Hacker News: cgag

New comment by cgag in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"

cgag — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:44:07 +0000

Hmm, I wonder why the title of the article doesn’t say the lawsuit was dismissed or why.

New comment by cgag in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

cgag — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:56:11 +0000

I don’t have any problem with my name, and it feels manipulative and overfamiliar and I assume someone’s trying to Carnegie me into something if they use it.

Doc Rivers is an awesome name though.

New comment by cgag in "An ode to bzip"

cgag — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:30:31 +0000

This seems very cool. Was going to suggest submitting it, but I see there was a fairly popular thread 5 months ago for anyone interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492803

New comment by cgag in "Tinnitus Is Connected to Sleep"

cgag — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 16:20:23 +0000

Just moving my jaw doesn’t affect mine, but moving it to the side and flexing whatever muscles involved in that motion are definitely makes mine louder, just for a second.

I’ve always wondered if that implied there must theoretically be a way to cure or reduce it by reducing pressure in there through surgery or stretching or something. I’ve done a bunch of neck stretches in the past that I think mostly relieved my anxiety about it, but may have helped. My motivation to fix it has gone down a lot though as I’ve gotten used to it.

New comment by cgag in "I Want You to Understand Chicago"

cgag — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 20:49:22 +0000

A plumber working on my pipes is upset, his wages are suppressed by competition from illegals getting paid under the table, while his rent has skyrocketed, and his taxes are paying for his illegal competitors food and rent and healthcare.

New comment by cgag in "You can now disable all AI features in Zed"

cgag — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 17:05:23 +0000

Doing their own rendering is one of the most attractive things about it imo. I am on macos though.

New comment by cgag in "Has Brazil Invented the Future of Money?"

cgag — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 11:26:56 +0000

I thought it was supposed to solve the problem of being kicked out of the banking system if you offend the wrong people?

New comment by cgag in "Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)"

cgag — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 15:25:47 +0000

I wouldn't be surprised if there is something to it, but I suspected they didn't use legitimate coin flips (because it seems like a large amount of people can't really flip a coin), and looking at the videos confirms it, at least for the flips done by Bartos:

https://osf.io/6a5hy/

They're very low RPM and very low time in the air. Nothing I would accept for any decision worth flipping a coin for.

New comment by cgag in "Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency"

cgag — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 09:33:04 +0000

Have you seen this?

``` You will be given a name of an object (such as Car, Chair, Elephant) and a letter in the alphabet. Your goal is to first produce a 1-line description of how that object can be combined with the letter in an image (for example, for an elephant and the letter J, the trunk of the elephant can have a J shape, and for the letter A and a house, the house can have an A shape with the upper triangle of the A being the roof). Following the short description, please create SVG code to produce this (in the SVG use shapes like ellipses, triangles etc and polygons but try to defer from using quadratic curves). ```

``` Round 5: A car and the letter E. Description: The car has an E shape on its front bumper, with the horizontal lines of the E being lights and the vertical line being the license plate. ```

Image generated here: https://imgur.com/a/Ia4Q2h3

How does it "just" predict the letter E could be used in such a way to draw a car? How does it just text predict working SVG code that draws the car made out of basic shapes and the letter E?

I don't know how anyone could suggest there are no conceptual models embedded in there.

New comment by cgag in "1k True Fans (2008)"

cgag — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 22:51:29 +0000

My friend showed me a cool series of photography books he'd backed on Kickstarter called Vanishing Asia. Only after we'd finished flipping through them did I realize they were by Kevin Kelly. I just looked up the campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kk-org/vanishing-asia): 2,348 backers pledged $603,420 to help bring this project to life.

New comment by cgag in "How I learned French in 12 months (2020)"

cgag — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 16:58:25 +0000

I agree, and people should probably ignore advice from people who haven't reached it, unless they'd be content with being b2, which is a lower level than I think people realize.

New comment by cgag in "When do people learn languages? (2002)"

cgag — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 21:22:21 +0000

Anyone who learns enough vocabulary to be something resembling fluent (say, can comfortably watch tv shows or read books in that language), will be good at grammar far before they learn the 10k+ words they need to know. You can't consume enough of the language to acquire that kind of vocabulary and not have a decent intuition for the grammar.

I don't advocate ignoring grammar, but you really just need awareness of the basics, not to spend time doing drills or filling in blanks.

New comment by cgag in "Against Translation"

cgag — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 05:35:54 +0000

I feel like I once heard of Jay Rubin say something like, if you don't know japanese, you've never read a word of Murakami, you've read Rubin. I suppose it's obvious but it did make me stop and think about how distant japanese actually is from English.

I can't actually find any reference to him saying this though.

New comment by cgag in "What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week"

cgag — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 05:36:44 +0000

This post is making me wonder if I did something wrong, but I hated the low resolution in the quest 2 for programming when I tried it.

New comment by cgag in "Show HN: Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web"

cgag — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 13:31:40 +0000

I just always use let because it looks better. Const provides pretty much no value in js anyway.

New comment by cgag in "Changes at Basecamp"

cgag — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 05:16:49 +0000

What the hell is water?

People can't even see politics anymore they're so steeped in it.

New comment by cgag in "Errors in learning a foreign language, 2 years in"

cgag — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 18:44:36 +0000

I do think going through a basic textbook is important but imo they shouldn't be a part of your plan once you get through one or two. I learned all the rules of spanish grammar more or less in a few semesters in college, but it's just a stepping stone to help with getting tons of input. Like now that I've listened to hundreds of hours of spanish, i just get the subjunctive. Occasionally youtube will recommend me a youtube video explaining it and hearing the rules people throw around seem pretty useless. You hear them and think about them and go, huh, i guess that is true, but for learning I don't think it helps beyond having in the back of your mind as you consume the language, I wouldn't spend any time doing grammar drills or anything with them.

Something else people should keep in mind (i don't mean for this to apply to you, i just don't want to make a separate post) is that people will give you language learning advice and claim to speak a language when they can't watch tv, listen to podcasts, or read books in it. If you aspire to this kind of level (no judgement if you don't) do not listen to anyone who hasn't reached it.

New comment by cgag in "How and why I stopped buying new laptops"

cgag — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 00:33:36 +0000

Nice graph of syllables per second vs bits of information per second here:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/09/28/why-are-...

New comment by cgag in "Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence"

cgag — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 17:12:37 +0000

I guess you could frame being unwilling to go outside and/or exercise as a chronic illnesses in and of themselves, but otherwise I don't see how anyone would consider this plausible.

New comment by cgag in "One hour of slow breathing changed my life"

cgag — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 04:29:00 +0000

I suspect you learn less by doing nothing. This kind of advice is probably good for normal people, but the people who need it least seem to be the ones most paralyzed by it.