Hacker News: dayvigo

New comment by dayvigo in "As an experienced LLM user, I don't use generative LLMs often"

dayvigo — Mon, 05 May 2025 22:22:15 +0000

There's also an argument that developers of new software, including libraries, should consider making an earnest attempt to do The Right Thing instead of re-implementing old, flawed designs and APIs for familiarity's sake. We have enough regression to the mean already.

The more LLMs are entrenched and required, the less we're able to do The Right Thing in the future. Time will be frozen, and we'll be stuck with the current mean forever. LLMs are notoriously bad at understanding anything that isn't mappable in some way to pre-existing constructs.

> for no especially good reason

That's a major qualifier.

New comment by dayvigo in "How to live an intellectually rich life"

dayvigo — Fri, 02 May 2025 20:16:39 +0000

It's common enough that there's a well-known term for it: workaholic.

New comment by dayvigo in "The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)"

dayvigo — Fri, 02 May 2025 19:19:43 +0000

Sure, lambda calculus is math. To call assembly or typical imperative C math, at least in the same sense, is a bit of a stretch.

New comment by dayvigo in "Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten"

dayvigo — Fri, 02 May 2025 06:20:40 +0000

No, the pathology of Parkinson's Disease is dopaminergic dysfunction (the symptoms coming from this happening in the area relevant to planning movements, separate from areas that influence emotion or reward), usually driven by loss of dopamine-producing neurons. This is well-described by decades of research and tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers.

New comment by dayvigo in "Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten"

dayvigo — Fri, 02 May 2025 06:07:11 +0000

No, activity and expression are always local. Exclusively. There are no global levers.

New comment by dayvigo in "Dropbox will require App Indicator support on Linux"

dayvigo — Thu, 01 May 2025 08:04:06 +0000

One has to be deliberately obtuse to pretend to not see how ridiculous it is to make having a third-party application that shows little icons in the corner of the screen a hard requirement for a cloud file sync application.

I use Linux and don't have a taskbar, a topbar, a sysbar, nor anything similar. I've never seen the need for one when I can manage my windows in other ways and have more screen real estate available. What does that have to do with syncing my files?

New comment by dayvigo in "U.S. Economy Contracts at 0.3% Rate in First Quarter"

dayvigo — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 16:45:23 +0000

If 1929 was a minor pain, then what's a major pain?

New comment by dayvigo in "Retailers will soon have only about 7 weeks of full inventories left"

dayvigo — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 16:38:57 +0000

AGI which will lead to ASI is going to happen before 2030, and the US is going to lose because of tariffs. Thinking in terms of decades rather than years will be a fatal mistake.

New comment by dayvigo in "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]"

dayvigo — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:14:04 +0000

It absolutely is a good idea. User-controlled smart automated filtering of outside content is clearly the future. Not sure why you're being downvoted.

New comment by dayvigo in "Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney"

dayvigo — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 06:43:55 +0000

Conservatives are the most prominent and dangerous de-bankers. It is well known that Mormons have a lot of power the payment processor world, and censor content they find offensive to their religion, using concerns about fraud and chargebacks as mere convenient excuses.

New comment by dayvigo in "Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)"

dayvigo — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:50:57 +0000

> To rephrase crudely: "inline everything".

Sounds a lot like what Forth does.

New comment by dayvigo in "Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)"

dayvigo — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:49:26 +0000

The other commenter asked about why J, but I want to more specifically ask, why did you choose J over K? I can't decide which to learn.

New comment by dayvigo in "A Love Letter to People Who Believe in People"

dayvigo — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:38:56 +0000

> I can't doubt that I want to eat a doughnut or that I want to be healthy or that I want a world with less cruelty in it.

The common case of the smoker (or someone around them) doubting whether they "really" want to quit cigarettes or not, after claiming they do want to quit and will quit, and then failing to do so, shows this is coherent though. It's just not applicable to the two examples you gave, because that's not what is meant.

New comment by dayvigo in "Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)"

dayvigo — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 20:01:41 +0000

>If you can manage to fluidly update your DSL design along the way, it might work

Forth and Smalltalks are good for this. Self even more so. Hidden gems.

New comment by dayvigo in "They made computers behave like annoying salesmen"

dayvigo — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 21:30:18 +0000

I'm not sure anyone who finds it difficult to write values to file and read from them later should be working on commercial software. I genuinely struggle to think of any single feature that could be more trivial than this is.

New comment by dayvigo in "They made computers behave like annoying salesmen"

dayvigo — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 19:02:51 +0000

No, I mean the developer publishes under a pseudonym, and said developer can use Tor if needed to hide their tracks so they can't be served legally, as no one knows who they are in real life. Joe Public isn't risking going to prison or being sued to bankruptcy because they downloaded some random YouTube client, so they don't have to use Tor.

New comment by dayvigo in "They made computers behave like annoying salesmen"

dayvigo — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:58:36 +0000

That works great for the one you already have, how would you discover future "I can't live without this" good videos if you stop using YouTube?

New comment by dayvigo in "They made computers behave like annoying salesmen"

dayvigo — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:51:30 +0000

One can publish their client/frontend pseudonymously, using Tor if necessary. Not like one is gonna profit off it anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

New comment by dayvigo in "Can we still recover the right to be left alone?"

dayvigo — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 20:21:41 +0000

Are witness protection programs a form of "censorship?"

We all agree the answer is no, I would hope. It follows that you are not affording this topic a proper level of nuance.

New comment by dayvigo in "Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature"

dayvigo — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 21:23:08 +0000

Sure. But how do you write that in a way that is expressive, terse, and readable all at once? Nothing beats x | y | z or (-> x y z). The speed of both writing and reading (and comprehending), the sheer simplicity, is what makes pipelining useful in the first place.