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mandown2308

21 karma · joined April 29, 2020

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mandown2308··on SHOCKING! College professor reveals hidden secrets of news headlines.
Aptly-named study headline
mandown2308··on Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?
I'm probably in the same boat as you, thanks for asking this question.
mandown2308··on Hot take: Success in life is mostly due to luck (2023)
Those who get lucky usually recognize the opportunity. Hence the luck (that others don't get to see the opportunity.)
mandown2308··on Birds masturbate, and that's perfectly normal
Interesting
mandown2308··on Forward Deployed Engineer
Thanks, I needed this. There's been a lot of sightings of this job title and I find this new.
mandown2308··on The Struggle Is Gone
I think this title can seen in a positive light, too.
mandown2308··on Occupations with the Highest Divorce Rates
It's very interesting to see that Actuaries have the lowest divorce rates. Marriage seems to be based more on a good estimation of the partner than whims of liking.
mandown2308··on A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC
Please someone buy this and make him a millionaire! It's better than buying a banana with a duck tape on it.
mandown2308··on London–Calcutta bus service
Wow. Mind-blowing!
mandown2308··on Pew Research - Striking Findings from 2025
All related to USA. Please append in title.
mandown2308··on Rusty-JVM – JVM Implemented in Rust
Great. Lot of potential for this to get adopted officially in future.
mandown2308··on Ask HN: My mother was scammed out of all her savings. What should I do?
I don't have any solution for you, but I'm really sorry for this happened to you. It makes me really sad. I hope you get justice legally.
mandown2308··on You can now play Grand Theft Auto Vice City in the browser
Amazing amazing!
mandown2308··on Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most
From personal experience, I would say that's quite true.
mandown2308··on Write in C – Let it Be
Amen
mandown2308··on Reasons to Not Use ChatGPT
From my understanding what Stallman says is that LLMs don't "understand" what they're saying. They do a probabilistic search of the most appropriate letter (say) that has had come after another letter in the text (or any media) they have been trained on, and they place it similar in resemblance in the text that they produce. This is largely (no pun) dependent on existing data that is there in the world today, and the more the data that LLMs can work through, the better they get at predicting. (Hence the big data center shops today.)

But the limitation is that it cannot "imagine" (as in "imagination is more important than knowledge" by Einstein, who worked on a knowledge problem using imagination, but with the same knowledge resources as his peers.) In this video [1], Stallman talks about his machine trying to understand the "phenomenon" of a physical mechanism, which enables it to "deduce" next steps. I suppose he means it was not doing a probabilistic search on a large dataset to know what should have come next (which makes it human-knowledge dependent), essentially rendering it to an advanced search engine but not AI.

[1] https://youtu.be/V6c7GtVtiGc?si=fhkG2ZA-nsQgrVwm

mandown2308··on Don't Become a Scientist (1999)
I just summarized the article with GPT, and from what it seems, the points are still valid arguments today...speaking slightly from personal experience.
mandown2308··on Programming, but make it Gen Z
gyatt!
mandown2308··on Bidet Toilet Use May Cause Anal Symptoms and Nosocomial Infection (2021)
What about non-attached bidets that you come separately and are attached to the walls? This study is for a very specific form of bidet.
mandown2308··on F-Droid build servers can't build modern Android apps due to outdated CPUs
On the other hand, we have "personal" data centers for AI and mining farms for crypto.
mandown2308··on Lead pigment in turmeric is the culprit in a global poisoning mystery (2024)
What I got by reading the paper: loose tumeric powder and polished tumeric root are the main "culprits" because they are contaminated with Lead Chromate (chemical used in paintings for yellow color.)

If you're using branded/packaged tumeric powder, or natural unpolished tumeric root, you're still good as a tumeric consumer in South Asia (though the paper differentiates branded vs packaged tumeric in Table 2, but does not explicitly explain the difference.)

Also, Patna in Bihar is the major source of Lead-adulterated tumeric (in the forms mentioned above) in India, and any exports of tumeric to other places from Patna could be harmful. Lead contamination in Guwahati, Assam is mostly found in imported tumeric from Patna.

mandown2308··on I Don't Need Ozempic. But I Want It
Some videos related to this:

https://youtu.be/ldDToZlLXdk?si=rBq5ksFpImeTifYA

https://youtu.be/IMzhmUze0Qc?si=7P6x6LXjRwgC6xtG

https://youtu.be/H7LxWXuDQto?si=FwDlIRUfhiGeyoGG

https://youtu.be/d3CzBnD6X8E?si=pWVjsIRm_PIZlTwe

(I didn't read the article.)

mandown2308··on Ask HN: How long did it take to learn your first programming language?
Thank you gilbertmpanga for your answer.
mandown2308··on Ask HN: Was Programming Intuitive to You?
Its been 6 years but I've doing it intermittently, trying out different languages. Its now that I'm working quite hard at it. Even though I've been studying it for 6 years now, I could not make much sense of it. It takes a while. But I've experienced the more I grind at it, the more it becomes clear. So there's hope, I guess.
mandown2308··on Ask HN: Was Programming Intuitive to You?
May I ask how long have you've been programming? I, myself, am finding it hard to make the correct mental models.
mandown2308··on Ask HN: Do you feel motion sickness by working on a computer fast enough?
Yes lots of scrolling and jumping around the browser fast. Screen and distance are normal though.
mandown2308··on Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?
and Naval too. I love his teachings.
mandown2308··on Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?
made me cry a lil bit
mandown2308··on Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?
Tao Te Ching and Alan Watts
mandown2308··on India to propose cryptocurrency ban, penalising miners and traders
What about the ones who already own it? They would need to forgo their bitcoin right?
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