Hacker News: spongebobism

New comment by spongebobism in "Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived"

spongebobism — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:36:47 +0000

> You have drawn a boy, born in the Russian Plain in 3843 BCE.

He probably spoke something close to proto-Indo-European

New comment by spongebobism in "Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps"

spongebobism — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:10:43 +0000

> To be clear, I’m not anti-AI. [...] If you want to autocomplete [...] But if you want to use FOSS trusted tools like Zed, OpenCode, Pi, Nanocoder, etc. [...]

isn't he just contrasting 2 use cases of LLMs?

New comment by spongebobism in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

spongebobism — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:18:30 +0000

I find this hard to parse, maybe because English is not my first language. Do senior SWEs provide more value than they provide principles, or do they provide more value than principles do?

New comment by spongebobism in "Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption"

spongebobism — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:22:27 +0000

Perlis's 10th epigram feels germane:

> Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.

New comment by spongebobism in "We Need to Die"

spongebobism — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:55:15 +0000

> > they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway.

> How is that a bad thing?

The point isn't that it's bad, but that it's equivalent to dying and then someone else taking your place. So if it's OK for your character to change fundametally over the span of your life, then it must also be OK for you to die at some point and yield the stage to the next generation.

New comment by spongebobism in "Richard Stallman on ChatGPT"

spongebobism — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:44:06 +0000

There are some semantic debates going on in this thread about the term "bullshit". But there is a clear definition. The paper Stallman links to uses bullshit in the Frankfurtian sense, that is, talk without care for the truth:

> The liar, Frankfurt holds, knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead instead of telling the truth. The "bullshitter", on the other hand, does not care about the truth and is only seeking "to manipulate the opinions and the attitudes of those to whom they speak"[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Harry_Frankfurt's_con...

New comment by spongebobism in "Richard Stallman on ChatGPT"

spongebobism — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:51:50 +0000

why not both?

New comment by spongebobism in "“Captain Gains” on Capitol Hill"

spongebobism — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:37:01 +0000

So the thing about disneyland with the death penalty that attracts you is the death penalty? Geez...

New comment by spongebobism in "Cherry gives up German production and wants to sell core division"

spongebobism — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 11:30:59 +0000

Is it so bad to stick with a product that works? I use a Cherry KC200 MX specifically because it is a simple office keyboard.

New comment by spongebobism in "AI has a deep understanding of how this code works"

spongebobism — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:58:23 +0000

Presumably the LLM also wrote the blog post. At least, it generated a file named OCAML_DWARF_BLOG_POST.md: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369/files#diff-bc37d03...

New comment by spongebobism in "Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels"

spongebobism — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 09:10:35 +0000

More like 3.5 years, right? December 2021 through May 2025.

New comment by spongebobism in "Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians"

spongebobism — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 18:07:50 +0000

Chain of Custody Cakkavatti

New comment by spongebobism in "Hypervisor in 1k Lines"

spongebobism — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 11:36:38 +0000

It's a bit more than that.

> We'll implement basic context switching, paging, user mode, a command-line shell, a disk device driver, and file read/write operations in C.

see https://1000os.seiya.me/en/

New comment by spongebobism in "X-ray scans reveal Buddhist prayers inside tiny Tibetan scrolls"

spongebobism — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:32:40 +0000

Is that an innovation of Mahayana or Vajrayana Buddhism? I've only read Theravada texts, and in those, good and bad Karma are clearly differentiated. Attaining a pleasant rebirth is considered a wholesome pursuit that the teachings of the Buddha are supposed to help you with, though it is considered a lower pursuit than attaining Nirvana (the hierarchy is pleasant current life < pleasant rebirth < Nirvana, and the Dhamma claims to be the supreme authority on all 3).

New comment by spongebobism in "Prime Number Grid"

spongebobism — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 10:56:40 +0000

When the col is seven, there are a lot of diagonals going from top right to bottom left. When col is five, from top left to bottom right. Are runs of consecutive sexy primes also this frequent for larger numbers, or does that pattern break down at some point?

New comment by spongebobism in "AI vs. Professional Authors Results"

spongebobism — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:52:25 +0000

Quoted in the well-tempered plot device:

> Our relationship / is beautiful / because / it is ours / because / it relates / to us.

Indistinguishable from Rupi Kaur. There is nothing new under the sun.

New comment by spongebobism in "AI vs. Professional Authors Results"

spongebobism — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:42:12 +0000

Maybe this is cope, maybe it's my dislike of modern fantasy, a genre that keeps repeating the same narrative elements to get the same reactions out of the reader, but I found the stories kinda bland, and to me they all seemed like something ChatGPT could have written on a good day. Compare them to Behm-Steinberg's Taylor Swift [0], which has a far more interesting premise, significant character development, and good style (to be fair, story number 6 also has relatively good style). Or to Samatar's The Huntress [1], a poetic piece of flash fiction that is willing to leave much more ambiguity and really shows what's possible in terms of style.

[1] https://tinhouse.com/the-huntress/ [0] https://gulfcoastmag.org/stories/2015-barthelme-prize-winner...

New comment by spongebobism in "How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card"

spongebobism — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:46:05 +0000

Is "degenerate" the word that comes to your mind when reading about the Levine family's game night?

New comment by spongebobism in "How to teach your kids to play poker: Start with one card"

spongebobism — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:28:00 +0000

Great stuff. Growing up, I played both chess an poker seriously. Chess mostly in person: in a club, at tournaments and league matches. Poker mostly online, for real money (age verification wasn't taken very seriously at the time). Though I've spent more time on chess in total, poker has had a bigger impact on my outlook on life. It constantly confronts you with your own cognitive biases and teaches you how to deal with uncertainty and variance, two very important things people by default kinda suck at.

New comment by spongebobism in "How to win an argument with a toddler"

spongebobism — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 22:21:12 +0000

"Wie man mit Fundamentalisten diskutiert, ohne den Verstand zu verlieren: Anleitung zum subversiven Denken", by Hubert Schleichert