Hacker News: zemvpferreira

New comment by zemvpferreira in "The Dark Night of Mathematics"

zemvpferreira — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:36:23 +0000

Because I’ve often been with professors in math, literature, arts who pride themselves on a certain intellectual purity that makes them a cut above, while living on wages paid by the taxpayer. Suddenly the golem of basic market dynamics comes for them and these extremely smart people are struck by the unfairness and bruteness of it all. Whole careers having fun publishing useless nothings, funded by people sowing soccer balls and scrubbing toilets. I have nothing against having fun while doing your job, I have it often. But I have a job first to serve society, not myself.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "The Dark Night of Mathematics"

zemvpferreira — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:00:48 +0000

This is what locking yourself away in an ivory tower gets you. Do things ‘for beauty’ and watch as they are automated and commoditized by the people who depend on them for their continued wellbeing, reduced to a hobby or sport. But the reduction began when you yourself started putting more importance on your enjoyment of the process over the value being provided to your customers.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Does creatine make you smarter?"

zemvpferreira — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:55:49 +0000

Personally I have noticed a lot less cognitive impairment after a poor night’s sleep since starting on 10g per day. It seems to make a noticeable difference in my ability to reason and to act having slept less than 7 hours per night, even on consecutive nights.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)"

zemvpferreira — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:21:21 +0000

You might not want it for yourself but many people, especially health professionals in my experience, will take a smaller but less painful lifespan over a chance to live longer through horrible treatments.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)"

zemvpferreira — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 08:00:40 +0000

The father of a good friend passed away recently from a brain cancer. He was a doctor, but atypically accepted every treatment available. His last 3 years were spent in surgery or sick from chemo, did not have one good day after his initial diagnosis. If he could have gone back I'm sure he would have decided not to be treated.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

zemvpferreira — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:54:35 +0000

I don't want or need war, but I won't deny to having felt tribal impulses before. I won't deny culture and groups are different from individuals. Idealism is fine until it starts interfering with reality.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

zemvpferreira — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:49:07 +0000

Where there are simians, there is war. The more primitive the society, the bloodier and more total the war is. I wish our problem were psychopaths in power, but the truth is we are a tribal and fearful species and war is in our genes. It's as certain as a sunrise as long as there are humans.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

zemvpferreira — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:25:39 +0000

I don't mean to belittle the American war machine but as someone involved in overseas manufacturing for a while, I just don't see how it's possible to source 90% of items now made in China without a solid decade or two of investment. There are no factories, no supply chains, no skilled workers. It seems like fantasy.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new"

zemvpferreira — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:56:38 +0000

No, culture and the means of production went global. Bespoke only makes sense when you can’t get an acceptable good at a decent price. That goes for food, building materials and physics engines. Different will only be found in fetishistic disneylands from now on.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "The Baffling World of Masayoshi Son's Presentations (2020)"

zemvpferreira — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:54:25 +0000

Interesting that you would use as an example two people who ingeniously built complex systems, through lots of hard and clever work, to turn the odds in their favour.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "The Baffling World of Masayoshi Son's Presentations (2020)"

zemvpferreira — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:05:13 +0000

Given that the lottery has a typical expected value of -$1.00 per ticket you really should revise your opinion of how lucky/smart these people who repeatedly make tens of billions by pouring all their money into tickets are.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies"

zemvpferreira — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:42:30 +0000

I didn't claim there's a simple solution, rather that the simplified system of publish-or-perish doesn't work. Personally I believe you can't replace a management layer that's aligned with the institution with a career progression based on metrics. Embrace complexity, let managers decide who should be promoted, sack or pay those managers based on their performance. Propagate onwards through the ownership chain.

The fact that Covid vaccines worked so well is precisely an endorsement of a hands-on, results-driven approach.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies"

zemvpferreira — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:22:53 +0000

As a former scientist it's embarrassing how easily the dismal state of science today could have been predicted decades before by applying Goodhart's Law, or any simple train of thought on incentives and moral hazard. Instead we chose to assume scientists collectively behave on a higher plane. No wonder the general public distrusts "the intelectual elite", we deserved it.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)"

zemvpferreira — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:26:30 +0000

Simple is definitely the wrong term. Chess's simplicity is where its inherent difficulty comes from. It's paradoxically much more difficult to optimize than more complex games like SC.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school"

zemvpferreira — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:18:01 +0000

From what I can tell the average school at best can aspire to teach kids how to work and how to socialize. That's it. I'd personally be very happy with computers mostly going away from school too. Most actual learning and exploring will hopefully happen at home.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Swedish parliament abolishes permanent residence visas for migrants"

zemvpferreira — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:54:46 +0000

If all you need are labourers to prop up the economy there are billions of people willing to work on temporary visas.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "What happened to nerds?"

zemvpferreira — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:18:17 +0000

In the end we have to face that systems have failed to replace competent managers. If there isn't a chain of accountability starting at the top that can manage people without extensive justification in metrics and is properly incentivised to keep the organisation healthy, whatever we are left with will be gamed to the detriment of everyone.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Stress disrupts hippocampal integration of overlapping events, memory inference"

zemvpferreira — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:57:57 +0000

I don’t think we should miss the forest for the trees. If you incentivize people to publish as much as possible, and institutions to apply as little oversight as possible, and peers to positively review and cite as much as possible, you end up with a system that produces a huge volume of the easiest “science” to produce over quality, meaningful work. Modern academia is mostly a ponzi scheme and that’s that.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Ferrari Luce"

zemvpferreira — Tue, 26 May 2026 11:59:36 +0000

Couldn't agree more. Jobs' advice to say no to a hundred things sounds easy in a vacuum, but to actually go against the powerful people around you and gatekeep the quality and essence of your business over decades is incredibly hard, foolish and brave.

New comment by zemvpferreira in "Greg Brockman interview [video]"

zemvpferreira — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:08:09 +0000

Not a fan of Altman but the devil you know is a powerful argument. If you believe a CEO/Founder to be a grifter-position at its core (fake it till you make it etc etc), retaining the best grifter you can find is the optimal play.