Hacker News: monktastic1

New comment by monktastic1 in "What Is a Centipawn Advantage?"

monktastic1 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 19:14:31 +0000

Yes, this is a huge omission, because it means that as engines improve, the stated advantage becomes increasingly meaningless to humans (which is the opposite of what we may intuitively expect).

What I really want to know as a player is how easy it will be for me to win from this position against someone of my opponent's strength, which is admittedly a very hard thing to define, let alone compute.

New comment by monktastic1 in "How will the miracle happen today?"

monktastic1 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:36:21 +0000

I think you're misreading the comment you're responding to. Its parent comment said that life can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you choose to look. They responded by asking whether the word "curse" is appropriate if it can be changed based only on perspective.

New comment by monktastic1 in "How will the miracle happen today?"

monktastic1 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:30:48 +0000

Indelible, probably -- though I admit that both trying to eat and trying to delete that passage failed. (I jest -- "impossible to forget," of course.)

New comment by monktastic1 in "14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal"

monktastic1 — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:05:01 +0000

Your account seems relatively new, so you might be unfamiliar with the rule to be charitable here. If you'd like to be snarky and lower the bar for discourse, Reddit is a much better place to do that (though ideally it would be kept out of public spaces altogether).

New comment by monktastic1 in "Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself"

monktastic1 — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 19:51:51 +0000

Huh, I would guess there's a different mechanism at work. In my experience, movies playing on TV during the holidays tend not to get people's deep, persistent, undivided attention.

New comment by monktastic1 in "We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness"

monktastic1 — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 16:43:54 +0000

My assumption here is that FAANG employees are not fundamentally different from the rest of the populace along that particular dimension (desire to inflate lifestyle). I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it. Of course many do not have that choice.

And yes, I agree with your second paragraph. "The culture" celebrates it — but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches. We all participate in our own little ways — and the more of us that step off the treadmill, the less those messages find footing, in a virtuous cycle. Again, it's not about blame. But for those of us who have the capacity and desire to decondition ourselves, it's very much worth doing. It can affect the feedback loop more powerfully than we think.

New comment by monktastic1 in "We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness"

monktastic1 — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 16:10:23 +0000

Perhaps "retire" is the wrong word. One can still work (whether for pay or not) and improve the lives of the people around them without staying on the consumption treadmill. Very few actually do. Again, this isn't meant as a judgement — it's just highlighting that we each have a role to play in slowing down this insane freight train.

New comment by monktastic1 in "We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness"

monktastic1 — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 15:25:51 +0000

I wouldn't be so quick to divide the world so neatly into victims and perpetrators. Every FAANG engineer I know, for example, could easily retire by mid-40s by keeping consumption in check. Instead, nearly every single one chose instead to "improve their lifestyles." Not blaming them, either, because it's cultural programming -- but until we all learn to slow down a bit and reflect, the madness isn't going to stop.

New comment by monktastic1 in "Perfume reviews"

monktastic1 — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 02:36:01 +0000

Right, each county is coextensive with one borough: Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, Bronx, New York (Manhattan), and Richmond (Staten Island).

New comment by monktastic1 in "NIST ion clock sets new record for most accurate clock"

monktastic1 — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:13:19 +0000

I see. Thanks for the added context; that's much clearer.

New comment by monktastic1 in "NIST ion clock sets new record for most accurate clock"

monktastic1 — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 17:47:07 +0000

If this were true, then why even bother to make atomic clocks? Why would an article about the "most accurate clock" be interesting to smart people like HN readers if there's no objective measure of accuracy (or if it didn't matter)? The correct answer is in a sibling comment to yours: we base it on other things we know (or believe, anyway) to be constant.

New comment by monktastic1 in "YouTube's new anti-adblock measures"

monktastic1 — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 16:45:58 +0000

It being "nice" does not negate the fact that there's no way to pay for _only_ ad removal.

New comment by monktastic1 in "US Army Appoints Palantir, Meta, OpenAI Execs as Lt. Colonels"

monktastic1 — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:32:50 +0000

BUD/S /s.

New comment by monktastic1 in "Proofs Without Words"

monktastic1 — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 15:50:44 +0000

> Yeah, I don’t get how you distinguish between a correct visual proof and a visual proof that looks right but doesn’t actually prove what it’s trying to prove.

This problem exists not only for visual proofs, but for standard written ones too.

New comment by monktastic1 in "Supreme Court allows DOGE to access social security data"

monktastic1 — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 23:40:56 +0000

> a government department

Looks like the propaganda worked. DOGE is not a "government department" and there is very little visibility into how it's run.

New comment by monktastic1 in "Reality Check"

monktastic1 — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 23:06:01 +0000

Like o3, which hallucinates more (as I learned from this piece)? https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/18/openais-new-reasoning-ai-m...

New comment by monktastic1 in "Watching o3 model sweat over a Paul Morphy mate-in-2"

monktastic1 — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 18:20:38 +0000

A little annoying that they use zero instead of o, but yeah.

New comment by monktastic1 in "Street address errors in Google Maps"

monktastic1 — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 02:31:44 +0000

Ha, I was in charge of data quality for Google Maps going on 15 years ago. Addresses were hard then, and I'm sure they're hard now. Alas, Google didn't want to invest in keeping this data high quality — a fact to which I actually owe my first promotion at the company (since taking over Maps data quality was a job that nobody else particularly wanted — nor did they want to move to Seattle, where Google wanted the team — but it still gave a lot of room for impact).

Sometimes I dream of going back, but the culture has changed too much (and not for the better, I hear).

New comment by monktastic1 in "Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance"

monktastic1 — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:43:13 +0000

I think it depends on the self-awareness of the user. It's easy to slip into the mode of conflating an LLM with a conscious being, but with enough metacognition one can keep them separate. Then, in the same way that walking on concrete doesn't make me more willing to walk on a living creature, neither does my way of speaking to an LLM bleed into human interactions.

That said, I often still enjoy practicing kindness with LLMs, especially when I get frustrated with them.

New comment by monktastic1 in "Let's Ban Billboards"

monktastic1 — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:43:54 +0000

Huh, could have fooled me. My first experience of Austin was long stretches of ugly billboards (I think mostly on Burnet and N Lamar), and despite living here for years that first impression never left. Now that I think about it, without some kind of ban of course there would be way more billboards where I now live.