Top all-time · #5330
metastable
Personal blog · kmeme.comculturephilosophy
metastable is a personal blog at kmeme.com about culture and philosophy. Since 2010, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 79 times, most often “GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-11, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link metastable's posts as examples of GPT-3 bots going undetected on Reddit and of the singularity as a steep takeoff curve. The comments cite them without judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Metastable: ideas about stuff
Most-linked posts?
- GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2020-10-06
- The Singularity is Always Steep2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-07-29
- The secrets of “Thegentlemetre” – Undetected on AskReddit for a Week2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-09
What Hacker News says?
I wrote this a while ago: http://www.kmeme.com/2010/03/healthcare-diff.html I wonder how well code-style line-oriented diffs work for laws. If you word wrap then your single-line changes can cascade and effect many lines. If you don’t word wrap seems like you need a better way to see diffs within long lines. Seems totally solvable, but that what github does for code might not be right. But this is so awesome, pull r…
Comment linking /2010/03/healthcare-diff.html
on “How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request”Submitted The Healthcare Diff as a story · 47 points
HN discussionOf 16,000 congressional elections over the last 100 years only one was decided by a single vote. So in some sense your vote doesn't matter, in that if you didn't vote the result would likely be the same. But one way every vote contributes is increasing voter turnout. Although your contribution is small, it always counts, no matter who you vote for. Mid-term elections have been averaging 37% voter turnout. As turnout…
Comment linking /2010/10/why-you-should-vote.html
on “Remind HN: Vote”Submitted Sit Straight Up: How Dieting Is Like Posture as a story · 17 points
HN discussionThis is a decent article but I strongly dislike the title. The phrasing "we aren't built for" is so pessimistic, as if being mindful (living in the moment) is hopeless or unachievable, or even undesirable or harmful. Thousands of years of meditation practices have proven that living in the moment is very possible. Yes our brains are constantly planning and scheming and trying to derail us, but this can be addressed…
Comment linking /2016/07/waking-up.html
on “We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment”Submitted The Future of Google's Street View as a story · 17 points
HN discussionIt has happened on reddit before: https://www.kmeme.com/2020/10/gpt-3-bot-went-undetected-askr... Then there's also https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ which is funny to read sometimes
Comment linking /2020/10/gpt-3-bot-went-undetected-askreddit-for.html
on “I asked GPT-3 for the question to “42””Submitted The secrets of “Thegentlemetre” – Undetected on AskReddit for a Week as a story · 15 points
HN discussionThat's because you're assuming the wrong frame of reference on your singularity. http://www.kmeme.com/2010/07/singularity-is-always-steep.htm... If you were to drop back to 1970 and estimate the next 20 years by the 2010 scale, things are almost identical. If you measure 2000-2010 on the 1970 scale, things are a hard takeoff.
Comment linking /2010/07/singularity-is-always-steep.html
on “No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup”Submitted GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI agree by numerical value the difference is huge and under appreciated. But like many things wealth is correctly perceived logarithmically not linearly. There aren't hundreds of shades of gray between a millionaire and a billionaire, there are few steps, I wrote about them here http://www.kmeme.com/2017/11/the-richer-scale.html .
Comment linking /2017/11/the-richer-scale.html
on “Founders Fund Makes Bet on Bitcoin”Submitted Never Again: We Need Science Based Government as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThis is a good list. It would be interesting to see a similar list of Singularity detractors. I know Jaron Lanier is one. His claim is that software in general is crap and won't be up to the task, even if the hardware is capable. Kurzweil does not say much about software. He feels we will get everything we need by reverse engineering real brains. I think this is possible, but it's certainly not obviously true, and i…
Comment linking /2010/07/singularity-is-always-steep.html
on “There's more to Singularity studies than Kurzweil”Submitted Superhot: Thinking Fast and Slow as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis wasn't a great article, but the topic fascinates me. I'm surprised the shift from faster-clocks to multi-core went so smoothly. No one seems to really mind. I really like my quad core, 4 processors is a lot nicer than one. But I wonder about hundreds or thousands of cores, if we'll see that and if people will start to worry that single threaded software uses ever smaller amounts of their shiny new hardware. Wil…
Comment linking /2010/09/clock-speed-wall.html
on “Why CPUs Aren't Getting Any Faster”Submitted GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week as a story · 4 points
HN discussion"And then he woke up" is the ending to every 5th graders first ambitious story. I don't buy it. I did think the little dream machine in the movie looked like game console. You and several of your friends slide in the IV to play a round of, what exactly? I thought the movie portrayed a pretty decent game already, just getting from one level to the next. More: http://www.kmeme.com/2010/07/inception-game.html
Comment linking /2010/07/inception-game.html
on “Inception isn't science fiction (spoilers)”Submitted The Singularity is Always Steep as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe article says "Gates is only other person to have built 13-figure fortune" but isn't $100B a 12-figure fortune? I suggested we count zeros instead which would make Bezos a level 11 and Gates a high level 10: http://www.kmeme.com/2017/11/the-richer-scale.html
Comment linking /2017/11/the-richer-scale.html
on “Jeff Bezos Is Now Worth More Than Bill Gates Ever Was”Submitted Intelligent Designer: Gaia as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe article implies we could hit 48-cores in 5-8 years before problems (memory contention) set in. After that I guess something new needs to come along. Also that might get us close to when Moore's Law itself ends, when something beyond integrated circuits needs to step in. I wrote about multi-core and Moore's law recently: http://www.kmeme.com/2010/09/clock-speed-wall.html
Comment linking /2010/09/clock-speed-wall.html
on “Multicore may not be so scary”Submitted The Coming AI Content Storm as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI wrote about this idea 8 years ago: http://www.kmeme.com/2010/10/future-of-googles-street-view.h... Will be interesting to see if it takes off. I think it might not work that well at first, but long term seems inevitable.
Comment linking /2010/10/future-of-googles-street-view.html
on “Google is using Maps to turn every video game into an earth-sized epic”Submitted Spotify's Worst Feature as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT-3 Generated Posts on AskReddit as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPT-3 Bot Went Undetected on AskReddit for a Week as a story · 3 points
HN discussion