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oska

7,782 karma · joined April 12, 2014

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oska··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Just as a FYI I would have upvoted yr comment (from grey) if it hadn't had the second line in it

(The first and third lines were fine)

oska··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
> I don’t support xenophobia

I personally don't have a problem with xenophobia. I see it as the other side of the coin from openness to 'foreign' cultures and peoples. Both always exist in a society (opening up and shutting out) and you need both.

A people that don't have any xenophobia will have their country taken over and their culture erased. While also, a people that don't have any openness to foreign people and foreign cultures will stultify. You need both, in balance (and often that balance is shifting, in one direction or the other).

oska··on The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
Sorry, my mistake then
oska··on The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
> and with the unsaid implication in the OP that all religions basically teach the same thing

I read the entirety of 3m4r's posts in that thread and nowhere did I see any hint of such an implication

oska··on The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
As an interested reader and not participant in this discussion, thanks for taking the time. I found what you had to say above informative.
oska··on Carmakers Have a New Idea to Boost EV Range: Add a Gas Engine
It's 1) the WSJ and 2) a really dubious headline

I don't find it surprising or disappointing that ppl aren't bothering to go read the article because of the two factors in conjunction above

oska··on That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
Yes, she's a bad writer.

It's a pity because the material she is covering, the fever of Elizabethan rhetorical inventiveness, including in the written form, is so rich & interesting.

She pulls out useful detail & quotes but then links it together with her own overwritten & eccentric prose.

oska··on That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
> The (small business) owner. The small (business owner).

Your second formulation doesn't work. Words in parentheses should be able to be omitted without loss of grammaticality.

Instead,

The small (business) owner

would be a better contrasting formulation to the first one.

oska··on That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis
I don't like the two examples of parenthesis used in the title & subtitle of this piece, where they put wonderful and perfect in parentheses before a noun phrase.

Putting adjectives in parentheses before a noun (phrase) is, yes, a useful device but those adjectives should usually be words that give more (but not necessary) information, rather than purely subjective qualifiers such as the two that the author uses. I know they're probably being a bit tongue in cheek but it still grates a little that these were the two examples they led with.

oska··on Launch HN: Keet (YC S24) – An app to create video courses on anything
The obvious rejoinder to this comment is don't self-post about your business on HN then, if you're going to ignore HN commentary as 'unrepresentative'
oska··on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
You could make a case for using Windows in the 90s (and yeah, I did; the last version of Windows I used was NT in the 90s). After that your time was much better spent on learning and using Linux (downloadable for free).

Visual Basic is a whole steaming pile of crap and you would always have been better learning to use non-corporate, non-proprietary languages and development stacks than wasting your time on that. And calling Office "the number one productivity desktop publishing software" only shows that you have fully drunk the Kool-Aid. More 'office productivity' has probably been lost to Microsoft Word than any other text-processing software on the planet.

oska··on I Stopped “Creating Content”
You can't resign from a position you never held or a game you never entered into
oska··on I Stopped “Creating Content”
Yes, I've always disliked this saying. People have agency. They can always refuse to play the game (and that is precisely what many great people chose to do).
oska··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
1. There is no such thing as "Artificial Intelligence" (but yes, machine learning and LLMs are real and powerful things)

2. Calling LLMs 'AI' is part of the grifting hype that has been wildly prevalent in the US corporate space. It's very natural and also very good that there is now backlash to and scepticism around all of the hype that is has been generated over the last 5 or so years

oska··on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
> windows, office, Visual Basic

This is all (Microsoft) junk and so I wonder if you actually benefitted from this 'piracy'. And of course, it's well known that MS turned a blind eye to such 'piracy' in lesser developed countries, as they knew that they were gaining a future paying customer base.

oska··on China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning
I prefix many of my LLM chat sessions with this line

> Chat rules : no sycophancy or over-agreeableness

(But even with that rule it's still necessary to be discerning about the responses you get and to push back against points made, or words used)

oska··on Who's afraid of Chinese models?
> Second, intelligence isn’t in fact a perfect commodity

We have got very far from Cicero's coining of the word 'intelligentia' (from inter legere, a 'reading between' and hence discernment) when people talk about 'intelligence' as a commodity

People have been decrying the 'cheapening' of the word intelligence for over a century now, going back to Psychology's adoption of the word and coining of nonsenses like "Intelligence Quotient". "Artificial Intelligence" is just the latest degradation of the original humanistic meaning, and now people aren't ever bothering to prepend 'artificial' to their idiotic use of the word

oska··on Think of the children: How to force real ID for all internet traffic (2023)
I completely agree with you, and it's strange to see you downvoted on a technical forum

Technology is what has always precipitated political change

oska··on With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX
> yet he's worshipped in the tech community

Maybe for those who are younger and who mostly know of Jobs posthumously but Jobs was a highly polarising figure through the 80s, 90s and 2000s and there were many ppl who would never buy any Apple product because of the Jobs personality behind it (including when Jobs wasn't actually in charge; it was still a company built in his "Walled Garden + Salesman Hype" image)

oska··on With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX
Here was my parsing of the submission title :

> With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

Yes, true, so why was it flagged ?

> (paulkrugman.substack.com)

Ah, ok, that's actually legit. Krugman is not worth reading on any subject, even when he's right (at least in the title).

oska··on Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone
The Buddha famously thought out loud with a good buddy, while pursuing Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree
oska··on Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
Gentle suggestion for you to read the guidelines again

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

oska··on Nearly half (44%) of every T-shirt goes to waste before you even buy it
It's my opinion that t-shirts with something printed on the front have never been and will never be cool, so I don't struggle with this choice at all
oska··on Brands got worse on purpose
Yeah, it's sad to see classic Australian brands caught up in this debasement process
oska··on SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B
Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs

oska··on Apple has removed most of the towns and villages in Lebanon from Apple maps?
I don't know if Southern Lebanon town names were removed or never there. In either case it seems quite odd that the southern part of Lebanon has been left so void of labelling.

Perhaps the submission title could be changed just to reflect this seemingly odd paucity of town names in S. Lebanon only on Apple Maps?

oska··on Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked
This is such an excellent comment (along with SoftTalker's reply) and made me think. I've long rejected the term "intellectual property", along with the delusional/fraudulent term "artificial intelligence" (as opposed to real things like LLMs and machine learning) and "money laundering" but hadn't previously stopped to think about "identity theft". Now I have.

I believe that it's really important to consider the validity of terms that are heavily adopted and pushed around and whether you should use them yourself or call them out as intellectually vapid/dishonest.

oska··on Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked
> But then your comment history reveals enough about your intent.

This is really poor form, and against the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

oska··on Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked
> Financial privacy is a complicated subject, could you perhaps agree that there is a use for transparancy?

No, because I don't believe in income tax or capital gains tax. I do believe in government taxes but they should be made on land holdings (Georgism) and on corporate activities, not on individuals' financial status (their earnings & capital).

oska··on Source code of Swedish e-government services has been leaked
> The Government IS the public.

How can you say this (and seem to believe it)?

The Government is answerable to the public and should serve the public. But conflating the government with the public is simply bizarre, to my way of thinking.

Governments should be transparent as much as possible, yes. But that doesn't mean being necessarily transparent with sensitive information that they know about members of the public. Only with your (bizarre to me) conflation of the public with the government would this make any sense.

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