HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

m0llusk

3,494 karma · joined February 15, 2014

submissionscomments
m0llusk··on Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
Having been involved with development of Internet social media and smart phones it seems like balancing futurist hopes with guarded pessimism might be an enlightened path.
m0llusk··on Finally, A True Blue Rose Exists
Could also be at least in part an epigenetic effect where the gene remains but is deactivated or strongly down regulated.
m0llusk··on The LLMentalist Effect (2023)
That is a bad faith summary. LLM driven proofs are turning out to be hard to verify, often take invalid shortcuts, and may not actually be helpful in getting humans to understand either the proof or related context. Even if one accepts your "insanely useful" statement, which is a huge stretch, that has to be qualified with the results being insanely complicated to actually verify and use. The point of mathematics is to advance understanding, not merely generate some isolated and incoherent results.
m0llusk··on The LLMentalist Effect (2023)
Generating and mastering language are two very different things. Even the best LLMs still have no ability to understand or work with abstractions.
m0llusk··on Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain
In short, no. The two types of thinking are both forebrain activity. One comes to a quick guess with pattern matching, the other goes slower with reasoning. It could be that some fast thinking is influenced by the hindbrain in some way, but the thoughts themselves are constructs in the conscious mind that inhabits the frontal lobes.
m0llusk··on Most people prefer traditional architecture
Mostly this is looking at architecture as urban sculpture. That is relevant, but the most critical experience of a building is on the inside. Modern designs spearheaded modern interior spaces including spacious corridors, atriums for exposing important views and improving navigation, and other such features. More than that modernist buildings are good at presenting functional spaces with a minimum of details to interfere with usage and customization. Different uses can add decoration or functional features as necessary as there is plenty of space available and no ornamentation to interfere with.

And then there is the issue of construction. Many older designs use materials and methods that are either out of date or expensive to replicate with currently popular building materials. Simply going back to older designs is not a practical option for most buildings. There has to be some balance of old ideas with newer methods.

m0llusk··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
Life saving is a good metric. So also are incidents of blocking traffic or interfering with responders. Navigation is only one aspect of driving which is a social act and requires both sophisticated understanding of context and communication. Looks like progress is impressive but there is still a lot of work to do.
m0llusk··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Linked cameras everywhere all the time has been coming for a while. Cheap hardware, connectivity, and analysis means who pays is not only not limited to governments and big companies but is barely even relevant. The remaining question is what if any rules there will be.
m0llusk··on Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs (2025)
That isn't true. The original Apple Store proposal by Bertrand Serlet is available and it is pretty clearly driven by the need to polish the user experience of installing and managing applications. Being able to charge a significant premium was just a part of the picture and originally considered to be required to pay for the associated infrastructure of reviews and such.
m0llusk··on Stop Making TUIs
Text is an extremely information dense medium. It makes sense for user interfaces to be centered around text. This keeps the focus on the data and its transformation.
m0llusk··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
It's worse than that. He is so completely off that he thinks this means US builders will chose to buy US lumber instead and that will work out positively for everyone in the US.
m0llusk··on Incident with Github.com
The end of the day is now.
m0llusk··on People are worried about America's solvency
Eisenhower who, despite being exhausted by WWII efforts, ran for presidency because he saw that as the only way to prevent a civil war. Nowadays the American Left is Center Right, but back then the American Right was Center Left. Things change, things stay the same.
m0llusk··on Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf
And that is what remains of the Pacific sardine fishery. It used to be that sardines were plentiful all around Monterey, but during WWII fishermen used improved sensors to track down and remove all schools of sardines until they were gone. Since then attempts to reintroduce sardines to that stretch of California coast have all failed. This is a really huge loss to the whole ecosystem there.
m0llusk··on My Rules for Using Spreadsheets
Seems like rules for using spreadsheets more strictly would suffice. Call this abstraction TypeSheet maybe?
m0llusk··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
My family used it to capture programming we couldn't normally be around for, especially late night BBC content on PBS. Pretty much all we used it for was DVR style recording.
m0llusk··on Banksy works cost public almost £150k
And the value of nothing.
m0llusk··on Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
Maybe more like do not interrupt the hype train while it is derailing?
m0llusk··on Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area
Actually, house mice appear to have a common ancestor which lived somewhere around India roughly 400,000 years ago.
m0llusk··on AI financial advice is surprisingly good if you ask the right questions
Also very strongly mean reverting.
m0llusk··on Shipping Godot VR and Porting to PSVR2: A Partial Post Mortem
Sometimes it is possible to pinpoint problems if not fix them. In my limited experience the Godot source is quite accessible and straightforward despite the complications of multiplatform builds.
m0llusk··on 7.1 Earthquake in Japan
It is also the timing of building booms. Problems being exposed have triggered regulations and enforcement in Venezuela but that is relatively recent and much inventory was built decades before.
m0llusk··on Systemd Linger
Absolutely not the case. Even relatively simple real world uses involved collections of shell scripts to carefully mount or initialize services in just the right order and would often fail with weird and infrequent timing glitches. With systemd that all becomes explicit, so of course it is awkwardly verbose. That is the whole point and a huge upgrade.
m0llusk··on The Dark Night of Mathematics
Seems like maybe now we have sufficient tools to actually get on top of string theory. And ultimately it is all about coming up with explanations and formulas and tools that people can use in facing real challenges.
m0llusk··on Couple pay >$800k for a gene-editing therapy for their daughter. She died.
It is more complicated than that. Markets have the structure and regulations we give them. Health care gets set up and delivered with very different concepts and guidance in various places regardless of whether it is for profit.
m0llusk··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
LLMs improve development speed such that enshittification can be in progress well before the IPO.
m0llusk··on So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
This is hyperbolic. Users that started with the older interface often prefer that. Humans do not like change. This is a trap that many software developers offering prereleases also fall into. The safety claim has as much to do with maintaining only one stack at a time. Keeping an older interface around extends vulnerabilities and generates ongoing maintenance costs. Referring to old Reddit as plain, safe HTML is not an accurate characterization.
m0llusk··on Never Enough
Really sad that the latest tech debacle gets the Silicon Valley label while so much interesting and constructive work plods along in relative dark.
m0llusk··on I Stopped “Creating Content”
Ironic that this piece is mostly discontent.
m0llusk··on Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
Seems like property ownership histories could be one of the few good applications of blockchain technology.
Page 1 of 34Next →