Hacker News: nomadpenguin

New comment by nomadpenguin in "U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective"

nomadpenguin — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:44:41 +0000

Is that even a conspiracy? It's well documented how closely the military works with Hollywood -- of course government apparatuses are interested in funding media that aligns with their goals.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"

nomadpenguin — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:11:21 +0000

It's a genuinely fascist tendency. Only the elite few are "real people" who think. Everyone else is irrelevant, democracy is a failed experiment, wealth = worth, etc etc etc

New comment by nomadpenguin in "AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region"

nomadpenguin — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:53:48 +0000

Yeah, this smells very fishy to me. It's almost trivially easy to gather a small validation dataset in humans for the paper. At my institution, it's about $800 an hour to scan someone. You can probably get enough data to validate the model with a half hour scan. Surely the group has enough grant funding to pop a few healthy controls in the scanner.

I haven't looked in super close detail to the paper, but their methods section says that they fit a video model (V-JEPA2) to the fMRI dataset in a voxelwise ridge regression, meaning that the baked in assumption is that the visual response affects each voxel independently. Voxelwise models are very nice for making statistical inferences, but are less good for prediction and modelling tasks, because our brains certainly do not work as collections of independent regions.

BOLD is intensely messy data, and their design is far too simple IMO to reflect anything of reality.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Can A.I. produce writing that we want to read?"

nomadpenguin — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:55:05 +0000

For me, the biggest AI writing tell (other than the blatantly obvious ones) is an unnatural consistency in style, whatever style that may be. It's most apparent in longer pieces, and I'm not sure I can really pin down exactly what it is. But human writers seem to lack the ability to keep a 100% consistent voice and lapse into different registers at different times. LLMs don't have this natural rhythm, which makes for an exhausting reading experience.

Writing as an Iterative Cybernetic Process

nomadpenguin — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:02:58 +0000

Article URL: https://shudhana.substack.com/p/writing-as-an-iterative-cybernetic

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314622

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"

nomadpenguin — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:43:47 +0000

The Cincinnati Zoo covered all their parking lots with solar panels last year. Your car stays cool in the summer, and there's motion activated lighting under the panels after dark. It's awesome.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Adenosine on the common path of rapid antidepressant action: The coffee paradox"

nomadpenguin — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 20:58:23 +0000

"Genetically encoded" is the appropriate term here -- it was used in the original journal article. It's a common industry term in neuroscience research. For example, GEVIs and GECIs are "genetically encoded voltage indicator" and "genetically encoded calcium indicator" respectively. "Genetically encoded adenosine sensor" here is a term of art.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Being poor vs. being broke"

nomadpenguin — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 21:26:41 +0000

> I have over 14 years of education in developed countries, and out of those, maybe 1 year combined meaningfully helped me in my jobs/career in terms of skills.

I think you're underestimating the effect of 14 years of daily training in literacy and numeracy.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)"

nomadpenguin — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:46:39 +0000

I believe Macrofactor has had these features for quite a while now.

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

nomadpenguin — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 01:07:27 +0000

I think Buddhism still (arguably rightly) doesn't sit entirely well with non-religious Westerners. I have studied with a Zen Sangha and transmitted teachers on and off for a bit and have found their explanations helpful. However, it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion. You can write them off as skillful means, but in some ways I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and dieties.

Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "'World Models,' an old idea in AI, mount a comeback"

nomadpenguin — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:54:16 +0000

There are specialized architectures (the Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine)* that are able to complete this kind of task. Interestingly, once trained, their activations look strikingly similar to place and grid cells in real brains. The team were also able to show (in a separate paper) that the TEM is mathematically equivalent to a transformer.

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything"

nomadpenguin — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:35:14 +0000

As Freud said, there is no negation in the unconscious.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Recovering from AI addiction"

nomadpenguin — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:45:42 +0000

He also believes that he can remember full memories from when he was 3 months old. There is no evidence that this is possible.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Spaced repetition systems have gotten better"

nomadpenguin — Sun, 18 May 2025 19:16:44 +0000

How are you handling scheduling with FSRS? The challenge that I quickly saw was that it was difficult to figure out when you should advance a segment of information. If you get 80% of the info right, should it be advanced? What happens to the 20% you missed? How do you prevent yourself from missing the same 20% every time it comes around?

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Spaced repetition systems have gotten better"

nomadpenguin — Sun, 18 May 2025 14:36:06 +0000

Poor generalization (overtraining on prompts) and loss of context over time are the biggest issues I've found with them. Slow card creation workflows and needing to rate your own reviews are merely UX issues -- losing context and losing generalization make SRS actively harmful when used for some topics.

There's 2 solutions I've thought of but haven't tried implementing:

1. A free-recall based approach. Free recall allows you to operate at a higher level of organization and connect concepts at lower levels. However, how you would schedule SRS with free recall is not clear.

2. Have an LLM generate questions on-the-fly so that you don't overtrain on prompts. You might also instruct the LLM to create questions that connect multiple concepts together. The problem with this approach is that LLMs are still not so good at creating good test questions.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

nomadpenguin — Fri, 16 May 2025 11:50:09 +0000

Yes, that is true. I phrased that badly -- it's more that we didn't take the evolutionary branch where we retain the fetal hemoglobin because it is maladaptive in adults.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

nomadpenguin — Thu, 15 May 2025 22:17:14 +0000

High affinity RBCs would actually be a disadvantage for athletics. You actually don't need very high affinity to pick up oxygen from the lungs -- your lungs are comparatively extremely high in oxygen. What matters more is being able to drop the oxygen off in peripheral tissues. Higher affinity means that it's harder to actually deliver the oxygen, which is why we evolutionarily developed the switch away from fetal hemoglobin.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria found in technician's garden"

nomadpenguin — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 17:53:11 +0000

This is correct, it's called empiric treatment. If a patient comes in with altered mental status and neck rigidity, you don't have time to take a lumbar puncture and culture bacteria. I don't know anything about phage treatment, but from what the other commenter said, it seems like then you'd have to do some sort of PCR test as well. You simply don't have time for any of that -- your only choice is to blast them with vancomycin + ceftriaxone.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Grok3 Launch [video]"

nomadpenguin — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:51:39 +0000

You're using two en dashes to approximate it -- few people have the en dash character on hand.

New comment by nomadpenguin in "Rethinking addiction as a chronic brain disease"

nomadpenguin — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 14:48:33 +0000

> No amount of willpower or happy thoughts will cause your hormones or neurotransmitter levels into the homeostasis you want.

Behavioral-only therapies are effective, even if they're not as effective as we'd like. We have the ability to modulate our own chemistry.