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dr_dshiv

10,853 karma · joined September 26, 2018

Professor of Human Centered Design in the Netherlands.

Founder of SourceLibrary.org

Derek@sourcelibrary.org

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dr_dshiv··on macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review
Something to improve my mess of ~22 active terminal windows comes to mind.
dr_dshiv··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
Thanks. It looks like we have some but not all of the original works you are looking for: https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian/thread/6aa7656bfa07a553c...

I’ll try to track down the ones you are looking for tomorrow. Yes, we avoid copyrighted modern translations.

dr_dshiv··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
I’m working on translating the Renaissance — it was mostly written in Latin and 90% of it has never been translated to English. Even big names, like Ficino, Durer, Kircher, Fludd and Drebbel. And that’s Latin— things much more sparse in other classical languages.

https://SourceLibrary.org is a hub that now provides over 20,000 translations of classical texts in dozens of languages (Latin and Greek but also Chinese, Sanskrit, etc). We always provide the original image of the text next to the AI translation (so if you don’t trust it, you can do it again). For a sense of scale, SourceLibrary now hosts more words than English Wikipedia!

You can freely connect to the public MCP for research; that way AI can read books and not hallucinate quotes. In Claude, it also retrieves images directly into the chat.

This is a philanthropic project based at the non-profit “The Embassy of the Free Mind” in Amsterdam, a rare book library devoted to free thought and mysticism. https://embassyofthefreemind.com

SourceLibrary is totally free and open source. If we can raise the money, we hope to translate 100k books before the end of the year.

If you want to dive in, I’d suggest trying our research agent with a rabbithole topic of your choice: https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian/

dr_dshiv··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
Disagree about the burden of proof. We have no better model for how human decision making works than LLMs. Humans are constantly predicting the next moment. We certainly have a different “tokenizer” and training set, but many of the concepts underpinning LLMs are both biologically inspired and, likely, have similar consequences and emergent architectures.
dr_dshiv··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
Why is anthropomorphism the problem here? If OpenAI hired a contractor and they did this, OpenAI or the contractor would still be liable, depending on the contract language.
dr_dshiv··on How GPT‑5.6 Sol helps run quantum computing experiments
Guess I need to update https://quantumvibecoding.org
dr_dshiv··on GPT-6 Astra
Creating new physics is the new AGI goal post
dr_dshiv··on Lion-man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohle_Fels

At Hohle Fels, they also found a similar lion man — 2 meters from a harmonically tuned flute!

dr_dshiv··on AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too
“I wanted to see if I can get in on this 10x magic. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and I bought $10 worth of DeepSeek credits to use with a project I was working on.“

Wow. I guess that’s the punchline!

dr_dshiv··on Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)
If it is undrivable in a straight line, why does that count? I’d assume the longest you could drive in a perfectly straight line would either be the longest straight highway or some drivable desert.
dr_dshiv··on Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?
You can also find a lot here: https://sourcelibrary.org/collections/sumerian-mesopotamian

Feedback welcome

dr_dshiv··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
Can you give an example of a fundamentally unintuitive idea?
dr_dshiv··on Oldinsurancemaps.net is now a Charter Project
SourceLibrary.org for instance… how to make what is done there an economic value for AI companies with data for training?
dr_dshiv··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
“Fortunately, concepts in statistics are grounded in intuition and rationality.“

Yeaaah… let’s talk about that.

Seems like a fair bit of stats were designed to intimidate —so as to get people to stop asking questions. Or at least that is the effect!

Stats designed for intuition are few. See Kill Math for how it might be done: https://worrydream.com/KillMath/

dr_dshiv··on Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help
Hmm, seems like which model teachers prefer would be the more important headline…
dr_dshiv··on The Sloppification of Peptides
The vaaast majority of LLM training data is LLM generated.

Source: look at how good Chinese models are.

dr_dshiv··on Decoding silent reading from non-invasive EEG
Id love to whisper vibe code in public. Oh well.
dr_dshiv··on Don't paste the AI, please
Points to the future where my bots talk to your bots. I think that’s healthy.

Context is everything.

Btw, Claude code sent my first accidental AI email yesterday. I guess permissions changed? Before it could only draft. Uhoh, waiting for the onslop.

dr_dshiv··on Being ambitious and being a dad
4 kids, 4 companies, let’s go!

Claude Code fits my lifestyle.

Just believe! And accept constant stress as a good thing.

dr_dshiv··on We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
The Embassy of the Free Mind (https://www.embassyofthefreemind.com) is a rare book library in Amsterdam that is scanning books the old fashioned way… leading to https://SourceLibrary.org — a collection of over 5,000 books from the renaissance that have never been translated before. Consider donating, if this is a topic you care about!
dr_dshiv··on Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+
Congrats to all parties. Makes me more likely to use openrouter and excited for where stripe is heading.
dr_dshiv··on Claude: System Prompts
Thanks for sharing! I’m super skeptical of the claims, but it really deserves careful discussion.

Hope they make comparisons to food and fashion. I measure my AI usage in terms of hamburgers. Makes me feel better about AI and worse about eating meat.

dr_dshiv··on Claude: System Prompts
It is still surprising that it was flagged. I’d have read it if it appeared — and the comments would be nice to read.
dr_dshiv··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
Regarding “actual tests”: My team and I built a battery of longitudinal cognitive assessments useful for testing memory and brain function. (http://getNeuroUX.com)
dr_dshiv··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
“It is not sharing anything, because it is not capable of sharing, because it does not have a soul”

soul.md though, just saying

dr_dshiv··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
Belt and braces all the way down. They did their post training in British context?
dr_dshiv··on Hello, me. It's been a while
That’s how Von Neumann did his thang, with a tv blaring in the background
dr_dshiv··on Understanding is the new bottleneck
Hot take: I look at the level of abstraction that matters most to me. When I encounter cognitive debt (usually due to sleepy sessions where I’m mostly “encouraging” Claude), I ask it to step back to clarify the overall purpose. If I get really stuck, I have it visualize the processes involved. Usually, the hard part is giving specific enough feedback to get a specific enough response within a much broader set of working material.
dr_dshiv··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
gemini-3-flash-preview is legit amazing and cheap. That's why i spent over 10k on it.
dr_dshiv··on Astronomers discover black hole 'star'
Black hole sun, won’t you come…
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