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jventura commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
jventura · a month ago
I've been working in the intersection of LLMs and Traditional Astrology, for personal knowledge, professional and personal decision-making, and mostly for fun. I'm not a professional astrologer (I'm a CS PhD Professor), but I've studied with some people (some renowned authors on the field) and always had curiosity about it.

I have a python astrology library [1] which I use to generate my astrology chart, as text, to feed it into an LLM (Gemini 2.5 Pro). I then ask it questions about personal characteristics (the easy parts), but, more interesting, I can also ask it to consider some scenarios and it answers back with several hypothesis and how well it fits my character, personal goals, etc. It's like talking to a friend that knows you very very well.

Lately I've been working with a technique called Primary Directions. It's a predictive technique that tries to describe events in your life by means of astrological symbols (things like "Opposition of Saturn reaches the MC by 34.5 years old", which means something "bad" for your career or social position) and use it to check if a specific scenario has worked for me previously and will work in the future, and to ask it for other scenarios that match my personal characteristics and predicted symbolic events. I find LLMs, specifically Gemini Pro, quite good at these kind of things.

I also have fun "playing" with other peoples charts. For instance last night I gave it my chart and list of primary directions to Gemini and asked it if it could find who it was. It said Kurt Cobain. Quite off! But it described a lot of events that could fit my primary directions, like for instance, that Kurt Cobain got his guitar at his 14's or the one at 27 where he died. I didn't die at 27 (but "life issues") and also got my first guitar at 14. I'm also a musician, although an amateur one.

If you're into these kind of things, I created a gist [2] that you can feed into an LLM and talk to Kurt Cobain's chart. Note that it doesn't mention anywhere that it's Kurt Cobain. For fun, ask it something like "Considering the chart and the events predicted by the primary directions, in which ages will this person have some success or public visibility". In my case it answered, among others, 13-14 yo something related to "success, popularity, academic, sports or artistic achievement" (Kurt Cobain seems to got his first guitar at 14, and discovered his vocation), and 23-24 "beginning of career, marriage, or first step that puts the person on the 'map'" (release of the Nevermind album that catapulted Nirvana to the world stage). You can then ask it to match the events to Kurt Cobain, and it will find the real life events that seem to match it quite well.

I find that LLMs are quite good at generating hypothesis, multiple scenarios, and I'm still exploring their strengths and weaknesses (and of astrology as well).

[1] https://github.com/flatangle/flatlib/

[2] https://gist.github.com/joaoventura/68e0aed7c49c389347df98ec...

jventura commented on Getting Past Procrastination   spectrum.ieee.org/getting... · Posted by u/WaitWaitWha
madduci · 3 months ago
Sometimes on house chores or small repairs to do.
jventura · 3 months ago
Everyday I have to prepare dinner and put the plates, glasses, forks and knifes in the table, and, I don't know why, get that feeling that I'd rather do anything else (or, most times, nothing at all). So I always start everything by putting the towel in the table (don't know if it's called like that in EN, not a native speaker). It seems to click something and the rest follows.

Maybe the idea can help you starting things?

It also helps that, sometimes, when the tasks are big, I convince myself that I can finish it later. Many times I do not have to finish it later..

jventura commented on Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal   bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8x... · Posted by u/lleims
yannvon · 4 months ago
I experienced it first hand in Madrid. This was much scarier than I would have imagined.

News travelled extremely slow: phone coverage was just barely enough to receive a couple text messages every 15 minutes or so. News spread on the street, I even saw a group of 20 people hunched around someone owning a hand-held radio in the streets.

Just before power was restored, things started to get worse, as the phone coverage went completely out (presumably batteries were depleted). People were in between enjoying the work-free day, and starting to worry about how tomorrow would look like if power didn't come back.

jventura · 4 months ago
Experience from Portugal, near Lisbon: fake news and made-up stories traveled fast! My wife called me (before phones went out) saying someone heard on the radio that Portugal was on red alert, it was WW3 (world war 3) and I think she even mentioned "missiles"! Also someone said it was a cyberattack and all Europe was off. Lots of panic reactions, many people buying toilet paper, water, candles, sausages and other canned food.

All gas stations closed because they could not sell gasoline/diesel. Today there are lines on all gas stations, people filling their car tanks and bottles..

Oh, let me tell you about electric cars! Many people had to spend the night somewhere away from home because they could not charge their cars.. My sister (with her job's electric car) had to stay the night some 200km away from home, and since the ATMs (Multibanco) didn't work, she didn't have physical money to pay for food. Luckily a stranger paid for the food (yogurt and some cookies). Petrol cars, because of their range, had better luck!

Pure fear and panic..

I can only blame the authorities (Portuguese/European) for not having contingency plans for keeping people informed, and thus letting fear spread like wildfire.

jventura commented on I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats   thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-te... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
mike_hearn · 6 months ago
> Maybe you’re suggesting 1 professor watching 1 student on a 2,5h exam?

Does your local school bus in hundreds of professors on exam day to act as personal security guards? Probably not. When I went to school at least, they used extra cheap labour of whatever minimum skill level was required to catch cheating, in exam halls with procedures designed to prevent cheating.

Professors keep acting like this is some unsolvable research problem when it's not. What's "hard" is stopping cheating for the near-zero price universities seem to expect to pay, and the solution is to get real and change the underlying practices to prevent cheating, regardless of what it takes. If that means no more coursework, fine, scrap the coursework or require it to be done under supervision as well.

CS departments especially have a wealth of options available to them via automation. Record screens on systems without network access, require students to be patted down at the door to stop them bringing in hidden phones, and watch them carefully as they work both in real time and do spot checks on the screen recordings afterwards. Or for that matter, use AI to do it.

The alternative is to just see universities be bulk defunded in future as a failed experiment: see what the Trump admin is doing right now as a preview of what happens when the credibility of public sector education and research falls too low. If degrees are worthless because universities won't do what it takes to stop cheating then what's the argument for preserving student loans next time there's a debt crisis?

jventura · 6 months ago
> When I went to school at least, they used extra cheap labour of whatever minimum skill level was required to catch cheating..

Not here where I leave (not USA)..

> If that means no more coursework, fine, scrap the coursework or require it to be done under supervision as well.

I have a course on building web apps. Not 2h prototypes, but apps that take days to build. Do you think it's the same as a 2h exam?

> CS departments especially have a wealth of options available to them via automation. Record screens on systems without network access, require students to be patted down at the door to stop them bringing in hidden phones, and watch them carefully as they work both in real time and do spot checks on the screen recordings afterwards. Or for that matter, use AI to do it.

Do you think we are police officers or what?! There's a limit for what we are able to do, and what students are able to tolerate..

> The alternative is to just see universities be bulk defunded in future as a failed experiment: see what the Trump admin is doing (...) If degrees are worthless because universities won't do what it takes to stop cheating then what's the argument for preserving student loans next time there's a debt crisis?

Ok, I get your point now! You probably live in some third world country where there's lots of wealth inequality and the state does not help its own citizens. Here in Portugal (and I guess almost all of EU) the tuition is very cheap (around 700€/year), so I wouldn't consider failed experiments for now..

jventura commented on I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats   thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-te... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
mike_hearn · 6 months ago
Is it hard? What's the difficulty with just having assessments be done in a controlled invigilated exam room?

I don't quite understand why higher education is acting like this is an impossible problem to solve when high schools manage to stop 13 year olds using phones and calculators just fine by virtue of having teachers watch them as they write their answers.

jventura · 6 months ago
> What's the difficulty with just having assessments be done in a controlled invigilated exam room?

Not all assessments are exams, eg: projects, and students cheat even in exams with professors present, eg: the OOP exam I mentioned before, where we had 2 teachers for 40 students.

Maybe you’re suggesting 1 professor watching 1 student on a 2,5h exam? For 40 students we would need 40 professors.. We don’t have that number of professors in out departament..

jventura commented on I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats   thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-te... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
recursivedoubts · 6 months ago
I have adopted the following explicit policy: I am here to teach you. I am a good teacher, and if you work hard you will learn important material in this course. If I catch you cheating you will be referred to the university for a disciplinary infraction. However my job is not to ensure that you are not cheating. Again, it is my job to teach you. And, likewise, it is your job to learn from me. You (or your parents) are paying good money for you to be here, and it is your responsibility to make good use of that time. It is likely possible to pass this class by simply cheating. However, that is deeply pointless for you. I get paid the same regardless. When you sit down at your first job, staring at a mess of unfamiliar code you have been given, you will either be glad you didn't cheat or regretful that you did. Let's begin.
jventura · 6 months ago
Fellow professor here, I don't think your approach would work where I teach. I teach in a Polytechnic school (Portugal), which is almost free for the students, so the incentive that they are paying good money does not work.

This semester I'm teaching a web development course (fullstack development), and my policy is that the project must be done on github classroom repositories, and I'll be asking clarification (face to face) on some of the commits. They can use whatever they want (stackoverflow, chatgpt, whatever), but they better know how to explain their commits to me. I don't know if my approach will work in the end, but I surely got their attention.

I'm doing this because it got so bad that, last semester, on my Object Oriented Programming course, even using moodle with the Safe Exam Browser on and an instance of Visual Studio code to try the code, we caught lots of cheaters. How they were doing it? By installing co-pilot plugin. How did we caught them? Some students solve all the exercises in 10 minutes, others had comments that were clearly made by AI, etc. etc. Of some 15 students we caught, only 3 came to us to review the exam.

Hard problem to solve..

jventura commented on What's happening inside the NIH and NSF   science.org/content/blog-... · Posted by u/rrock
csa · 7 months ago
> I’d love to know more.

Probably not news, but here are a few big ones that I remember from our conversations:

1. Family member lived in a rural area. They could see the train line that ran between two major cities. I can’t remember the exact order of events (e.g., construction), but at some point they noticed packed trains turning off the main tracks to go to a facility. Packed trains went in, and empty trains came out. At first they didn’t think anything of it… just resettlement stuff or war stuff or whatever. But then it continued. And continued. The rumors started. Everything was hush hush. Nobody dared to ask the authorities. Only later did they learn that it was a concentration camp and what actually happened there. That one kind of blew my mind… they had no idea about what was going on except vague rumors, most of which were wrong.

2. One family member had access to privileged information about the war (in the later stages of the war). One bit of info they knew was about causalities, and how certain assignments were less survivable than others. The propaganda machine made it seem like it was noble to go fight the war that would inevitably be won, but this person knew with a reasonable degree of mathematical estimation that some of the kids being sent off weren’t likely to come back. They said it was tough to look those parents, especially mothers, in the eyes when they made some comment about hoping their kid came home safely. My family member knew that these parents would likely never see their son again, and all for what was looking like a lost and/or questionable war effort that was still playing on nationalist sentiments.

3. This really isn’t that interesting, but… The propaganda late in the war made it seem like Germans in general and the troops specifically were eating well with an abundance of good food, while people who actually grew the food had to do things like use sawdust and straw as filler in their bread. They had a long list of accommodations that they told me that they made so that they didn’t feel hungry, and I don’t remember them all. The cool thing is that there were ways for the rural folks to get access to food beyond the rations. Sometimes they could sneak some extra food to the city-dwelling family members, but the folks in the cities seemed to have it tougher. They were sort of bitter about how the food situation got progressively worse as the war progressed as well as the total disconnect from reality that the propaganda was presenting.

Note that these were stories that were told to me decades ago about stuff that had happened many decades before then. I’m sure that some stories were embellished while others were muted. I’m also sure that some of the details were “lost in translation” — either via my mediocre German, their mediocre English, or the limits of language assistance that some of the bilingual folks provided.

I don’t really feel like I did these stories justice.

jventura · 7 months ago
Almost 80 years has passed, some details get lost, but it is important to keep things like that alive in our consciousnesses. Even if you didn't to justice to those stories, I still read them with attention. Thanks for them!
jventura commented on The Tsunami of Burnout Few See   charleshughsmith.blogspot... · Posted by u/dxs
spot5010 · 8 months ago
Wow. How I long to be in the position you are! I got burnt out, and then learnt to emotionally detach myself from my work so that I don’t get hurt by things that are beyond my control.

But I sorely miss not being 100% dedicated. What I do for work has always been a big part of my identity. And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.

jventura · 8 months ago
> And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.

Been there many times, but I found that it’s best to aim for good enough, given the resources and constraints, than 100% all the time. I’m a recovering perfectionist, so it’s not always easy to reach that balance, but I try it anyways. When I do not, my anxiety kicks in, and I’m forced to slow down.. I use to be able to ignore it (the anxiety) and keep pushing, but not anymore..

jventura commented on Ask HN: How do you deal with overly negative comments?    · Posted by u/Uptrenda
gperkins978 · 8 months ago
As a lover and admirer of all things porcine, I am deeply offended by that comment. Although pigs do enjoy a good wrestle, they are a fine animal with a great spirit and refined wisdom. If you think I am joking, I am wearing a solid gold pig pendent right now, surrounded by pave diamonds. I genuinely adore these creatures. They have been unfairly maligned in our culture.
jventura · 8 months ago
I always interpreted it as the pig liking getting dirty, not necessarily the fight.. And before reading your comment I never thought there could be another way of interpreting it..

u/jventura

KarmaCake day1502February 4, 2016
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