Hacker News: MengerSponge

New comment by MengerSponge in "DOGE is done. What happened to its records?"

MengerSponge — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:41:07 +0000

They saw Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but didn't really get it.

New comment by MengerSponge in "DOGE is done. What happened to its records?"

MengerSponge — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:50:30 +0000

Also about destroying the government's investigative/enforcement capacity. USAID's destruction was ideological, but protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential.

New comment by MengerSponge in "The Meta Glasses backlash is changing how (or if) people use them"

MengerSponge — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:45:02 +0000

They learned from Scoble's glasshole picture https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/yes-you-can-w...

New comment by MengerSponge in "The Meta Glasses backlash is changing how (or if) people use them"

MengerSponge — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:44:11 +0000

It's already hard to tell, because chunky sunglasses don't change in volume much when you add electronics and optics. You kind of have to know what you're looking for to clock even these: https://www.ray-ban.com/usa/electronics/RW7002ray-ban%20meta...

New comment by MengerSponge in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"

MengerSponge — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:04:38 +0000

I've seen videos of flock cameras installed improperly (missing a breakaway device) right next to roads. The city must be able to remove unsafe devices!

https://highways.dot.gov/safety/local-rural/maintenance-sign...

New comment by MengerSponge in "The Meta Glasses backlash is changing how (or if) people use them"

MengerSponge — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:34:08 +0000

I'm curious what those conversations in Meta sound like:

A> People are calling our omnipresent surveillance technology "Pervert glasses"

B> Are the people who wear them perverts?

A> Most probably aren't.

New comment by MengerSponge in "Unexpected Solidlike Fracture in Simple Liquids"

MengerSponge — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 05:56:29 +0000

They care about rheology because that expertise enables fracking, and they're smart enough to understand that you have to fund basic science to get (valuable) applied science.

New comment by MengerSponge in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

MengerSponge — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:51:00 +0000

It's horrifying. I don't remember acid rain or CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer, but I'm good enough at pattern recognition to see it playing out again.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD04...

New comment by MengerSponge in "How to hide from killer drones"

MengerSponge — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:43:30 +0000

Doesn't a fiber tether give its drone desktop-class computing?

New comment by MengerSponge in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

MengerSponge — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 22:43:17 +0000

"Is you taking notes on a criminal f-cking conspiracy?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZLoMrRgFFE

New comment by MengerSponge in "The mathematical secrets of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia"

MengerSponge — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:13:39 +0000

Calculus exists, but analytic solutions generally don't. Gaudi's chains and weights serve as an incredibly elegant mechanical computer that were only surpassed in the last few decades by CAD. Designers used mechanical splines until the advent of CAD in the 70's/80's.

New comment by MengerSponge in "What Big Food Did to Ice Cream"

MengerSponge — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 05:01:44 +0000

There's a frozen custard shop in my town. They sometimes do silly things like including raw sliced strawberries that just turn into ice shards, but their vanilla and chocolate absolutely beat the pants off anything I can find in the grocery.

New comment by MengerSponge in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026"

MengerSponge — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:06:12 +0000

Do they have an insignia or patch? Can we buy it?

New comment by MengerSponge in "BMW iX5 Blows Away the Competition with 460-KW Charging, 435-Mile Range"

MengerSponge — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:28:09 +0000

That's prior art if there ever was prior art. It's just unicode U+1D54F

New comment by MengerSponge in "Europe's resistance to AC is driving it insane"

MengerSponge — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:26:11 +0000

AC is far more efficient than most heating methods, but there isn't the same level of censure applied to traditional heating technologies. If you listen, people talk about AC like it's inherently polluting, like it's something to moralize.

Europe historically has not been this hot, but they regularly have heat waves. I remember a 40C heat wave more than a decade ago! That's enough time to add emergency infrastructure, unless you're hoping to snuff old people. When you get your third hundred year flood in a decade it's time to update your priors.

New comment by MengerSponge in "Tidal AI Policy"

MengerSponge — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:17:18 +0000

CSAM?

New comment by MengerSponge in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

MengerSponge — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 02:05:09 +0000

Good idea! Nothing bad could possibly come from advocating for centralization of academic assessment! Let's give more authority to a handful of private publishers who adapt their curricula to the whims of Texas!

It's not just because "it would just show how terrible they actually are"

New comment by MengerSponge in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

MengerSponge — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 02:01:04 +0000

There are schools with severe penalties for cheating (Army/Navy, Haverford, Davidson), but most aren't set up for that. Professors didn't self-select to be prosecutors, and we didn't spend decades becoming world experts to then become cops.

Love the sinner, hate the sin. If you let yourself start blaming students, you open a pretty corrosive path of moral judgement. Students are clever, and they're making choices informed by what they see in the world. Don't blame them for being unwilling to fail a class that cost a down payment on a house. Don't blame them for seeing powerful people get away with cheating and trying to do the same.

Kallus is right: qualitative assessment is an adversarial problem. Build the assessment correctly, and all of those previous points become moot. By clearly establishing and enforcing the rules you make it more fair to boot.

New comment by MengerSponge in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

MengerSponge — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:53:05 +0000

Understanding 90-95% of someone else's proof is much easier than writing your own ;)

It's hard to verify that you understand someone else's work at 100%, but it's reasonable for an expert to tell once they've built it themselves, right?

New comment by MengerSponge in "Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck"

MengerSponge — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:49:17 +0000

The reasons for not marking it are ignorance and fraud. Both are terrible looks for an academic.