Hacker News: elmomle

New comment by elmomle in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

elmomle — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:35:42 +0000

It has been discussed for generations, but unsurprisingly the people with the megaphones don't tend to promote that angle.

https://inist.org/library/1982-03-21.Illich.Silence%20is%20a...

New comment by elmomle in "Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers"

elmomle — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:41:45 +0000

Let's take the work of Raymond Carver as just one example. He would type drafts which would go through repeated iteration with a massive amount of hand-written markup, revision and excision by his editor.

To really recreate his writing style, you would need the notes he started with for himself, the drafts that never even made it to his editor, the drafts that did make to the editor, all the edits made, and the final product, all properly sequenced and encoded as data.

In theory, one could munge this data and train an LLM and it would probably get significantly better at writing terse prose where there are actually coherent, deep things going on in the underlying story (more generally, this is complicated by the fact that many authors intentionally destroy notes so their work can stand on its own--and this gives them another reason to do so). But until that's done, you're going to get LLMs replicating style without the deep cohesion that makes such writing rewarding to read.

New comment by elmomle in "Revealed: UK's multibillion AI drive is built on 'phantom investments'"

elmomle — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:14:09 +0000

Yeah, parent post to yours is sensationalist astroturf garbage. Russian troll accounts call Zelenskyy a NarcoFührer.

New comment by elmomle in "Stories from 25 Years of Software Development"

elmomle — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 18:36:51 +0000

Like many people in the working world, he likely knew his company's policy but did not consider it important to know the reason, only to stand by the policy.

New comment by elmomle in "Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments"

elmomle — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 03:04:26 +0000

Your links are for the inaugural (first) ball in December 2011; OP's text referred to a second annual ball in December 2012.

New comment by elmomle in "Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction"

elmomle — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 01:52:44 +0000

It's not a linear relationship where you trade one for the other. You don't just get a more competent government by giving up freedoms.

New comment by elmomle in "Who owns Rudolph's nose?"

elmomle — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 03:13:23 +0000

Didn't realize this was such a niche idea that you'd be downvoted. I don't think anybody really benefits when a child or grandchild coasts through life on the basis of their ancestor's success.

New comment by elmomle in "Dude, where's my supersonic jet?"

elmomle — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:34:06 +0000

Honestly it sounds like the "right" way to do it would be electric ground vehicles pulling the planes into position, as with tugboats in water. Plane never need carry batteries into the sky and saves a literal ton of fuel.

New comment by elmomle in "Lessons from 14 years at Google"

elmomle — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 03:24:09 +0000

That's a highly idealized view that I hope we can agree doesn't completely jive with what we see in society today. If a small number of shareholders reap all the profits, the vast majority of the benefit from automation flows to them, and it's even possible for the lives of average people to get worse as automation increases, as average people then have less leverage over those who own the companies.

New comment by elmomle in "New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care"

elmomle — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:55:25 +0000

To paraphrase Harville Hendrix, we are wounded in relationship and we heal in relationship. Compassion is a feeling, not a thought. I don't think a galaxy of LLMs would ever discover the precepts of Buddhism (or psychology) on their own.

New comment by elmomle in "Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory"

elmomle — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:59:57 +0000

That's a fair point. I suspect that to one outside the field, their touting major breakthroughs while trying to conceal that their first model was a distillation may cause a sense of skepticism as to the quality of their research. From what I've gathered, their research actually has added meaningfully to understandings of optimal model scaling and faster training.

New comment by elmomle in "Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory"

elmomle — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:41:03 +0000

Your comment seems to imply "these views aren't valid" without any evidence for that claim. Of course the theft claim was a strong one to make without evidence too. So, to that point--it's pretty widely accepted as fact that DeepSeek was at its core a distillation of ChatGPT. The question is whether that counts as theft. As to evidence, to my knowledge it's a combination of circumstantial factors which add up to paint a pretty damning picture:

(1) Large-scale exfiltration of data from ChatGPT when DeepSeek was being developed, and which Microsoft linked to DeepSeek

(2) DeepSeek's claim of training a cutting-edge LLM using a fraction of the compute that is typically needed, without providing a plausible, reproducible method

(3) Early DeepSeek coming up with near-identical answers to ChatGPT--e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1idqi7p/deepseek_a...

New comment by elmomle in "Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions"

elmomle — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 23:45:06 +0000

If you were looking to buy a house right now, you'd be looking at a bunch of options that are worse than what you currently have. You experience this as lock-in but in reality the "problem" is just that you have something significantly better than anything you (or others) can find on the market right now. And of course that's actually a fantastic boon.

New comment by elmomle in "Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain"

elmomle — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 16:02:49 +0000

The statement "there is evidence of black swans" does not justify the conclusion "every swan is black".

New comment by elmomle in "Nine things I learned in ninety years"

elmomle — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 21:49:11 +0000

Right now I'm reading As It Is by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (if you don't have previous experience with Buddhism I'd recommend starting with something broader like Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, and find yourself a Buddhist meditation group!), and Self-Therapy by Jay Earley. Something else very much written for an intellectually-oriented audience but that gives inklings of a ladder into non-intellectual being, is Unwinding Anxiety by Judson A. Brewer. I liked it at the time, though I found I needed more help practicing the things that that book suggests, which led me deeper into Buddhism and eventually towards Dzogchen.

I wouldn't recommend How to Win Friends and Influence People, it is all about fine-tuning behavior to make a better impression on people, and that doesn't sound like the heart of the issue you described. The heart of that issue _could_ be that one clings to mind-concepts rather than trusting the whole being and feeling a connection with the universe. If so, one must slowly learn to trust the felt experience of life, to know that gut feelings and open-heartedness are just as important as thoughts (moreso in many respects), to trust that one can relax one's whole being and be carried by an infinite love within. It is a gradual progression.

New comment by elmomle in "Nine things I learned in ninety years"

elmomle — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 15:45:08 +0000

It's really essential that one have (1) down (to be self-constituted) down in order for (3) not to lead to a circle of confusion. If I feel very assured in my own relationship with the universe, that doesn't depend on how anybody else sees me, and my security does not depend on others being happy with me. And when I don't need to make anybody happy, connection and compassion arise naturally from a place of curiosity--there are feelings of abundance and security underlying it rather than confusion or anxiety.

That sounds simple but the self-constitution part takes years of serious searching and work; some things (good therapists, good meditation teachers, good books, consistent practice, etc.) help the journey along, but there is no quick route.

New comment by elmomle in "The link between trauma, drug use, and our search to feel better"

elmomle — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 18:41:23 +0000

Do you think another term is more appropriate to describe the experiences underlying CPTSD? It's now quite broadly recognized that its effect on the psyche is severe and if anything broader in impact and more difficult to heal than acute trauma.

New comment by elmomle in "OS Yamato lets your data fade away"

elmomle — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 03:27:00 +0000

Or: this is a system that forces mindful consideration of notes, photos, etc. If you want them to persist, you must at least look at them once a year. No dusty boxes in the attic.

New comment by elmomle in "Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library"

elmomle — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 01:15:50 +0000

Also reflected in Vedic/Hindu philosophy: conscious experience (cetanā) arises from the interfacing of ātman (the immaterial self / soul) with śarīra (the physical body).

New comment by elmomle in "The fish kick may be the fastest subsurface swim stroke yet (2015)"

elmomle — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 18:40:02 +0000

Or more simply (and with fewer alterations to how swimming competitions work today), just have a couple of unused lanes on the outside of the pool.