MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freedomben | 2026-01-21 16:12:48+00:00
Firstly, thank you for posting this! I'm one of the people who primarily values the art on its own merits, and not on whether it was made by a human chiseling with rocks and ground up flower petals for ink, or an AI generating something. The primary part of that value assessment is definitely how it makes me feel. Your post is the first time I felt I may actually understand the other side.

Speaking only for myself, I can absolutely understand where you are coming from. It makes a lot of sense when put this way. But, I think the difference here is that what you are describing is deceit, and it's the deceit rather than the output, that would bother me in all of your scenarios.

For example, your strongest point in my opinion, is the AI girlfriend versus the real girlfriend. That's a phenomenal argument because it is in my opinion an accurate analogy so how's the logic side strong, and it's also a horrifying one, so it hits hard on the emotions as well as the logic side. The beauty of this is not lost on me, you have created amazing art with that argument! That's the kind of art that really resonates with me.

But zooming in on that scenario, I think the key is disclosure. If the person dating the AI girlfriend knows that it's an AI girlfriend, that doesn't float my boat but I know people who would actually prefer an AI girlfriend to a real one. Again, not for me, but I recognize that it is for some people.

Same with seeing a pretty picture on the screen. If it's being presented to me with deceit behind it, either a person claiming they snapped the photo or made the art digitally when it is actually just AI, then it does ruin the art for me. If it's disclosed though that it is made by AI, I can evaluate it on its merits. Just like in your table example above, I may appreciate the effort and personality behind a more flawed piece that was made by hand, but I also appreciate the precise lines and geometry of a machined output. The key is the honesty and disclosure behind who created it. I get a different value out of the handcrafted piece than I do the AI generated piece. One isn't necessarily better than the other, just different.

Where I do feel a little hesitant on the AI side, though is as you get at the capitalist destruction of art. Without a doubt, the middle level of artists will be hollowed out. I suspect there will always be a place for the traditional artist, but I do worry it will be diminished. On the flip side, I've been able to use AI to take photos of my pets or family, and reimagine them in interesting ways. I know it's not real, I know it's computer generated, and I'm not hanging those pictures on my wall. I simply do not get the same joy from seeing those pictures as I do the originals. I could be wrong here, but I feel like that is the heart of your point, and I think it's a good one.
by LexiMax | 2026-01-21 16:12:53+00:00
I do not take their claims un-skeptically. I've been lied to one too many times by users who claim, "Oh I totally didn't do anything to get banned, bro."

But I don't trust you either, and my reasons for being reluctant to flag and downvote are genuine. This is because I've also seen moderation teams who swear up and down that they're not biased, but who later get caught out when they put their finger on the scale through action or deliberate inaction.

But there's another dimension to the unfrustworthiness, because I have also seen moderation teams who don't put their finger on the scale per se, but are so invested in their own rules that they let their community rot beneath their feet from people who have figured out how to manipulate them.
by andyfilms1 | 2026-01-21 16:13:52+00:00
A key difference is that each of the mediums you mentioned are deterministic and unbiased (to a certain degree.) The the work created can therefore be inferred to be a "pure" expression of the artists intent. A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.

The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium? I often hear people say "Well EDM was looked down on when it first came out," but EDM is not a tool, it's a genre. I think most artists wouldn't really care about "AI" becoming a genre of art, but it's silly to think that all future art will be AI just as it would have been silly to think EDM would have replaced all future music.
by jeroenhd | 2026-01-21 16:14:07+00:00
It is rather jarring to be stuck in the woods with Google Maps offering turn-by-turn navigation back home while the emergency room only gets a vague triangulated position (which might be wrong entirely if the signal gets reflected off of something).

Of course these days such a system has been added. Bonus feature of the (at least American) feature: the system can be activated remotely, even if you're not actually calling in an emergency. The European ETSI spec is pretty funny, it basically comes down to sending an SMS to a Secret Number with a Secret Format containing your coordinates to prevent abuse (both can be found very easily); at least that supposedly only activates when you dial the emergency services.
by whateveracct | 2026-01-21 16:14:42+00:00
AI feels like it's bringing the Matrix to the real world. Imagine you are in a space, and all the posters and text are AI-generated slop. They tickle your dopamine sensors and look good out of focus. But upon closer inspection, they are lacking a substance we didn't even know was there before. It's like living in a simulacrum of the real world. Instead of our energy being harvested, it's our attention.
by micromacrofoot | 2026-01-21 16:14:43+00:00
It's not that deep, if someone thinks it's AI it loses value to them. If you're able to utilize AI tools in a way that doesn't make the output look like AI to the average person you'll be fine.

Eventually no one will be able to really tell the difference and all of this will go away (though likely at the expense of more people's livelihoods).
by seanhunter | 2026-01-21 16:15:00+00:00
It’s a cool blog post so I’m making those observations from what I hope you will see as a helpful place. It’s been a long time since I was in the industry, and the sources you’re looking at (eg Shreve) are all great. One thing you might want to check out as well is “The Volatility Surface: A Practitioner’s Guide” by Jim Gatherall. I remember really enjoying it back when I worked in Equity Exotics and it was very highly regarded by the people I really respected in the financial maths stakes.
by miroljub | 2026-01-21 16:15:06+00:00
That's the same fallacy as claiming that rich people save money by donating to charity.

Simple example:

- Germany gives 100 € to other EU states

- Those states 100 € to buy made in Germany goods

- German companies have 10 € profits from those sales

- German state collects 5 € from those profits

In summary, German taxpayers paid 100 € so the state can collect 5 € taxes, and companies another 5 €. Not a very good deal.

And this calculation is crazy optimistic, because it assumes that all money that Germany gives to other countries will be used to purchase German good. In reality, they will be spent willy-nilly and German companies may not see even 1 € in return.
by melenaboija | 2026-01-21 16:15:23+00:00
I don’t understand why people pretend there’s no paperwork to do in the US. Not only that, but different states have different processes.

I think there are some misconceptions about the US and tend to over idealize, especially around paperwork and taxes. And I think it’s precisely that misconception that makes it appealing to foreigners and makes it an attractive place to be an entrepreneur.

And again, yes, objectively it’s easier, but I don’t think that’s the main reason the country is successful in this aspect.
by __turbobrew__ | 2026-01-21 16:16:01+00:00
I don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
by realitydrift | 2026-01-21 16:16:10+00:00
Many organizations report that AI saves time without delivering clearer decisions or better outcomes. This essay argues that the problem is not adoption, skills, or tooling, but a structural failure mode where representations begin to stand in for reality itself. When internal coherence becomes easier than external truth, systems preserve motion while losing their ability to correct. Feedback continues, but consequences no longer bind learning, producing what is described as “continuation without correction.”
by heliumtera | 2026-01-21 16:16:12+00:00
LoL

the reason they give a badge (Claude as author) is so you can showoff on LinkedIn how you are AI first.
using AI, from the braindead normies perspective, is cool. there is an economical reason for people to allow their AI usage to be perceived.
it is the equivalent of showing your support flag and pronouns in 2020.

if at any time people start using this information to filter out content, they'll hide it immediately.

nobody has your satisfaction as a high priority you know
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-21 16:16:22+00:00
> Modern apps should get the area to render and the desired pixel density.

What if you want to smoothly slide an app window over to a second monitor with a different pixel density? That's admittedly a very rare thing, but some people seem to be obsessed with it and insist that it must work. You either have to compose some window surface, or just use clean vector rendering throughout.
by ungovernableCat | 2026-01-21 16:16:44+00:00
In a country where every single facet of life is being increasingly politicised, you think this wouldn't cause a fuss?

Oddly enough if any government could just push and shove this through it might be Trump. I bet 20 years later you'd have a sizeable constituency who could be convinced that the change from imperial to foreign units was the beginning of the fall and decline and that everything could be fixed if you went back.
by minitech | 2026-01-21 16:16:58+00:00
There’s a whole field’s worth of really cool stuff about error correction that I wish I knew a fraction of enough to give reading recommendations about, but my comment wasn’t that deep – it’s just that in hashes, you obviously care about distribution because that’s almost the entire point of non-cryptographic hashes, and in error correction you only care that x ≠ y implies f(x) ≠ f(y) with high probability, which is only directly related in the obvious way of making use of the output space (even though it’s probably indirectly related in some interesting subtler ways).

E.g. f(x) = concat(xxhash32(x), 0xf00) is just as good at error detection as xxhash32 but is a terrible hash, and, as mentioned, CRC-32 is infinitely better at detecting certain types of errors than any universal hash family.
by dspillett | 2026-01-21 16:17:15+00:00
My understanding is that almost all edge routers provide at least basic firewalling, not just pure routing. How were you “doing NAT” on the edge routers you were using otherwise?

(Baring in mind that what most people are referring to as NAT here and elsewhere is “IP masquerading with connection tracking” rather than simple static SNAT & DNAT)
by lostmsu | 2026-01-21 16:18:17+00:00
Windows doesn't care and neither do I. But still, this can be done in immediate mode if the DE can tell the app it wants it to render the window in multiple rectangles with different pixel densities.

I have a hope for the whole idea, because imo it could significantly improve text rendering in VR by passing or allowing realtime access to the projection matrix along with the areas to render to. Regular VR compositing distorts text and vector graphics due to reprojection.

Plus, as noted above in VRAM speed vs GPU compute speeds, it might actually be faster and more power efficient overall if done right. See e.g. the famous Windows Terminal optimization issue with glyph atlas caching and object reuse.
by Manuel_TPC | 2026-01-21 16:18:19+00:00
Oh man, SETI@home! That takes me back. That screensaver was a total vibe—my little gateway drug to distributed computing. It was wild feeling like my humble PC was out there, just a small cog in this massive cosmic search party. The thought that it might, against all odds, stumble on "the signal"... that was the magic of it. That specific kind of hopeful, nerdy optimism of the early 2000s is hard to find now.

You hit the nail on the head about missing projects like that. It wasn't just about the science; it was about the story, the shared dream. You felt like you were part of the crew on the starship, even if you were just scrubbing the decks. Modern BOINC projects are awesome, but they don't quite have that same "Holy cow, we're listening for E.T.!" mainstream charm. It was our generation's version of a barn raising, but for the galaxy.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip, my dude. Here's hoping the aliens are just shy and on dial-up.
by palmotea | 2026-01-21 16:18:24+00:00
Those are good ideas, but none of them will actually address this problem. It's a combination of charity and the same partisan battle mentality that alienates many people. For instance:

> For political change we need two things: democrats to win in 2026 and 2028 and democrats to have the guts to dismantle the systems that enabled Trump and charge people involved for their crimes. Existing dem leadership is clearly not willing to do this. So we need involvement starting at the local level all the way up to replace dem leadership with people with guts. Find community groups involved in local elections.

That just reads like a Trump-like ideological power grab: "we need to make sure our opponents can never win again." But what does that do for people who aren't partisan Democrats? They want Trump to lock in his power, but they don't want Democrats to, either.

The first step is to acknowledge that voters dislike Democrats so much that not only did a guy like Trump have a chance of winning, but he won. Twice. The response needs to be for the Democrats to reform into a party with broad appeal across diverse regions. The first step to that is saying no to the technocrats, and taking some pages out of Trump's economic playbook (and Sanders's). The second steps is saying no to the activists, and stop alienating large fractions of the electorate by pushing too hard and too fast on a lot of issues.

But if you want a Trump 3.0: stay the course.
by bediger4000 | 2026-01-21 16:18:26+00:00
Right, but a bit vacuous: Trump personally decides what (categories of) goods get tariffs, and which importers and exporters. I personally never want to hear conservatives talk about "distorting the market" or similar topics. Either they were lying about faith in markets pre-Trump, or they're lying about how good a mercantilist system is today. And, no, "we've gotten new data" is not an excuse. Conservatives were standing athwart history and yelling "Stop!" They had these sacred, immutable principles that "new data" did not effect.
by borenstein | 2026-01-21 16:18:30+00:00
You are correct both that the AI wrote 100% of the code (and 90% of the raw text). You are also correct that I want a safety guardrail for the process by which I build software that I believe to be safe and reliable. Let's take a look at each of these, because they're issues that I also wrestled with throughout 2025.

What's my role here? Over the past year, it's become clear to me that there are really two distinct activities to the business of software development. The first is the articulation of a process by which an intent gets actualized into an automation. The second is the translation of that intent into instructions that a machine can follow. I'm pretty sure only the first one is actually engineering. The second is, in some sense, mechanical. It reminds me of the relationship between an architect and a draftsperson.

I have been much freer to think about engineering and objectives since handing off the coding to the machine. There was an Ars Technica article on this the other day that really nails the way I've been experiencing this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/10-th...

Why do I trust the finished product if I don't trust the environment? This one feels a little more straightforward: it's for the same reason that construction workers wear hard hats in environments that will eventually be safe for children. The process of building things involves dangerous tools and exposed surfaces. I need the guardrails while I'm building, even though I'm confident in what I've built.
by ImJasonH | 2026-01-21 16:18:59+00:00
I thought the use of AI in the Secret Invasion title sequence was actually really appropriate, even "meta", maybe even a bit ahead of its time.

The seemingly purposeful AI style made it seem unnatural (on purpose), and like a facsimile of an otherwise trustworthy thing (on purpose), which was exactly in line with the idea of the show.

The execution of that show and that idea was pretty bad, but one of the few positives of it was, to me, an example of using AI art overtly, and leaning into its untrustworthy nature.
by clowncubs | 2026-01-21 16:19:14+00:00
My personal experience: As an artist throughout my life, whether it be drawing, painting, or sculpting, I have been asked again and again how long it took me to make a piece. It is probably the most common question I get when I interact with people over my art. My experience has shown me people value the effort and time it takes to make something beautiful and unique.
I recently began attending events/cons to share my sculpting and it was eye opening. Not only did people frown on A.I. generated art at these events, but I had to broadcast that my sculpting was not 3D printed. Quite a few visitors to my table let me know they appreciated my work was handmade.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-21 16:19:27+00:00
Because of findings like this

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

(A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size) to save clicks to read the headline

The way I think of it is, coding agents are power tools. They can be incredibly useful, but can also wreak a lot of havoc. Anthropic (et al) is marketing them to beginners and inevitably someone is going to lose their fingers.
by keepamovin | 2026-01-21 16:19:30+00:00
Agree, but, ah, can you illuminate. <totally-offtopic data-but="i am intesnely curious"> Quite amazing 6000 points in under 3 months. Yuge. OK a few almost 1K posts, but they drop off. You must have some mega-point comments. Can you, eh, "point me" to a comment of yours that has a super amount of upvotes?

Sorry if this is weird, it's just I've never personally experienced a comment with anything more than 100 - 200 points. And that was RARE. I totally get if you don't want to...but like, what were your "kilopoint" comments, or thereabouts? </offtopic>
by basscomm | 2026-01-21 16:19:41+00:00
> How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art?

You don't. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, I guess.

> Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?

You can't quantify art that way. People work at different speeds. I can appreciate that something took some number of hours without knowing the precise number of hours.

> As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.

Maybe, but I'm not qualified to make that comparison. Both are beyond my level of artistic ability (I've never studied art nor practiced much). I don't know why one thing or artist gets more popular than another while another who's just as talented (or maybe even moreso) languishes in obscurity. Skill is a factor, sure, but there's no formula that I'm aware of.

> What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'

Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"
by dostick | 2026-01-21 16:19:49+00:00
One of biggest obstacles we will have to overcome is for people stop thinking that communism is the only alternative and cling to capitalism.
Capitalism was tried by 120 countries in past 120 years. Not a single country can report harmonious society free of corruption and unnecessary suffering. Every country employ 50% of workforce on pointless jobs only because capitalism requires artificial scarcity.
by anileated | 2026-01-21 16:20:03+00:00
1. It's decided by courts in US. Courts in US currently are very friendly to big tech. At this point if they deny this and say something that undermines this industry it's going to be a big economic blow, the country is way over-invested in this tech and its infrastructure.

2. "Transformative means fair" is the old idea from pre-LLM world. That's a different world. Now those IP laws are obsolete and need to be significantly updated.
by 72deluxe | 2026-01-21 16:20:25+00:00
I started watching it but the modern presentation style of shouting everything instead of speaking at a normal volume, and using many many gestures and facial expressions to state a simple sentence made me switch it off rapidly.

It seems to be a presentation style afflicting the YouTube generation, where they think you want to see a colossal microphone in someone's face (directional microphones work very well, and is a reason you can hear dialogue in a film without a mic in front of everyone) whilst they gesticulate wildly and over-emphasise words in a sentence. It is quite wearying; perhaps it's because I am British, but it is afflicting general conversation where only superlatives can be used ("awesome" "amazing" "insane" "mind-blowing") instead of "good"/"enjoyable".
by freedomben | 2026-01-21 16:20:54+00:00
Generally speaking, yes. I have worked with the corrections side of law enforcement in the US and don't internationally for quite a few years at this point. The correction side is a different beast than the police side in many ways, so I definitely want to meet clear that my personal experience is limited in scope to that. However, generally speaking I have seen that the majority of corrections staff take protection very seriously. There are individual officers that can be scum, and ideally they should be bounced out of there. But realistically, it's a human problem. I've known plenty of software engineers that were cavalier with people's personal information in ways I think can be just as damaging. On the whole though, the majority of software engineers I know take protecting that information quite seriously.