Hacker News: johngossman

New comment by johngossman in "The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft"

johngossman — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:22:15 +0000

Look, I understand. There is a ton of low-value writing in the world: legal boilerplate, press releases, most documentation. That writing can and will be replaced or supplemented by AI. But look up cognitive offloading. It doesn't take centuries of research to show evidence for that, and in fact the benefits of writing for thinking have been known long before AI writing became available (the alternative being just talking or thinking without writing).

New comment by johngossman in "The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft"

johngossman — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 16:54:34 +0000

Sorry but I think this essay is largely wrong. First, there is tons of evidence that working your thoughts on paper, word by word, helps develop the idea and exercises the brain. Secondly, in other endeavors we have defined clear lines between human and machine labor: chess computers are banned from human tournaments; race cars and bicycles are not allowed in footraces. And while I am very sympathetic to the advantages of AI writing for the impaired and non-native speakers, we make allowances all the time for this today: handicapped parking, special sporting events, and allowing dyslexics more time on written exams for example. The existence of these does not justify parking in a handicapped spot when you don't need it.

From the title, I expected a different argument, that it's going to be increasingly difficult to determine. Many people have demonstrated that careful prompting can already produce prose that passes as human, and this will only increase as models get better and inevitably are trained to bypass checkers. Maybe someday we'll have novel-writing rooms where, like grandmasters coming into a tournament, the writers must relinquish all their digital tools at the door. Because it's difficult to imagine any other system that will guarantee human authenticity.

New comment by johngossman in "A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese"

johngossman — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:34:33 +0000

Fun. I studied Japanese for two years, let it slide and now every Kanji is like "Hmmm, I've seen that before but..." I can still read kana though, which is nice to know.

How to Choose a Translation of the Odyssey

johngossman — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:16:41 +0000

Article URL: https://gossmanster.substack.com/p/how-to-choose-a-translation-of-the

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48848342

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by johngossman in "Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe"

johngossman — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 13:06:54 +0000

I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into true and false. It's a bit like saying the purpose of programming is to have a bunch of unit tests.

New comment by johngossman in "Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI"

johngossman — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:03:19 +0000

Ironic that you should question if the commenter talks to regular people and then cite people who work on laptops from the coffee shop, use Slack etc.

New comment by johngossman in "It is an amazing time for programmers"

johngossman — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:37:24 +0000

They wrote a lot of letters to each other. That's effectively how the Royal Society started, as the formalization of a network of letter writers

New comment by johngossman in "The dead economy theory"

johngossman — Sat, 30 May 2026 04:48:47 +0000

According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.

One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications.

New comment by johngossman in "The dead economy theory"

johngossman — Sat, 30 May 2026 01:30:59 +0000

Lots of serious historians disagree. There are whole books on the topic. Here's just one paper as an example

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demograph...

New comment by johngossman in "Do teachers need advanced degrees?"

johngossman — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:50:18 +0000

Fwiw, in 1900 my grandfather taught school in Washington State. He was 16 years old.

I don't know how good he was, just saying it wasn't so long ago.

New comment by johngossman in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

johngossman — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:12:16 +0000

Go look at the demographics of the last election and then tell me which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote.

New comment by johngossman in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

johngossman — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:38:11 +0000

Wait...aren't you quoting the Boomers from the 60s?

New comment by johngossman in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

johngossman — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:43:50 +0000

If only the olds would die we could build more datacenters!

More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change?

New comment by johngossman in "What makes a good smartphone camera?"

johngossman — Thu, 07 May 2026 06:05:34 +0000

"The default setting on phones is to save storage by only using 12 megapixels, so unless you've changed settings, the 200 megapixel phone loses 94% of its megapixels as soon as you press the shutter. Bad deal!"

The final picture is the result of digital processing of the 200 megapixels, which is quite different from losing the data, all other things being the same. His point is right, but this paragraph isn't worthy of the rest of the essay.

New comment by johngossman in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

johngossman — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:46:42 +0000

Welcome to my rathole: Venetian history. To expand on your thesis, the Council of Ten was the executive power in Venice, but the Doge and minor council attended the Council of Ten meetings and the Doge often chaired those meetings. And even if he was powerless, the Council was made up of other old men. I don't want to push this whole argument, I'm not recommending we adopt the Venetian constitution. But I don't think you can blame current chaos on age.

New comment by johngossman in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

johngossman — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:39:33 +0000

Average is probably not what you need to worry about: I'd bet David Attenborough and Mel Brooks still have IQs considerably higher than the average 25-year old. And I'm not convinced IQ is as important as that elusive factor called character.

But you may be right. Maybe what the US really needs is a lagoon.

New comment by johngossman in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

johngossman — Thu, 07 May 2026 01:59:07 +0000

While I mostly agree...

Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.

Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.

New comment by johngossman in "Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American"

johngossman — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:18:45 +0000

Businesses are risk averse and in the current environment they are all looking to secure their supply chains, whether to reduce their dependence on silicon from Taiwan, oil from the strait of Hormuz, or digital services from the United States. I think you are also underestimating the power of regulation. Not all European businesses have to be all-in for Mistral (or another alternative) to survive. This is one reason so many countries still have domestic defense, aerospace, and even automobile companies.

New comment by johngossman in "An amateur historian's favorite books about the Silk Road"

johngossman — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:45:31 +0000

While I generally do not trust information from "advertisements", in this case I don't see how this is any worse than including a list of sources in the bibliography. What this could be is an attempt to use those other books to sell the author's through some reflected glory (or SEO-fu) but in that case, the author is still incentivized to recommend good books.

New comment by johngossman in "An amateur historian's favorite books about the Silk Road"

johngossman — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:33:31 +0000

Good list. It does not include "Silk Roads" by Frankopan, which I agree with. That's a good read but much more a history of world trade (hence the plural) and strangely western-centric. I saw strangely because in the introduction Frankopan says he wanted to write a history from the point of view on central Asia, but its not that at all. Dalyrymple's "Golden Road" succeeds at Frankopan's objective and I found it much better in general. I don't want to sound too negative on "Silk Roads" but I think the title is subtly misleading if you want to learn about the trade general referred to as the Silk Road.