Hacker News: catgary

New comment by catgary in "If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it"

catgary — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 07:33:17 +0000

It’s like someone had Claude binge on Galton, Murray and Yarvin then let it loose on Hacker News.

New comment by catgary in "If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it"

catgary — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 06:30:03 +0000

Dropping slurs after being compared to a eugenicist is an interesting choice. Maybe you would be more comfortable in the comments of Curtis Yarvin’s blog. You’d certainly get less pushback there.

New comment by catgary in "If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it"

catgary — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 03:01:41 +0000

Whereas “abstraction ceiling” is hard science backed by ample literature, not a loose metaphor directly contradicted by several prominent mathematicians who didn’t quit when the going got tough.

I think the fact the Feynman took an IQ test and scored 127 is damning of the entire concept. I think what turns mathematicians off is the thought that psychologists who couldn’t tell you the difference between a scheme and a metric space think they can actually measure who has the capacity to be a mathematician and who doesn’t.

Like, why fucking bother doing anything? Why run the 100 meters at the Olympics, let’s just do some genetic testing and measurements to pick the fastest man in the world. Why teach kids music, let’s just measure hand size and do some sight singing exercises and teach the talented kids piano. This whole nonsense reeks of Gattaca-style quasi-eugenics where people get sorted into profession by people who don’t actually have expertise in any of them. You’re not in the guild, you don’t get to appoint to the guild, and you certainly don’t get to gatekeep who can apply for the guild.

Edit: Dropping slurs when someone compares your views to eugenics is an interesting strategy. Shouldn’t you be at a meetup discussing Curtis Yarvin’s work or something?

New comment by catgary in "If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it"

catgary — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:32:02 +0000

That stuff always gives me such a eugenics 2.0 vibe — no, no, the hierarchy is based on innate cognitive ability now. Gives me the creeps that they're actually in academia pushing that stuff.

New comment by catgary in "If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it"

catgary — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:22:39 +0000

Well you're just a generally rude person, aren't you.

New comment by catgary in "If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it"

catgary — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:02:55 +0000

That's far different than telling a math PhD whom you've never met that they hit their "abstraction ceiling" based on a 2/3 paragraph comment on hacker news. I'm sure you'd have said a similar thing to a young Grothendieck if he were describing his early struggles in graduate school. You're getting pushback because you were being rude and presumptuous.

New comment by catgary in "If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it"

catgary — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:30:55 +0000

> Since then I've had the chance, in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my "elders" and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more "gifted" than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle - while for myself I felt clumsy. even oafish, wandering painfully up a arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn ( so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end.

(Alexander Grothendieck, Recoltes et Semailles)

Amazing that he managed to keep going after hitting his abstract ceiling in graduate school.

New comment by catgary in "Deus Ex creator Warren Spector is retiring from game development"

catgary — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:23:35 +0000

Spector is 70 years old, that’s a pretty reasonable age for retirement?

New comment by catgary in "CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back"

catgary — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:53:25 +0000

This plus the zoom firing anecdote is basically confirming that Garg operates at a Cousin Greg level.

New comment by catgary in "CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back"

catgary — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:34:52 +0000

> Garg acknowledges he’s “hard-nosed” and the famous Zoom layoffs severely damaged the company’s reputation — a mistake he knows will continue to haunt him.

I really hope Garg is here reading this. It’s not just a mistake that will continue to haunt him, it’s all he’s ever going to be. It’s how he was introduced in this headline. It’s how he’ll be referred to when he starts his next venture. If newspapers publish his obituary someday, it’ll be in the first few sentences explaining why anyone knows his name.

New comment by catgary in "Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59"

catgary — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:51:36 +0000

I think, generally speaking, the decision to enforce a linter in CI/CD pipelines is well within a project lead’s or technical director’s purview, and there seems to be a pretty broad consensus that they add value, so they’ll almost always be in CI/CD pipelines. So just use the same linter locally and format on save so you catch any issues like your comment getting folded example.

New comment by catgary in "Now is the best time to be a duct tape engineer"

catgary — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:49:57 +0000

I think you should just focus on the road because most of us are just trying to get home safely to our families. Some of us are even biking beside the road on a lightly-protected bike lane.

New comment by catgary in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

catgary — Thu, 07 May 2026 02:46:52 +0000

Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.

New comment by catgary in "China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus"

catgary — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:49:57 +0000

I think you need to give some concrete examples, considering the US happily let its companies offshore a lot of work to China over the years, and Chinese funds own large chunks of American companies.

New comment by catgary in "Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'"

catgary — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:32:38 +0000

I’ve found they’re quite good when you’re higher in the compiler stack, where it’s essentially a game of translating MLIR dialects.

New comment by catgary in "Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents"

catgary — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:33:53 +0000

Because it doesn’t? Thats why the field of formal methods exists.

New comment by catgary in "Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents"

catgary — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:28:33 +0000

Because the code is the actual thing, tests can only show that the code fails in certain cases, they don’t actually prove the code is correct.

New comment by catgary in "Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents"

catgary — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:19:43 +0000

Generally speaking, I try to ensure that the LLM is using core abstractions throughout the codebase in a consistent manner. This makes it easier for me to review any changes it makes.

New comment by catgary in "Some uncomfortable truths about AI coding agents"

catgary — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:22:53 +0000

And even then - I still read the code it generates, and if I see a better way of doing something I just step in, write a partial solution, and then sketch out how the complete solution should work.

New comment by catgary in "Telnyx package compromised on PyPI"

catgary — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:00:26 +0000

This line of thought is honestly a bit silly - uv is just a package manager that actually does its job for resolving dependencies. You’re talking about a completely orthogonal problem.