Hacker News: greentimer

Video Call Website

greentimer — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 20:33:19 +0000

Article URL: https://chatcamnow.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46348138

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The Langlands Program, by ChatGPT [pdf]

greentimer — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 03:59:21 +0000

Article URL: https://timurvural.github.io/langlands2.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163671

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by greentimer in "Universal Summarizer"

greentimer — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 03:49:26 +0000

Idea: create a website that hosts the questions and responses from summarizers and language models on a webpage like StackOverflow. If Google implemented this it could save their business from ChatGPT.

New comment by greentimer in "Have we already been visited by aliens?"

greentimer — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 05:45:53 +0000

Worth noting that you can’t conclude time travel is impossible or irrelevant just because other people have. There could exist time travelers who secretly have control either of your life or the world with advanced technology (potentially up to the level of mind control chips) who are keeping the evidence from getting out.

New comment by greentimer in "Paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible"

greentimer — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 05:21:39 +0000

Mind Control

greentimer — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 19:31:50 +0000

Article URL: https://complexanalysis.wordpress.com/2020/10/07/mind-control/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24741255

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by greentimer in "The Right to Repair could help address a critical shortage in school computers"

greentimer — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 20:15:55 +0000

People who read this would probably be interested in one laptop per child, which was a nonprofit effort to provide $100 laptops to students throughout the third world. There is no need to buy cheaper used laptops when the laptops can just be manufactured more cheaply to begin with. A lot of what people are spending their money on is the software like that of the operating system which is not strictly necessary for young students. The actual components of a barebones computer are dirt cheap.

New comment by greentimer in "User's Kindle eBook collection revoked by Amazon (2012)"

greentimer — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 15:42:40 +0000

The lack of details make it tougher to side with the apparent victim here. I'd like to know whether she really did violate DRM in a meaningful way and the closure of her Kindle account was an appropriate response. I wouldn't go so far as the author and claim that DRM means you merely rent books from Amazon and they can be taken away at any time. This is likely something that affects a very small percentage of users and is like a freak accident when it happens, though according to radical skepticism, freak accidents may be much more likely than we intuit. However I agree that the response from the Amazon representative must have been very frustrating to receive and this would cause Amazon significant problems if the same thing happened to a large number of users. In the end I hope writing such articles about the problem helps resolve it before it does affect a large number of users.

New comment by greentimer in "2,000-year-old redwoods survive wildfire at California's oldest state park"

greentimer — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 15:28:49 +0000

Many commentators have blamed climate change for the fires because it is fashionable, especially on the left, to do so. The reality is that the very small change in temperatures produced by climate change isn't sufficient to produce a change in the rate of fires. We'll have to wait a long time for climate change to produce such effects, if it ever does. I would lay the blame more on our society's technological stagnation in terms of its inability to come up with better technologies than those that have existed since the 1950s to fit fires. We haven't buried our power lines, we don't have strategically positioned water storage systems, we don't have huge drones specifically for firefighting that could dump more water on the fires than an ordinary helicopter could.

I'd say this article barely meets HN's standards of something that garners intellectual interest and is more the type of thing I'd expect to see on Reddit alongside cat videos. And then of course there is the environmentalist bent that the redwoods of at most sentimental value were the important thing that burned down, rather than things of material value to people. I wonder if anyone ended up homeless as a result of the fires.

According to the theory of radical skepticism it is very tough to put a probability bound on supposedly low probability disasters like fires, and so we must be prepared for them.

New comment by greentimer in "Show HN: HyScale – An abstraction framework over Kubernetes"

greentimer — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 15:10:47 +0000

Kubernetes was released only 6 years ago so I'd imagine there is still a lot of legitimate evolution left in the ecosystem. I'd have to compliment you for choosing a project like this rather than something that had no chance of working because the ecosystems are completely set, like a new programming language. I believe there will be a distributional challenge for you in getting people to use this software. You can't pay for an advertising campaign. Maybe the most you can do is post on HN, but after that, people will forget about it. The fact that once it's used once in a GitHub project others will be forced to use it provides some hope. You say you want to be like JQuery over javascript. It may be worth it to you to figure out how JQuery solved their distributional challenge. Just as nobody needs to use JQuery, nobody will need to use your software, and there will be a strong temptation for people to bypass it and just use raw Kubernetes.

It is amazing the complexity of modern software projects like Kubernetes and I'd agree they have challenges in creating a simple interface that everyone will like while still getting the software to work consistently. According to the principle of radical skepticism it's amazing that anything so complex works at all.

New comment by greentimer in "How to Write in Plain English"

greentimer — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 14:37:38 +0000

"Most experts would agree that clear writing should have an average sentence length of 15 to 20 words."

This quote is so preposterous it almost made me want to stop reading the article. Different types of writing should have different sentence lengths. I'm quite sure the sentence length for a math textbook and a Clorox ad should be different. There's a reason it's not common practice to measure one's average sentence lengths.

Like most material written on language, this article says almost nothing and is basically filler. "Don't be afraid to give instructions". "Use lists where appropriate". Well of course we know we can give instructions! I recently read a famous book called "How to Read a Book" that in a similar vein struggled to find anything non-obvious to say about language. It just comes so naturally to people that it's difficult to comment on. This article is coming from an organization called the Plain English Campaign that's been around since 1979. I wonder what they can have claimed to have accomplished since then.

This article reminded me of arguments I always read in philosophy about tough subjects like radical skepticism where the authors fail to make any points beyond the obvious. Sure, certain knowledge is impossible for humans to attain, but can you say anything else!?

New comment by greentimer in "‘Better Yield on 5nm Than 7nm’: TSMC Update on Defect Rates for N5"

greentimer — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 14:22:14 +0000

It's slightly misleading to say that there were better yields for 5nm than 7nm because according to the graph in the article the yields have been almost exactly the same, maybe slightly lower. The article's assertion that the defect rate is a key metric seems dubious since it seems to have been roughly the same for the last three generations of chips and thus kind of a nonfactor. But in fact low yield rates were the reason Intel famously had to delay its 7nm processes. The fact that defect rates have been kept roughly constant seems to suggest they can go even further into 3nm processes, but this is the problem with extrapolating from graphs with too little data - at 3nm they'd run into very challenging physical limits and it's not clear we'll ever get a 3nm chip.

It is amazing to me that we can achieve such low defect rates on projects so complicated as highly brain-insecure sticks of meat that evolved to hunt and forage. Under the principle of radical skepticism the true defect rates could be much higher.

New comment by greentimer in "Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data"

greentimer — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 14:04:11 +0000

It would be quite interesting to know how this data is actually used on Amazon's servers. It reminds me of the criticisms of government data collection programs, that they just hoover up every bit of data that's available without actually knowing what to do with it. Suppose you train some AI to predict what pages in a book will be most engaging to the reader. Since your interface to the book is still just going to be something where people can turn the pages what are you actually going to do with that information? It's a massive sacrifice of the privacy of the user for small gains at best in getting insight into the user's behavior. I wouldn't be surprised if this information is sitting in a database somewhere at Amazon completely unused.

The philosophy of Amazon appears to be to do as much as possible in the hopes that one day it will be useful. This is at odds with the principle of philosophical skepticism, that because we can't be sure of the consequences of our actions we should strive to do as little as possible. The data could be hacked and leak out, for example. There is tremendous uncertainty around things like that.

New comment by greentimer in "Navy F/A-18 squadron commander's take on AI repeatedly beating real pilot"

greentimer — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 01:22:29 +0000

For all we know this kind of AI is much more advanced than we think, even up to AGI. All that needs to be true is that the AI has brain implanted us to make it look like nothing is happening.

New comment by greentimer in "Being OK with not being extraordinary"

greentimer — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:59:54 +0000

By the principle of Pyrrhonism, it's better to do as little as possible rather than try to accomplish a lot. Your brain could be damaged / controlled in a way that prevents you both from seeing the damage / control as well as other errors in your thinking. In a world with unbounded uncertainty on your own thoughts, it's best to do next to nothing.

New comment by greentimer in "An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra (2012)"

greentimer — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 23:36:50 +0000

Higher math involves a very different way of thinking from the typical, useful things people do for a living. Exactness is important. The abstractions can run very deep. It's easy to get lost in the pure side of things without really understanding how to apply it.