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pegasus

1,120 karma · joined June 20, 2011

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pegasus··on Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks
> Formulating theories is all nice and dandy, but it ain't science.

Formulating theories ain't the whole of science, but it's a big part of it.

pegasus··on I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
It could be that they live in an area with more variable or more unpredictable weather than you. Or that they are much more outdoorsy. Or something else altogether. I'm surprised by your surprise. People live wildly different lifes and have correspondingly wide-ranging needs and preferences.
pegasus··on Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue
Aqua Voice does (at least some of) that as well.
pegasus··on Expensively Quadratic: The LLM Agent Cost Curve
If you'd write the code yourself, you'd be much more likely to remember to handle those cases as well.
pegasus··on SCM as a database for the code
Some very bright Jetbrains folks were able to solve most of those issues. Check out their MPS IDE [1], its structured/projectional editing experience is in a class of its own.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvCc0DFxG1s

pegasus··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
They must be, I can't imagine they're all on Android. I'm on iOS and didn't know there was an issue with the keyboard. Maybe it's because I've not tried out any competing ones or maybe because I don't type that much on the phone generally.
pegasus··on GLM-5: Targeting complex systems engineering and long-horizon agentic tasks
Interesting, what were the instructions if you don't mind sharing?
pegasus··on Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog – Particle Accel Reveals Original
In case you're wondering why you're being downvoted: the history is much more nuanced. While the Archimedes Palimpsest is a genuine and tragic example of lost text, the broader claim that Christianity engendered a period of scientific erasure is considered outdated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis).

For example, monasteries were the primary centers of literacy and education in Europe during the early middle ages, and they acted as the primary bridge for the survival of Greco-Roman intellectual heritage in the West. Not always intentionally, but they were the only sanctuary for books during those times.

Besides, this is not how history works. Civilizations come and go and times of transition always take a toll. An eye-opening recent book on these questions I can recommend is Tom Holland's "Doninion: The Making of the Modern World".

pegasus··on First Proof
Mathematics is indeed one of those rare fields where intimate knowledge of human nature is not paramount. But even there, I don't expect LLMs to replace top-level researchers. The same evolutionary "baggage" which makes simulating and automating humans away impossible is also what enables (some of) us to have the deep insight into the most abstract regions of maths. In the end it all relies on the same skills developed through millions of years of tuning into the subtleties of 3D geometry, physics, psychology and so on.
pegasus··on First Proof
Sure, but at the risk of running into completely unforeseen and potentially catastrophic misunderstandings. We humans are wired to use human language to interact with other humans, who share our human experience, which AIs can only imperfectly model.
pegasus··on First Proof
They are transient only in those rare domains that can be fully formalized/specified. Like chess. Anything that depends on the messy world of human - world interactions will require humans in the loop for translation and verification purposes.
pegasus··on AI is killing B2B SaaS
But then he went on to spite the pope for no good reason, leading to all that trouble with the church.
pegasus··on OpenAI Frontier
These two are not unrelated. It's just a step further along the same path.
pegasus··on New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
But could they do the same to goat herders with bigger guns, drones, bombs, etc?
pegasus··on Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
Actually, what you're listing above is just another set of beautiful (to you) abstractions. No, "banksters" are not "100% parasitical". The percent is definitely less than 100. But, you know, as they say: the devil is in the details.
pegasus··on Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law
Yet it won't be easy not to anthropomorphize it, expecting it to just know what we mean, as any human would. And most of the time it will, but once in a while it will betray its unthinking nature, taking the user by surprise.
pegasus··on Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law
The same way you test any system - you find a sampling of test subjects, have them interact with the system and then evaluate those interactions. No system is guaranteed to never fail, it's all about degree of effectiveness and resilience.

The thing is (and maybe this is what parent meant by non-determinism, in which case I agree it's a problem), in this brave new technological use-case, the space of possible interactions dwarfs anything machines have dealt with before. And it seems inevitable that the space of possible misunderstandings which can arise during these interactions will balloon similarly. Simply because of the radically different nature of our AI interlocutor, compared to what (actually, who) we're used to interacting with in this world of representation and human life situations.

pegasus··on AGENTS.md outperforms skills in our agent evals
Those of us who've ventured this far into the conversation would appreciate if you'd share your findings with us. Cheers!
pegasus··on Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
Didn't read the whole wall of text/slop, but noticed how the first note (referred from "the intuition I developed of the years of thinking deeply about these problems[0]") is nonsensical in the context. If this is reply is indeed AI-generated, it hilariously self-disproves itself this way. I would congratulate you for the irony, but I have a feeling this is not intentional.
pegasus··on Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
Woe upon us, for we shall all drown in the unstoppable deluge of the Slopocalypse!
pegasus··on Software is mostly all you need
Look into RLVR (Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards). It happens during model post-training.
pegasus··on The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013)
It's not that a random shuffling of songs doesn't sound random enough, it's that certain reasonable requirements besides randomness don't hold. For example, you'd not want hear the same track twice in a row, even though this is bound to happen in a strictly random shuffling.
pegasus··on Proof of Corn
> the humans involved don't want AGI, they want ASI

They are virtually synonymous. After all, a computer already exceeds human capabilities in some areas (for example, numeric computation). If (hypothetically, I don't believe this is possible) they would be able to achieve human-level performance in all other areas, they would already have achieved ASI as well.

pegasus··on Scientists find a way to regrow cartilage in mice and human tissue samples
Hope you see your dream realized. But know that that stillness is achievable through other activities as well. Most directly and deeply, through a meditation practice which is geared towards reaching those deep meditation states (called Jhanas in the Pali canon). My favorite guide on that particular path is Leigh Brasington.
pegasus··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
Sure, but my point is that all that is in the past. The British Empire already fell, and so did all the other European colonial powers. These days, when I think of empire, countries like the US, China or Russia fit the bill much more than the EU, which is struggling to reach that level of integration and influence.
pegasus··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
Are you foretelling the dissolution of the British Empire which happened many decades ago? Are you saying Algeria will soon be free of French colonial rule? Is your middle name Nostradamus?
pegasus··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
They probably didn't list any because estimating the upsides versus the downsides is what it's about, and that's very hard to quantify. Suggesting, like you seem to, that there are no upsides to the German economy whatsoever, is just not a serious argument so doesn't actually deserve a serious answer.
pegasus··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
That sounds an awful lot like the Trump whining about being taking advantage of while bullying countries around the world to do his bidding.
pegasus··on De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
Sure the contexts are different, and you can also look at the federalization of German states as yet another example with a different context, but not all of the factors are unfavorable. For example, the countries of the EU are already more integrated than the colonies were. Plus it's a very different time now, we've had the UN for a long time already, etc.

Also, I was surprised to learn how heterogenous the different regions of the US were from the very beginning, in origin, character and motivations. The Puritans, Quakers, Cavaliers, French nobles and traders etc.

This video explains why it's very likely to happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yHJehbWiNo

pegasus··on De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
I was referring to the possibility of the EU becoming a federal union which acts like a country. Yes, like the US and Germany, but unlike China and of South Africa I don't know enough to say.
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