Hacker News: mashygpig

New comment by mashygpig in "The Ferrari of Espresso Machines Is Fueling a Hot Resale Market"

mashygpig — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:25:06 +0000

100%, I just don’t have an eye yet for commercial grinders :)

New comment by mashygpig in "The Ferrari of Espresso Machines Is Fueling a Hot Resale Market"

mashygpig — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:24:09 +0000

Totally, I meant no shade to LaMarzocco. They’re some of my favorite looking machines too :)

New comment by mashygpig in "Used La Marzocco machines are coveted by cafe owners and collectors"

mashygpig — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:00:34 +0000

In my anecdotal experience of reacting to “wow this espresso is good” it’s often been a Slayer machine. It’s been a rough indicator of where to get good coffee for me.

New comment by mashygpig in "AI Market Clarity"

mashygpig — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:34:38 +0000

I’m looking closely and I’m not seeing IP laws being relevant. Maybe regarding windows 11 keys? Can you elaborate?

I think the claim isn’t totally inaccurate. Claiming that companies prioritize making products last just beyond return windows because that maximizes profits is a critique of capitalism IMO. Since capitalism is about profit (capital) being the dominant signal as far as I understand it.

In my opinion, a lot of frustration about capitalism nowadays can be tied to Goodhart’s law. Profit being the measure and companies getting so efficient at optimizing it, that we’re starting to harm the things that profit is a proxy for.

New comment by mashygpig in "LLM Inevitabilism"

mashygpig — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 14:38:06 +0000

I don’t find it fair that you point out straw man in your parent comment and then use ad hominem in this comment. I would love to see you post some examples. I think you’d have a chance of persuading several readers to at least be more open minded.

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

mashygpig — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 01:31:20 +0000

I think a lot of people in tech unintentionally blind themselves to reality by obsessing over technology, and then thinking that is all that matters. It’s a behavior that is incentivized because it helps those with power utilize the tech-blind’s skills for their bidding.

New comment by mashygpig in "Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab"

mashygpig — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 19:37:55 +0000

Glad to see the UPL alive and well!

New comment by mashygpig in "The Bayesian Cringe (2021)"

mashygpig — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 04:20:44 +0000

It seems that there’s still unavoidable subjectivity in making the choice of prior distribution? I get how it’s objective for a fixed choice, but my understanding is that you need to first make that choice in order to be objective. Is it actually that making your choice of prior is obvious (or there is some objectively optimal way to pick a prior), which rules out any subjectivity in the choice of prior?

New comment by mashygpig in "A Single Small Map Is Enough for a Lifetime"

mashygpig — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 18:09:05 +0000

I think that could be a pretty interesting walk itself though!

New comment by mashygpig in "The Inner Ring (1944)"

mashygpig — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 01:07:16 +0000

The latter quarter of the article goes into depth about how one can accidentally find oneself in an inner ring, but it is through a wholesome pursuit and no ulterior motive. The other reply to this comment gets it write: people here like interacting with the things on HN.

In other words, to comment on HN does not mean you are striving to be in the inner circle.

New comment by mashygpig in "Ask HN: Which non-fiction books had the biggest impact on you?"

mashygpig — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 01:41:22 +0000

I’ll echo the Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan.

Recently, I finished the making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes. It’s quite long, but a fascinating view on physics, weapon development, and then the politics of the bomb. It’s a good exercise to compare with the current state of AI and see what things are similar and what are different.

New comment by mashygpig in "Ring attention with blockwise transformers for near-infinite context"

mashygpig — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 21:00:02 +0000

Sounds interesting, try it and share your results here :)

New comment by mashygpig in "The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge"

mashygpig — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 20:06:25 +0000

I thought of these as well while reading the article as they convey the fun aspects of archival visits well (I’ve done a bit of my own and really enjoyed the random “side quest” things you discover along the way).

If anyone else has recommendations for things like these (text or video) then I would love to see more!

New comment by mashygpig in "Do Machine Learning Models Memorize or Generalize?"

mashygpig — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 23:20:17 +0000

Yea, this is what’s really going on here and feels like it’s been shrouded in language to make it seem more grandiose. That being said, I would believe generalization to occur from minimum norm solutions in some sense, but whether that corresponds to minimum norm weights or not is a different question, and one you probably won’t know a priori (not to mention even knowing which norm to choose).

New comment by mashygpig in "How too much daydreaming affected me"

mashygpig — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 01:57:21 +0000

OP, have any doctors mentioned that it may be epilepsy? Seizures present in many ways and can sometimes be described as dreamlike experiences. Might be worth asking about.

New comment by mashygpig in "Have we lost our minds?"

mashygpig — Wed, 31 May 2023 03:05:02 +0000

I sympathize with the author’s (OP I believe based on the last name) feelings here and also find myself wanting to leave somethings not understood. Maybe we’ll be fortunate and it literally will be the case that some things always will be a mystery.

One thing I would like clarified: I don’t follow the refutation of epiphenomenalism. Is the intent that I can raise my hand only as a result of my conscious experience? Couldn’t one imagine instead a LLM hooked up to a robotic arm that also is trained to raise its hand it reaction to similar text? I feel like that or something similar would refute this. How can you say was is causal in sending the signals to raise the arm? Why can’t the conscious experience just be a theater?

What’s more weird to me about epiphenomenalism is that consciousness seems like it need not exist - if it performs no function than why bother with it? So why do we experience it? Sort of seems that its very existence implies that it should be more than just a theater.

I’m a total amateur about this, but would appreciate recommendations if anyone resonates with this.

New comment by mashygpig in "Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?"

mashygpig — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 23:05:19 +0000

Fascinating, thanks

New comment by mashygpig in "Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?"

mashygpig — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 20:33:54 +0000

> Here's a new trend happening these days. Upon releasing new non-fiction books to the general public, authors are simultaneously offering an LLM-based chatbot box where you can ask the book any question.

Can you link to an example?

New comment by mashygpig in "Shoshikantetsu"

mashygpig — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 16:45:23 +0000

Amusing to see this in the thread as, inspired by CGP Grey, my theme for the year is "be intentional" so this post particularly stood out to me.

New comment by mashygpig in "Americans lost a record $10.3B to online scammers last year, FBI says"

mashygpig — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 15:51:19 +0000

Get ready for the gpt powered scams that call your family members and use a text to speech model that mimics your voice because a few second snapshot of your voice is all that’s now needed to reasonably mimic you.

Maybe it’s too expensive to run right now for scammers, but just wait a few months or weeks for the open source models to shrink and improve!