deleted by creator

we can live with, until we can’t

*angry upvote noises*

At this point I don’t even know how people still use Windows. Seriously.

A consistent-ish trait I found among the so-called “quick thinkers” is pattern recognition; or rather, the willingness to force a new situation to fit an already solved old pattern, and then if necessary address the differences. That alone makes me question the very analogy this text is built upon, and its conclusions.

I think the matter is not one of “processor” speed, as if our brains operated faster or slower for the same algorithm; I think instead we’re running different algorithms, in similar processors. With the so-called “quick thinkers” first retrieving data from memory, and then using their processing power only to address the differences.

I’ll extend an example from the text to show that. Suppose the restaurant bill was €349.20, and you’re splitting it among six people. Here are two ways to do this. By “textbook division”:

• 3<6, so skip; carry 3 over
• 4 with the carryover is 34; 5*6=30 (lower), 6*6=36 (higher), then the result is 5. 34-30=4, so carry 4 over
• 9 with the carryover is 49; 8*6=48 (lower), 9*6=54 (higher), then the result is 8. 49-48=1, so carry 1 over
• Mind decimal dot.
• 2 with the carryover is 12; 2*6=12 (bullseye), then the result is 2
• we found a 0 and there’s no carryover so transfer it to the result. End result, 5-8-dot-2-0 = €58.20

Or by approximation:

• 349.20 ≃ 360. 360/6=60.
• 360-349.20 = 10.80 ≃ 12. 12/6=2.
• 12-10.80 = 1.20; 1.20/6=0.20
• 60-2=58, 50+0.20 = €58.20

The second method is way faster. It evokes patterns you memorised from school times - you see that “36” in “360” and it triggers “6x6=36”, in a way “34” wouldn’t. And you can even drop it midway, with the intermediate result being already useful (“it’s a bit less than sixty bucks”).

Other examples seem to be like this, too. Like, the “witty responses” will be often similar to each other, because you already got a similar context in the past. But note how being quick at mental maths won’t automatically make you good at quick witty responses or vice versa, it’s field-dependent - because your pattern recognition is trained from your experience; as you perform the same activity over and over you’re memorising more patterns, and you’re able to retrieve faster, but only for that activity.

That might explain why being a “quick thinker” isn’t so much of an edge as the writer thinks - because it isn’t something intrinsic. As you’re in a craft you’ll eventually become a quick thinker for that craft.

Just my two cents.

I’m reading the paper and it doesn’t answer me a key question: how different is this from cellophane? We already got cellophane for decades.

This is hilarious, cute, and expensive.

Shitty beliefs (AI cult) handled by a shitty framework (apocalyptic babble) and commented by shitty people (HN users). I’m not even mad, just amazed at all this shitception.

From the thread:

Why not include both. What are you trying to hide reddit

I think Reddit is trying to hide that most users don’t actively engage with the content there, they only passively consume it, and that this will likely get worse over time. In other words: subreddits aren’t communities any more, just random assortments of junk for you to consume.

The following comment confirms it for me:

I miss the old reddit, reddit is awful these days. Mindless scrolling.

On another matter…

Reminder that Digg is back and has an app

1. Yeah. Sure. It went to shit once. It totally won’t go to shit again. By the wings of a pig. /s
2. I could understand mentioning “it has an app” if the person actually talked about the good features of the application in question. But nope - it’s only “i can haz app lol lmao”, as if the user was unable to use a bloody browser. *sigh*

Chatbots made previous knowledge and good critical thinking even more important - because of their tendency to output incorrect info, and because incorrect info is worse than no information. And you might say “I don’t use a chatbot”, but some clown on the internet will; and you will read the resulting slop without realising (because the clown tweaked it to look less sloppy).

You’re probably half-joking but that’s a good example of vagueness. Like, there are multiple ways to interpret this:

• “dunno”, “I’m at a loss here”
• “you’re like an old man screaming at the sky”, or “who cares lol lmao”
• “that’s just, like, your opinion”
• [insert 9001 other possibilities]

And even given the context, the reader (in this case, me) has no way to tell which one is the right one.

1. Feature creep. Unicode was about providing a standardised way to encode text, so you don’t get rubbish when mixing writing systems. It wasn’t to provide an infinite amount of little pictures of eggplants and the likes.

2. Inconsistent across implementations. It was obvious corporations would use the standard as toilet paper, and come up with their own “unique” interpretations of the emojis, for the sake of “brand identity”. Like this:

Not a big deal when encoding actual text, as graphemes are abstract units. Except emojis are primarily used as icons, not as graphemes - their assigned value depends on the icon itself.

3. Obnoxious, distracting, and vague. They’re colourful icons in otherwise monochromatic text, of course the reader’s attention beelines towards the emoji. I’m not opposed to mindful usage so I’m not automatically blaming everyone who uses emojis, but let’s be frank, 90% of the time you find an emoji “in the wild”, it boils down to “I’m braindead trash and I have nothing to say lol, but I feel entitled to attention lmao.”

Unicode emojis were a mistake.

I’ve been repeating this like a broken record; it’s useful tech, even if not intelligence, and it isn’t intelligence even if useful tech. The issues associated with it are less like “IT’S GOING TO MAKE THE WORLD A PAPERCLIP MACHINE LOL” and more the Industrial Revolution in England.

Let me start highlighting excerpts of the “about” page:

I have not accepted payments from LLM vendors, but I am frequently invited to preview new LLM products and features from organizations that include OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Mistral, often under NDA or subject to an embargo. This often also includes free API credits.

One exception: OpenAI paid my for my time when I attended a GPT-5 preview at their office which was used in a video. They did not ask for any editorial insight or control over what I wrote after that event, aside from keeping to their embargo.

Keep the author’s interests into account.

With that out of the way: no, it is not good. Google might be smearing its model really hard on the users’ snouts, but it’s the wrong tool for the job.

The main point of searching is to find information that is accurate and reliable; however, the way those models work they’ll output nonsense (mislabelled “hallucination”) fairly often. They’re also extremely noisy, usually assuming what the user “means”, instead of bloody addressing directly what the user is looking for.

Some things never end. For example, CEOs’ propensity towards dishonesty / idiocy / disingenuousness. Or my disdain towards straw men, I hope it outlives me, like a meme.

EDIT: my point is, that those CEOs are consistently distorting what SKG is about: from “don’t design games to be unplayable once support ends” (fairly reasonable) into “u think gaems shuld live 4ever lol but ackshyually nuffin does lmao XD”. This is a fucking straw man; it’s the bottom of the barrel when it comes to irrationality.

And they’re doing it to discourage people from supporting SKG. And in this specific case what the article is calling “vibing” is just part of a diversion tactic - to avoid having people calling him out for his dishonesty / idiocy / disingenuousness. Say something filthy, then distract the audience with mental masturbation, it works!

I wonder why languages lost that form, because it seems really useful to have a single verb for those.

I am not sure, but I think it’s due to the changes in the passive. Latin had proper passive forms for plenty verbs, and a lot of those verbs handling states were either deponent (passive-looking with active meaning; like irascor) or relied on the passive for the state (like terreo “I terrify” → terreor “I’m terrified”). Somewhere down the road the Romance languages ditched it for the sake of the analytical passive, sum + participle.

I’m saying this because, while irascor died, the participle survived in e.g. Portuguese (Lat. iratum → Por. irado, “angered”). And it got even re-attached to a new verb (irar “to cause anger”).

It isn’t something you’d expect people to say; like, “hoy estoy miedoso, pero mañana estaré valiente” sounds weird as fuck. But it isn’t agrammatical, the oddity there is semantic.

“Soy aqui” reminds me a certain movie scene:

–El senado decidirá tu destino.
–YO SOY EL SENADO.

Bad idea to confuse it with “estoy cenado”, otherwise you might get Jedi trying to murder you for having dinner.

I know some German but I’m not proficient with it.

It’s easier to analyse the sentence by including the subject, typically omitted: “es ist mir kalt” = “it is me cold”, or “it’s cold to me”. It’s a lot like saying “that’s blue to me”, you know? Like, it isn’t like you are cold or blue, it’s something else, but you’re experiencing it. (It’s a dative of relation, in both languages.)

“Mir” is German for “me” or “to me” roughly, right?

Roughly, yes. But that gets messy, there’s no good equivalent.

Think on it this way: you have a bunch of situations where you’d use the first person, right? English arbitrarily splits those situations between “me” and “I”; German does it between “ich”, “mich”, and “mir”.

That German dative is used in situations like:

• if a verb demands two objects, one gets the dative; e.g. “er gibt mir das Buch” (he gives me the book).
• if the preposition demands it; e.g. “er spricht mit mir” = “he speaks with me”
• if you got a dative of relation (like the above), or benefaction (something done for another person), etc.

I tried to learn some German at some point, but I didn’t manage to learn enough to get comfortable with the various cases.

I got to thank Latin for that - by the time I started studying German, the cases felt intuitive.

But… really, when you’re dealing with Indo-European languages, you’re going to experience at least some grammatical hell: adpositions (English), cases (Latin), a mix of both (German), but never “neither”.

Speaking on Latin, it just clicked me it does something else than the languages you listed - those states/emotions get handled primarily by the verb:

• hungry - esurio (verb, “I’m hungry”)
• angry - irascor (verb, “I’m angry”)
• cold - frigeo (verb, “I’m chilly/cold”)
• scared - timeo (verb, “I fear/have fear”)
• brave - fortis (adjective, “strong”); animosus (adjective, roughly “adamant”, “stubborn”, “angry”)

German also mixes it a fair bit. Following merc’s table in order:

1. hungry - ich habe Hunger / ich bin hungrig
2. angry - ich bin böse / ich bin wütend
3. cold - mir ist kalt
4. scared - ich habe Angst
5. brave - ich bin mutig

#4 uses haben (to have) + noun; #2 and #5 use sein (to be) + adjective.

For #1 you’ll typically see the noun + haben. Adjective + sein is perfectly viable, but a bit less common, and I feel like it leans towards metaphoric usage; e.g. «ich bin hungrig nach Liebe», literally “I’m hungry for love”.

#3 uses the dative instead, it’s roughly “it’s cold for me”. If you use “ich bin kalt”, you’ll convey that your temperature is low, not that you’re feeling cold.

Being the other main language behind the drunk hodgepodge that is English

That’s inaccurate.

To keep it short, the situation between English, Dutch and German is a lot like the situation between Romance languages: they have a common origin (West Germanic), one isn’t from the other. And while English got bits and bobs of vocab due to Norse and Norman influence, vocab is rather superficial, and most oddities of the language were born in the islands.

This table is a good example. English is basically adjectivising almost everything physiological and emotional, while both German and the Romance languages would use a mix of adjectives and nouns instead. (With the Romance languages typically preferring nouns, but that isn’t a hard rule.)