Hacker News: importantbrian

New comment by importantbrian in "AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain"

importantbrian — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:12:12 +0000

I used to think I wasn’t very good at math, because I struggled to route memorize formulas and the like. Then I had a calculus professor in class that took a bunch of time explaining how to derive the formulas we were using and it unlocked everything for me. I’m much better at deriving from core principles than trying to remember a bunch of formulas and algorithms for solving problems.

New comment by importantbrian in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

importantbrian — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 03:44:59 +0000

For the US? No. The mandatory retirement age is 64. The fall of Saigon was 1975. So the youngest you could be to have served in Vietnam is 69. The last general with Vietnam experience retired in 2010.

New comment by importantbrian in "Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction"

importantbrian — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:08:04 +0000

I think we shot ourselves in the foot by calling machine learning AI for so many years and now calling LLMs AI. We have a bunch of non-technical folks in our company who are convinced if we just give them access to claude with a connection to the data that it can make all these predictions for them.

New comment by importantbrian in "The dead economy theory"

importantbrian — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:33:01 +0000

I recently had a similar discussion with my BIL who owns a construction business. He was saying he was glad he didn't have to worry about AI, because even if it automated everything about the business he'd still own it. I was like not so fast. In that situation access to capitol to pay for compute is going to be how businesses compete. Are you confident you're going to be able to have enough capitol to out compete the other businesses in your industry? Not to mention if AI and robotics get good enough why would I need to hire any construction company, let alone yours?

New comment by importantbrian in "I'd rather read the prompt"

importantbrian — Mon, 05 May 2025 19:52:04 +0000

I'm not sure this is entirely fair. When I was in college I genuinely enjoyed learning and now that I'm out of school I still spend time learning about the subjects of my major and minor in my free time, but this would have described me pretty well in school, "they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class." I love to learn, but something about being forced to do it makes me rebel against it.

In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.

New comment by importantbrian in "But what if I want a faster horse?"

importantbrian — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 16:54:22 +0000

For some reason I thought they had already dropped Star Trek when it all moved to Paramount+. That's how I watch Star Trek these days anyway. If all you watch is Star Trek it's probably worth switching, because Paramount+ is cheaper than Netflix.

New comment by importantbrian in "Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it"

importantbrian — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:41:23 +0000

I had a long winding road through academia. Went to a big selective R1 state school in a different state after high school. Had an existential crisis, moved back home with my parents and went to community college for a year, finished my undergrad at a large, less selective R2 and then did grad school at a large, very selective private R1. I would rank the quality of instruction:

1. Community College 2. Probably a tie between the R2 and grad school. However, that grad school focused a lot on grad students, so it's possible the undergraduate experience isn't quite as good. ... 3. After a very large drop off the R1 state school.

You obviously can't extrapolate too much from my personal experience, but it does seem to line up with man others.

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

importantbrian — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 23:18:48 +0000

They increased their defense spending because of Russia invading Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. It didn't have anything to do with US bullying. The biden administration certainly wasn't going around bullying Europe between 2021 and 2024.

New comment by importantbrian in "Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?"

importantbrian — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 15:43:44 +0000

Something similar to this actually happened to a friend of mine. His kid managed to buy a cheap burner phone with a prepaid data plan. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these things though. Just because you can't perfectly enforce a boundary doesn't mean you should give up and just not have boundaries.

New comment by importantbrian in "Learning not to trust the All-In podcast"

importantbrian — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 17:17:10 +0000

This is not how it works. The weighting is based on the Consumer Expenditure Survey. BLS does not arbitrarily assign the weights. If they change the weighting between butter and bread it's because they found that people were buying more bread in the CES not because they assume that's what will happen.

CPI's methodology is transparent and the data is available if you wish to reproduce it. They aren't playing games with the data. There are all kinds of reasons your personal inflation rate might differ from CPI but it's not because BLS is putting their thumb on the scale to try and show less inflation.

New comment by importantbrian in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

importantbrian — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 23:54:41 +0000

Sure I’ll pass your email along to her and see if she wants to do that.

New comment by importantbrian in "CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops"

importantbrian — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 16:52:38 +0000

Wife is a nurse. They eventually go 2 computers working for her unit. I don't think it impacted patients already being treated, but they couldn't get surgeries scheduled and no charting was being done. Some of the other floors were in complete shambles.

New comment by importantbrian in "Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]"

importantbrian — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 17:40:29 +0000

I think almost exclusively through inner monologue, and I find I can't speed read at all. If I'm not vocalizing I'm not thinking, so when I try to not vocalize in order to speed read I don't retain anything. It's like my brain is incapable of processing the words if they aren't being vocalized.

New comment by importantbrian in "Disney's robots use rockets to stick the landing"

importantbrian — Tue, 14 May 2024 15:31:18 +0000

I wonder if to get rid of the fans they could use a control moment gyroscope or reaction wheels.

New comment by importantbrian in "Show HN: Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun"

importantbrian — Thu, 09 May 2024 18:56:37 +0000

As someone who is not an academic myself, but likes to listen to podcasts where academics discuss issues with each other, I often find that the conversations feel contentious, and sometimes they are, but the vast majority of the time the academics themselves feel like they're having a perfectly cordial and productive conversation. So I do think there is something to the idea that academic discussion comes across as being negative.

New comment by importantbrian in "Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest"

importantbrian — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 16:52:20 +0000

Because the shareholders would most likely rather have X billion dollars from selling the company than 0 dollars from refusing to sell and getting banned.

New comment by importantbrian in "Epigenetic age oscillates during the day"

importantbrian — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 20:04:34 +0000

Yeah, that's been my experience. Everytime I see my primary my BP is elevated in the office and they send me home with a log and I have to take my BP multiple times a day for 2 weeks and at home it's fine, so I've never been put on meds for it even though it's very high in the office.

New comment by importantbrian in "Epigenetic age oscillates during the day"

importantbrian — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 20:01:57 +0000

I have really bad white-coat hypertension. Like 150-90 in the drs. office. So every time I go in they send me home with a chart and I have to dutifully record my blood pressure a couple of times a day for 2 weeks and send it back to them, and when measured at home it's totally fine.

Since I have the cuff I check it every so often to make sure it's still fine and it is, but the moment I get in a drs. office boom it spikes. This is even true when I'm there for someone else like my son or my wife. I can feel that my blood pressure is high.

I have absolutely no explanation for why except that I had a major surgery when I was 5 and there must be some suppressed trauma from that that comes out physically when I'm in a doctor's office.

New comment by importantbrian in "LLMs use a surprisingly simple mechanism to retrieve some stored knowledge"

importantbrian — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 16:06:02 +0000

Not to mention not everyone can be devoted to doing cancer research. Some Drs. and Nurses are necessary to you know actually treat the people who have cancer.

New comment by importantbrian in "The one about the web developer job market"

importantbrian — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 22:21:07 +0000

I think that probably depends on just how productive AGI is. AGI is fundamentally resource-constrained just like everything else. It can only do as much work as there is power and compute infrastructure to support that work, which means that AGI will tend to be allocated toward the tasks for which it provides the most value. There will likely still be tons of things where the AGI is better than a human being, but because the AGI resources are better spent elsewhere humans still end up doing those jobs. As long as the AGI is resource constrained comparative advantage will still come into play.

This has always been my head cannon for why you don't see more AGI in Star Trek. The computers in Star Trek clearly perform a lot of work and automation how else can you operate such a large and complex ship with such a small crew, but they don't have unlimited resources so the AIs perform the work where they are most valuable and humans do everything else.