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slwvxon Kahneman: Theory Induced Blindness

Daniel Kahneman: "I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. If you come upon an observation that does not seem to fit the model, you assume that there must be a perfectly good explanation that you are somehow missing. You give the theory the benefit of the doubt, trusting the community of experts who have accepted it."

mb related to choice supportive bias

slwvxon Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

  I don't think the out loud or someone listening / reacting matters at all here. Suspect it's entirely this:

  >The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure.

I often construct full sentences in my head. And have conversations with my mental model of some other person. In full sentences

slwvxon Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

I wonder if there's a difference between people who have a strong inner voice and those with no inner voice (Anendophasia). I.e. do people w Anendophasia do better on their own than those with a strong inner voice?

slwvxon Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves NP-Complete Problems

Are you sure you're looking at the right paper? I don't find the sentence you mention in the paper.

slwvxon Making espresso with ultrasound

I grow my own beans and harvest rain water from my roof to use in my coffee ritual and ... am happy to let others do their own thing

slwvxon The history of butterfly swimming

> to that end, i'm not sure why it exists, except that it's truly a unique style.

Many people swim as a form of exercise. Fly is exercising different muscles and allows me to get my heart rate up higher than freestyle

Fly is useful to train for other strokes

Perhaps more importantly, I think that having a different stroke to do makes swimming more interesting. Whether doing sets as part of a swim team or on your own, it's more interesting when you can vary things. The more swimming is interesting, the easier it is to enjoy and keep doing it

slwvxon Apple Made a Sports App That Does Almost Nothing. It's Incredible

give Apple some time; they'll add ads and otherwise enshitify the app

slwvxon A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center

To be explicit, if one separates ownership rights and development rights, and gives the development easement to a conservation trust/foundation that has a mandate to never sell them, I guess things will go better. There are land conservation trusts all over the US and if there isn't one you can create one.

To be clear, I guess that a city who had ownership rights but not development rights could be stupid and ignore a conservation easement, but I guess that is not likely.

slwvxon Show HN: Ironwall, a safety-first native programming language and compiler

Is there a story behind the hash-like Github username [1], email address [2], and HN usernames [3]?

[1] https://github.com/3WyUFvDOdCbBw7gOZHwcfgKF

[2] IZ1zPtHyDX5b3s7iLYS2zRoz5 @ proton.me

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bOZbfU4YdRnJQ

slwvxon A Man Who Reads Books for a Living (One Every Two Days)

Sounds like a "dickover", a term coined by John Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

slwvxon Pluto.jl 1.0 release – reactive notebook for Julia

I would love Pluto but am completely put off by the output of a command being shown above the command that creates it. Sure, maybe the whole notebook is reactive, and I shouldn't care, but I still see Pluto as producing something close to a document or web page, which I want to read from top to bottom, and can't do with Pluto. This single feature/problem has kept me away from Pluto

slwvxon A Gentle Introduction to Lattice-Based Cryptography [pdf]

> Seems to me that these lattices and error-correcting codes are very close to each other...

mb see https://www.amazon.com/Lattice-Coding-Signals-Networks-Quant...

slwvxon SICP Video Lectures (1986)

> ...the constraints imposed in building large software systems are the limitations of our own minds.

There are always constraints and limitations, including those to build and provide energy for software, and also the societal impacts. I guess the designer of Bitcoin and of current AI datacenters ignored constraints in the way described in the quote and the world is now paying the price in higher carbon emissions and energy prices

slwvxon Snuffleupagus, a newly described species, is an adorable little predator

Quoting the article:

  Milton Love, a marine biologist at the University of California’s Marine Science Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., says the fish's muppet-like appearance demonstrates "the awesome power of natural selection."  ...    "Or, and here is another hypothesis, Gaia created this fish after having one too many of those rum drinks that come with those little umbrellas."

Nice :-)

slwvxon Why Trump Lost to Iran

https://archive.ph/GO28d

slwvxon 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

> those who do have capital and earn their income from labor...

I meant "those who do NOT have capital ...

slwvxon 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

"The Great Tax Wars" by Steven R. Weisman is about the debate about taxes during the progressive era. On p 123 [1] we read

  “Since 1860, federal taxation had increased sixfold, yet the tax burden was primarily borne by the poor. At the same time, corporate profits had increased tenfold, much of it untaxed. It cost rich Americans 8 to 10 percent of their earnings to finance the government, while the poor paid taxes equivalent to 75 to 80 percent of their savings.”

Sounds very much like today: those with capital (like me) are benefiting from a low tax rate, while those who do have capital and earn their income from labor pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes. I definitely see the debates of the progressive era as being about capital.

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Great_Tax_Wars/kw-Q...

slwvxon 'Capitalism has to become more humane': a Stanford economist on big tech

I think social democracy is, by its nature, trying to be a humane system while allowing a form of capitalism. The Nordics may not be a perfect example of social democracy, but a useful one. Looking closer to home, the progressive era in the US was all about making society more humane while still allowing capitalism. In the sense of capitalism of these examples, I definitely think it can be humane.

For a more recent example, listen to this podcast episode: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/vanguard

slwvxon Utah data center is causing a ruckus [video]

The SL Tribune has three videos on this

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATUxfN_lEVo

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpgPXkdEvs

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYLWq3pWMzk

slwvxon Casimir force co-opted to generate free energy, midichlorians not included

Unlock the vacuum: https://xkcd.com/1486/

HT https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/casimir-force-co-opt...

slwvxon Making the news available at no cost is a victory

The Salt Lake Tribune seems pretty centrist to me, but in Utah it is considered left-leaning.

slwvxon Making the news available at no cost is a victory

> Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.

The Tribune will still have advertising.

slwvxon Making the news available at no cost is a victory

> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?

The Salt Lake Tribune (as in the article above) CAN afford salaries.

> If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?

People ARE paying. I'm a subscriber to the Tribune and a donor.

slwvxon A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at Zspec = 14.44 Confirmed with JWST

The last sentences of the abstract:

> ... The nitrogen emission and highly super-solar [N/C]>1 hint at an abundance pattern similar to local globular clusters that may have once hosted luminous supermassive stars. Since this abundance pattern is also common among the most ancient stars born in the Milky Way, we may be directly witnessing the formation of such stars in dense clusters, connecting galaxy evolution across the entire sweep of cosmic time.

slwvxon The Brazil Nut Effect

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_convection

slwvxon Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria

I think that birth rates also drop when girls and women are educated. I would like to see such education AND lotsa child support programs and credits. I.e. I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world

slwvxon Ads on Apple Maps

I don't like my hardware and OS provider turning me into a product to be sold