reasons that providers do get most/all of the questions over time, and they can do sneaky things with them).

The only true tests are the ones you write yourself, never publish, and only work 100% on open models. If you want to test commercial SotA models from time to time you need to consider them "burned", and come up with more tests.

rachofsunshine · a month ago

What makes Goodhart's Law so interesting is that you transition smoothly between two entirely-different problems the more strongly people want to optimize for your metric.

One is a measurement problem, a statement about the world as it is: an engineer who can finish such-and-such many steps of this coding task in such-and-such time has such-and-such chance of getting hired. The thing you're measuring isn't running away from you or trying to hide itself, because facts aren't conscious agents with the goal of misleading you. Measurement problems are problems of statistics and optimization, and their goal is a function f: states -> predictions. Your problems are usually problems of inputs, not problems of mathematics.

But the larger you get, and the more valuable gaming your test is, the more you leave that measurement problem and find an adversarial problem. Adversarial problems are at least as difficult as your adversary is intelligent, and they can sometimes be even worse by making your adversary the invisible hand of the market. You don't live in the world of gradient descent anymore, because the landscape is no longer fixed. You now live in the world of game theory, and your goal is a function f: (state) x (time) x (adversarial capability) x (history of your function f) -> predictions.

It's that last, recursive bit that really makes adversarial problems brutal. Very simple functions can rapidly result in extremely deep chaotic dynamics once you allow even the slightest bit of recursion - even very nice functions like f(x) = 3.5x(1-x) become writhing ergodic masses of confusion.

rachofsunshine commented on Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors soatok.blog/2025/07/24/ag... · Posted by u/SlackingOff123

phyzix5761 · a month ago

I'm not seeing where private citizens are prevented from engaging in lawful private microeconomic activity when a privately owned payment processor doesn't want to engage in certain transactions. The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc. Are these options as convenient in this day and age as tapping a credit card? No, but that doesn't mean everyone is entitled to convenience in every situation.

Also, how do you reconcile the fact that many US citizens, for religious or other reasons, can't in good conscience endorse certain economic exchanges? A government that is supposed to represent the needs of all citizens would fail if it engaged in facilitating transactions that some portion of its population found immoral or inappropriate. The public has no say in private, legal, transactions but public enforcement on private entities is a different story; akin to endorsement.

The best we can do is ensure that private citizens have the freedom to engage in legal transactions. But if we start forcing private entities to participate in every legal transaction, we risk setting a precedent that could backfire. Especially when a future administration decides to enforce or block transactions based on political or ideological grounds that conflict with our own values.

rachofsunshine · a month ago

> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc...everyone is[n't] entitled to convenience in every situation.

These options aren't small impositions, they're sufficient added overhead that they dwarf the value of the transaction itself. Bitcoin is the only one of them that seems vaguely realistic to me, but most people don't (and shouldn't) keep their own crypto wallets and don't (and can't) get paid in crypto, so that still requires interaction with third-party processors on two levels. It needs one level to convert fiat to crypto and vice-versa and another to conduct the crypto transaction.

Put another way, the sites that are shutting down this content clearly have substantial financial incentive not to do so. If they thought they had a reasonable alternative, don't you think they'd be using it? And if decent-sized companies with financial incentives cannot find an alternative that seems practicable, what makes you think private individuals are reasonably able to do so?

The broader issue here is one of monopoly, and I guess it might be helpful to zoom out here a bit. Do you think a company with market dominance should be able to engage in (otherwise legal) anticompetitive practices to suppress new companies in their domain? If it were up to you whether to have anti-trust law, would you have it?

If yes: isn't this essentially the same problem? These payment processors have a duopoly and are suppressing alternatives who would take these payments (and might outcompete them in the market on that basis).

If not: are you not concerned about a failure-state where monopolies (a) control critical sectors like finance with an unbreakable grip, (b) intertwine that grip with governments who want to circumvent civil liberties protections to suppress private action, and thus (c) become a de facto shadow government whose behavior - by virtue of being nominally private - isn't subject to constitutional protections or court oversight?

rachofsunshine commented on Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors soatok.blog/2025/07/24/ag... · Posted by u/SlackingOff123

phyzix5761 · a month ago

But, effectively, you want to tell other people what to do with their money without taking on any financial risk for those policies. The majority shareholders for Visa are retirement accounts and retail investors. Why does one segment of the public get to tell another segment of the public what to do with their money without putting any skin in the game?

rachofsunshine · a month ago

Because we know that not doing so leads to bad outcomes, and in some cases, to outright catastrophe.

A person who was not invested in subprime mortgages in 2006 had no skin in the game - yet the fact that others did invest in subprime mortgages created instabilities that threatened them. Virtually everyone agrees, in retrospect, that something should have been done then. But it wasn't, with precisely the justification you're articulating here. The problem is that that person did in fact have skin in the game, because the outcome had important ramifications for their life even if those ramifications were not in the form of direct financial losses.

Now, sure, your ability to buy furry porn is very different from sparking a global recession. But you're implicitly articulating a very strong claim here, that you cannot regulate economic activity to which you are not a party. That has a clear counterexample well within the memories of most people reading this thread.

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I think we agree that private individuals should be able to purchase legal content from the people who produce it. Without action here, that will become either impossible or very difficult, to the point of having a major chilling effect. I think we also agree that businesses should generally have the right to conduct business as they see fit, both because it allows the exploration of new ideas and because market economics is a powerful force for increasing productivity.

To me, that says that there is a tension between two irreconcilable rights. On one side, we have the rights of businesses to act in their economic best interest (which is important!). On the other side, we have the rights of individuals to (actually and with reasonable effort) engage in lawful private microeconomic activity. And when you encounter such a tension, you need to consider:

- How important the rights are

- How much of one you get by sacrificing some of the other

In this case, I would consider the ability of individuals to conduct microeconomic activity more important than the ability of corporations to conduct what is effectively a PR campaign (since no one seems to be of the opinion that payment processors are actually taking a loss on people buying porn, they're just caving to political pressure). And I think the restriction of payment processors here is small compared to the potential restriction on private individuals. So to me, the trade-off has a clear winner.

If you disagree with this chain of reasoning, can you explain where?

rachofsunshine commented on Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors soatok.blog/2025/07/24/ag... · Posted by u/SlackingOff123

willprice89 · a month ago

If I'm the sole owner and only employee of a small business, should I have the right to choose my clients? If so, at what size/scale/level of market capture should I lose my rights?

rachofsunshine · a month ago

"Small" is doing a lot of work there.

Large entrenched companies have leverage small businesses do not, in the same way that a large moon orbits in a way a test particle of infinitesimal mass does not. We already recognize this with respect to monopoly law: you lose your right to do certain things to your competitors precisely when you're large enough that you could reasonably suppress them.

That is essentially what we are talking about here: a duopoly that is actively suppressing competition. My understanding is that the big-two payment processors don't just refuse to process certain payments, they also refuse to work with banks who work with payment processors who will. Assuming that I am correct in that understanding (I might not be, this is not my area of expertise), that would prevent (or at least hinders) someone from just saying "there is a market need here" and forming their own payment processor to fill that need. To me, that seems like a problem for the exact same reasons that monopolies are a problem, and regulating against monopolies is not particularly controversial.

rachofsunshine commented on First Hubble telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS bsky.app/profile/astrafox... · Posted by u/jandrewrogers

teraflop · a month ago

> "The retrograde orbital plane... of 3I/ATLAS around the Sun lies within 5 degrees of that of Earth... The likelihood for that coincidence out of all random orientations is 0.2%." Not sure where he comes up with 0.2%.

This part of the calculation, at least, is basically correct. The orientation of a plane in space is defined by its normal vector, so the right way to look at probabilities is in terms of solid angle. The normal of 3I/ATLAS's orbit falls within a cone around Earth's normal vector, having a half-angle of 5 degrees, and that cone's solid angle occupies about 0.2% of the full sphere.

Of course, this is only the chance of a retrograde alignment. Presumably, if the comet's orbit was prograde aligned with the Earth's to within 5 degrees, Loeb would be making exactly the same claim. So really, the relevant probability is 0.4%.

Nevertheless, I agree that the article is basically just a bunch of cherry-picked probabilities and insinuations that don't add up to much.

Also:

> "the brightness of 3I/ATLAS implies an object that is ~20 kilometers in diameter (for a typical albedo of ~5%), too large for an interstellar asteroid."

But to justify this, Loeb cites his own work showing that the object is either a large asteroid, or a comet with a small nucleus. And then he seems to have looked at some earlier spectra and jumped to the conclusion that 3I/ATLAS couldn't be a comet, so it must be a large asteroid. But of course, follow-up observations have debunked this point and clearly shown it to be a comet.

rachofsunshine · a month ago

I think there's also a sampling bias here? ATLAS, the survey that discovered the comet, is specifically looking for potential Earth impactors. One assumes that would involve looking close to Earth's own orbital plane.