Hacker News: taurknaut

New comment by taurknaut in "Show HN: I Built a Reddit-style Bluesky client – still rough, but open to ideas"

taurknaut — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 16:31:03 +0000

Dunking on people is like half the value of twitter-like platforms. I only go on twitter (or I'm guessing bluesky) to see politicians and journalists and pundits and celebrities get dunked on. It's a public square: open moderation of social values is half the point. It's the conflict that makes us stronger.

Haters will say dis/misinformation makes it not worth it, but i simply point out that it's the truly stupid people who speak the loudest and you need to look deeper. There's no going back to a world where for-profit media is above critique. The relentless violence in palestine firmly endorsed and enabled by western media has pretty much destroyed any faith I had that our for-profit media is capable of self-regulation. Dunking on these morons is a public good.

What we really need to figure out is a way to systemically encourage punching up, not down.

New comment by taurknaut in "Humpback whale briefly traps young kayaker in its mouth in Chile"

taurknaut — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 14:36:18 +0000

...what is there to debunk?

New comment by taurknaut in "Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL"

taurknaut — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:49:12 +0000

> rather than abusing existing relational databases for graph purposes.

In my experience, the vast majority of graphs can be embedded in relational databases just fine and most people don't want general graph querying. People just don't like optimizing queries (or equivalently the schema to enable such queries).

I personally have never seen a pitch for graph databases that makes them seem attractive for more than data exploration on your local machine.

New comment by taurknaut in "Searchcode.com's SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours"

taurknaut — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:41:46 +0000

Presumably the database needs to be distributed to servers, too. The engine needs to access something. This is a necessity whether or not it's referred to as a binary.

New comment by taurknaut in "Searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours"

taurknaut — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:33:39 +0000

Reading without write contention is not a terribly difficult problem. You could use any database and it'd work fine. It's the mutations that distinguish db engines. Sqlite is indeed close to ideal but the comparison to other databases (at scale no less) is without substance.

New comment by taurknaut in "Searchcode.com's SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours"

taurknaut — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:21:08 +0000

This comment appears to be the only place between article and thread where mongo getting recommended is even mentioned. Maybe stop giving them free press. I certainly haven't heard anyone seriously suggest them for about about ten years now.

Edit: ok the other guy mentioning mongo is clearly being sarcastic

New comment by taurknaut in "Spanish 'running of the bulls' festival reveals crowd movements can be predicted"

taurknaut — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 04:13:22 +0000

I imagine the original use of "bull market" was derived from this practice. If this isn't the case i have no clue myself.

New comment by taurknaut in "AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans"

taurknaut — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 03:54:15 +0000

I'm very aware of these archives. They are very clearly not sufficient to train a model to interpret asl to the standards of corporate america. Let alone the standards of an arbitrary human. Hence my above post.

New comment by taurknaut in "Uchū – Color palette for internet lovers"

taurknaut — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 01:44:48 +0000

I imagine at least something mapping each color to what it applies to.

New comment by taurknaut in "How Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 23:48:03 +0000

Sounds expensive as hell.

New comment by taurknaut in "AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 23:44:30 +0000

When someone gives this opinion, I think to myself they surely must be terrified of a stranger killing their wife with a rock (or merely desiring it themselves). How else can you excuse or explain such an impoverished imagination?

If you are actually looking for an answer and not simply to comfort yourself, I heartily recommend Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson.

New comment by taurknaut in "Spanish 'running of the bulls' festival reveals crowd movements can be predicted"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:48:30 +0000

Why else would you put a bull in front of the stock exchange except as commentary on assholes pitching bull markets? How could you possibly construe this as a coincidence?

New comment by taurknaut in "Spanish 'running of the bulls' festival reveals crowd movements can be predicted"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:41:12 +0000

Crowd density is certainly the key here. Over a certain density crowds move like a liquid. Under a certain density crowds get much more difficult to model.

This is not new in any way, btw. This paper seems to specifically address the running of the bulls.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat9891

New comment by taurknaut in "Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:32:07 +0000

Yup, that's a failed language.

New comment by taurknaut in "AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:27:48 +0000

Sure, but this completely neglects the aspects of humanity we left behind moving into sedentary communities. We will be forever blind to what we lost, and the morons among us will claim we lost nothing.

New comment by taurknaut in "AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 19:24:55 +0000

Hard to imagine this hasn't already been done for decades. What role would AI play?

New comment by taurknaut in "AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:25:43 +0000

ASL seems like a really hard problem. I've learned a fair bit myself being friends with a few interpreters and deaf people and two different people can sign the same thing in a way that would look very different to an AI. Sometimes it feels like you have to put a fair bit of effort into understanding how a specific person signs (from my very inexperienced perspective). I'm curious if this could be overcome with sufficient data, but where is this massive archive of videos of sign? There are some databases certainly, but nothing close to the level of which we have written and spoken english via the internet. Plus then you get into regional and cultural dialects... i think banks will be obligated to hire interpreters for the forseeable future.

New comment by taurknaut in "AI can interpret animal emotions better than humans"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:18:35 +0000

...than untrained humans, presumably, because otherwise how would you produce the model?

New comment by taurknaut in "Carbon capture more costly than switching to renewables, researchers find"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 15:20:41 +0000

The working class should complain, that's their role in liberal democracy. Better complain about energy prices than armies of invading muslim rapists.

New comment by taurknaut in "The True Costs of Being on YouTube"

taurknaut — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 06:14:37 +0000

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