Hacker News: rsaarelm

New comment by rsaarelm in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

rsaarelm — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:57:13 +0000

It's also funny how Finland has a concept of "thermic spring", which is defined by the temperature no longer dipping below 0° C, and the term doesn't exist in English because the definition wouldn't work in the climate of most of the English-speaking world.

New comment by rsaarelm in "An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters"

rsaarelm — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 04:58:21 +0000

It's helpful to tell people that they are in uncharted territory and can't rely on running on autopilot even if you don't have a new map to give them. Whether they can make their way or not is unclear, but the first step is just making sure they understand that they're now in a place where they need to make their own way and can't fully rely on existing maps. Otherwise they might not even realize they need to start asking "am I doing the right thing right now" by themselves.

Investigating an LLM generated C compiler

rsaarelm — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 07:40:40 +0000

Article URL: https://shape-of-code.com/2026/02/22/investigating-an-llm-generated-c-compiler/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119248

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Cosmologically Unique IDs

rsaarelm — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 07:49:56 +0000

Article URL: https://jasonfantl.com/posts/Universal-Unique-IDs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012551

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The Anthropic Hive Mind

rsaarelm — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 12:04:54 +0000

Article URL: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-anthropic-hive-mind-d01f768f3d7b

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911828

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

New comment by rsaarelm in "Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog"

rsaarelm — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 08:56:03 +0000

Archive.today does not seem to have worked for people connecting from Finland since mid-January, it just gives an endless captcha loop. Is this related to whatever this drama is?

New comment by rsaarelm in "Basic Social Skills Guide"

rsaarelm — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 07:06:50 +0000

There is a true asymmetry that's avoided by the anodyne "everyone needs to think about these things" talk. If you take a group of 20 people from your country chosen completely at random, some people are likely to find things being similar with themselves and several people in this group, no matter which group was picked, and other people are likely to find little in similar between themselves and the group for most of the groups.

Social skills instruction is often about how to get along with averaged random groups like this. The first sort of person might find it as useful know-how for a thing they already find agreeable. The second sort of person might not find the initial situation agreeable at all, so the instruction gets the implicit added bit of "first of all, you need to not be yourself".

New comment by rsaarelm in "Basic Social Skills Guide"

rsaarelm — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:53:35 +0000

> Mostly true actually. If this was not so, the world would look like a daycare without supervision. Just a bunch of primal feelings and violence.

The inner self isn't just an id, it's your goals, interests, values and ways of thinking too. And the social fitness script is that you should only have acceptable goals and interests and acceptable ways of talking about them. Talking about wanting to buy a nice house and a sports car, good. Talking about wanting to beat the speedrun record for Mario 64 and how you've figured out a CPU glitch to use for it, keep it to yourself. "Let's agree to disagree", good, "let's sketch a causal model graph of this and plug in our guesses for priors to see where we get different intuitions", no.

New comment by rsaarelm in "Basic Social Skills Guide"

rsaarelm — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 14:45:38 +0000

> Thinking about the things you say isn't faking it - it's just using your brain and being considerate.

I guess what gets me with this stuff is that there are multiple things going on that are getting conflated. Considering your words is pretty straightforwardly good, it's learning to not say things you yourself wouldn't have wanted to say.

But then this stuff tends to show up in the context of work, or business, and it starts turning into selling. You are the seller, the other people are buyers. Buyers have no expectations on them, they react as they react and they want what they want. The seller must contort themselves to please the buyer and then close a sale to get one over the buyer. And this is where it gets corrosive for me. It feels like there's no common ground being built, the relationship is adversarial in both directions, and both sides are a bad model for a person to be. People are being split into feckless buyers who express immediate wants and judgments with no thought or development, and conniving sellers whose main order of business is to get themselves in front of the buyer and get noticed, no matter what the real value of what they are offering is. People might make money if they internalize this system and get good at it, but are they going to make lasting friends?

New comment by rsaarelm in "Basic Social Skills Guide"

rsaarelm — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 10:01:44 +0000

> Fake it till you make it.

What are you trying to make though? You're pretending to want the same things the people you think you need to fit in with want, but if you don't actually want those things, what point is there to be in a competition to get them?

New comment by rsaarelm in "Basic Social Skills Guide"

rsaarelm — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:27:36 +0000

Sometimes people already are like something and don't want to change it or feel like they could change it, but also don't get along being like they are. This is more awkward to think about than just treating them as damaged or incomplete people who would get around to becoming people who can fit in fine once the damage is fixed or the incomplete development is completed, because it's harder to see good solutions.

New comment by rsaarelm in "Basic Social Skills Guide"

rsaarelm — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:09:22 +0000

Mask every day. Life goal: Be 100% artificial person. All openings and responses must be calculated and faked. Your inner self is faulty and not appropriate at any situation. Once you train and work hard enough to suppress it at all times forever, you may be accepted and allowed to participate.

New comment by rsaarelm in "Greek Woman Divorces Husband After ChatGPT 'Predicted' He Would Cheat on Her"

rsaarelm — Sat, 03 May 2025 04:40:16 +0000

English has the idiom "reading the tea leaves". Elsewhere in Europe it's "reading the coffee grounds", eg. "kahvinporoista katsominen" in Finnish.

New comment by rsaarelm in "'Once in a Century' Proof Settles Math's Kakeya Conjecture"

rsaarelm — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 12:23:12 +0000

I think OP is thinking about covering the sphere of directions in 3D space, not just directions in a 2D plane. No matter how hard you spin the pencil, you're drawing a one-dimensional curve that has no area, so any finite amount you draw will cover zero percent of the area of the two-dimensional sphere surface.

New comment by rsaarelm in "Out of Africa: celebrating 100 years of human-origins research"

rsaarelm — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 08:52:00 +0000

> They always assume their race (or gender) will end up on top - probably just coincidence! I always wonder what they'll say about research that turns out otherwise.

They go "hey, cool, we can get a paper out of this" https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jb...

New comment by rsaarelm in "Steve Meretzky – Working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker's Guide"

rsaarelm — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 04:38:30 +0000

The Z-code images are up on IFDB: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4h62dvooeg9ajtfa

You can click the "play online" link or download the image and play locally with an interpreter like frotz.

New comment by rsaarelm in "Ask HN: Which blog platform is suitable for personal blogging?"

rsaarelm — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 12:57:01 +0000

Static site generation and Github pages. Start with the Jekyll generator Github supports out of the box and roll your own if you need something it doesn't provide.

New comment by rsaarelm in "The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)"

rsaarelm — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 11:06:53 +0000

Someone with IQ 160 might have trouble empathizing with what IQ 100 people find convincing or compelling and not do that well with an average IQ 100 population. What if they were dealing with an average IQ 145 population that might be much closer to being on the same wavelength with them to begin with and tried to do social coordination now?

New comment by rsaarelm in "The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)"

rsaarelm — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:16:36 +0000

Yes, because you need to spend a lot of time doing social organization and thinking about it to get very good at it, just like you need to spend a lot of time doing math or science and thinking about it to get very good at it. And then you need to pick up patterns, respond well to unexpected situations and come up with creative solutions on top of that, which requires intelligence. If you look at the people who are the best at doing complex political organization, they'll probably all have above-average intelligence.

New comment by rsaarelm in "The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)"

rsaarelm — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 09:40:39 +0000

Why will it never be? If the adequate intelligence is what something like 0.1 % of the populace naturally has, seems like there's a pretty big difference between that level of intelligence being stuck at 0.1 % of the populace and it being available from virtual assistants that can be mass-produced and distributed to literally everyone on Earth.