Hacker News: giraffe_lady

New comment by giraffe_lady in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

giraffe_lady — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:32:54 +0000

Oh, well you should have said that then.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

giraffe_lady — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:40:10 +0000

"These arguments may be correct but they aren't novel" ??

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Haunting Photos Show the Aftermath of the Kursk Submarine Disaster in 2000"

giraffe_lady — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:20:35 +0000

It's stereotypical now but I remember at the time this was taken as a kind of confirmation that russia had been coasting on and also neglecting a lot of the soviet-era infrastructure. It's hard to reflect back now but in 2000 the soviet collapse was recent memory and the role and effectiveness of its successor was an open question, internationally.

I do remember that in the 90s the "russia understanders" were split into two camps: now that russia is free of the shackles of communism it will step into its destiny as supreme global superpower vs the soviet system was actually quite effective at large scale mundane infrastructure & logistics in a way the russian federation isn't.

By 2000 the weight of evidence was already fairly strong for the second view but this disaster, and especially their response to it, really settled the matter. This is how I remember feeling about it all anyway.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Haunting Photos Show the Aftermath of the Kursk Submarine Disaster in 2000"

giraffe_lady — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:10:41 +0000

Being able to look at a full actual likeness of a person who is dead is incomprehensibly novel to human experience. It has never stopped giving me chills.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet"

giraffe_lady — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:11:22 +0000

Peaked at about half the food produced internally iirc and it’s like three people. It’s a good and necessary start but shows just how incredibly far we are from the real deal.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet"

giraffe_lady — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:23:01 +0000

We have never, even as a proof of concept, been able to develop a closed system capable of supporting mammalian life separate from earth's ecosystems. We assume it's possible based on no particularly rigorous evidence and in spite of our numerous failures to even come close. "Mars as backup" is not a credible plan based on science within even our optimistic grasp.

The technology & social systems capable of doing this would be incredibly valuable long before any permanent mars settlement became feasible so if we can do it we should and then we can see.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

giraffe_lady — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:22:55 +0000

Nah it's good. It shows exactly how far you can get with just a modest understanding of what strategy actually is at the level of nation states plus publicly available facts from the news.

Especially in the heavily jingoistic american context, where all of the focus is implicitly on the military means and technology and execution, but people have lost sight of, maybe can not even state plainly, what the point of a military is, what considerations are part of deciding to use it to accomplish a goal.

If you're going to accomplish a strategic goal with a military action, that goal had better be achievable through military action and this one plainly isn't. A historian can see it, a blogger can see it, a programmer can see it. Why wasn't it seen by people whose job is ostensibly to see it?

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Too Much Color"

giraffe_lady — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:27:32 +0000

Something I think about often is an oliver sacks book about an ethnic group that has a particularly high rate of true monochromacy. And the people with no color perception at all are particularly adept at spotting certain plants based on some characteristic of their leaves that is obscured by color. So even removing information can change perception in surprising ways.

OTOH sacks seems to have fabricated a lot of shit over the years so who knows if this is even real. Another thing I think about a lot now.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Too Much Color"

giraffe_lady — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:20:27 +0000

It depends on something about your screen at least. I first did it on a low quality monitor and it made the line between the two obvious even if I couldn't tell the colors apart. The "hard mode" one was impossible on that screen however.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "The Soul of a Pedicab Driver"

giraffe_lady — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:12:18 +0000

It seems to me that a significant point of the article is that this is a choice you're continuously making, not an immutable fact about you.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

giraffe_lady — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:03:49 +0000

People mostly lose their jobs and suffer through no failure they were positioned to avoid, and often through no fault of their own at all. Spending your career chasing fads out of fear of being abandoned to penury is at least as limiting as mere conservatism towards new technologies. The risk is real and the fear is valid but that isn't the solution, no individual action you can take is the solution.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

giraffe_lady — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:59:45 +0000

Some might call that learning from our mistakes.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

giraffe_lady — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:17:07 +0000

Are you saying you believe the cop who said, under oath, he "doesn't know" whether his wife could be having an affair with afroman chose to do that as part of a deliberate legal strategy? And that you think this casts him in a more positive light than merely being clueless?

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

giraffe_lady — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:57:46 +0000

It's a small county with an extreme minority of black people, like a couple hundred or less. It's quite likely he had personally encountered some of these officers before, and almost certain they knew who he was. Within the realm of possibility he saw something like this coming. Small rural sheriff depts are astoundingly corrupt.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

giraffe_lady — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:41:59 +0000

He is a seasoned professional at this. He was respected in the diss track game in his day, he definitely understands the boundaries of defamation. And what has long been known in rap in newspapers: even if you're right it's not worth it to be on the stand defending defamation. "It's average size your honor."

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Oil nears $110 a barrel after gas field strike"

giraffe_lady — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:48:11 +0000

Any effective defensive weapon is an offensive weapon, in that it allows you to commit other resources to offense, or defend against a retaliation in response to an escalating offense on your part.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "FDA links raw cheese to outbreak; Makers "100% disagree," refuse recall"

giraffe_lady — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:55:20 +0000

Yeah sorry I was a little careless there. For the cheeses we were sourcing it didn't matter, and for most of the raw milk cheeses they are done that way out of tradition and because the process is reliably safe enough.

For some unwashed aged cheeses it does truly seem to matter but those the production is so closely tied up with the local agriculture, aging in specific natural conditions etc it's really not a process to try to emulate in your cheddar at your dairy that averages an outbreak every 18 months like the one in the article.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "FDA links raw cheese to outbreak; Makers "100% disagree," refuse recall"

giraffe_lady — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:10:29 +0000

There's almost no discernible difference between unhomogenized pasteurized milk and raw milk, both tasted directly and in the final cheese. As a working chef* I had to be taught to detect the difference, and now that I'm not doing it regularly I doubt I even could.

* at the time at a michelin star restaurant, not to brag but because the finesse of my palate is directly relevant and likely to be called into question.

New comment by giraffe_lady in "Bubble Sorted Amen Break"

giraffe_lady — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:29:50 +0000

yes, What Is to Be Done?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done

New comment by giraffe_lady in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

giraffe_lady — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:55:32 +0000

In at least the US and EU but probably elsewhere, the asset categories of banks are tightly regulated as well. They can have transient ownership of anything but there are hard limits on what portion of their assets can be indefinitely tied up in nonbanking businesses that they are operating on their own behalf.