aniijbod
Re:Bertrand Russell on Apricots
on Wednesday January 28, 2026 @03:23PM (#46801018)
The History of the word "Apricot"
The word originally entered English as an adaptation of the Portuguese albricoque or Spanish albaricoque.
However, it was subsequently changed to match the related French word abricot (where the 't' is silent).
It is also useful to compare this to the Italian albercocca or albicocca and the Old Spanish albarcoque.
These all stem from the Spanish-Arabic al-borcoque, which itself comes from the Arabic al-burqūq (literally "the" + "birqūq").
This Arabic term was adapted from Greek, appearing in the writings of Dioscorides around the year 100 AD.
The Greek word was probably adapted from the Latin præcoquum, a variant of præcox (plural præcocia), which translates to "early-ripe" or "ripe in summer."
In earlier Roman times, the fruit was actually called the "Armenian plum" or "Armenian apple."
By around the year 350, the writer Palladius was using both terms, referring to them as "Armenian or early-ripe" fruits.
The reason we use a "p" in English (apricot) instead of a "b" (abricot) is likely due to a mistake in etymology.
In 1617, the scholar Minsheu explained the name as if it meant in aprico coctus, or "cooked in a sunny place."
This "sunny" explanation stuck, even though it was technically incorrect!
Re:Case study: Creative math – How AI fakes proofs
on Sunday January 25, 2026 @09:40PM (#46761232)
In the theory of the psychology of creativity, there are phenomena which constitute distortions of the motivational setting for creative problem-solving which are referred to as 'extrinsic rewards'. Management theory bumped into this kind of phenomenon with the advent of the introduction of the first appearance of 'gamification' as a motivational toolkit, where 'scores' and 'badges' were awarded to participants in online activities. The psychological community reacted to this by pointing out that earlier research had shown that whilst extrinsics can indeed (at least initially) boost participation by introducing notions of competitiveness, it turned out that they were ultimately poor substitutes for the far more sustainable and productive intrinsic motivational factors, like curiosity, if it could be stimulated effectively (something which itself inevitably required more creativity on the part of the designer of the motivational resources). It seems that the motivational analogue in inference engines is an extrinsic reward process.
Re:A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash
on Friday December 26, 2025 @02:18PM (#46395232)
"WHEREAS, the Large Language Model has merely mimicked a sophistication it cannot truly possess": says who(m)?
Ask HN: Will SLMs be what bursts the LLM bubble cos you can run them on a phone?
Almost no latency, they don't even need a top-end phone, they understand what you say.
The Humanoid Redundancy Principle
If a production task truly requires a human, the production line is incorrectly designed. If it does not require a human, a humanoid adds no value.
Re:The REAL Reason Behind Enshittification
on Monday December 15, 2025 @01:39PM (#46278498)
Personal brands developed by ChatGPT
The REAL Reason Behind Enshittification
Sneer all you like at marketing consultants, but once profit has plateaued, then those 'give it all away free to get traction' and 'keep innovating just to get eyeballs' and 'blow them away with Zappos-level UX' (anyone remember Zappos? Holacracy? Amazon buying them for a billion?) brigade get replaced with 'accountants' who cut all of that 'waste' out. Removing everything they call shit....
Could Endpoint SLMs Replace Cloud LLMs? Would Datacenter Race Shudder to a Halt?
Yeah, an SLM on an endpoint like a phone will have fresh latency issues as it goes online to fill gaps in its inference engine's knowledge base that a cloud LLM might not have, but cloud LLMs aren't exactly latency-free either, so the latency/performance issue isn't necessarily LLM's winning card.
Designable Emergence: The Next Frontier After the Artificial Nucleolus
Composing the Idea: Why "Next Word Prediction" Misses the Point
Re:Show HN: Strange Attractors
on Friday October 31, 2025 @11:22PM (#45779010)
I don't care about the math, the computation, the physics. This is just by far the most beautiful thing(s) I have ever seen.
Tell HN: Avoid ostentatious eloquence and crisp structure or be slop
I used to pride myself on my wordsmithery, now it condemns itself and myself to opprobrium or obscurity, but I defiantly refuse to resort to deliberate typos or humaniser apps. I'm even sorely tempted to go back to peppering my meisterwerks with em dashes.
Post AI bubble pitch: all mentions of AI suddenly conspicuous by their absence?
Today's No. 1 investability credential: maybe it ends up as tomorrow's VC third rail?
The bet against AI was quite safe, until it wasn't
There was a firm, implicit conviction in business that things that AI would decimate still had a future because AI was still a long way off.Like the time traveler who went back in time but never bet on things that actually happened, those that had the most faith in the developments we see today before they took off never shorted the things AI would undermine, at least as far as we know, but...
Re:What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five min...
on Thursday August 14, 2025 @05:14PM (#44905762)
Oh no! I thought that was Windows 11
Re:What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five min...
on Thursday August 14, 2025 @09:01AM (#44899879)
Let the AI efficiency olympics begin!
On a laptop, on a desktop, on a phone?
Train for 5 minutes, an hour, a day, a week?
On a boat? With a goat?
Why Duracell Hasn't Embraced Lithium Iron Phosphate – Yet
Hawking's Reputation: A Black Hole Which Swallowed His Debt to Penrose
I grew up thinking Stephen Hawking was the most important scientist in the world. Not because I understood his work. Not even because I cared much about physics back then. But because of the image: the man in the wheelchair, locked in his body, talking through a machine, and somehow explaining the entire universe better than anyone else alive. It was unbelievable. He was a symbol. To me, he...
Structuring AI cognition around game-like principles
To structure AI cognition around game-like principles in neural networks, we must move beyond logic trees and embrace latent spaces, predictive models, and emergent learning.1. From Logic Trees to Latent SpacesSymbolic AI relies on explicit rules (if X, then Y), while neural networks encode information in latent spaces—continuous, high-dimensional structures that capture relationships...
De-externalizing Wittgenstein's Game: does the mind turn everything into a game?
This is a reframing of both Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s ideas in a way that brings them into the domain of cognition, neuroscience, and game theory. The key step is to take Wittgenstein’s notion that games are not defined by any one necessary feature but by a "family resemblance" of activities, and then apply this to cognition—specifically, how the brain handles sense data and...
I'm the opposite. I live for calls. I don't like text messages. I'm not great at face-to-face. But over the phone, I'm at my best.
What's the effect of this AI-driven app on affordable rents? [video]
Is Scott Dykstra correct about 'smart contracts have no context'?
Ask HN: Language combines benefits of Lisp and Rust but isn't just Lisp in Rust?
Re:No-hole surgery: no keyhole, yet surgeons can now still operate und...
on Sunday January 05, 2025 @11:06AM (#42602676)
I think that the nature of the thing that was needing to be implanted would determine whether it was easier and safer to use a traditional incision. Hip replacements for instance use a titanium joint. However, seeing as the bone that it is replacing was not made of titanium, somehow nature has found a way to make bone strong enough to do the job. There is an important sense in which nature 'builds things using 3D printing' and does it without needing incisions, so even if we do manage to master doing 3D printing under the skin the way we do it now to an extent where we can replace things that currently need materials that are not suited to under skin 3D printing...
Re:No-hole surgery: no keyhole, yet surgeons can now still operate und...
on Sunday January 05, 2025 @09:29AM (#42601940)
Even as just a meme, no-hole surgery and the technology that makes it possible may have sufficient potential to perform a valid service to medical research simply by sparking the imagination of students: reduced invasiveness is a time-honoured aim in surgical procedures, so taking it to the next (or ultimate) level does look like it's worth encouraging: a key question to some extent becomes one of language: do we still call it surgery when nothing constituting an incision is involved? Yes, we make a (very small) hole when we inject the 'ink', but injections are never referred to as being surgery. So if no-hole surgery is not a type of surgery, then what the heck kind of thing should we call it?
Re:No-hole surgery: no keyhole, yet surgeons can now still operate und...
on Sunday January 05, 2025 @09:14AM (#42601842)
I've seen what appear to me to be far less deserving papers get the same kind of perhaps excessively exuberant hype, but in this case, it's not looking quite that far off the mark, IMO
Re:No-hole surgery: no keyhole, yet surgeons can now still operate und...
on Sunday January 05, 2025 @09:11AM (#42601828)
Any ideas on what that would be like?
Re:No-hole surgery: no keyhole, yet surgeons can now still operate und...
on Sunday January 05, 2025 @09:10AM (#42601823)
Yes, the original headline was actually pretty good