Hacker News: DiscourseFan

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Reviews have become expensive, rewrites have become cheap"

DiscourseFan — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 03:11:43 +0000

I don't think that there is anything wrong with having stylistic depth in any wriitng

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Foreign business owners are scrambling to raise capital to stay in Japan"

DiscourseFan — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:06:08 +0000

It will become increasingly difficult to police international borders. On the other hand, commercial space travel will create new states that can police there borders. The borders don’t disappear but they will change

New comment by DiscourseFan in "YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter in COBOL"

DiscourseFan — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:36:25 +0000

>As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be.

This feels a lot like how LLMs are today. Like in 50 years we will have a far more extensive and rigorous notion of their capabilities and mechanical functions, and someone looking back at our ChatGPT Codex or Claude Fable will think of it not so differently as we think about COBOL today.

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Why Gentoo?"

DiscourseFan — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:08:24 +0000

Well that’s a personal preference, but objectively (and I use that word very loosely here), apple sillicon is equivalent to portage in terms of efficiency, since the software is fully integrated with the machine, to extract as much compute as possible out of it. The problem is that this can’t be configured for every operation on the machine. You can install other people’s software, and the machine has one universal preset basically that governs all the alternative customizations, so other people’s software is not as efficient as it could be if you optimized for it directly, like you can do with Gentoo. But if you just installed a random linux distro without customizing it, it would not even be necessarily well integrated with the hardware, in fact it could not be, since Linux is by its nature reaching towards a universal that no particular machine could possible land totally within. And its true with Gentoo as well, except you can squeeze out far more edges, and arguably go further than apple silicon. But an apple silicon machine will always be more efficient in its preset condition than one running Gentoo in its active use: the problem is that you can’t even know the computer is working unless you start using it, and then all the sudden Gentoo is possibly infinitely more efficient in every actual use case.

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Why Gentoo?"

DiscourseFan — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:59:52 +0000

Yes well as another commenter noted, this is actually freely available software, and when people provide goods and services for free it depresses the price of said goods and services. And anyway this was a comment about Apple in general, how every fix costs at least $20. Airpods not synced up? Just buy a new pair! Etc.

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Why Gentoo?"

DiscourseFan — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:12:27 +0000

Yeah, but if I’m not customizing it, Linux is just worse in every way. If you are going to do that why not just buy a Mac?

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Why Gentoo?"

DiscourseFan — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:10:50 +0000

Why am I paying $20 for an audio mixer?

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Why Gentoo?"

DiscourseFan — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:10:02 +0000

>account created 10 hours ago

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Why Gentoo?"

DiscourseFan — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:07:58 +0000

I have not had the, ahem, privelege yet of installing Gentoo. I gave up on Linux a while back after I bricked my computer because I missed an update on Arch Linux (no joke). Got a macbook and I’ve been happy ever since…well, at least until I was trying to shareplay Mulholland Drive with my girlfriend while she’s out of town and discovered that the only way to manually adjust audio levels of facetime vs, say, the movie we were trying to watch, which was nearly muted because of the call, was to purchase and install a $20 piece of software. Now, I could go ahead and buy a windows machine which comes preloaded with this feature, but let’s be honest, windows sucks major ass and there is virtually no advantage these days to using it over Linux or a Mac. The software might be a little screwed up but Tim Cook really made some magical consumer grade hardware that outperforms virtually all its possible competitors…still, the audio levels.

I don’t have time to futz around installing Linux distros instead of getting laid like I did as a teenager. I have a job and a girlfriend and more than enough of a social life to keep me busy day to day. But something keeps nipping at my heels, telling me to return to the pen—-the sun is setting on my long sojourn in the warm fields of average life, the long night of idle tinkering approaches once more, that I might sooner forget the morning before it ends.

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Google I/O"

DiscourseFan — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:30:47 +0000

Yeah well my dad works ar Nintendo where they have AI that will blow you while doing your taxes

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Google I/O"

DiscourseFan — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:29:38 +0000

Generative Machine Answering Inbox Lovingly

New comment by DiscourseFan in "I’ve joined Anthropic"

DiscourseFan — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:57:58 +0000

No, these are developed off of the assumed uses of the models (predictive autofiller) rather than their actual, cognitive and potential industrial use (developing large scale frameworks for industrial production, automating systems that normally require human monitoring), and uses that we have not yet discovered, because we have not figured out all the constraints and limitations of these models. If Karpathy was in the game like he used to be, he would be on real product. Right now he’s probably so lost by the very thing he helped create that he is stuck doing these mini projects for his own personal interest, without anyone really critically engaging with his work.

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Mitchellh – I strongly believe there are entire companies now under AI psychosis"

DiscourseFan — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:18:24 +0000

They are being developed, but it takes over a decade for this to happen normally

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Foucault's Order of Things Explained with Trading Cards [video]"

DiscourseFan — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:37:53 +0000

Foucault is a very subtle thinker. His second dissertation was a translation of Kant’s anthropology, with a very long and thorough introduction[0]. It is quite important to the rest of his thought. Remember his advisor was Jean Hyppolite, France’s leading scholar of Hegel at the time, so it is kind of interesting that Foucault decides to return to Kant. But Discourse and Punish is a philosophical anthropology, similar to Hegel’s project, that reads Kant in terms of force and Violence (Gewalt), which is central to, say, Heidegger’s reading of Kant, his pinpointing that negative pleasure in the face of death that, for him, constitutes the ontological structure of Dasein. Foucualt is able to retain the structural force of Heidegger’s ontology without falling into the trap of Dasein’s basically ethical stance that also relies on a “phenomenological destruction” of the cartesian cogito that is never achieved. Foucualt, on the other hand, understands that the fabric of history is determined architectonically, and he achieves a schematic, positive anthropology that even contains its own absence in the figure of a violence that vanishes in its activity, as seen in the examples of the schools, the prisons, the panopticon, etc. Not a Hegelian negative or even a metaphysical one, but a positive force that is always already vanishing as it appears, as constituitive of an architectonic structure—say, and architecture—of violence that acts as the horizon of epistemology as such. Thus, the public executions relied on a dialectical relation: the audience must legitimate the sovreign’s exercise of power. In the modern period, such a sight is foreclosed, violence structures but is always absent in its appearance, it derives its force, even, from its insistent absence, as we see in the example of the panopticon.

We could say that this is a reintepretation of Kant’s “ding-an-sich” that goes beyond what either Heidegger or Hegel could achieve, which is perhaps why he reaches toward Nietzsche, who makes a similar move in his work, if not as far.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Kant%27s_Anthr...

New comment by DiscourseFan in "The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization"

DiscourseFan — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:20:08 +0000

Will we all be more or less flesh and bot in the future? Robocop style

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Riding the D in Los Angeles: city hopes new subway stations will be game changer"

DiscourseFan — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:05:42 +0000

Its actually part of the official marketing campaign around the new extension.

New comment by DiscourseFan in "LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction"

DiscourseFan — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:51:40 +0000

Very few people are even beginning to understand the constraints of these systems, and none of them have yet been elevated to high enough positions of prominence to rise above the noise of all the hype. Give us some time man, jeez

New comment by DiscourseFan in "LLMs consistently pick resumes they generate over ones by humans or other models"

DiscourseFan — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:00:20 +0000

Why would I want to work for a company where all the employees made slop to get hired by slop to do slop? It’s slop all the way down!

New comment by DiscourseFan in "I won a championship that doesn't exist"

DiscourseFan — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 05:43:33 +0000

The models are trained on expert data for important inquiries, this gets “hard coded” so to speak, and allows them to differentiate between the gunk online. For hyper specific references like this, it really doesn’t matter if its “true” since its not like someone’s life depends on it.

New comment by DiscourseFan in "Oxford All Souls College General Examination (2025) [pdf]"

DiscourseFan — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 05:49:44 +0000

It’s not about highly specific knowledge: none of these questions are justifiable for a graduate level program, they are better served as prompts for essays that Americans write in their college applications. With these questions you are not going to be engaging with anything particularly deep, but you may produce something that sounds deep. But sounding deep and having actual depth are very different things, and the latter can often look very boring or painstaking, whereas the former always appears profound—and it seems like all of these questions are meant to help the student produce something “profound,” not necessarily something thoughtful or difficult.