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ergonaught commented on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?    · Posted by u/embedding-shape
dinkleberg · 10 days ago
Why do you suppose we come to HN if not for actual insight? There are other sites much better for getting an endless stream of weighted amalgamations of human content.
ergonaught · 10 days ago
Coming here for insight does not in any way demonstrate that genuine insight is actually widely available here.
ergonaught commented on Time to start de-Appling   heatherburns.tech/2025/11... · Posted by u/msangi
al_borland · a month ago
My day-to-day life has never been impacted by who is in the White House. Where is the disaster?
ergonaught · a month ago
Yes yes, it's only a problem if it affects you.

Utterly tedious.

ergonaught commented on The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1987) [pdf]   gandalf.fee.urv.cat/profe... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
pstuart · a month ago
I think we're well served by distinct language:

  * "intelligent" is the intellectual capacity one is born with
  * "stupid" is the failure to use that intellectual capacity
I know plenty of very intelligent people who have been quite stupid at times. I know that while I may have adequate intelligence I've certainly been stupid more than once (or maybe even twice).

ergonaught · a month ago
That is not the "stupid" used in this context.
ergonaught commented on Some people can't see mental images   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/petalmind
andy99 · 2 months ago
I’ve read tons of these and still have no idea if I have aphantasia or not. I can’t understand whether people just have different ways of describing what’s in their minds eye or if there’s really a fundamental difference.
ergonaught · 2 months ago
Okay, so, if you think people are only metaphorically referring to their "minds eye", then you probably have aphantasia. If the idea of people "counting sheep" to go to sleep confuses you, thinking that perhaps you could not go to sleep if you just lay there counting to yourself (hint: that's not what they mean), welcome to club aphantasia.

I haven't even read the comments yet and I guarantee there are people here debating that there is some spectrum or degree of quality to the imagery of the minds eye, and those people don't understand that there is nothing which can possess qualities when you have aphantasia. If there are degrees, then you don't have aphantasia.

It's entirely possible to imagine things, and to access data/information about things that the brain is presumably constructing, but there is no direct, sober, conscious access to mental imagery. None. Not "fuzzy", not "cloudy", not "not very strong": none.

Resonates? Again, welcome aboard.

No? Thanks for stopping by. :)

ergonaught commented on Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”   josepheverettwil.substack... · Posted by u/adityaathalye
ergonaught · 2 months ago
The book has a lot of flaws. The trauma industry that's grown up around it and similar work has a lot of flaws. The post has a lot of flaws.

They're all quite confident, though.

ergonaught commented on Laptops create systems. Phones feed algorithms. The asymmetry determines power   zakelfassi.com/command-in... · Posted by u/zakelfassi
ergonaught · 2 months ago
TLDR: RMS remains correct and we continue losing.
ergonaught commented on In Defense of C++   dayvster.com/blog/in-defe... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
ergonaught · 3 months ago
It's a fine post except for this:

> Countless companies have cited how they improved their security or the amount of reported bugs or memory leaks by simply rewriting their C++ codebases in Rust. Now is that because of Rust? I’d argue in some small part, yes.

Just delete this. Even an hour's familiarity with Rust will give you a visceral understanding that "Rewrites of C++ codebases to Rust always yield more memory-safe results than before" is absolutely not because "any rewrite of an existing codebase is going to yield better results". If you don't have that, skip it, because it weakens the whole piece.

ergonaught commented on We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds   zettelkasten.de/posts/the... · Posted by u/maksimur
ergonaught · 3 months ago
The actual central point is that the brain requires conditioning via experience. That shouldn't be controversial, and I can't decide if the general replies here are an extended and ironic elaboration of his point or not.

If you never memorize anything, but are highly adept at searching for that information, your brain has only learned how to search for things. Any work it needs to do in the absence of searching will be compromised due to the lack of conditioning/experience. Maybe that works for you, or maybe that works in the world that's being built currently, but it doesn't change the basic premise at all.

ergonaught commented on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline   publichealthpolicyjournal... · Posted by u/cainxinth
ergonaught · 4 months ago
No idea whether this holds up, but the human body is all about conditioning and maximizing energy efficiency, so it should at least be unsurprising if true.

My vehicle has a number of self-driving capabilities. When I used them, my brain rapidly stopped attending to the functions I'd given over, to the extent that there was a "gap" before I noticed it was about to do the wrong thing. On resumption of performing that work myself, it was almost as if I had forgotten some elements of it for a moment while my brain sorted it out.

No real reason to think that outsourcing our thinking/writing/etc will cause our brains to respond any differently. Most of the "reasoned" arguments I see against that idea seem based on false equivalences.

u/ergonaught

KarmaCake day3048September 15, 2015View Original