Hacker News: 613style

New comment by 613style in "The most famous transcendental numbers"

613style — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 21:00:58 +0000

They're saying you can't find a ruler accurate enough to be sure the number you measure is sqrt(2) and not sqrt(2) for the first 1000 digits then something else. And eventually, as you build better and better rulers, it will turn out that physical reality doesn't encode enough information to be sure. Anything you can measure is rational.

New comment by 613style in "Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)"

613style — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 16:22:10 +0000

Non-physicst here. Hopefully someone can correct me or elaborate. My understanding is that what's being described is smaller scale decoherence inside the proton. Normally, the universe only asks protons the question: "are you a proton?" and it's like "Yep I'm a proton." (What's your baryon number? What's your charge? etc)

When we blast it with higher and higher energies, we're asking new questions: "What are the momenta of your quarks? What's your color field arrangement?" There are many possible answers to those questions and we're now starting to see the landscape of them.

So having different answers based on how you look is really answering different questions, just like asking an electron: What's your momentum? What's your location?

New comment by 613style in "Our new SAM audio model transforms audio editing"

613style — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 05:26:22 +0000

He's not making it up and there's no reason for that tone. Strings are more straightforward to isolate compared to vocals/horns/etc because they produce a near-perfect harmonic series in parallel lines in a spectrogram. The time/frequency tradeoff exists, but it's less of a problem for strings because of their slow attack.

You can look up HPSS and python libraries like Essentia and Librosa.

New comment by 613style in "Microsoft Favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code"

613style — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:04:54 +0000

Agreed. My experience is GPT5 is significantly better at large-scale planning & architecture (at least for the kind of stuff I care about which is strongly typed functional systems), and then Sonnet is much better at executing the plan. GPT5 is also better at code reviews and finding subtle mistakes if you prompt it well enough, but not totally reliable. Claude Code fills its context window and re-compacts often enough that I have to plan around it, so I'm surprised it's larger than GPT's.

New comment by 613style in "What does it mean to be thirsty?"

613style — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 05:11:58 +0000

Why are you monitoring your colleagues’ water intake?

New comment by 613style in "Open models by OpenAI"

613style — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 23:26:32 +0000

These models still have guardrails. Even locally they won't tell you how to make bombs or write pornographic short stories.

New comment by 613style in "Quantum mechanics provide truly random numbers on demand"

613style — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:32:20 +0000

Bell's Theorem (1964) describes an inequality that should hold if quantum mechanics' randomness can be explained by certain types of hidden variables. In the time since, we've repeatedly observed that inequality violated in labs, leading most to presume that the normal types of hidden variables you would intuit don't exist. There are some esoteric loopholes that remain possibilities, but for now the position that matches our data the best is that there are not hidden variables and quantum mechanics is fundamentally probabilistic.

New comment by 613style in "Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests"

613style — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:54:54 +0000

I believe that those who justify cruelty with rhetoric and spread hate will one day look into the mirror and be horrified at what they see.

New comment by 613style in "How Does Claude 4 Think? – Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken"

613style — Mon, 26 May 2025 18:29:02 +0000

The sharpest cries of, "that's not thinking!" always seem to have an air of desperation about them. It's as if I'm special, and I think, and maybe thinking is what makes me special, so if LLMs think then I'm less special.

At some point the cry will change to, "It only looks like thinking from the outside!" And some time after that: "It only looks conscious from the outside..."

New comment by 613style in "The average college student today"

613style — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 04:18:47 +0000

> Part of this problem is also because courses have (in my experience) rarely rewarded actual knowledge or understanding

It doesn't matter. There is literally no assignment you can give students that they won't cheat on. In an intro college astronomy class, "Look at these pictures of planets, what do think is interesting about them?" or "Walk around your house and look at the different types of light bulbs, what kinds do you have?" Both of these will include 20% ChatGPT responses.

New comment by 613style in "The Webb Telescope further deepens the Hubble tension controversy in cosmology"

613style — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 15:26:26 +0000

megaparsec (1 million parsecs)

New comment by 613style in "Tritone Substitutions"

613style — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 16:22:35 +0000

This is exactly what I got wrong when I started learning jazz piano as an adult. My wife is a lifelong musician and I got to the annoying point where I'd be playing and she'd walk by and go "that third chord sounds wrong." I'd ask why and she'd be unable to elaborate until she sat down and played the better version intuitively. Then she'd retroactively analyze what she did to explain it to me. I understood the theory, she understood the sounds. It was always humbling and helped me understand that intellectualizing comes second.

New comment by 613style in "Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain"

613style — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 22:43:19 +0000

Yet it remains true that not having magic evil talismans in my house makes it very unlikely that my family or I get cursed by accident.

New comment by 613style in "The Diamond Sutra, the oldest dated printed book (2016)"

613style — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 13:39:59 +0000

I didn't say and don't believe those things.

New comment by 613style in "The Diamond Sutra, the oldest dated printed book (2016)"

613style — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 23:03:10 +0000

> changing how you in particular perceive the world does not actually change the world that you are a part of

It's impossible to change yourself without changing the world, because those two things are not separate.

Further, much of the world exists only as abstract ideas in my mind. When I change how I relate to and perceive them, I do change them in every way that matters.

New comment by 613style in "Try Clojure"

613style — Wed, 22 May 2024 19:26:02 +0000

What is this "statement" you speak of?

(if (= 2 2) :OK :nope)

New comment by 613style in "Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds [video]"

613style — Sun, 12 May 2024 23:19:46 +0000

> otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have so much done inside such a small volume, with such small amounts of energy

That's interesting. Could you share your source?

New comment by 613style in "Brain Uses Quantum Effects, New Study Finds [video]"

613style — Sun, 12 May 2024 19:33:13 +0000

This feels a lot like a standard line of muddy thinking we see in youtube videos about consciousness (for example): "we don't understand brains, and we don't understand quantum mechanics, so they're probably related."

It's easy to speculate, but it's not easy to find any evidence at all to back up those guesses. It's still not clear that this has anything to do with consciousness or information processing or AWS datacenters.

New comment by 613style in "A Rosetta Stone for Mathematics: André Weil's 1940 letter"

613style — Tue, 07 May 2024 21:20:16 +0000

Like all writing, proofs have a target audience. If you don't know what a Galois group or a modular form is, it's not the author's job to teach you.

Formal verification is getting more mainstream, but it's not there yet.

New comment by 613style in "Roblox players to start seeing video ads in its virtual realms"

613style — Wed, 01 May 2024 22:28:03 +0000

> That's a pretty extreme interpretation. Anyone who downloads the IDE can create and publish a game. If kids are using the tool, making fun games, and sharing them with other people, than I think that's a good thing.

It sounds like you might be lacking some context on this. Here's an article with more details: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/09/the-trouble-wi...