Hacker News: gaussiandistro

New comment by gaussiandistro in "AI Is Like a Crappy Consultant"

gaussiandistro — Tue, 13 May 2025 14:15:29 +0000

From Wikipedia: Computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former AI leader at Tesla, introduced the term vibe coding in February 2025.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding)

New comment by gaussiandistro in "Canoeing on the Danube"

gaussiandistro — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 07:53:19 +0000

Some other great adventures canoeing on the Danube: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11438/pg11438-images.ht...

New comment by gaussiandistro in "How I ship projects at big tech companies"

gaussiandistro — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 11:05:14 +0000

A human can't survive without somehow exploiting the resources in their environment, at minimum you need a certain amount of baseline calories from either harvesting or hunting food. Do you think there is a square inch of arable land, areas suitable for livestock, or regions with plentiful wild fruits and animals, which is not currently claimed by some existing power structure who already claims exclusive rights over the exploitation of those resources and with whom you would need to negotiate with in order to access?

The issue isn't merely that you give up the benefits of modernity, the issue is that industrialized states and corporations have spent the last 200 or so years claiming every resource in the world as their property- that's why you see living off the grid as being in a "mud hut" or something, the resources left unclaimed are the ones that weren't valuable enough for someone to snag them already!

New comment by gaussiandistro in "Care Doesn't Scale"

gaussiandistro — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 12:03:31 +0000

So, maybe interesting in the context of "creating scalable structures of aid and care", one of the big points I think that makes scaling hard is how much complexity gets pushed onto a central administrator. You have societies like certain Basque communities (see https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... ) where households are literally arranged in circular patterns, and there are obligations of care and service between you and your "first neighbor", "second neighbor", and so on, chains of dependencies moving clockwise and counterclockwise through the circle, allowing a potentially very large structure that still allows you to mostly interact with a small number of "near neighbors".

Quoting directly from the article:

"THE GIVING OF BREAD

Until the 1960’s, a fundamental circular exchange was the giving of blessed bread. Each household regards its neighbor to the right as its first neighbor

(The directions right and left are as viewed from the center of the circle so that right is clockwise and left is counterclockwise.)

The giving of bread took place weekly and was thought of as being given from first neighbor to first neighbor. That is, each Sunday a woman from one particular household, call it H_i, bought two loaves of bread to the church where it was blessed and partially used in a church ritual. Then, before sunset, a portion of the bread was given by H_i to her first neighbor, namely to H_{i+ 1}. The following week H_{i+1} was the bread-giver and H_{i+2} the bread-receiver. Thus, the giving (and receiving) of bread moved around the circle serially, taking about two years to complete one cycle of about 100 households. While each household was both a giver and receiver of bread, this mode differs from simple reciprocity; only if there were a total of two households would H_i and H_{i+1} directly reciprocate as each other’s first neighbor."