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defterGoose

1,196 karma · joined June 10, 2015

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defterGoose··on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices
...meaning both houses of Congress.
defterGoose··on A graph that should be front-page news
Forgot the /s tag
defterGoose··on NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say
What a hilariously fact- and understanding-free piece of ragebait.
defterGoose··on Why Can't California Count?
...and if you had actually seen our ballot for this primary, you'd know that anyone with a semblance of care to know who they were voting for and why constituted veritable weeks of legwork. The governor's race had like 60 people running, not to mention all the judge seats, etc.
defterGoose··on Why Can't California Count?
You mail in your credit card payments? My bullshit detector is absolutely pegged right now.
defterGoose··on I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
As someone who took both a 4 year latin curriculum and a year of koine Greek in HS: unqualified no.

Really wish I were fluent in Spanish or Japanese or really anything spoken.

defterGoose··on What killed the Florida orange?
You got a bad/dry one. Happens all the time with home grown and less frequently with commercial products. My backyard trees have improved, but only with fairly intensive upkeep.

The flavor coming right off the tree can be truly candy-like given optimal conditions. After tasting the best ones from my own tree, I had the revelation that so many things that are "orange flavored" are mimicking navels specifically.

defterGoose··on What killed the Florida orange?
I'll pick a bone on the flavor comment because a good Washington Navel is probably one of the best tasting oranges in existence.
defterGoose··on The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness
It's the pervasive theme in the book, but never really given a conceptual grounding further than "this sort of looks like recursion or can be modelled circularly so it's a strange loop". The vagueness of it reveals itself as being "more intuitive", because a vaguer pattern will have more matches. I don't remember Hofstadter digressing on whether these loops work "in reverse" either, which is sort of what the author here is denying. Basically positing that f doesn't have a well-defined inverse.
defterGoose··on The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
It's only a little bit comforting that computers still live in meatspace when you consider something like an AI-controlled Metal Gear roaming around though.
defterGoose··on Trump says U.S. operation captured Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro
I see it's still the season of perpetual hope wherever you are...
defterGoose··on Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer
Yeah, but there's nothing like some sweet, sweet justification.
defterGoose··on My thoughts on renting versus buying
The author disclaims that he's not a homeowner at the very end of the article, but these types of pieces steelmanning renting always read to me as thinly veiled pleas of "please exit the market so I can have more".
defterGoose··on Launch HN: Societies.io (YC W25) – AI simulations of your target audience
Someone must have a wild-ass theorem about whether or not consciousness is representable as some distribution over possible realities. But yeah, I agree this feels like taking a huge step towards fewer and fewer people having agency in their own (real) lives.

I'm certain Big [insert industry] will gobble this kind of thing up.

defterGoose··on Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden
Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.
defterGoose··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
I would love to have such a model tell me how to prune my fruit trees as they grow up. Should be a fairly straightforward supervised problem with the right front end for the graph generation.
defterGoose··on The long-awaited Friend Compound laws in California
That's what a Bungalow Court is all about. They're kind of a dying breed, but have previously been very popular here in LA County.
defterGoose··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
Totally a mischaracterization. On one hand an imperfect crisis response, on the other hand, a brazen, unforced error.
defterGoose··on The Intelligence Age
|such intelligence isn't really a bottleneck today.

Yep, pretty much agree. As soon as I see LLMs start solving millennium problems one after another I might change my tune.

The bottleneck is much more likely to be people unwilling to quit hoarding economic potential in the form of money.

defterGoose··on The Intelligence Age
Everyone's life will be better than anyone's life is now? That is some impressively breathless optimism.

I dunno Sam, groceries have gotten awfully expensive.

defterGoose··on Five Most Productive Years: What Happened and What's Next
> Back in 1979, for example, I’d invented the idea of transformations for symbolic expressions as a foundation for computational language.

Right, so math then. You invented math.

defterGoose··on FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations
Don't trust changing your card either. I had a predatory LA Fitness membership. When they made me jump through one too many hoops to cancel, I called up WF and had them issue me a new card (Visa). Well, Visa, in their infinite wisdom, gave my new credit card number to LA Fitness and they kept on charging me for almost two years before I noticed. I don't remember the name of that program at Visa, but I'm sure they and other CC companies continue to do this. Should be illegal.
defterGoose··on Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
Care to relate some of them? My mom was a high school math teacher, my dad is a physicist and I had a STEM education, so math pedagogy is near and dear to me.
defterGoose··on Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?
And those books you're reading. They came from where?
defterGoose··on VW to Build €20k EVs on Its Own, Forgoing Partnerships
The i3 I've been driving around has been a complete revelation. It's an older model with a worn-out small battery. It usually claims to have 52mi range when it's topped up in the morning. Realistically, I can only use about 40-45 of that before I worry about it shutting off the contactors to protect the cells.

But it has a range extender. That transforms it from essentially a dedicated grocery-getter to a daily driver that can commute all over Socal. Barely over 2 gallons of gas will give you an extra 70mi (at about 65mph)

Granted, it's more a technology demonstrator than a blueprint for an affordable mass-market EV, but it's a huge step in the right direction if you ask me. Much more similar to what the average person in a city needs in a car than, say, the 600hp model 3 I was driving around for awhile.

defterGoose··on Mustard
Probably horseradish which, incidentally, is also a member of the mustard/cabbage family. If you make mustard from scratch you will note that raw mustard seeds have a very horseradish-like flavor as well.
defterGoose··on Tuna species popular in sashimi and poke bowls in sharp decline
Not going to downvote you because I appreciate your position. It seems really unlikely that tuna consumption is driving obesity or detrimental health effects though. Sushi lovers (and meat eaters) such as myself do need to make educated choices about their consumption though, I agree. Which is why basically any tuna species is (and has been) at the bottom of my list.
defterGoose··on Methane under the seabed is thawing as oceans warm
You just said the same thing twice.
defterGoose··on Tiny volumetric display
That's all true, but I liked his solution of using an IR sensor for the sync. It was so cool how he was able to rotate the display by changing the position of his finger. No guessing involved.
defterGoose··on Ask HN: Manufacturing somewhat novel MIDI controller
To piggyback on this: I've disassembled a 2nd gen Axiom 25 for research purposes. It's a pretty industry standard entry-level semi-weighted keyboard with decent controller capability. The keyboard and other buttons are implemented with custom large-format FSRs and several-shot molded (silicone?) membranes/switches. So you get physical feedback from a combination of a spring on the key root and the squishiness/variable force of the silicone contact. None of this is cheap, but it's not impossible to prototype either. It's just a very high bar.

Edit: I was particularly impressed by the engineering of the drum pads.

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