Hacker News: canjobear

New comment by canjobear in "Do Babies Dream of Baby Sheep?"

canjobear — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:21:50 +0000

It was standard procedure to do invasive surgeries on newborns without anesthesia until the 1980s, on the theory that they can’t feel pain. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/long-life-early-pain

New comment by canjobear in "Epidurals are a miracle technology"

canjobear — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:00:41 +0000

Midwives don’t participate in C-sections

New comment by canjobear in "Alice is impatient"

canjobear — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 01:25:02 +0000

I was clicking around in response to this article and found this video that explains the inspection paradox nicely. https://youtu.be/Jd1wNizPjoE

New comment by canjobear in "Amateur may have cracked Linear A"

canjobear — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:56:50 +0000

You can evaluate the logic for the decipherment step by step and make sure all the claims are justified. But the best test is to try the proposed decipherment against some new text and see if it makes sense. In the case of Linear A and the other remaining undeciphered scripts, there's not a lot of held-out text to test against, so it's tricky.

New comment by canjobear in "AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A"

canjobear — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:52:15 +0000

> Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge

What does this mean? Like he e-mailed it to some people at Rutgers and Cambridge? Or it's under some kind of non-anonymous peer review?

New comment by canjobear in "A dumpster arrived behind my university's library"

canjobear — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:18:15 +0000

Gratuitous destruction of books by librarians has been done for a while. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold

New comment by canjobear in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

canjobear — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:14:11 +0000

Egyptian writing had phonetic elements (as does the modern Chinese writing system) but it was not an alphabet in the strict linguistic sense that individual symbols indicated individual phonemes.

New comment by canjobear in "Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity"

canjobear — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:14:59 +0000

Close. One approach is to conjecture that the universe only supports a limited about of information per unit surface area.

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

New comment by canjobear in "Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity"

canjobear — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:30:13 +0000

Also very well explained by PBS Spacetime here https://youtu.be/UKxQTvqcpSg

New comment by canjobear in "Do transformers need three projections? Systematic study of QKV variants"

canjobear — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:28:32 +0000

It’s not typeset in math mode so you can’t expect the hyphen to correspond to minus.

New comment by canjobear in "They’re made out of weights"

canjobear — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 03:39:43 +0000

A mapping of Chinese characters to integers (like a tokenizer) would not be a dictionary. You’d also need definitions. At best it’s an index to a hypothetical dictionary.

New comment by canjobear in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

canjobear — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:51:18 +0000

Your model of what AI is good at is wrong. Generative AI is not good at wandering off into novel esoteric abstract corners while maintaining correctness, it is good at things that are close to its training data. I suspect that humans will long outperform AI in the domain of "novel esoteric abstract useless math" whereas AI will outperform humans in the domains of (1) making connections between already-well-understood concepts, things that seem obvious in retrospect but which no human figured out just because of the accidents of what people happened to focus on, and (2) proving things that require long, tedious, intellectually unsatisfying calculations, which would cause a human mathematician to give up for boredom.

New comment by canjobear in "Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over AI risks"

canjobear — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:03:28 +0000

I have multiple friends now who used to quote me that factoid, then went to Florida and came back convinced that no, Florida man is real.

New comment by canjobear in "DuckDuckGo makes its 'no-AI' search engine easier to access as its traffic booms"

canjobear — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:10:21 +0000

Google search already had a huge quality slide before 2022.

New comment by canjobear in "Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis"

canjobear — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:47:35 +0000

As early as last year "AI psychosis" seemed to refer to people going crazy due to talking to ChatGPT too much. That was a useful term for a real phenomenon! Now it seems like it's been taken over to mean "thinking that AI is promising" which is more of a rhetorical bludgeon and less useful as a concept.

New comment by canjobear in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

canjobear — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:42:00 +0000

PhD students paying tuition would be highly unusual.

Disappearing Polymorph

canjobear — Sat, 09 May 2026 16:45:10 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076294

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Pasilalinic-Sympathetic Compass

canjobear — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:36:48 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasilalinic-sympathetic_compass

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058997

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by canjobear in "The Disappearance of the Public Bench"

canjobear — Fri, 08 May 2026 01:14:30 +0000

Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?

New comment by canjobear in "I want to live like Costco people"

canjobear — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:00:43 +0000

China at least has this. The stuff you get at the Ole Supermarket inside a shopping mall is different from the stuff you get from the little store facing the street on the ground floor of your apartment building.