Hacker News: shanusmagnus

New comment by shanusmagnus in "NetHack 5.0.0"

shanusmagnus — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:43:15 +0000

This is going to seem either beyond idiotic (which it may be) or a troll (which it is not) but: is this game actually fun? Like, if you have zero nostalgia or anything, and your evaluation of it is based solely on what it is, is it something a person in their 20s would want to play? Is it fun in a different way than, say, Dwarf Fortress is fun? (Haven't played DF but I think I understand why people do.)

Would really love informed takes on this.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction"

shanusmagnus — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 02:35:05 +0000

A lot of life wisdom wedged into those two sentences, I think, that goes beyond journalism.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "The McPhee method for writing deeply reported nonfiction"

shanusmagnus — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 02:29:05 +0000

Sounds a bit like Gingko, which I used to really love:

https://gingkowriter.com/

New comment by shanusmagnus in "I'd rather read the prompt"

shanusmagnus — Mon, 05 May 2025 13:27:23 +0000

Are you saying the US is the only country that has an excess of applicants for entry-level positions? Or the only one for which credentialism is the solution to this problem? If the second, how does the place you're from solve it?

New comment by shanusmagnus in "History of Maths for Beginners"

shanusmagnus — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 12:55:49 +0000

This looks like an absolute delight:

"Cambridge University History of Mathematics Society presents an illegal, immoral, and fattening lecture series, without the endorsement, approval, or approbation of University authorities on: HISTORY OF SCIENCE IN ANTIQUITY"

Gives me a warm feeling. Here's one of the lectures to get a flavor:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wkQmFPcrkLM9oJk1G7jF...

Contains this banger of a quote:

"The Greeks were very poor at using YouTube."

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise"

shanusmagnus — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:36:51 +0000

What would you suggest?

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Watch R1 "think" with animated chains of thought"

shanusmagnus — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 14:34:27 +0000

But in a larger frame, of "things tightly associated with coffee", they mean something extremely close. Whether these things are opposite from each other, or virtually identical, is a function of your point of view; or, in this context, the generally-meaningful level of discourse.

At scale, I expect having dairy vs non-dairy distance be very small is the more accurate representation of intent.

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

shanusmagnus — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 01:56:16 +0000

Is there a place to download the old Infocom games, or play them on the web somehow? HHGTTG was my favorite game, but I never played LGOP or MFV and would like to.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Drawing Animals with Margaret Mead"

shanusmagnus — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 18:55:24 +0000

There are psychological hypotheses that can be stated and tested empirically. So yeah, you can find people who maintain that it's a science.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Show HN: Org-Supertag"

shanusmagnus — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:35:36 +0000

Is org-roam still alive? Last release almost 3 years ago. Could be because it's nearly perfect, which, if so, great.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Hoarder: Self-hostable bookmark-everything app"

shanusmagnus — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 19:13:12 +0000

I didn't know this term before, thanks! Are there any examples (e.g., products you like) that demonstrate this One True Way in practice?

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Show HN: I combined spaced repetition with emails so you can remember anything"

shanusmagnus — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 18:57:58 +0000

Emacs org-mode -- it's less visually obvious that it's exactly equivalent from a structural / hierarchical point of view. But the editing experience is infinitely better, because Emacs.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "GPT-5 is behind schedule"

shanusmagnus — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:37:05 +0000

Ironically, if it plays out this way, it will be the biggest boon to actual AGI development there could be -- the intelligence via text tokenization will be a limiting factor otherwise, imo.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Show HN: I combined spaced repetition with emails so you can remember anything"

shanusmagnus — Sat, 07 Dec 2024 00:04:26 +0000

It's all a matter of point of view I guess. Given that I replaced it with something costing zero dollars may explain my attitude. Also, the fact that it started out as basically free, and is now a recurrent expense over a hundred bucks a year.

That said, the author seems like a cool guy. Hope he's finding success.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Show HN: I combined spaced repetition with emails so you can remember anything"

shanusmagnus — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 14:07:29 +0000

You're thinking of this [1]. Super duper cool idea, ahead of its time. Author seems to have transitioned to a ludicrous pricing model, but I suspect it's because the people who like it really _love_ it. I used to be among them, but then switched to org-mode .

[1] https://gingkowriter.com/

New comment by shanusmagnus in "The industry structure of LLM makers"

shanusmagnus — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:36:01 +0000

That insight, or lack of it, is esp surprising giving the example of how sticky the Coke brand is.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation [pdf]"

shanusmagnus — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 18:08:18 +0000

I love a good analogy. Can you expand on this one?

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Memories are not only in the brain, human cell study finds"

shanusmagnus — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:13:51 +0000

I'm very curious, from the perspective that you have based on your experience at the retreat, what it means to you when you talk about "processing" these traumas?

Maybe a very concrete way to ask would be: what's the difference between someone who undergoes the ayahuasca experience and successfully "processes" a trauma, vs someone who does not? Is there such a thing?

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Evaluating the world model implicit in a generative model"

shanusmagnus — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 15:58:29 +0000

Makes me think of an interesting related question: how aware are we, normally, of our incoherence? What's the phenomenology of that? Hmm.

New comment by shanusmagnus in "Evaluating the world model implicit in a generative model"

shanusmagnus — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 15:52:03 +0000

Brilliant analogy.

And we can imagine that, in a sci-fi world where some super-being could act on a scale that would allow it to perturb the world in a fashion amenable to causing hurricanes, the hurricane model could be substantially augmented, for the same reason motor babbling in an infant leads to fluid motion as a child.

What has been a revelation to me is how, even peering through this dark glass, titanic amounts of data allow quite useful world models to emerge, even if they're super limited -- a type of "bitter lesson" that suggests we're only at the beginning of what's possible.

I expect robotics + LLM to drive the next big breakthroughs, perhaps w/ virtual worlds [1] as an intermediate step.

[1] https://minedojo.org/