Hacker News: odyssey7

New comment by odyssey7 in "Thinking will become a hobby"

odyssey7 — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:48:14 +0000

I would agree that research as a career in the United States is exceptionally broken.

New comment by odyssey7 in "Thinking will become a hobby"

odyssey7 — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:08:28 +0000

It’s already a hobby. Look at what it costs a person to do a PhD. The opportunity cost is even higher if you want to do research as a career.

New comment by odyssey7 in "AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity"

odyssey7 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:16:00 +0000

Or, for a more current and better developed discussion, Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator.

New comment by odyssey7 in "AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity"

odyssey7 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:44:00 +0000

It’s more to get you thinking about them, talking about them, writing on the internet about them…

New comment by odyssey7 in "DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why"

odyssey7 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:28:17 +0000

It was kind of fun doing this math back when I was a freelancer. An hour saved would literally produce more money than the order cost. But really, it would have been better to save the money by making food ahead of time.

New comment by odyssey7 in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead"

odyssey7 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:33:25 +0000

0 to 1 is part of why the first Curiosity cost so much. If they kept the technology alive in practice, launching a new one every year doesn’t sound unreasonable.

In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.

New comment by odyssey7 in "New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb"

odyssey7 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:56:39 +0000

Thanks

New comment by odyssey7 in "New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb"

odyssey7 — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:59:24 +0000

What is the physical limitation that prevents a very big metal detector from telling us if there’s gold or other signatures?

New comment by odyssey7 in "'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet"

odyssey7 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 18:01:48 +0000

Clearly wasn’t a “planet” — failed catastrophically at clearing its neighborhood. The Royal Astronomical Society should be ashamed for publishing something so un-scientific. /s

New comment by odyssey7 in "Security through obscurity is dead, and AI delivered the fatal blow"

odyssey7 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:49:02 +0000

An interesting consequence is that cybersecurity researchers and hackers are now AI researchers.

The prominent game right now is about the classes of attacks that AI can recognize both to exploit and to remedy.

Implicitly, that creates a new highly valuable class of vulnerabilities: the ones that AI for whatever reason is unable to readily see. Understanding those two groups will be paramount and will lead to better AI.

New comment by odyssey7 in "Great Lakes sturgeon may be 400 years old:Scientists rethinking how to save them"

odyssey7 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 17:53:19 +0000

I feel somewhat skeptical of the methods as they were superficially described in this article. Will need to read more later. However, I also have been aware of the demise of sturgeon and I really hope we will get to see their populations return.

New comment by odyssey7 in "The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative"

odyssey7 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:50:25 +0000

I hypothesize that with more people on a daily basis encountering information and claims that require those skills, there will be a time in the future when those skills are much more enhanced.

New comment by odyssey7 in "Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom"

odyssey7 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:55:03 +0000

Insightful. The title being more to distinguish than to describe.

New comment by odyssey7 in "Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom"

odyssey7 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:53:11 +0000

> learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go

A certain Amazon Web Services comes to mind…

New comment by odyssey7 in "Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom"

odyssey7 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:42:56 +0000

I’m sympathetic to this viewpoint, but most music students in the classroom will be playing instruments or singing rather than working in DAWs.

The instruments, music, and notation all evolved together in a shared tradition that make them well-suited for one another.

New comment by odyssey7 in "Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings"

odyssey7 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:15:25 +0000

> It's not science until it passes peer review.

We all know that science is about experiments and evidence whereas peer review is a social process.

Confusing science with peer review is very unscientific. Galileo’s work did not pass the dominant socio-scientific review process of his day and we all know how that turned out. Peer review serves a purpose but peer review is not science per se — unless, perhaps, your field is sociology, and you study the social processes of science practitioners, so that peer review outcomes are the evidence that you use to study those social processes.

New comment by odyssey7 in "Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings"

odyssey7 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 01:13:00 +0000

The pace of things is moving along so rapidly right now, I’m not sure that waiting for peer reviews is always a wise move. Doubly so if there’s a paywall; why limit your article’s impact by placing it where practitioners’ agents might not be able to access it? The rapid progress right now is challenging for conventional academic processes.

If the value of the paper is difficult to independently verify, for example, if it depends on the credibility of the author, then the academic ritual can add something. If it’s a mathematical result, one that can be automatically verified, or a machine learning technique that anyone can try with Claude code reconstructing it for them, this sort of pre-print publishing model is advantageous.

New comment by odyssey7 in "Music Theory for Programmers"

odyssey7 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:59:38 +0000

+1 on recommending Schoenberg. Harmonielehre is a philosophical work as much as it is a music theory treatise.

New comment by odyssey7 in "South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones"

odyssey7 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:52:10 +0000

If we figure out low-energy fusion for economical lab-origin gold, imagine what businesses would close if that were to happen.

The transmutations are possible, it’s just that the energy currently required is worth more than the gold would be. Colder fusion -> cheaper lab-origin gold.

New comment by odyssey7 in "Music Theory for Programmers"

odyssey7 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:18:31 +0000

All too true.

Something along these lines, people who would like to improve their musical abilities sometimes procrastinate by doing music theory instead. It's safe and it's introspective. And it's authoritative---a legitimate and difficult subject---so there's the potential to feel falsely reassured that you're not wasting time. In a sense, it avoids the more difficult act of creation. This seems to be especially more likely for those who would have wanted to write music.

I.e., "drink responsibly." Perhaps music theory classes should come with a warning label, like the Mirror of Erised. You can stare into it endlessly and produce nothing.