Hacker News: Noumenon72

New comment by Noumenon72 in "IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses"

Noumenon72 — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:20:42 +0000

That's a smart idea, similar to how I keep a little cash in the car just in case. For example, I could get something in my eyes and have to remove my contacts, and an old pair of glasses would let me get home.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Various LLM Smells"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:27:46 +0000

Joking that Turing superhumanly foresaw AGI and created the Turing Test as a bar we must never cross, subtly introducing changes to the world's training data to ensure that models could never impersonate humans.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Various LLM Smells"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:37:15 +0000

Alan Turing poisoned the context in ways we can't comprehend and all LLMs are bound by his dead hand.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "I found a second vote.gov – and it's registered to the White House"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:44:36 +0000

> Weeks before that certificate appeared, this administration signed an executive order requiring DHS, the Social Security Administration, and the SAVE program to construct a federal citizenship-verified voter list, with a deadline of ninety days from signing. That deadline is weeks away. When the order was challenged in federal court, the Department of Justice told the judge the agencies named had not yet begun preparation and were still in the deliberation phase

Does the following story make sense?

- The agencies will take ninety days just to approve the "voter list creation committee"

- The plan is for the DOGE-equivalent to create example sites from AirBnB templates so that when the deadline approaches they can say "Here, adopt this code so you can make the deadline. You'll need to replace the certificates".

- Thus it's true that the agencies are still in the deliberation phase. It's the national design studio that is prototyping.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:57:33 +0000

What is all this talk of "Candy"?

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Cisco workforce reductions"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:49:25 +0000

Because it's just as beneficial to society to say "we're doing the same work with fewer workers" as "we're doing the same work with fewer trucks" or "we're doing the same work with fewer barrels of oil".

New comment by Noumenon72 in "The Rise of the Bullshittery"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:32:44 +0000

Not amused by it editing my tab and icon to a Google Maps search pin for "adult entertainment clubs" on my work computer. OK, maybe a little.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "The rise and fall of snake oil"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:41:49 +0000

Based on his ranking of MP (mood/productivity), he concluded that it helped for the first three weeks and then got worse because he was overdosing on the magnesium. So not much there is going to apply to the general case.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Show HN: Hallucinopedia"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 06 May 2026 22:26:54 +0000

This is irresponsible for people who don't get it, takes away confirmation for people who do get it, and makes me block/blacklist any liar who does it.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Show HN: Hallucinopedia"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 06 May 2026 22:24:55 +0000

So by "I made the same thing months ago" you didn't mean "an article about the great pigeon census" (your link is created May 6) or "an encyclopedia of hallucinations" like the OP, but just "an encyclopedia with some articles AI wrote". What's the point?

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 06 May 2026 16:17:02 +0000

According to ChatGPT Accessibility Inspector is a developer tool in Xcode now.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?"

Noumenon72 — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:03:25 +0000

I took your point to be "hirers would rather that job seekers contact them directly than look through resumes", but then your example is one where no one contacted you and you hired without looking through many resumes anyway. That doesn't really prove your point, and makes it sound like advice for people who don't much care who they hire.

Anyway, if people start to follow the advice of reaching out directly, that channel will become exactly as clogged as the job postings.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Maladaptive Frugality"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 01 May 2026 04:42:58 +0000

Even more optimal would be to pick an age, say, 60, and commit to moving to Canada for MAID at that time. This means you don't need to compound nearly as long, because you don't need to insure against a long life unable to work. Then you can start not selling your labor while you're still young enough to enjoy it.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Waymo in Portland"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:29:25 +0000

That's what I was asking -- why do you believe this? What is your mechanism for safety in numbers? If it's "criminals fear being observed", that doesn't hold now that catch-and-release is standard practice. If it's "criminals fear being outnumbered", that doesn't hold when the crowd will be prosecuted if they attack. The only mechanism left for safety in numbers is hoping that criminals feel shy.

This seems intuitive to me because I would never risk fighting someone in the street over some crime, so I don't see why having me around would deter them at all. The same goes for maybe 90% of the people I know. We're weak and docile, even in numbers.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Waymo in Portland"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:17:16 +0000

Has it been shown that screaming drugged out homeless riders avoid the presence of crowds? Is there any physical mechanism where having more people on the trains leads to Daniel-Penny-like suppression of drugged out homeless riders? Or does "getting more people onto the trains" just mean removing their options until they are forced to ignore the drugged out homeless riders?

As a solution, "get MORE people onto the trains" seems less optimal than "get fewer drugged out homeless riders onto the trains".

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Tesla (TSLA) discloses $2B AI hardware company acquisition buried"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:15:12 +0000

That's a better title, as "Tesla discloses $2B AI hardware company acquisition buried" could also mean "Tesla disclosed that it buried an acquisition" or "Tesla disclosed that a hardware company buried an acquisition".

New comment by Noumenon72 in "I'm done making desktop applications (2009)"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:02:03 +0000

My coworker showed a Jupyter notebook with ipywidgets and it looked just like an app. A good CLI using FastAPI's `typer` looks a lot like an app too.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "3.4M Solar Panels"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:15:06 +0000

It's funny how I started skimming as soon as I saw "My Workstation" without ever consciously perceiving why I had started hitting Page Down, until you mentioned it and I went back to notice what it said there. My brain has really automated web page signal extraction.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Israeli soldiers using sexual assault to force Palestinians out of West Bank"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:47:12 +0000

It doesn't matter for things that are bad whether they are policy or not, like sexual assault. It matters for things that are okay if they are policy, like strip searches. If prison guards do strip searches on their own for fun, that is a problem, but the mandated ones are not. (Assuming the policy was made with a normal level of concern for human dignity and officer safety.)

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:35:52 +0000

Or to resist ever passing a national health system.