Hacker News: accidentallfact

New comment by accidentallfact in "Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise"

accidentallfact — Wed, 13 May 2026 10:27:57 +0000

I'm going to get downvoted to hell for this, but you described the exact reason why education is a waste of time.

New comment by accidentallfact in "What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)"

accidentallfact — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:33:06 +0000

That, just isn't true. Many animals live in herds, flocks or other groups. There is a kind of fish that eats debris from the teeth of much bigger fishes. Predators get swarmed.

New comment by accidentallfact in "Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers"

accidentallfact — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:57:43 +0000

I believe that this goes beyond vocabulary. It's more about who bears the burden in communication - in most cultures, it's the speaker, who is supposed to communicate clearly, and concisely. In western culture, it's the listener, who is expected to decipher whatever the speaker is talking about.

New comment by accidentallfact in "Sam Altman Is Losing His Grip on Humanity"

accidentallfact — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:37:23 +0000

He was talking about education. I'm pretty sure about it.

New comment by accidentallfact in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

accidentallfact — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:04:42 +0000

There is no reason to doubt that Jesus lived in the Roman Empire, once you believe that he lived at all. And there is no reason whatsoever to doubt that the church formed in Rome. All known world was Rome at the time. From Britain to Morocco to the Middle East. (Islam only happened in the middle ages, it isn't that old.)

New comment by accidentallfact in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

accidentallfact — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:03:00 +0000

It fell, (quite violently, in fact) in the third century. The rest was pretense.

New comment by accidentallfact in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

accidentallfact — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:45:12 +0000

The thing that made him question geocentrism was that Venus quite visibly orbits the Sun.

It has always been known that the tides are caused by the Moon. The hard part is to predict the tides in detail, as they depend on the geography as well. Some of the first computers were invented to predict the tides.

New comment by accidentallfact in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

accidentallfact — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 08:35:18 +0000

Napoleonic wars? The Spanish used guns against the Aztecs.

>The first use of firearms as primary offensive weapons came in the 1421 Battle of Kutná Hora.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_firearm

New comment by accidentallfact in "How far back in time can you understand English?"

accidentallfact — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 11:57:57 +0000

People always overestimate how 'phonetic' their language is, because nobody actually uses phonemes in regular speech. In Korean in particular, there doesn't even seem to be any obvious correspondence between what is written, and what is actually said.

Foreign accents don't come from any inherent inability to learn language after X years of age. They come from people pronouncing languages as they are written, and virtually no language is like that in reality.

New comment by accidentallfact in "Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet"

accidentallfact — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:43:10 +0000

The amount of red light goes down, (and you can use a camera with white set to sunlight to check how much blue it gets on a clear day, it isn't an illusion at all) so if anything, we should be using red light filters, not blue.

New comment by accidentallfact in "Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet"

accidentallfact — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 11:45:15 +0000

Even the premise of the idea is wrong, as evenings are either blue from the blue sky, or white from the clouds. It takes exceptional circumstances to have a reddish evening, and even then it's just around the sunset.

I guess that it may help people with undercorrected myopia due to the chromatic aberration, but, I don't know.

New comment by accidentallfact in "The Dark Side of the Enlightenment"

accidentallfact — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 15:57:13 +0000

I think the reason for it is actually pretty banal. Rationality won. But it didn't win over irrationality, but over superrationality, and we just suffer the horrors of its wrongness.

New comment by accidentallfact in "Where did all the starships go?"

accidentallfact — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:57:05 +0000

Too much of sci-fi has become reality, and space alone isn't interesting. So, you can fly to another planet? What are you going to do there? Talk with computers, like you do with your phone?

New comment by accidentallfact in "WiFi could become an invisible mass surveillance system"

accidentallfact — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:00:43 +0000

It applies to the sensor size as well. Such as you need a 3m sensor to get 100px per radian, under ideal circumstances, unless I'm mistaken. (I think I'm not)

New comment by accidentallfact in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

accidentallfact — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:49:25 +0000

It isn't a way around, you still obey. Only now, the authority you obey is a machine.

New comment by accidentallfact in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

accidentallfact — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:32:22 +0000

The point of Dune is that the worst danger are people who obey authority without questioning it.

New comment by accidentallfact in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

accidentallfact — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:43:56 +0000

A better approach is to make AI bullshit people on purpose.

New comment by accidentallfact in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

accidentallfact — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:36:48 +0000

Reality won't give a shit about what people believe.

New comment by accidentallfact in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

accidentallfact — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:00:52 +0000

I'm so sick of this "good guy approach". It didn't give us progress, it gave us those like Watt and Intel, highly celebrated bullshiters who stopped being relevant as soon as their IP deadlock expired.

I suppose the only solution is undeground science. Do enough progress in silence, dont disseminare the results, unless the superiority becomes so obvious that an armed resistance becomes unthinkable.

New comment by accidentallfact in "The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein"

accidentallfact — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:21:49 +0000

The mechanisms in the body are not heat engines. The stuff is so tiny that it works basically by reshuffling molecules, so the traditional concept of efficiency doesn't really apply, as the amount of stuff that happens is given by integral math. You get this amount of charges from reshuffling this amount of molecules. The type of stuff that can be done is limited by how hard the stuff sticks together.

Anyway, the core problem of obese bodies is that they can't produce energy. You can't outwill it, the reshuffling just isn't happening, and there is actually no great reason to believe that fat tissue is some kind of fuel tank, rather than a mass of broken cells.

Also, the body can just reshuffle the molecules in an idle mode. You don't need to spend the energy on moving around.