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md224

3,786 karma · joined October 3, 2011

Creator of FuckItJS and /r/AskOuija.

Occasional music-maker.

Frequent internet-builder.

https://matt-diamond.com

https://x.com/mattdiamond

submissionscomments
md224··on How to Exist
it's possible that he was making a joke about exiting a startup

but I appreciate your comment regardless

md224··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
I think you misread the person you replied to.

"decisions which they don't understand to be compliant" = "decisions which they don't believe to be compliant"

In other words, they understand that the decisions are not compliant. There's no contradiction with what you said.

md224··on Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart
If you like space visualizers, NASA has a cool one:

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/

md224··on A. J. Ayer – ‘What I Saw When I Was Dead’ (1988)
The most striking thing to me is that Ayer hopes there isn't life after death.

> My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. (italics mine)

I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas Nagel wrote something along those lines.) I sort of get it but regardless I think it's very interesting.

md224··on A perfectable programming language
I believe you can thank Verso for that:

https://github.com/leanprover/verso

md224··on Git commands I run before reading any code
The last sentence of the article is "Here’s what the rest of the week looks like." and then it just stops. Am I missing something?
md224··on Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]
A fun way to track the mission is via NASA's Eyes on the Solar System visualizer:

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_artemis_2

md224··on Life on Peptides Feels Amazing
https://archive.is/pTTQK
md224··on JSDoc is TypeScript
Sure, but if the caller is Javascript then you're running Javascript, not Typescript*, so it makes sense that you're not going to get type safety.

I'm also not sure we're actually disagreeing on anything, so perhaps my reply was pointless. I agree that if you mix JS and TS in the way you describe, you'll have problems. My reply was just to say "yes, and that's not really Typescript's fault", but perhaps you weren't implying that to begin with.

* I'm aware that you can't run Typescript directly, but I hope my point here is clear... you're running a program that wasn't type-checked by TS.

md224··on JSDoc is TypeScript
Writing a Typescript program that takes external input but has no runtime error checking is already a mistake, though. Dealing with external input requires type assertions (since Typescript doesn't know what the program is getting at compile-time) and if you write type assertions without ensuring that the assertions are accurate, then that's on you, not Typescript.

However, if your point is that Typescript can lull people into a false sense of safety, then sure, I take your point. You have to understand where type assertions are coming into play, and if that's obscured then the type safety can be illusory. The benefits of Typescript require you to make sure that the runtime inputs to your program are sufficiently validated.

md224··on A new bridge links the math of infinity to computer science
This might be a dumb question but are there any current or foreseeable practical applications of this kind of result (like in the realm of distributed computing) or is this just pure mathematics for its own sake?
md224··on Secret diplomatic message deciphered after 350 years
> The solution was reached by using codebreaking software the team had developed along with extensive manual work, in part required because Perwich had mistakenly omitted a couple of letters in his ciphertext.

That explains how the team of 3 codebreakers got it, but what about the other codebreaker, Matthew Brown, who figured it out by himself? The article doesn't say anything about his approach. Seems impressive if he can match the effort of three cryptographers using their own custom software. I want to read more about him!

md224··on Working pipe operator today in pure JavaScript
I suspect this was written with an LLM and the author didn't actually verify that the examples in the README worked.
md224··on Low Earth Orbit Visualization
If you're looking for something real-time, I'd recommend checking out NASA's "Eyes on the Solar System" visualizer (not as comprehensive but still pretty cool):

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/earth

md224··on Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
Tanner Greer has a good piece on how the American tradition of bottom-up self-organization has been supplanted by top-down bureaucracy: https://palladiummag.com/2023/03/30/a-school-of-strength-and...
md224··on Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo
> technologies aren't themselves disruptive; customer choices are

Technologies are themselves disruptive, as their introduction can shape human behavior. Choice doesn't happen in a vacuum.

md224··on Cloudflare incident on August 21, 2025
I'm having trouble understanding the second diagram in the article. I can make sense of a directed graph, but this one has thin horizontal lines with arrows leaving them in both directions. These lines look like dividers, not nodes, so I'm not sure how to interpret it.
md224··on Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models
I was intrigued that one of the researchers was listed as "independent", so I checked her out:

https://lindapetrini.com

It looks like she's a science communicator rather than a scientist herself. That's interesting... I'm not used to seeing academic papers that include an author devoted entirely to the writing aspect. (Then again, maybe I just haven't noticed?)

md224··on Numbers Are Leaves
> set theory is the foundation of all of mathematics

I disagree. I would say set theory is a foundation, not the foundation.

Which system is the "correct" foundation of mathematics? Does it even make sense to talk about correctness in this context? These are open questions and they're very interesting! Don't prematurely close yourself off to them by assuming that set theory's role is some kind of scientific fact.

md224··on Alignment faking in large language models
But what if it's only faking the alignment faking? What about meta-deception?

This is a serious question. If it's possible for an A.I. to be "dishonest", then how do you know when it's being honest? There's a deep epistemological problem here.

md224··on On 17th century "cocaine"
I wish the US would legalize coca leaves. Our nation's drug laws are so goddamn stupid.

Two different Popes drank Vin Mariani!

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

md224··on Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005)
Something that continues to puzzle me: how do molecular biologists manage to come up with such mindbogglingly complex diagrams of metabolic pathways in the midst of a replication crisis? Is our understanding of biology just a giant house of cards or is there something about the topic that allows for more robust investigation?
md224··on Out of Your Head
> Once, after injecting himself with a large dose of morphine, he found himself hovering over an enormous battlefield, watching the armies of England and France drawn up for battle, and then realized he was witnessing the 1415 Battle of Agincourt... The vision seemed to last only a few minutes, but later, he discovered he’d been tripping for 13 hours.

This doesn't make any sense... morphine is not a hallucinogen or a psychedelic. You don't "trip" on it. I have a feeling the journalist mixed something up here.

md224··on A breakthrough towards the Riemann hypothesis
Aw man, yours is way cooler than mine: https://matt-diamond.com/zeta.html

Still, it's funny to see how many people have attempted this! It's a fun programming exercise with a nice result.

md224··on The Telechron master station clock was used to maintain power grid frequency
Why does HN automatically drop "This" in article titles?
md224··on ProofWiki: Online compendium of mathematical proofs
> However, we also see that for only those combinations starting with a T (that is f(n - 1))...

Why is that f(n - 1)?

md224··on The English cottage where John le Carré wrote Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
One of my favorite films! Agreed that it's not for everyone, but if you're on its wavelength it's really something special. Just incredibly well made with terrific performances. That ending sequence with La Mer...
md224··on Critique of the mind/body problem
It's not just about conscious action but also perception, being conscious of things. I don't know how that could be a trick.
md224··on Goodbye, data science
> if you find just one experiment that goes against your model, you immediately invalidate the model

Pierre Duhem would like to have a word with you:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermina...

> Holist underdetermination ensures, Duhem argues, that there cannot be any such thing as a “crucial experiment”: a single experiment whose outcome is predicted differently by two competing theories and which therefore serves to definitively confirm one and refute the other.

md224··on Our conscious experience of the world is a memory, says new theory
Wouldn't this mean that the author of this article wrote it unconsciously?
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