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I've never had a real adversary

https://inoticeiamconfused.substack.com/p/ive-never-had-a-real-adversary
63•walterbell•5h ago

Comments

chasil•1h ago
"There are two great tragedies in life: not getting what you want, and getting it."

- Oscar Wilde

globalnode•1h ago
Because we're conditioned like the dog that chases the car. Its a good observation.
politelemon•1h ago
This reads like an exercise in deliberately misunderstanding the word adversary.
XorNot•1h ago
I'm not sure I really see that problem with it? It's a correct observation that people tend to discount what actual, intelligent opposition will do.

The number of people who declare they can totally trust what an adversary says because they agree with it is astounding, as though a committed opponent wouldn't do anything if it gained advantage including feinting in a way which seems unadvantegeous to gain long term advantage.

maxbond•1h ago
There is however the flip side, where people distrust something because they believe an adversary said it. Sort of like how link spammers switched from SEO to "negative SEO" where, after Google started identifying and penalizing SEO networks, spammers started extorting people with the threat of linking to their site (thus penalizing them in search results). Blind trust and blind distrust are equally exploitable.

In the end, the only winning move is not to play. If you believe an adversary said something (or "a liar" if you prefer), you ignore it entirely. You make your mind up about what you believe based on evidence, and you decide if you agree with someone based on how well their statement comports with the evidence.

Naturally people will try to fabricate evidence, and even good faith evidence may be unreliable, so you'll have to do your best to access it's veracity. But what the adversary believes or appears to believe is largely immaterial.

habitue•1h ago
Maybe chess was wrong, it's adversarial. But there's definitely a qualitative leap between "adversary withing defined rules in a particular context" and "anything is on the table, they could kill you etc." kind of adversary
mgaunard•57m ago
Any kind of competition is adversary; it's just that in most competitions, you'd be disadvantaged if it came to light that you didn't follow good sportmanship.
dang•1h ago
Ok, but please don't post putdowns to Hacker News.

If you know more than others, that's great, but in that case please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn.

andyferris•1h ago
I suppose this is taken seriously by a society at war. Otherwise we tend to try to be civil (which requires giving the benefit of the doubt).

The white-anting by Russia hasn't really triggered this kind of "immune response" - it's hard to know what to do about it, which is of course the entire point.

Mistletoe•1h ago
> Paul Crowley recently mentioned that we underrate the effect of the Russian IRA (Internet Research Agency) which works full-time on creating discord and anger among Americans online

What would a task force built to oppose the IRA seeding discord online look like? How would it operate? We need that.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•14m ago
My 2 cents is, people should be online less. This is vague scattershot advice but it would at least help me
jrowen•1h ago
I remember reading somewhere that Yudkowski said that he had been convinced to "let the AI out of the box" in a conversation with someone, or maybe it was the other way around, but either way the convincing arguments were not revealed.

This feels like the same kind of vague "rational mysticism." "We don't know what we don't know, and we're such silly humans, therefore...AI will kill us all" is all I can really take from it.

baxtr•1h ago
"rational mysticism" - what a great term to describe this genre
nis0s•56m ago
Adversarial relationships might occur under any number of circumstances, but there’s a spectrum of this type of relationship where you have friendly competition at one end (healthy, pro-social) and detached vendetta at the other (unhealthy, antisocial).

When you come across an adversary, it’s to your benefit to try to bring them to the healthy side of things.

People can be pretty reasonable, and if they’re not then they can be shamed into behaving. If they cannot be shamed, then there’s retribution. If that doesn’t work, then there’s always the option to go full Rambo.

You never want to go full Rambo, but your adversary must understand that it’s an option that’s available to you. I don’t think super AI will be any different as an adversary, but maybe there’s something I haven’t considered.

Code review can be better

https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-08-04-code-review-can-be-better/
221•sealeck•7h ago•110 comments

Show HN: I replaced vector databases with Git for AI memory (PoC)

https://github.com/Growth-Kinetics/DiffMem
13•alexmrv•47m ago•0 comments

Epson MX-80 Fonts

https://mw.rat.bz/MX-80/
63•m_walden•3d ago•11 comments

Data, objects, and how we're railroaded into poor design (2018)

https://www.tedinski.com/2018/01/23/data-objects-and-being-railroaded-into-misdesign.html
24•dvrp•2h ago•0 comments

Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization

https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/
728•damarberlari•17h ago•122 comments

SK hynix dethrones Samsung as world’s top DRAM maker

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-08-15/business/tech/Thanks-Nvidia-SK-hynix-dethrones-Samsung-as-worlds-top-DRAM-maker-for-first-time-in-over-30-years/2376834
117•ksec•3d ago•44 comments

A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes

https://www.statsignificant.com/p/is-rotten-tomatoes-still-reliable
106•m463•6h ago•43 comments

Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html
440•taviso•16h ago•448 comments

Universal Tool Calling Protocol (UTCP)

https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol/python-utcp
10•edweis•2d ago•3 comments

Mirror Ball Emoji Proposal (2018) [pdf]

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19310-mirror-ball-emoji.pdf
22•michalc•3d ago•7 comments

Gemma 3 270M re-implemented in pure PyTorch for local tinkering

https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch/tree/main/ch05/12_gemma3
359•ModelForge•17h ago•52 comments

Python f-string cheat sheets (2022)

https://fstring.help/cheat/
9•shlomo_z•1h ago•1 comments

'Reading crisis' prompts Denmark to end 25% tax on books

https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2025/0820/1529397-denmark-book-tax/
47•austinallegro•1h ago•37 comments

Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet

112•glawrence13•15h ago•64 comments

Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts

https://petapixel.com/2025/08/20/home-depot-sued-for-secretly-using-facial-recognition-technology-on-self-checkout-cameras/
98•mikece•15h ago•84 comments

The Pleasure of Patterns in Art

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/why-repetition-in-art-pleases-the-brain/
20•prismatic•3h ago•2 comments

SimpleIDE

https://github.com/jamesplotts/simpleide
60•impendingchange•7h ago•26 comments

Show HN: PlutoPrint – Generate PDFs and PNGs from HTML with Python

https://github.com/plutoprint/plutoprint
112•sammycage•10h ago•24 comments

Sequoia backs Zed

https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed
365•vquemener•18h ago•222 comments

Show HN: Luminal – Open-source, search-based GPU compiler

https://github.com/luminal-ai/luminal
107•jafioti•15h ago•51 comments

French firm Gouach is pitching an Infinite Battery with replaceable cells

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/gouach-wants-you-to-insert-and-pluck-the-cells-from-its-infinite-e-bike-battery/
88•pabs3•3d ago•69 comments

Project to formalise a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover

https://imperialcollegelondon.github.io/FLT/
106•ljlolel•12h ago•71 comments

An Update on Pytype

https://github.com/google/pytype
169•mxmlnkn•14h ago•56 comments

Zedless: Zed fork focused on privacy and being local-first

https://github.com/zedless-editor/zed
463•homebrewer•12h ago•259 comments

Coris (YC S22) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/coris/jobs/rqO40yy-ai-engineer
1•smaddali•10h ago

Advice for Tech Non-Profits

https://mitchellh.com/writing/advice-for-tech-nonprofits
36•ksec•6h ago•9 comments

Introduction to AT Protocol

https://mackuba.eu/2025/08/20/introduction-to-atproto/
156•psionides•11h ago•80 comments

OPA maintainers and Styra employees hired by Apple

https://blog.openpolicyagent.org/note-from-teemu-tim-and-torin-to-the-open-policy-agent-community-2dbbfe494371
125•crcsmnky•15h ago•42 comments

Tidewave Web: in-browser coding agent for Rails and Phoenix

https://tidewave.ai/blog/tidewave-web-phoenix-rails
279•kieloo•21h ago•52 comments

Creating 3D Worlds with HTML and CSS (2013)

https://keithclark.co.uk/articles/creating-3d-worlds-with-html-and-css/
25•razodactyl•5h ago•6 comments