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dougb5

1,286 karma · joined October 4, 2012

Software engineer interested in NLP, search, data analysis, and dictionaries.

https://www.dougb.com https://www.datamuse.com https://onelook.com https://civicsearch.org doug.hackernews@dougb.com

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dougb5··on Seven books I keep close because I love them
That fills my heart with brobdingnagian joy, thank you!
dougb5··on Seven books I keep close because I love them
Thanks so much! It's a joy to make it every day.
dougb5··on Seven books I keep close because I love them
Hey, I'm the developer of OneLook. I'm so glad to see it here! The concept clusters on the site are directly inspired by Roget's work. Like the author, I see a thesaurus less as a synonym dictionary and more as what the word literally means, a storehouse of treasure. I'm in the midst of a long-overdue data refresh across OneLook right now, so I'd be curious to hear your feedback once it's done.
dougb5··on Sam Altman's Creepy Eyeball-Scanning Company Gets in Bed with Zoom and Tinder
Without the scammy crypto angle ("Worldcoin") it's less ghoulish than before. And a company collecting biometric data to run an identity service isn't necessarily evil. But this one is not to be trusted, because the individual behind it is not to be trusted. The moment it suits his world-bending needs to sell my eyeballs to the fascists, he will do so.
dougb5··on At long last, InfoWars is ours
If "people are confused" I think it's because you are rejecting empirical evidence that The Onion is relevant without offering any counter-evidence of your own. Is it possible it's just no longer relevant to you personally? (I myself am a proud print subscriber...)
dougb5··on AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance
""Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (approximately 10 minutes)."
dougb5··on Employees at OpenAI and Google support Anthropic's lawsuit against The Pentagon
Amicus brief is here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...

I'd be curious to know how OpenAI and Google employees came to learn about and sign on to this brief (and, relatedly, why my OpenAI friends aren't on it.)

dougb5··on Employees at OpenAI and Google support Anthropic's lawsuit against The Pentagon
https://archive.is/KpWS8
dougb5··on We Will Not Be Divided
Yes, it would help so much. Especially if a lot of people with money and power voiced their honest opinions at the same time.
dougb5··on AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
Minor correction: "sparks of AGI" was in reference to GPT-4, which came out 5 months later in 2024. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712)
dougb5··on CIA to Sunset the World Factbook
Not to be confused with The World Almanac and Book of Facts, which is still publishing after 140 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Almanac)
dougb5··on Sam Altman responds to Anthropic's "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude" ads
> I am far from a SamA stan, but this line was pretty good a zinger:

That zinger seemed similar to how Trump deals with criticism from the media -- he tends to begin with an attack on the ratings / popularity of the speaker.

dougb5··on We (As a Society) Peaked in the 90s
I too loved that song as a kid, but it's from 1985. It felt like the right song for that era too!
dougb5··on Open letter from more than 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based companies
You can tell the message was written by committee, or by a large language model prompted to respect "both sides". No human with a soul could honestly characterize the situation as passively as this: "The recent challenges facing our state have created widespread disruption and tragic loss of life."
dougb5··on Miami, your Waymo ride is ready
We've had it for a few years in SF and, while it's very convenient, I haven't witnessed the revolution you speak of. Judging from the traffic, people still mostly get around in their personal vehicles. There's about as much parking as before and it's still a nightmare. But I'd like to believe.
dougb5··on Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
To clarify the headline, this is the effect for households that use a GLP-1, not the country overall.

> Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.

dougb5··on "Many students are simply refusing to do *anything*."
Maybe colleges shouldn't have accepted these kids in the first place or shouldn't move them along. But I think the author is raising a different alarm -- the number of kids who "do nothing, want nothing, and try nothing" seems to have spiked significantly. Public schools, at least, have a mandate to care about this.

I think the problem of student motivation is much broader than this author's college; I've heard it echoed by so many professors lately, but never as poignantly.

dougb5··on Mag Wealth (2024)
It reminds me of how Sam Altman recently said: "I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires." But the hyper-wealthy don't just have _stuff_, they also have power to make decisions affecting society -- to buy elections, to buy social networks, to influence which countries we do AI chip deals with, to start new cities, and so forth. A world in which everyone has the same amount of this decision-making power is probably not a world in which billionaires exist.
dougb5··on Mag Wealth (2024)
The "↑11" bucket -- which Saul labeled as "Megacorps ($300b-$3t)" -- now contains at least one individual human. How far we've come (or fallen?) in just a year.
dougb5··on Mag Wealth (2024)
It's an order-of-magnitude notation used in Saul's "MagWorld" writings and podcast. Recommended: https://saul.pw/mag/
dougb5··on A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'
As dumb as People magazine is/was, it is not algorithmically optimized to hook its readers through constant notifications and rewards. I'd say social media has the edge in terms of its ability to cause sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction, especially in kids.
dougb5··on A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors
Yeah I can make it available! Contact me at the email in my profile and I can explain what I have.
dougb5··on A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors
Great project! It's visually dazzling and it really drives home the sheer size of the universe(s) of named colors.

I've long been interested in the names of colors and their associations. If I may plug my own site a bit, check out the "color thesaurus" feature on OneLook that organizes color names more linearly. Start with mauve, as an example: https://onelook.com/?w=mauve&colors=1 (It also lets you see the words evoked by the color and vice versa, which was a fun LLM-driven analysis.)

dougb5··on Myanmar military shuts down a major cybercrime center, detains over 2k people
I also recommend the Scam Factory podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/show/2cfjCS28vx1MVoukNjpINt

dougb5··on ChatGPT Atlas
And make restaurant reservations! We also make restaurant reservations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806755
dougb5··on "The open web is already in rapid decline"–Misleading Quote [pdf]
I'm confused here. How should this additional context change our understanding of the intended meaning of "the open web is already in rapid decline"?
dougb5··on A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom
https://archive.is/twynO
dougb5··on We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness
Agreed. Techno-solutionists now use the verb "solve" in every imaginable context -- often where there's not a coherent question, let alone a workable answer ("AI will solve physics!"). It's comfortable to see everything as a system of equations.
dougb5··on Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers
> Cloudflare can detect and block verified AI bots that comply with robots.txt and respect crawl rates, and do not hide their behavior from your website

It's the bots that do hide their behavior -- via residential proxy services -- that are causing most of the burden, for my site anyway. Not these large commercial AI vendors.

dougb5··on Tell HN: (dictionary|thesaurus).reference.com is now a spam site
I learned of this when users of my dictionary search site (OneLook) started complaining. I'd been in contact with folks from dictionary.com in their early days, and I've watched its rise and fall with curiosity. If whoever owns reference.com now is reading this, I'll buy it from you and I can promise to honor its original mission as I have with OneLook -- make me an offer.

FYI dictionary.com and thesaurus.com are still available on their original domains. I believe that, under prior ownership (IAC), they consolidated the traffic of their properties under reference.com in order to get higher audience numbers in ComScore and hence better ad deals. It's baffling to me that they (apparently) either let the domain expire or sold it to a spammer. It's accrued brand equity since 2008 -- and no doubt a lot of backlinks, for whatever that's worth now.

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