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lebca

44 karma · joined April 23, 2016

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lebca··on Pixel 11 Pro Fold
Anecdotally, every iphone I've tried since my iphone 11 pro seems to take worse photos. I do take a lot of photos with a standalone camera though so I imagine I am biased.
lebca··on New Framework Desktop Option with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 and 192GB Memory
It is possible to be successful in spite of one’s decisions
lebca··on The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
I used to know someone wealthy whose continued wealth relied on working with local and state governments. This person's public correspondence in lawsuits and with local government officials was purposefully littered with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization errors. When I asked them about it, their response was that it was on purpose so that they seemed less smart and thus less threatening, with the hope that they would get more favorable rulings and contracts by not seeming like "one of the big entities."

I'm not asking you to believe me on this, but sharing it more as an anecdote of: something on the surface is sometimes not the reality of what's underneath.

lebca··on I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
Just a reminder that our experience does not necessarily invalidate someone else's experience.

Eg, I was typing Alt-0151 and Alt-0150 (en-dash) on the reg in my middle school and high school essays along with in AIM. While some of my classmates were probably typing double hyphens, my group of friends were using the keyboard shortcuts, so I am now learning from this "detect an LLM" faze that there's a vocal group of people who do not share this experience or perspective of human communication. And that having a mother who worked in technical publishing who insisted I use the correct punctuation rather than two hyphens was not part of everyone's childhood.

lebca··on Lie groups are crucial to some of the most fundamental theories in physics
Second this! And if you want a part memoir part history of this subject as it relates to physics (through Langlands Program) part ode to the beauty of maths, I recommend reading Edward Frenkel's Love & Math:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_and_Math

and if you went to school in maths but now have left that world, this book engenders an additional spark of nostalgia and fun due to reading about some of your professors and their (sometimes very difficult) journey in this world.

lebca··on The Reverse Flynn Effect
Could you elaborate on your comment here? My interpretation of this critic's point regarding the difference in "print" vs "digital" is that print has(d?) more friction to publish, thereby having a built-in filter or higher cost to weed out grifters or unsubstantiated claims that the digital path has not (blogs, social media, etc...).
lebca··on OpenAI co-founder John Schulman says he will leave and join rival Anthropic
Please consider avoiding more ad hominem attacks or revising the ones you've already plastered onto this discussion.
lebca··on Show HN: You Need Less Caffeine Than You Think
The "feel shit for a week" are basically withdrawals, right? So...addictive? In terms of addicted to the taste of good coffee (+1), curious if you've found good tasting decaf. I struggle to find decaf flavors that are as rich and flavorful as caffeinated coffee.
lebca··on First batch of student’s washing machines shipped to Iraq
Mark Rippletoe of Starting Strength has some counterarguments to this. E.g. being fit and heavy is better for bone density than out of shape and slim so in older age one is less likely to break something.
lebca··on Google/Fitbit will monetise health data and harm consumers [pdf]
Aren’t Google and Fitbit one in the same now given the acquisition? Or are you implying that Fitbit will function independently and Google will sell it if Fitbit isn’t profitable?
lebca··on Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro
What if the Mac had a newer OS than Mojave originally installed on it? That is how I interpreted the parent poster's comment. Given this interpretation, I'm don't think I'd have the expectation to be able to install an earlier OS.
lebca··on Being Bored Is Good
Could you point out where in the song you hear space? I was interpreting the conversation's use of space to mean silence. Do you mean space in the auditory spectrum, but not in the time spectrum? Meaning, this song is less crowded instrumentally than a house/edm song (auditory spectrum), but does not create space in the time spectrum, say like a Mozart sonata does?
lebca··on Google to Acquire Looker
My understanding was that apart from GM killing it on a more general statewide level, the SC dirt is really soft and the tunnels collapsed a lot more often than expected, taking deaths with them during collapses and rebuilds.
lebca··on Show HN: Five Thousand Novels, Ranked by Vividness
just discovered this! Thank you.
lebca··on Show HN: Five Thousand Novels, Ranked by Vividness
Thanks! I'm enjoying comparing novels I've read and finding surprises at misremembering the prose of some of them. Was it a deliberate decision to not include the ability to search for specific titles? I've been clicking through the percentiles and realized could save some time finding the titles if they were all on one page (Ctrl-F) or via a search box.

edit: manually editing the URL helps with this :)

edit2: and apparently the home page

lebca··on Finish your stuff
As someone who only discovered Pieter by finding his last article posted on HN, and then subsequently learning a lot from reading many of his other articles on his website (different perspective on life, humility, consulting in tech outside of SV, presentations), here is his homepage for those who are curious: http://hintjens.com.

Three examples I'd recommend:

Life, Consulting, Humility, Calming Down: http://hintjens.com/blog:125 (confessions of a necromancer)

Presentations: http://hintjens.com/blog:107 (ten steps to better public speaking)

Life, Humility, Time: http://hintjens.com/blog:123 (fighting caner)

He's one of the few online writers who keeps my attention no matter the length. His humor is fun and his imagery and story telling style are engaging.

[edit: formatting]

lebca··on Zillow's second letter about McMansion Hell is still wrong
To add to this point, I contacted a realtor through Zillow, had two email exchanges with him where I asked specific questions about a property. Each time, my questions were ignored, and his responses can be summarized as "are you pre-approved?" In the second email, he politely redirected me to another realtor that it appeared he was managing and I never heard from them again.
lebca··on A Path Less Taken to the Peak of the Math World
Having majored in mathematics and music, and taken only undergraduate physics courses I would say my personal experience agrees with kafkaesq. I often thought maths was closer to English literature & composition classes or music composition classes than to my physics classes. For me, maths was definition focused like the difference between lightning and lightning bolt, big picture focused like writing a thesis argument or a composition, and detail focused similar to understanding how the structure of a sentence altered the affect of that sentence or detail focused when manipulating melodic lines or harmonies and rhythm within one measure of music (ie get through a harmonic progression to another key while still maintaining the set of rules/laws/constraints I had created for myself for a specific piece).
lebca··on The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow
While I have not read the book, when I've spoken about it to reputable Bach musicologists and logicians, one group says Hofstadter misinterprets Bach's work and tries to create something that actually isn't there while the other says he oversimplifies Gödel's work to the point that it is uninteresting and misleading. I haven't found a visual artist who's read it to discuss the Escher parts. These opinions steered me away from it, so I'm curious about you having a more rewarding experience.
lebca··on Music Theory: An Education from First Principles
Sure, but even in western music the chromatic scale is considered to have been exhausted in the 20th century. Modern music has moved on to use other notes and sounds and in many cases is not even pitch-centric.
lebca··on Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal [pdf]
While real analysis alone is probably not enough to do a real representative analysis, if the class were the first real analysis class in the undergrad sequence, then I'd call it an earlier class. Eg, 1st upper division real analysis class, assuming the lower divs were the ones the pre-meds and CS majors took.
lebca··on The Real-Life Plan to Drain the Mediterranean and Merge Africa and Europe
You're not wrong about the bay being mostly shallow. To clarify though, the bay's average depth in the southern and northern areas is closer to 15-17 ft and near the Golden Gate Bridge and Treasure Island area is closer to 40ft[1]. Maybe the median depth is closer to 7 feet.

[1] http://omp.gso.uri.edu/ompweb/doee/science/descript/baysfran...

lebca··on How I Built a Custom Camper Van (2015)
This works until one notices the backwards hanging clothes more than the forwards hanging ones, and then one's OCD or something begins to care about reversing all the hangers more than choosing what to wear, like a game...
lebca··on Master Plan, Part Deux
and post Tesla acquisition of SpaceX,

Master Plan: Part Tres

Solar powered flying cars that will take you to Mars and beyond.

lebca··on My First 10 Minutes on a Server
Could you recommend another hosting service with better security practices than Linode?
lebca··on How to assign partial credit on an exam of true-false questions?
That was beautiful. It's been a long time since I've read anything derived as elegantly and clearly described as that. Got any more?