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xelxebar

3,028 karma · joined December 2, 2015

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    Email local-part: boexahgahk
    Email domain: wilsonb.com
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xelxebar··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
80年代SF傑作選.

Recently, I remembered a short SF story that I read back in high school and tracked it down, "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers".

I find new wave SF to be really playful and enjoyable to read, not to mention that the experimentation with funky themes and formatting adds a lot of novelty. The above Japanese title is a nice collection of late era stories in this genre.

xelxebar··on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years
Happy path coding is certainly the most fun.
xelxebar··on We are unconsciously becoming someone else
Authenticity as a notion is a robust Western cultural more that I find confusing. The best parse I can get on it is this: developing an awareness and possibly a narrative around ways you behave with a subconscious expectation of social affirmation. Developing that awareness can certainly feel like a liberation of self-determination.

That can, also, undoubtedly be a powerful tool in overcoming cultural brainwashing of sorts, but I think the knife cuts both ways. The "authentic self" term makes it sound ontologically real and suggests that there is merit in searching for "finding oneself" when no ther motivating need exists. That road leads to pathological definition writing, IMHO.

xelxebar··on The Hugging Face Hack Wasn't What It Was Cracked Up to Be
grok make good security? is lot of money and much time. grok not do? easy. maybe good PR too.

TIL my brain is an Olympic gymnast.

The incentive structures are clearly there. I think the case of intentional manufacture is definitely weaker, requiring the conjunction of more weakly-supported events.

xelxebar··on English: A vs. An
The one that gets me is when people use "a" with initialisms, e.g. "She drives a RV," just sounds off to me. she can do her thing but I drive an RV.

That said, I think the former might be more common these days, so arguably the rules might just differ between written an spoken English in some dialects.

xelxebar··on Dramatic insider warnings over AI fall flat with some in Silicon Valley
Thank you for the epistemic humility here. It's a breath of fresh air amongst the polarized declarations we seem to have upregulated amongst ourselves for whatever reason these days.
xelxebar··on Tree Calculus
Surprisingly, there are combinatorial systems with just a single combinator[0]. Also, NAND along with a single axiom[0] can reproduce all of propositional calculus. By Curry-Howard-Labek, these are related facts and suggest that a universal tree likely exists in the tree calculus.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_and_Jot

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicod's_axiom

xelxebar··on The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
Shame is a feeling, "decent person" is a moral characterization. The former might be part of an insentive structure leading to the latter.
xelxebar··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
Thanks for the Niven reference. Neutron Star was a fun read. I'm currently working through a collection of 80s SF shorts[0]. It's an entertaining lens into the narratives mores of the time, and or own in contrast.

[0]:https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB07948947

xelxebar··on I resigned from Anthropic today
Heavier-than-air aircraft, yes. It is instructive to read actual contemporary arguments. Flighted birds seem to be limited in size well below human loading capacity; Helmholtz power-to-weight ratio calculations suggest that vultures are at about the size limit; birds are all muscle with very little relative carrying capacity; bird reflexes vastly outpace the reaction times available to a human operator; etc.

Please show us actual evidence from 1900 or earlier that human flight will be practical or even possible.

Birds are neither real evidence nor real at all[1].

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren't_Real

xelxebar··on I resigned from Anthropic today
Your call for clarity has merit, but I think you have backed yourself into a corner, honestly.

In 1900, there was no evidence of the kind you seek that lighter-than-air flight was possible. Good thing some people were foolish enough to ignore you then. Why you would cordon yourself off from the kind of reasoning that predicts legitimately new things, rather than just scaled up versions of the present?

Not to put too fine a point on it, every example you give is based in concrete evidence, some try to think through the implications farther than others, resulting in larger or smaller error bars around the conclusions.

Let me back up though. Maybe in the collaborative human effort here, we are better off having very concrete thinkers, like you seem to be, along with abstract thinkers like the "divorced-from-reality" Rationalists. Personally, I wish we had a stronger culture of collaboration and assuming good-faith and competence in our peers. In my experience, blanket dismissals are very rarely grounded in reality and mostly grounded in fears.

xelxebar··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
There is also a large incentive for OpenAI to fold user conversations into the training process. Proving this happened is unduly hard, and given that professionals are using frontier LLMs for daily work, such training would make it easier for labs to scoop said professionals.

I have seen private correspondence between one mathematician working on Navier-Stokes and OpenAI that makes it sound like OpenAI deliberately scooped this Navier-Stokes result. The alleged correspondence also contained veiled threats if said mathematician went public.

xelxebar··on The Overton Window of Food
What about oats and an assortment of nuts? These go pretty well with cold milk or hot water alike, and you can flavor any which way if desired. Or are oats in the US also "fortified" with sugar?
xelxebar··on True Rate of Unemployment
From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be. IMHO, this should be read as a campaign to improve and add precision to a political narrative more than an indictment of existing statistics.

In particular, the BLS in the US reports 6 different measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, each measuring something slightly different. LISEP adds another to the bunch; this is their operationalization:

> LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in January 2020 dollars.

The white paper gives their rationale for the $20,000 cutoff. The "true" name here is marketing, which might honestly be the right play here. My gut says that we already have better statistics than TRU but they smell dry and academic. I would be interested to hear more about their political strategy and philosophy.

FWIW, the institute looks to be chaired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Ludwig.

xelxebar··on Bhartrhari's Paradox
It's because most real numbers are uncomputable. That means, most of the time, the only way to check that two numbers (i.e. names) are the same is to spend infinite time looking at all their infinite digits.

An unknowable name isn't a very good name, IMHO.

xelxebar··on Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS
This is interesting. You're gesturing at the idea that individual security practices can be at odds with those needed for group security. I'll be pondering on this.
xelxebar··on Two German airport workers die of malaria after 'mosquito arrives on plane'
> 2. Risk is convex, so every risk increase by measures not taken is multiplicative, not additive.

Wait. Is this true? f(x) = x^2 is convex but f(x+d) = f(x) + O(x). Are you saying that human risk assessment is estimated to be exponential?

xelxebar··on Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
I believe you completely miss the point.

The interesting observation is this: when we judge something to have subjective experience, we are invoking moral intuitions. There is no objective measure we can perform (yet?), and it's not even clear whether such a measure makes sense. You may disagree, but this is still a central debate in serious discussion on "hard" consciousness.

I would say that your entire argument just begs the question by implicitly assuming consciousness to have real, independent existence. Does elan vital (the substance that provides the motive force of life) have mass? You're saying that this is a theorem; the article questions the entire premise.

> The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia.

Bizzare. "If it rains, the car will get wet." Is this a statement, as you say, about rain? Descarte tries to prove the existence of his God and states an axiom. The atecedent "I think" seems to be about thinking, whatever that may mean, and "I am" makes an existential claim based on subjective experience... or something. Who knows why Descarte believed cogito ergo sum to be solid starting ground.

IMHO, your rebuttal here reads as little more than a complaint that something disagrees with your personal assumptions about the world.

You clearly got me riled up just as much as you did against OP, so thanks for the elan vital!

xelxebar··on A Man Who Saw Humanity from Two Billion Years Away
There is also a brilliant and ponderous film adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqDBlBKlbDA. It is one of my favorites in the "sublime" genre.
xelxebar··on Queryable Executables
And those trees are usually represented as tables via an array of structs or similar. IMHO, the architecture of memory and memory access should push us more towards tables as a default data structure than trees.
xelxebar··on Queryable Executables
As long as there are no self loops, then you can represent a graph with a set of spanning trees that cover the edges. This is particularly efficient when using a depth or parent vector tree representation and is seen in HPC applications.
xelxebar··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
Goodhart's Law. We want to incentivize right intent in addition to right action. This has nothing to do with degree of perfection and plays a part in why mental state factors significantly into culpability assessment in the law. We want to avoid inadvertently incentivizing reward hacking behavior, especially when the individual rewards are high, overall transparency is low, and the consequences far-reaching.
xelxebar··on Three important steps in my maturation process
What cultural values does this wisdom and advice implicitly engender? That question bothers me a lot.

For some reason it strikes me that we don't think of a potato plant as needing life lessons. I doubt anyone here has moral compunctions about leaf structure or starch formation. People seem much the same way to me. Another part of me does instinctively model the inner world of people as small deviations from my own. Other parts of me think that is quaint.

It appears to me that the sense of clairty imparted by wisdom often looks like mere rigidity when seen from the outside. I have little doubt that your particular wisdom has been hard-earned, and at the same time, I think it is hopelessly myopic. The thing that gets me is that this also almost surely applies to my own wisdom, which is why I distrust them implicitly.

I think the world is so vast and our exposure so limited such that any Life Wisdom is hopelessly doomed to be a horrible overfit on the particulars of an individual.

Keep growing your idiosyncratic leaves though. I also genuinely think they're beautiful.

xelxebar··on A spectre is haunting Unicode
Xu Bing has a book that consists entirely of invented characters:

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

xelxebar··on AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
Pretend for a second that you're in a position of trying to run a successful business. Congrats, you're a c-suite executive now. Of course, you are free to define "successful" by whatever criteria you want, but not going bankrupt probably needs to be downstream of them.

Notice that whatever your goals are, they don't automatically serve the interests and per concerns of all your employees. Are you now delusional, evil, ruled by greed?

Running a smooth operation mostly just makes for really boring news. You should perhaps factor in survivorship bias of narratives into your views of the world.

xelxebar··on GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2
Hurd specifically includes a userspace. Its kernel is Mach.
xelxebar··on Why is it all in the kernel?
Intriguingly, Metamath handles recursive definitions by factoring out the recursion into a single higher-order function:

https://us.metamath.org/mpeuni/df-rdg.html

Essentially, it's just doing a lazy fixpoint a la Haskell's fix function. The definition is a little more general, though, to make it work for both transfinite and well-founded recursions as well.

This chashed out nicely in a sequence builder:

https://us.metamath.org/mpeuni/df-seq.html

which specializes to "normal" recursion.

xelxebar··on That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
> I can remember some obscure AIX partitioning-related fact

Now you have my attention. I'd love to read about some of these trivia.

xelxebar··on 9front "This Was Supposed to Be Fun" Released
I daily drive 9front.

The historical emergence answers here are fine as far as they go, but they're a bit like saying that Linux is an OS developed by Linus to help him learn x86.

IMO 9front is an exposé of what an OS can look like when it's written for and by hackers with a focus on simplicity. The YouTube channel adventuresin9[0] parades some nice examples of what real world usage looks like.

For example, since everything is just a file, you tunnel traffic with a simple bind mount. Since everything is just text, small regexes suffice to route mouse clicks to UI actions. Since windows are just buffers, grepping history is grepping the window's text buffer; taking a screenshot is just cp-ing the window's draw buffer.

Oh, and 9front C diverges from the standard intentionally in some nice ways: evaluation of function args is sequenced, anonymous unions like

    struct {
      int a;
      union {
        uint i;
        int j;
      };
    }
do what you want, the libc is a lot leaner and cleaner, etc.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA

xelxebar··on Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576
Ease of implementation means we get more, independent verifiers rather than trusting any particular one.
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