Hacker News: mjd

New comment by mjd in "Archive of Our Own"

mjd — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:55:06 +0000

I suppose it won't help to point out to you that it's fiction, none of it actually happened, no person was ever hurt, and this is nowhere close to ”free speech absolutism”.

New comment by mjd in "Everything is going wrong for Muhammad bin Salman"

mjd — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:55:14 +0000

Yes, but a democracy isn't stuck with the moron until he dies.

New comment by mjd in "How to be more ambitious: A tutorial for humans with models"

mjd — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:12:14 +0000

“Work out which three decisions are most urgent” sounds like it is inviting horribly embarrassing mistakes. What will you do if, in three months, it transpires that Claude overlooked an obviously urgent decision, and you didn't notice because you didn't actually analyze or even look at the data?

New comment by mjd in "Serverless Horrors $10,811.41"

mjd — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 19:36:56 +0000

“laws against providing cloud services without a fee cap” really sounds to me like something that could and should be fixed by the market.

New comment by mjd in "Mosquitoes Are a Choice"

mjd — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:17:21 +0000

I agree with the GP comment, but your framing of this as “convenience” mininizes the possible gains.

Malaria still kills 600,000 people a year. A person who loses their child to malaria is not “inconvenienced”.

New comment by mjd in "I'm the AGI that's wiping out humanity"

mjd — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:13:55 +0000

The end reminds me strongly of Ted Chiang's remark that Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.

New comment by mjd in "L-systems generate weevils, pizza toppings, and matriarchal lineages"

mjd — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:24:05 +0000

Let that be a warning to the rest of you.

New comment by mjd in "Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict"

mjd — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 08:59:30 +0000

What is the source of your knowledge of French FOI law? Are you already familiar with this topic?

New comment by mjd in "Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict"

mjd — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 08:57:40 +0000

The project was begun in 2017 and the suit was filed in 2019.

New comment by mjd in "Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines"

mjd — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 02:22:52 +0000

For those not familiar with it already, the writing and art style are a well-executed pastiche of Arnold Lobel's ”Frog and Toad” books.

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

New comment by mjd in "Muse.ai gets me kicked off fb marketplace"

mjd — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:10:04 +0000

But their record of failing to protect data is rock-solid!

New comment by mjd in "Seven books I keep close because I love them"

mjd — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 13:27:37 +0000

One fun thing about Decameron is that because it's 100 short stories, you can pretty much pick it up anywhere, read a couple, then put it down again. It doesn't require a giant time commitment.

Each day's stories have a theme, so pick a theme that sounds interesting. Except the tenth story on each day is not on the theme, it's told by Dioneo, and it's usually more or less dirty.

There are definitely a couple of those stories that are adapted in The Little Hours. For example, the one about the guy who gets work in the nuns' garden by pretending to be deaf and dumb, and the nuns quickly see the advantages of having a guy around who can't tell tales.

New comment by mjd in "Bin Laden's "Letter to America""

mjd — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 21:19:12 +0000

I guess this was written in the early 2000s, while OBL was hiding in Afghanistan?

New comment by mjd in "Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?"

mjd — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:19:01 +0000

Short answer: no.

Interesting nevertheless.

New comment by mjd in "Seven books I keep close because I love them"

mjd — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 13:38:16 +0000

You don't think it would be parting the Red Sea?

New comment by mjd in "The Origin of Consciousness (2008)"

mjd — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:26:12 +0000

The comment said that Jaynes's theory was that consciousness historically arose after writing, not that writing or literacy is necessary for individual consciousness.

New comment by mjd in "The Origin of Consciousness (2008)"

mjd — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:32:59 +0000

That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically.

You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.

New comment by mjd in "The Origin of Consciousness (2008)"

mjd — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:31:24 +0000

It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan.

I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.

New comment by mjd in "Seven books I keep close because I love them"

mjd — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 13:36:43 +0000

Incidentally, Ibn Battutah was on the at-my-elbow shelf for quite a while. The elbow shelf is not a static collection. Things move on, then they move off again, as Roget 8th edition did recently.

You've got me thinking that it might be nice to get a translation of _Līlāvatī_ by Bhaskara II to put there. Thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%ABl%C4%81vat%C4%AB

New comment by mjd in "Seven books I keep close because I love them"

mjd — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 04:14:39 +0000

Since you asked, I took a survey around the office. I have the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the one edited by Wallis Budge. I have a Chinese translating dictionary, a Chinese etymological dictionary, and a Hawai'ian dictionary. I have the Yasmine Seale translation of the Thousand and One Nights. I have the Travels of Ibn Battutah. I have Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography. I have a book by Ichisada Miyazaki about the history of the infamous civil service examinations in China. There's a book of poetry by Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah and Weinberger's little book comparing 19 translations of the same poem by Wang Wei. I have "Erotic Art of the East" by Rawson, an illustrated edition of the Rubaiyat, and a history of Iran by someone named Axworthy. I have a couple of books about pedagogy by A. Ya. Khinchin, who was Soviet Russian; I don't know whether you'd consider that "Western".

Of those, only the Thousand and One Nights and the Book of the Dead are anything like canonical. But of the seven I talked about in the article, only the Bible and the Decameron are canonical. I wouldn't have mentioned the dictionaries, except that one of the books in the original article was a thesaurus.

But most of the books I keep in the office are technical (lots of mathematics) or are more or less contemporary Western fiction.

I think some people might see my reading habits as those of a dilettante with a lack of serious focus, and I don't think I would care to dispute that. As I said, my brain is full of stuff, and and what's in it doesn't always make sense or go together with the other stuff.