Hacker News: defterGoose

New comment by defterGoose in "A graph that should be front-page news"

defterGoose — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:04:17 +0000

Forgot the /s tag

New comment by defterGoose in "NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say"

defterGoose — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:42:39 +0000

What a hilariously fact- and understanding-free piece of ragebait.

New comment by defterGoose in "Why Can't California Count?"

defterGoose — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:35:45 +0000

...and if you had actually seen our ballot for this primary, you'd know that anyone with a semblance of care to know who they were voting for and why constituted veritable weeks of legwork. The governor's race had like 60 people running, not to mention all the judge seats, etc.

New comment by defterGoose in "Why Can't California Count?"

defterGoose — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:33:35 +0000

You mail in your credit card payments? My bullshit detector is absolutely pegged right now.

New comment by defterGoose in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

defterGoose — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:28:05 +0000

As someone who took both a 4 year latin curriculum and a year of koine Greek in HS: unqualified no.

Really wish I were fluent in Spanish or Japanese or really anything spoken.

New comment by defterGoose in "What killed the Florida orange?"

defterGoose — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:11:08 +0000

You got a bad/dry one. Happens all the time with home grown and less frequently with commercial products. My backyard trees have improved, but only with fairly intensive upkeep.

The flavor coming right off the tree can be truly candy-like given optimal conditions. After tasting the best ones from my own tree, I had the revelation that so many things that are "orange flavored" are mimicking navels specifically.

New comment by defterGoose in "What killed the Florida orange?"

defterGoose — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:41:36 +0000

I'll pick a bone on the flavor comment because a good Washington Navel is probably one of the best tasting oranges in existence.

New comment by defterGoose in "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness"

defterGoose — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:33:38 +0000

It's the pervasive theme in the book, but never really given a conceptual grounding further than "this sort of looks like recursion or can be modelled circularly so it's a strange loop". The vagueness of it reveals itself as being "more intuitive", because a vaguer pattern will have more matches. I don't remember Hofstadter digressing on whether these loops work "in reverse" either, which is sort of what the author here is denying. Basically positing that f doesn't have a well-defined inverse.

New comment by defterGoose in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

defterGoose — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:46:29 +0000

It's only a little bit comforting that computers still live in meatspace when you consider something like an AI-controlled Metal Gear roaming around though.

New comment by defterGoose in "Trump says U.S. operation captured Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro"

defterGoose — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 11:02:34 +0000

I see it's still the season of perpetual hope wherever you are...

New comment by defterGoose in "Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer"

defterGoose — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:44:55 +0000

Yeah, but there's nothing like some sweet, sweet justification.

New comment by defterGoose in "My thoughts on renting versus buying"

defterGoose — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 01:13:03 +0000

The author disclaims that he's not a homeowner at the very end of the article, but these types of pieces steelmanning renting always read to me as thinly veiled pleas of "please exit the market so I can have more".

New comment by defterGoose in "Launch HN: Societies.io (YC W25) – AI simulations of your target audience"

defterGoose — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:53:55 +0000

Someone must have a wild-ass theorem about whether or not consciousness is representable as some distribution over possible realities. But yeah, I agree this feels like taking a huge step towards fewer and fewer people having agency in their own (real) lives.

I'm certain Big [insert industry] will gobble this kind of thing up.

New comment by defterGoose in "Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden"

defterGoose — Mon, 19 May 2025 18:33:26 +0000

Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.

New comment by defterGoose in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)"

defterGoose — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 17:34:47 +0000

I would love to have such a model tell me how to prune my fruit trees as they grow up. Should be a fairly straightforward supervised problem with the right front end for the graph generation.

New comment by defterGoose in "The long-awaited Friend Compound laws in California"

defterGoose — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 01:05:53 +0000

That's what a Bungalow Court is all about. They're kind of a dying breed, but have previously been very popular here in LA County.

New comment by defterGoose in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

defterGoose — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 18:06:04 +0000

Totally a mischaracterization. On one hand an imperfect crisis response, on the other hand, a brazen, unforced error.

New comment by defterGoose in "The Intelligence Age"

defterGoose — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 15:51:19 +0000

|such intelligence isn't really a bottleneck today.

Yep, pretty much agree. As soon as I see LLMs start solving millennium problems one after another I might change my tune.

The bottleneck is much more likely to be people unwilling to quit hoarding economic potential in the form of money.

New comment by defterGoose in "The Intelligence Age"

defterGoose — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 15:42:12 +0000

Everyone's life will be better than anyone's life is now? That is some impressively breathless optimism.

I dunno Sam, groceries have gotten awfully expensive.

New comment by defterGoose in "Five Most Productive Years: What Happened and What's Next"

defterGoose — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 16:02:35 +0000

> Back in 1979, for example, I’d invented the idea of transformations for symbolic expressions as a foundation for computational language.

Right, so math then. You invented math.