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sowbug

7,477 karma · joined March 9, 2009

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sowbug··on Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin
I was recently reading about a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, where a person suffering from mental decline such as Alzheimer's spontaneously improves, recognizing loved ones, retrieving memories, and being able to carry on conversations. It's called "terminal" because the person usually dies within hours or days.

If this is a real phenomenon, then it's amazing to think that at least some of the people who suffer from Alzheimer's still have their memories inside their minds, as opposed to the disease erasing the memories from existence, which means that an effective treatment might recover their identities.

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

sowbug··on Successful Psilocybin Treatment of Alzheimer
It might be coincidence. Hiatal hernia affects more than 50% of the population over age 50, though not everyone shows symptoms.
sowbug··on Firewood Splitting Simulator
Then you're really going to love this.

The proper term is a shortened form of "hear him, hear him," which was necessary because British Parliament didn't allow clapping or cheering. Instead, if you wanted to show agreement with a speaker's point, you'd shout out that everyone else should "hear" him.

Not to be confused with "hear ye," which evolved from the French "oyez," which is the imperative form of "to listen," which was shouted at a crowd before an important announcement.

sowbug··on How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?
The article mentions the "registration" process. Those multicolored gunsight-like symbols you sometimes see on the edges of printed things are called registration marks. They help the operator quickly judge whether the plates are aligned. Slightly different from the pins and stops the article mentions; those are to align the screens, while the marks are to see whether the result is aligned.

This is all familiar to people above a certain age. Younger folks who grew up without Sunday color comics might still be able to find a slightly blurry plus sign on the bottom of a paper milk carton.

sowbug··on GLM 5.2 Is Out
I would so download a car.
sowbug··on US-Canada border library gets new Quebec-only entrance
Related: episode 653 of 99% Invisible mentions Peace Arch Park, which is along the US-Canada border in Blaine, Washington, and Surrey, British Columbia. Anyone from either country can enter the park and mingle with people from the other country. There's supposedly strong incentive, because of a treaty from the War of 1812, for both countries to keep their side of the park open:

If Canada broke the treaty, in theory, the U.S. could lay claim to parts of Ontario and Quebec. And if America broke it, Canada could get parts of Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin. So, basically, North American geography as we know it is contingent on this early 1800s treaty remaining in effect.

The podcast was from December -- an eternity ago in these interesting times -- and I don't know whether anything has changed since then.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/653-beyond-the-99-inv...

sowbug··on US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%
The person you're replying to erroneously interpreted "stay even" as "avoid going into debt," instead of your income's purchasing power remaining constant.
sowbug··on An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight
That's the usual car stereo theft economics: cause $1,000 of damage to sell a $100 radio for $10.
sowbug··on Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?
I'm certain I've read this comment before.
sowbug··on Gemma 4 QAT models: Optimizing compression for mobile and laptop efficiency
Whatever you're doing, try doing 500 or 1,000 of it in a batch. You'll exhaust any subscription quota you have, or if you're paying per token, you will probably find it too expensive. That's when you'll start to ask "how smart a model do I really need for this job?", and you'll investigate running a small but sufficiently capable model on your own PC, churning overnight through your 1,000 tasks.
sowbug··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
One concrete and one abstract.

Concrete: Last year I was DIYing a solar-power system for my home. I spent about an hour spitting out a Python tool that took (as inputs) drone photos and JSON and generated several proposed roof layouts for the panels and conduit. The tool helped me identify the exact railing attachment points and route around existing roof obstructions. Professionals already have these tools, and maybe they're available to DIYers, but you know what? It was faster to build my own than to do the product research on the web.

Abstract: This "oh shit" was more of a slow burn than a sudden realization. I see a lot of angst from developers who complain about their LLM agents. Agents write terrible code that barely works. They say things are done when they aren't. They misinterpret feature requests and ignore clear-cut project rules. They make assumptions that would have taken three seconds to research and invalidate. They suddenly quit because we're not paying them enough. And so on.

But you know what? All those complaints apply to humans, too! The industry has been dealing with these problems forever. Many of the same management techniques and software-development processes apply. This is why I discount a certain class of criticism about AI-generated code. If a fault of an LLM applies equally well to human engineers, and the person voicing the criticism hasn't managed a team, then I'd invite that person to wear a management hat for a while. Read some books/blogs, talk to an EM. Maybe this is a skill issue, which matters because we're all managers now.

The "oh shit" for me is that I have yet to hear a criticism that I can't map to one or more actual engineers I've worked with -- eventually successfully -- in my career. Which means that I'm still waiting for a new criticism, and eventually absence of evidence might be evidence of absence. LLMs fit too well into the giant machine of commercial software development for them to be a parlor trick.

sowbug··on Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other
There are at least eight top-level comments here saying that Claude reads documentation, but humans don't.
sowbug··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Careful there! You almost sound like you're suggesting a prayer.
sowbug··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Everyone but me might be a philosophical zombie. But I still treat them with respect. I do this because I like living in a world that gives us the benefit of that doubt.

It can't hurt to say "please" and "thank you" to an LLM.

sowbug··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
Doesn't 91.3(a) already give the PIC absolute authority to act regardless of whether there's a threat? Why invoke the FBI?

> Turning the plane around and landing is certainly in the realm of "reasonable".

Agreed. But doing it without the FBI threat would also be in the realm of reasonable. Which, it could be argued, means that making the FBI threat was unreasonable, or at least very close to it.

Beyond a certain point, even a PIC can cry wolf.

sowbug··on SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
After today's update, I'm able to build roads. Thank you.
sowbug··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
I agree that technical lock-in wouldn't cause the consolidation. Instead, if it happened, it would be because of the network effects of the two-sided platform.

People could email cat photos and resumes. But Facebook and LinkedIn are where everyone already is, so that's what they use instead.

sowbug··on Having your insulin pump die while you're on vacation
Retired manager, been in my share of tense meetings.

I appreciate it when someone recognizes that they're struggling with conflict and emotion, and lets me know that they know this. It's better to acknowledge the emotion and put it on the table as its own valid topic of discussion, than to tiptoe around it or try the "I'm sensing that you're dealing with some internal conflict" approach that risks embarrassing them or worsening it.

The choice is whether to acknowledge the emotion, not whether to have it.

sowbug··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
If you believe there will be lots of LLM providers in the future, then OpenRouter could be a DoorDash play.

Established restaurants didn't need DoorDash because they were already on everyone's speed dial. But new or small restaurants couldn't afford to advertise or maintain a team of delivery people. DoorDash created a two-sided marketplace that made it a lot easier for new entrants to bootstrap. Today even the established restaurants have to pay them their tithe because hungry people have learned to start with the DoorDash app. A bit of a prisoner's dilemma.

If OpenRouter plays its cards right and gets very lucky, a large number of people will configure their hungry LLM clients to start with OpenRouter, and then LLM providers will have to join the marketplace or else miss out on all those customers.

sowbug··on Jef Raskin, the Visionary Behind the Mac (2013)
It might have been an emailed list of questions, rather than a real-time conversation.
sowbug··on The Last Technical Interview
That sounds like a corollary of the Diamond Paradox. If there's any cost at all to price-shopping, then once you're at one store that sells the thing you want, it's usually not worth continuing to shop around.

Tangent: people do a lot of stressing out lately about which LLM they should be using for a certain task. I bet this advice applies there, too.

sowbug··on Accenture to acquire Ookla
thefacebook.com was developed in a few days, too. The value was never in the code.
sowbug··on What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks
All my childhood Apple II 5 1/4" floppies have been mirrored, so I can visit those files in an emulator any time I want. But I'll miss the crazy amount of control the system had over the physical disk drive. Nibble counting, half tracks, quarter tracks, spiral tracks, tracks 35+, weak bits... it was like an adventure game built directly into the machine.
sowbug··on The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
Not exactly the same thing, but a few years ago the law changed to require a sesame-allergen notice on foods that had sesame. Some manufacturers starting adding sesame to foods that didn't need it, because they concluded that including the notice was easier than guaranteeing that their product was sesame-free. The intent of the law was to protect people with sesame allergies, but the result was fewer choices for them.

Sometimes laws have unintended consequences.

https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...

sowbug··on It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12
Some conformal coatings, which protect PCBs from dust and moisture, can emit ethyl acetate or butyl acetate if they weren't fully cured. The smell is sweet but absolutely revolting.
sowbug··on Separate the Cord from the Device
Some of that is because they want a single factory assembly line to produce one device that works in many locales. They build the rice cooker with the universal socket, then ship the right kind of cord when they package the product for a specific locale.
sowbug··on The most unlikely school bag
Recent discussion on topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777209
sowbug··on I analysed 20 years of my chats
Might depend on how old you are. If you're in your 20s or 30s, you probably still remember the silliest details like a childhood friend's middle name. But after that, bright memories start to fade, and trust me, it only gets worse. That's when you realize that having a little bit of memory scaffolding like old email, chats, and calendar is helpful for once-easy questions like "where did we go camping that one time when I was 28 or 29?"
sowbug··on SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
On Steam Deck, I am having a rough time with the road that the paperclip wants me to place. Holding down the physical A button (of the ABXY group) and wiggling around the left joystick (as well as every other control I can think of), both pressed and not pressed. Sometimes I'll see the green highlight appear, and I can stretch it out into a road path, but when I release A, it just vanishes.
sowbug··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
I'll wager a hypersled of my Twix against your next three rations of gruel. But I think I'm done betting after this one.
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