People keep saying this, and again and again I find it be false; a single session with Claude Opus is all it takes to debunk this, and yet people take it as given.

I have to wonder, have people drunk the vibe-coding cool-aid so much so that they are asserting the superiority of code they have never reviewed?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144373

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Apparently, they are a brand of speculoos cookies, and this Wikipedia synopsis is eye opening:

> speculaas [speːkyˈlaːs] ⓘ refers to the more traditional variant, made with a mix of various spices, which is nowadays most popular in the Netherlands; speculoos [speːkyˈloːs] ⓘ refers to a Belgian variant that omits the traditional spices in favour of caramelized sugar for flavour, and which is nowadays the most common variant in Belgium and worldwide

So the Belgians enshittified speculaas to create speculoos, pumping it full of sugar, and presented it to the world as something special.

FWIW I love modern design, and I hate all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.

None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.

I don't know, what are the possible effects of antibiotics? What are the possible effects of uprooting weeds, which some organisms may depend on? What are the possible harmful effects of putting out wildfires?

For every action that someone might think of as beneficial, there are all sorts of "harmful" effects that can be posited. In the examples above, these harms are not even just theoretical, and yet people do not constantly wring their hands worrying about wildfire fighting, weed control, or the proper use of antibiotics.

That this seems to happen only with mosquitoes seems quite weird to me, especially when it occurs even with efforts to reduce mosquitoes that spread malaria and other diseases. People are oddly very worried about some nebulous harm caused by reducing real and serious harm now.

It is not meaningful to allow every conceivable unknown unknown (to channel Rumsfeld) suck out any sense of agency.

Oh, the joys of living in a place with actual rule of law.

Here in my 3rd world country, people are free to annex land demarcated for streets that adjoin their property, without any real consequences, as long as it is not meant to be a major street.

Of course the top tier private hospital and specialists can be pretty expensive, but is not that expensive to avoid the public/government health system.

Same for optometrist/opticians. Always pushing me to get glasses. I know my vision would be better with glasses, but my vision has remained pretty good without them even into middle age; no need to fix what is not truly broken

It does not always work, but a lot of doctors in my experience take some time to kindly explain why they think the other possibilities I'm concerned about are unlikely, and sometimes my questions actually prompt them to add some additional investigations.

The advantage of the less developed countries is that you can get pretty good private medical care for a reasonably price. The quality may not match the very best care available in the rich countries, but in many cases, it is adequate.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50088541

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

But, might be more complete to say that complex numbers are two-dimensional numbers used to model a lot of different things. So simply saying they are two dimensional numbers only part of the explanation. To fully understand them, you need to consider the notion of a 2-d number fits the application area, and what it means in context.

For example, complex numbers can provide an elegant way to represent rotations, oscillations, waves, etc. making certain calculations much easier.

But complex numbers are also used to extend the real number system in a way that ensures every non-constant polynomial has a root. In that context, they aren't merely a convenient tool for representing two-dimensional phenomena; they help complete the number system itself in a mathematically precise sense.

And then there is quantum mechanics, where complex numbers play a fundamental role in the mathematical description of reality itself.

I guess what counts as a number is arguable. But -1 is a number, and yet it has two parts: the natural number, and the sign. Sqrt(2) is a number, and yet it cannot be written down exactly. It requires an algebraic representation.

Generally, I think we use the word "number" for mathematical objects that have some notions we associate with the natural number (which are what we most intuitively understand as numbers), like ordering, summation, a notion of zero, etc. Complex numbers do not have all of these, but they have enough that we consider them numbers.

Another way to think of this: most of these non-natural numbers arose as a way of being able to represent results of basic operations on natural numbers, that are not themselves natural numbers. These results could sometimes be operated on further to yield a natural number again. But if we did not invent new numbers for these, these result were not easily expressible, and led to gaps in our math frameworks. In fact, a lot of math progress was hampered by not recognizing these numbers, and progress followed once they were recognized. And the reason we call them numbers is that they arise from basic algebraic operations on natural numbers.

More than that, it cannot go beyond a certain level. Like a dog that can only do dog-level actions. I've lost count of the number of times I step back, take a critical look at what it has been hacking away at for hours, which would seem OK, but can be replaced by a much more effective architecture.

For the foreseeable future, a human is still very much needed in the driver's seat.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034324

Points: 2

# Comments: 0