Hacker News: MadcapJake

New comment by MadcapJake in "Why I don't think AGI is imminent"

MadcapJake — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:53:24 +0000

> What if we built simulated environments where AIs could gather embodied experience? Would we be able to create learning scenarios where agents could learn some of these cognitive primitives, and could that generalize to improve LLMs? There are a few papers that I found that poke in this direction.

Simulation Theory boosted! We're all just models in training.

New comment by MadcapJake in "Why I don't think AGI is imminent"

MadcapJake — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:14:28 +0000

You did not ask the same thing. You framed the question such that readers are supposed to look at their current lives and realize nothing is different ergo AGI is lame. Your approach utilizes the availability bias and argument from consequences logical fallacies.

I think what you are trying to say is can we define AGI so that we can have an intelligent conversation about what that will mean for our daily lives?. But you oddly introduced your argument by stating you didn't want to explore this definition...

New comment by MadcapJake in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

MadcapJake — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:51:55 +0000

I would love to see a model designed by curating the training data so that the model produces the best responses possible. Then again, the work required to create a training set that is both sufficiently sized and well vetted is astronomically large. Since Capitalism teaches that we most do the bare minimum needed to extract wealth, no AI company will ever approach this problem ethically. The amount of work required to do the right thing far outweighs the economic value produced.

New comment by MadcapJake in "Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content"

MadcapJake — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:26:50 +0000

The Corporate religion demands unwavering profit orientation. "Ethics" is just barely maintained right above the limits of market research. All for the betterment of man, amirite?

New comment by MadcapJake in "Modern messaging: Running your own XMPP server"

MadcapJake — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 12:26:47 +0000

I went looking for more info on Libervia and noticed your site is down.

New comment by MadcapJake in "Knowledge and memory"

MadcapJake — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 11:38:26 +0000

Reconstructing from what?

New comment by MadcapJake in "Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music"

MadcapJake — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:05:05 +0000

I'm all for ceremonial drumming but there's gotta be a specific pace that fits their definition of "progressively" and i feel like that detail is lacking. Maybe there's more in the paper proper but the appendix is quite vague.

New comment by MadcapJake in "Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music"

MadcapJake — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:02:48 +0000

Should i have clarified "no music you can find online or otherwise make use of in any way"? I appreciate the honest effort to come up with things! I'll see if i can find that anywhere and of appropriate length.

New comment by MadcapJake in "Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music"

MadcapJake — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 13:45:24 +0000

> encouraged by the tempo of the music progressively increasing to the end of HVB

How does this part work? No real music does this so did they make their own for the study? Or do they select songs that change tempo subtley from one to the next?

New comment by MadcapJake in "We rewrote the Ghostty GTK application"

MadcapJake — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:51:25 +0000

"native" here means using the same toolkit as the desktop environment.

New comment by MadcapJake in "Go 1.25 Release Notes"

MadcapJake — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:43:47 +0000

Where is it mentioned that the arena experiment has been dropped?

New comment by MadcapJake in "Human speech may have a universal transmission rate (2019)"

MadcapJake — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 14:12:49 +0000

I'm sorry, but this is essentially racism prettied up. The research is about language bitrate not about regional speaking rate variations within a language.

Tangentially, I'm relatively confident that what you're experience has provided you is simply confirmation bias. Unless French is not their first language.

New comment by MadcapJake in "I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it"

MadcapJake — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 18:46:37 +0000

I won't argue that this wasn't the appropriate action given the circumstances in capitalism today but we've got to stop legitimizing buying companies and then watching the market of product options shrink and engineers, amongst many other career employees, lose jobs. Companies should be required to continue to maintain some semblance of their acquired company's product portfolio for a good long while, otherwise what purpose did you acquire that company for? Killer acquisitions are still bad whether through intentional choice or negligence.

New comment by MadcapJake in "The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe"

MadcapJake — Wed, 28 May 2025 15:02:50 +0000

Cosmology, like many sciences, is about learning the scientific truth through the remnants left behind. Just like we can see an early earth by digging, we can see an early universe by zooming.

A well reasoned theory in any science should include and test for implications in the past and present. We can't just ignore time if we want a proper understanding of the universe.

New comment by MadcapJake in "Thoughts on thinking"

MadcapJake — Sat, 17 May 2025 02:34:41 +0000

> Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.

This is an outrageous thought experiment. Novelty is creating new connections or perceiving things in new ways, you can't just say "try to have eureka moment, see! impossible". You can't prompt engineer your own brain.

In fact, there's some research about eureka moments rewiring our brain. https://neurosciencenews.com/insight-memory-neuroscience-289...

New comment by MadcapJake in "Writing that changed how I think about programming languages"

MadcapJake — Wed, 14 May 2025 13:44:33 +0000

What I've never understood about this argument is this:

How often are you passing around data that you don't fully understand?

Also, people use types and then end up reaching for reflection to perform pattern matching on types at which point you've just moved the typing from the user level to a type system. Not much gained imo.

New comment by MadcapJake in "The FTC puts off enforcing its 'click-to-cancel' rule"

MadcapJake — Mon, 12 May 2025 17:56:59 +0000

Elected officials should make the average salary from the year prior. If it's not enough to survive then they'll need to do something about it!

New comment by MadcapJake in "I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt"

MadcapJake — Tue, 06 May 2025 10:11:18 +0000

They said that implicitly by choosing to debate a trivial sentence designed to impart the reader with the sense of importance that this principle holds for the OP. This kind of tone policing is a tactic designed to pull you away from the original argument.

New comment by MadcapJake in "How to win an argument with a toddler"

MadcapJake — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 19:47:10 +0000

As a parent, I often found that if I actually explained why instead of the usual "Because I told you so", then I got a lot further in making them rationally arrive at the right behavior themselves (as toddlers are wont to do). I suspect that the "I told you so", not only does it completely nullify their desire but it also forces them to accept not learning and hurts their pride (which is where the tantrum comes from). These are undesirable outcomes and since parents use this trick all the time, it leads to learned behavior. Disclaimer: This is just my own analysis and I know there are times when it's too challenging to do this but it's a principle you have to focus on.

Einstein's dream of a unified field theory accomplished?

MadcapJake — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 19:00:08 +0000

Article URL: https://phys.org/news/2025-04-einstein-field-theory.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43647051

Points: 15

# Comments: 14