Hacker News: ImaCake

New comment by ImaCake in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

ImaCake — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:14:49 +0000

If you go to the original link [0] you will see that things are actually pretty stable and okay?

0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/

New comment by ImaCake in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

ImaCake — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 03:46:05 +0000

It's fun and it looks good regardless of whether its 100% correct (It would certainly take me more than 9 hours of work to do better than this). Making these bespoke tools possible for most people is a big deal.

New comment by ImaCake in "Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies"

ImaCake — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:17:56 +0000

People are not (yet) aware what has been making everyone fat, but ozempic is making it harder to ignore that ultraprocessed foods are the culprit. So hopefully this will change.

New comment by ImaCake in "Show HN: Gaussian Splat of a Strawberry"

ImaCake — Sun, 24 May 2026 11:05:23 +0000

You can do it with a phone camera, ffmpeg, colmap, and opensplat on an m4 macbook air easy enough. I got a nice render of my logitech mouse from it.

New comment by ImaCake in "Google changes its search box"

ImaCake — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:25:34 +0000

In my experience, LLM usage follows an exponential distribution i.e. most people using LLMs are not using many resources, but a very small few are using a massive amount of resources. Most LLM usage is trivial and tiny, most of what I use LLMs for could be done by a local model with a decent web retrieval tool. What some people I know use LLMs for requires massive volumes of tokens. Its that small power user base which I would bet they are targetting.

New comment by ImaCake in "Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era"

ImaCake — Tue, 12 May 2026 23:12:41 +0000

I think this falls flat for a technical audience because we already know how to do this stuff. But there are a lot of people who don't know how to copy paste, or use reverse image search, or apply a filter to a table. Being able to use plain language to do these things is a game changer for them. Sure, it's inefficient and inelegant but it's an interface that will do for basic technical stuff what the ipad touch screen did for the mouse and keyboard.

New comment by ImaCake in "Launching the Claude Partner Network"

ImaCake — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 04:06:51 +0000

Or what if local models get good enough to threaten the server based product?

New comment by ImaCake in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

ImaCake — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 02:38:15 +0000

I read/listened/sampled a lot this year but a few have reached out into my life and changed me at least a little bit.

- In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan. A brilliant "not diet" book about not eating crap and enjoying chocolate cake with your friends. I followed this up with Ultra Processed People to arm myself with the facts to defend not eating the junk people call food.

- The Dispossesed - Ursula Le Guin: recommended in previous year's HN what did you reads. An absolutely triumph for how it manages to portray a believable anarchist society.

- Adult Children of Alcoholics: useful to the multitude of us who grew up with an alcoholic parent(s). I used this to identify the common patterns I share with others who grew up like me. You are not alone!

- The Invention of Clouds (not finished): I really like the context of "dissenting science" which the author conveys brilliantly. Turns out Dark Academia and Bro Science are not new.

- The Art of Frugal Hedonism: Irreverant although it comes off a little pious. This book has helped me accept that I have enough stuff already.

New comment by ImaCake in "GLP-1 therapeutics: Their emerging role in alcohol and substance use disorders"

ImaCake — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 02:44:57 +0000

Can't speak for OP but I largely spend it reading (and web). I bought a kindle recently because I found the ipad/iphone were too distracting to reliably avoid web surfing instead of a book. I view the switch to long form content as a form of information dieting in the same way as a switch to whole foods.

New comment by ImaCake in "Just talk to it – A way of agentic engineering"

ImaCake — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 12:08:03 +0000

> LLMs struggle with simplicity in my experience

I think a lot of this is because people (and thus LLMs) use verbosity as a signal for effort. It's a very bad signal, especially for software, but its a very popular signal. Most writing is much longer than it needs to be, everything from SEO website recipes, consulting reports, and non-fiction books. Both the author and the readers are often fooled into thinking lots of words are good.

It's probably hard to train that out of an LLM, especially if they see how that verbosity impressess the people making the purchasing decisions.

New comment by ImaCake in "Smartphones and being present"

ImaCake — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 22:28:41 +0000

HN is too boring though. Often I come here and there is nothing clickbait enough to get me to read it and I go elsewhere. It's great.

New comment by ImaCake in "Our efforts, in part, define us"

ImaCake — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 14:26:12 +0000

No smartphone can match the bottom tier super-zoom camera I have for bird photography. Even with the frankly microscopic sensor on the super-zoom the power of depth-of-field on an adjustable zoom lens is amazing.

New comment by ImaCake in "Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history"

ImaCake — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:40:41 +0000

Text size is also contingent on the basic technologies of the time. Ancient texts by the length and cost of parchment, and anything before the printing press by how easy it is to copy.

Maybe its only now that we are less constrained by technology that we have to really focus on our mental faculties as the limiting factor for writing.

New comment by ImaCake in "Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference"

ImaCake — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 07:41:37 +0000

This whole argument would be dead in the water if society had de-carbonised 20 years ago instead of now. This stinks of the personal responsibility fallacy of carbon emissions when the real answer is to do the boring job of making energy production cleaner and doing a better job at moving people around.

New comment by ImaCake in "Why are there so many rationalist cults?"

ImaCake — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 22:40:31 +0000

Not sure why you got down voted for this. The opening paragraph of the article reads as suspicious to the observant outsider:

>The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.

Anyone who had just read a lot about Scientology would read that and have alarm bells ringing.

New comment by ImaCake in "Why are there so many rationalist cults?"

ImaCake — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 21:56:23 +0000

Most science runs on BS with a cursory amount of statistics slapped on top so everyone can feel better about it. Weirdly enough, science still works despite not being rational. Rationalists seem to think science is logical when in reality it works for largely the same reasons the free-market does; throw shit at the wall and maybe support some of the stuff that works.

New comment by ImaCake in "Why are there so many rationalist cults?"

ImaCake — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 21:37:34 +0000

You can treat climate change as your personal Ragnarok, but its also possible to take a more sober view that climate change is just bad without it being apocalyptic.

New comment by ImaCake in "Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%"

ImaCake — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 11:23:07 +0000

I tried the Age of the Captain on Gemini and ChatGPT and both game smarmy answers of "ahh this a classic gotcha". I managed to get ChatGPT to then do some interestng creative inference but Gemini decided to be boring.

New comment by ImaCake in "Study mode"

ImaCake — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:28:51 +0000

> searching through piles of spam and junk

In the same way that I never learnt the Dewey decimal system because digital search had driven it obsolete. It may be that we just won't need to do as much sifting through spam in the future, but being able to finesse Gemini into burping out the right links becomes increasingly important.

New comment by ImaCake in "Study mode"

ImaCake — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:21:04 +0000

The article states that Study Mode is free to use. Regardless of b2b costs, this is free for you as an individual.