Hacker News: Telemakhos

New comment by Telemakhos in "Is math big or small?"

Telemakhos — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:38:14 +0000

This is one of those places where Plato really is worth reading. Plato has levels of reality that correspond to numbers. The first level, forms (also called "the monad"), is what the statement "Picture a torus" engages: contemplate an ideal torus. That torus won't have a particular color or texture or any accidental quality, just the essence of a torus, which is its shape (because torus is a shape). Size is one of those accidental qualities, and those live in the second level, which Plato calls "the bigger and smaller"—exactly what the question asks you to imagine—or "the dyad."

So, the instructions for Plato boil down to an absurdity: "contemplate the monad; what dyad do you see?" The two sentences should have nothing to do with each other in Platonic terms.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

Telemakhos — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 01:16:38 +0000

That's exactly why my first point was that it was a civil lawsuit brought by the Attorney General, not a criminal case: the underlying overstatement of real estate values was not charged as the crime of fraud, which would have required more proof including proof of intent and actual harm—of which the former would have been hard to prove, and the latter did not exist. The District Attorney (who handles criminal matters like fraud) decided there was no criminal case, but the Attorney General took it as a civil matter despite there being no criminal case and nobody unhappy about the deals. It was purely a political prosecution.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

Telemakhos — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 23:27:26 +0000

One seems to be New York v. Trump, which was a civil lawsuit instead of criminal. The main charge in the case was overstatement of real estate values to secure loans, yet the banks lending the money (mainly Deutsche Bank, if I remember correctly) were sophisticated lenders who were capable of assessing those estimates and the risk of lending. The banks not only did not lose money from the transactions but in fact happily made money, and they had no complaint about the deals they'd made with Trump. These were all private deals between sophisticated parties who knew what they were doing, and everyone made money. So, no bank suffered harm leading to the charge and no bank lodged any complaint against Trump—the prosecutor went looking for something with which to charge him, and this was the best she could find.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers"

Telemakhos — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:22:10 +0000

You've equated war and murder, but the distinction between the two is one of the brightest lines in many law codes. Murder is a private act committed by private individuals, while war is a public act of friend against foe (distinguished as a public enemy in contrast to private ones).

Further, murder may be restricted to the killing of publicly acknowledged members of the public "friend" group, i.e. citizens, while the killing of outsiders living with the "friend" group, like slaves, is considered something else in the law.

When we codify morals as laws, we usually make a heavy and deliberate distinction between private and public, and between citizen and non-citizen. This is probably related to the nature of a social animal.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

Telemakhos — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:15:07 +0000

Investors do very much question how corporations use their money, and that is why corporations publish quarterly financial statements and have shareholder meetings and hire accountants and auditors. Investors want to make sure that they're going to get their investment back plus profit and thus care about a company's balance sheet. Any financial transparency in non-profit donations is derived from the financial transparency required by for-profit investments.

New comment by Telemakhos in "The Importance of Being Idle"

Telemakhos — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:40:39 +0000

The urban-rural distinction is one of the oldest ideological divides in human history, and that has built immense and unexamined prejudice. We have words like “urbane” and “polite” on the one hand and “pagan,” “villain” and “heathen” on the other, and nobody stops to think about how this is a one-way street of city-dwellers condemning their rustic relations. A lot of modern political decisions boil down to “everyone should live in cities” when cities are historically demographic sinks (lower birthrate), largely because the people who make political decisions live in cities.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

Telemakhos — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 04:37:00 +0000

OK, I'll bite. I want to know more of the reasoning behind this, because I think it implies that S-expressions are alien to the innate/evolved syntactic knowledge in human languages. A lot of American linguistics, like Chomsky's gropings for how to construct universal grammar and deep syntax trees, or the lambda calculus of semantic functions, looks like S-expressions, and I think that's because there was some coordination between human linguists and computer science (Chomsky was, after all, at MIT). At the same time, I've had a gut instinct that these theories described some languages (like English) better than others (like ancient Greek), requiring more explanation of changes between deep structure and surface structure for languages that were less like English. If models trained on actual language handle s-expressions poorly, that could imply that s-expressions were not a good model for the deep structure of human language, or that the deep-structure vs surface-structure model did not really work. I'd be very happy to learn more about this.

New comment by Telemakhos in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

Telemakhos — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:19:48 +0000

When the first-tier hostile leadership structure was eliminated in the first day of the war, and only after a month do the surviving enemies finally manage to damage a plane so severely that it can't return to a friendly base to land, is "quite useless" an adequate and accurate description of the technology used to prosecute that war?

New comment by Telemakhos in "Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom"

Telemakhos — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:11:09 +0000

I think you are right, and your "bet" about Zuckerberg checks out, at least according to media reports about his family. Still, asking someone to draw an inference based on three pieces of evidence, of which two are a bet and an assumption, seems hasty.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator"

Telemakhos — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 01:20:06 +0000

In Latin it's a tuft of wool, best known for expressions of valuelessness like "flocci non facio," meaning 'I don't consider it worth a tuft of wool.'

New comment by Telemakhos in "Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies"

Telemakhos — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:27:53 +0000

How does this square with regimes like Singapore, which is one of the least corrupt nations in the world yet also an authoritarian, one-party system?

New comment by Telemakhos in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

Telemakhos — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:20:22 +0000

I remember seeing In the Mood for Love on the big screen in my local arthouse cinema back around 2000. It was shot with analogue film and projected as such, and the sheer details of the textures were astounding. It's not a bad film on my 4k monitor, but I don't feel the same awe.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age"

Telemakhos — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:04:06 +0000

I don't think this is a left- or right-wing issue: Australia was one of the first to ban kids from social media, and Australia is not right-wing by any measure. Canada is hardly right-wing, but age verification is bill S-210 in their parliament.

What you're seeing is a coordinated push by transnational interests; Meta's name has come up in discussions of the funding behind this push. At the very lest, verifying age also verifies that a person is real and not a bot, so advertising firms like Meta will benefit from verification. That's not right-wing or left-wing but rather the influence of business over the political, and neither wing of the spectrum is immune to corruption.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Ghostmd: Ghostty but for Markdown Notes"

Telemakhos — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 02:23:22 +0000

I really wanted to try this out, because it reminded me of a free version of Ulysses, which I used to (before it became subscription-based) find helped me be very productive. Unfortunately, the latest release wouldn't install:

> "GhostMD" is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash.

I suspect this is a signing or notarization error.

New comment by Telemakhos in "First in-utero stem cell therapy for fetal spina bifida repair is safe: study"

Telemakhos — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:53:26 +0000

Does the physical repair also help with the mental developmental effects? Children with spinal bifida often develop cognitive abilities much slower than children without it.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Leaving Google has actively improved my life"

Telemakhos — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:16:32 +0000

I don't even use Google's regular search that often... but I'm addicted to Google Books, and nobody is offering to replace that. Google Scholar is also amazing. In those niche spaces, Google is a defacto monopoly.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums"

Telemakhos — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 15:38:11 +0000

Audio and video surveillance via robot vacuum is a feature: you can control the vacuum, see and hear the world from its perspective, and spy on your cats. I wish I were kidding.

https://youtu.be/TltYXEDoong?t=412

New comment by Telemakhos in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

Telemakhos — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:13:59 +0000

> If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.

The state of exception is the true test of sovereignty, and powers that crave sovereignty therefore seek out states of exception. The PATRIOT act created new institutions and authorities like the TSA. Just a few years ago local health departments were making business-shuttering decisions that ruined life for a lot of people over the common cold. Ukrainian war funding provides the EU with opportunities for exports and new experiments in joint funding (Eurobonds). Emergencies and exceptions are how power grows, so everything can become an emergency if you look at it in the right way.

New comment by Telemakhos in "Archaeologists find possible first direct evidence of Hannibal's war elephants"

Telemakhos — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:55:45 +0000

The anthill garnet is mined by ants on a Navajo reservation.

https://columbiagemhouse.com/pages/anthill-garnet

https://myeldesign.com/blogs/journal/the-fabulous-story-of-a...

New comment by Telemakhos in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

Telemakhos — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:50:38 +0000

Before the time you mention, the common model for TV was, you bought a TV, and you got as many channels as your antenna could pick up, all for free. Advertisers fought over the privilege of having access to your living room so much so that they sponsored whole shows, as they had with radio before TV. From this revenue, every local station was able to put together a news broadcast, and national networks broadcast the national news every evening, all for free as far as the viewer was concerned. This was the golden age of journalism, back when people believed the journalists [0].

Somehow all the media advances, the democratizing influence of the internet, the rise of social media, and the ubiquity of constant streams of news in various forms has just made the news more expensive and less trusted.

And, frankly, anyone even remotely considering microtransactions needs to take into account that one third of the population distrusts the media and another third gives it no credibility whatsoever—and money in the form of microtransactions would have to follow credibility, because nobody pays for what he believes is a lie.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...