Hacker News: FeteCommuniste

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Who Is America's Homer?"

FeteCommuniste — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:09:09 +0000

The vast majority of Cervantes's work was not in poetry, either. I think the idea is more "emblematic national storyteller" than poet in the narrow sense.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Who Is America's Homer?"

FeteCommuniste — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:05:29 +0000

What on earth is "politically charged" or "inaccessible" about Frost or Ingalls Wilder? It's not like they threw in Gertrude Stein or William Gaddis.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Who Is America's Homer?"

FeteCommuniste — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:02:34 +0000

And France has Molière, and Portugal has Camões...how many authors should be listed?

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Who Is America's Homer?"

FeteCommuniste — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:01:01 +0000

Heh, we're closer to the Beowulf poet than the Beowulf poet was to Homer.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "The kids with phones are alright"

FeteCommuniste — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:47:40 +0000

> The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach.

Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever. Or block the people bothering you. If anything I'd say digital bullying is easier to escape because unlike school kids aren't required to be on those sites six to eight hours a day, and blocking someone needs a lot less effort and cooperation from adults than reporting them to school authorities.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "The kids with phones are alright"

FeteCommuniste — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:46:05 +0000

Interesting reversal of the "think of the kids" argument, though: think of the kids who could have used their phones to document their mistreatment at the hands of alcoholic perverts.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Female US rower completes historic solo journey from California to Hawaii"

FeteCommuniste — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:00:01 +0000

Portable desalinators exist.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Automating AI Away"

FeteCommuniste — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:54:23 +0000

> Humans aren't deterministic

Thus why we replaced computers (flesh and blood people writing out calculations) with computers (silicon-based number-crunching machines).

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "In Praise of Observational Evidence"

FeteCommuniste — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:23:36 +0000

Yes. Potentially life-saving drugs in RCTs are usually compared to "standard of care," i.e. already-approved treatments, not to placebos.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Claude Science"

FeteCommuniste — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:33:19 +0000

The two feed into each other. "Publish or perish" ups the incentive to pump out shaky papers to pad resumes. LLMs make it easier to churn them out.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'"

FeteCommuniste — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:48:29 +0000

The sloppings will continue until morale improves.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

FeteCommuniste — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:59:40 +0000

American children are pretty hefty.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Whole cross-sectional human ultrasound tomography"

FeteCommuniste — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:46:19 +0000

MRI uses RF wavelengths, which are measured in meters. Ultrasound waves are measured in fractions of a millimeter. Wavelength is not the relevant factor here.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

FeteCommuniste — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:19:18 +0000

The instinct of many people (myself included, a lot of the time) is "feed the AI the problems from the domains I'm least good at / familiar with" because those ones are the most frustrating and where I'm the most likely to spin my wheels. It's easy to imagine how this feeds into a cycle of "only put forth effort at things I'm already good at" and a consequent narrowing of professional / intellectual development.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "How Alberta Eradicated Rats"

FeteCommuniste — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:10:07 +0000

The big ones (oriental, not German) unfortunately come into my house pretty regularly. Setting out poison helps but hasn't rid of us of all of them.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "How Alberta Eradicated Rats"

FeteCommuniste — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:08:03 +0000

For me it's less fear than an instant "I must kill it / get it out of here" feeling. A big spider or centipede gives me a more intense "creepy crawly" shiver but a cockroach is way higher on the disgust scale for some reason.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "A robot is sprinting towards you. Do you want it running on Claude or Grok?"

FeteCommuniste — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:52:26 +0000

The "writing part" is not neatly separable from the "ideas part," much as AI-writing defenders would like to pretend so.

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "A robot is sprinting towards you. Do you want it running on Claude or Grok?"

FeteCommuniste — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:00:55 +0000

If you're outsourcing your writing to AI, I assume you're outsourcing your thinking to it as well. And I don't really care what some weighted average of all human text written on the topic "thinks."

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

FeteCommuniste — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:30:45 +0000

Precisely. "We're doing this with AI" reads as "we don't care enough about this to pay a person to do it."

New comment by FeteCommuniste in "Getting Creative with Perlin Noise Fields"

FeteCommuniste — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:46:27 +0000

Also his "Coding Train" videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain