Hacker News: zjp

New comment by zjp in "OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco"

zjp — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 04:44:10 +0000

No kidding. After years of all offices and no housing I wouldn't put it past this place. What other city on earth hates its citizens more?

New comment by zjp in "OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco"

zjp — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 03:57:28 +0000

Build more housing.

New comment by zjp in "It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history"

zjp — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:58:54 +0000

It's more than reading. Peoples' patience for long-form anything is dying, and I'm guilty too. Too often I'm on my phone with a movie playing in the background. When it ends, I can't even tell you what happened. It was just noise in the background, to raise the dopamine floor of twitter even higher, and because nothing goes in long enough to remember, nothing interesting comes out in conversation.

New comment by zjp in "Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms"

zjp — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:08:22 +0000

You know it never occurred to me I could look things up before. Everything I've ever known I learned orally. Even C. I remember sitting on pappy's lap, watching him wave his hand to draw out an asterisk in the air. "A pointer..."

Literary culture is so confusing.

Anyway, the editorial rule is to spell it out on the first use and then to abbreviate it:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced today... ...NASA says...

Many articles fail to do this and assume insider knowledge. It's all fine and good after you look it up or if you're an expert and familiar with the topic. Good for you. For everyone else, in other disciplines, or lay people, or for students, it's nice to extend the courtesy of spelling it out once.

New comment by zjp in "Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms"

zjp — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:47:04 +0000

Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.

New comment by zjp in "Words, Words, Words"

zjp — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:39:51 +0000

Derrida was worried that people were merely imitating his style of thinking without the substance, but it's fine for AI to do it to humanity-in-general. OK.

New comment by zjp in "What British people mean when they say 'sorry'"

zjp — Thu, 07 May 2026 06:04:03 +0000

Yeah I'm from Kansas and none of these meanings were new to me.

New comment by zjp in "Different language models learn similar number representations"

zjp — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:15:14 +0000

Different models, similar number representations. Different models for different languages, similar concept representations. They have to learn all of this from human text input, so they're not divining it themselves. It all makes a strong case for universal grammar, IMO.

New comment by zjp in "Slop Cop"

zjp — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 07:43:09 +0000

This is the Hemingway Editor by another name, and I have the same complaint about it that I have about the Hemingway Editor. See:

https://zjpea.substack.com/p/an-llm-will-never-say-thou

New comment by zjp in "[dead]"

zjp — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:22:43 +0000

What if we turned the regional love for megaprojects into something actually useful like a canal from the UAE through Oman, to permanently weaken Iran?

New comment by zjp in "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

zjp — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:33:18 +0000

At some point you just have to spend spare cycles on ideas you think matter. What's harder than rejecting an idea is rejecting a finished, working product. And if your team says "I wish you had worked on something else", that's great, but if you're not my boss and and they're happy, who cares? And sometimes even your bosses. If you believe in something hard enough you will build political capital by meeting work obligations and spend it down working on your baby.

New comment by zjp in "Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right"

zjp — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:40:58 +0000

Just anecdotally, you should always ask things in the third person. I feel like it sidesteps LLM sycophancy somewhat.

New comment by zjp in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

zjp — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:58:55 +0000

Also, nothing has changed! Claude will still yes-and whatever you give it. ChatGPT still has its insufferable personality, where it takes what you said and hands it back to you in different terms as if it's ChatGPT's insight.

New comment by zjp in "Have a fucking website"

zjp — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:22:02 +0000

'Fuck' is every part of speech simultaneously because it doesn't mean anything.

I just want it to be clever and load bearing. Back to the food lens: like an ice cream shop called Daddy's Ice Cream, stylized as Daddy's [Ice] Cream, a name that would recast even "Vanilla", selling a flavor called "Chocolate Paint". You have to work to figure it out. Is it a non sequitur, a Valentine's Day tradition, or a failure of prep? It doesn't force you to be the straight man in a bit. You have an out. The words are literally clean. It's not 'ha, I am about to sexually submit to my food, and eating is a blowjob'.

New comment by zjp in "Have a fucking website"

zjp — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:58:58 +0000

This is clever but it’s self defeating because it’s tasteful. It’s a good joke. I felt like John Waters was saying it to me. And the painful thing to me is the tastelessness.

New comment by zjp in "Have a fucking website"

zjp — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:55:44 +0000

Firefly, Dr. Who, Sherlock, on repeat. My own personal circle of hell.

New comment by zjp in "Have a fucking website"

zjp — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:11:27 +0000

They’re exactly as cringy as each other actually, but your self-righteous point is well taken. Sure, agreed. I have class consciousness now. I am awakened. As if I would ever make this some random cashier’s problem.

New comment by zjp in "Have a fucking website"

zjp — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:57:02 +0000

I don’t really think that’s a proportionate solution to a minor annoyance. So far the advice I’ve gotten has been:

- restructure my relationships

- say something psychotic like “let’s go to a different neighborhood so I don’t have to say two words for dessert”

But you are all misreading this as a cry for help or advice. It is a bit. I even say the goddamn fucking words! I just think they’re cringey and I was commenting on my distaste for that feeling. I don’t have a cellarful of champagne either. I have bad news about the Easter bunny.

“You sound like a whiner”. Get a sense of humor maybe? Or failing that at least display the self composure and grace I so lack and pound sand.

New comment by zjp in "Have a fucking website"

zjp — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:49:20 +0000

Fucking performative fucking profanity is fucking gratuitous and is fucking clearly only fucking there so you fucking know I fucking smoke fucking Camel Lights. It’s not fucking musical. It doesn’t fucking enhance the fucking thought or it’s the wrong fucking emotional fucking register for the fucking material. It’s just fucking there.

New comment by zjp in "Have a fucking website"

zjp — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 10:43:16 +0000

Wait no, I see what’s happening. I am sorry. Deeply and I mean it. I was cruel to you. When a person does what you just did it is itself typically a dominance move. Those questions scream passive aggression. They are too close too early to be anything else. I read concern trolling. I read elaboration as escalation. I missed confusion and concern. And I was drunk on how annoying I found that to be, because getting into it on a forum can be thrilling. And when you replied to something so simple and dripping with sarcasm with complete earnestness, it snapped me out of my stupor, and made our conversation clear. Yes, I have called a cookie a basic bitch. I found that somewhat grating. It is conceptually true that you could avoid it. There are social pressures that disincentivize avoiding it. Everything else is drama and joke and rhetorical flourish. Recast in this light, I am embarrassed by what I have said to you. We have barely been speaking the same language because the language is the layers as much as the words.