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kashyapc

Re:Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @10:19PM (#49191648)
Yeah, I think Plato's dialogues are unparalleled. I love the rigour, drama, and how they don't end with a clear conclusion ("aporia"), forcing you to find your own.
Re:Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @10:07PM (#49191562)
> It doesn't help that nowadays Aurelius is being held up as some beacon of masculinity nowadays.

Yeah, it's people like Tim Ferris, Ryan Holiday and others who write titles such as "how to think like a Roman emperor" (a terrible title if you know anything about Aurelius or Stoicism in some depth) and other tech bros are to blame. They drummed up excessive hype for Aurelius, he's good marketing material.

Neoplatonists: I tried reading Plotinus, but it didn't resonate with me, afraid. But it was a weak attempt.

Re:Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @01:32PM (#49186110)
FWIW, I got a lot more about virtue ethics from reading Plato's works, the Stoics, and Cicero. Aristotle is somewhat dry and tedious to read. Go for him if you're into formal logic and related technical systems. But if you're truly interested in virtue ethics and have some reading discipline, try Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

On Marcus Aurelius: he's often recommended mindlessly (especially in tech circles). I actually to suggest to read him last. He does have valuable things to say, but he's the most depressive of the Big Three Stoics. You can better appreciate Aurelius if you've already digested some Socratic dialogues and Epictetus. One of the top-most Stoicism scholars (A. A. Long) describes Marcus Aurelius this way: "a melancholy emperor, who was hardly a card-carrying Stoic".

FWIW, here's[1] my recommended reading order and top English translations from five years ago. Cut out the cheap rehashes by people such as Ryan Holiday and stick to the originals. A bonus note[2] on the Roman gem, Cicero, from six years ago.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990579

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24638573

> One of the example Gwern brings [1] is a GA as an agent for public discourse and political life, to bring your "set of values" to have an effect in solving society's issues, when you yourself don't have the time or energy to.

I'm sorry, that doesn't sound meaningful. If I don't have the energy, I'd rather shut up than have a stupid "avatar" of me yell on the internet in the name of "bringing my values" or "participate in an online discourse". I'm all for forward-looking thinking, but we must show humility. "Society's issues" are complex and deep. Those who propose internet-based solutions to troubling social ills don't often demonstrate a deep understanding of the nature of the problem. You can't plug it all with "agents"! Socrates would be rolling in his grave.

I know everyone in Silicon Valley in a rush, but this idea needs more soak-time (3-4 years) to see if it actually holds any water. But this kind of thinking won't you get that sweet VC money.

> What would it take for LLMs to make me 100× more productive? Without this, I am doomed to irrelevance.

Are you, though? You will only be "doomed" if your place your value system squarely on "productivity". Then what is to differentiate you from a machine?

    * * *
Edit: I'm not sure how I can feel confident about a proposal that puts so much value on "productivity". How can you reconcile this with "self-actualization"? (Don't get me wrong, I like my LLM-based productivity gains as the next person, but I care more about wisdom than becoming "100x more productive".)

Edit 2: "the goal of GA is to preserve individual human cognitive liberty and flourishing" — so the proposal is to do that by overlaying a software bot that continuously mimics your "self"?

Not to be that guy, but the article has 14 (!) occurrences of the word "cyber". It's nauseating.

As usual, this is OpenAI trying to give themselves a backhanded compliment: "look, how dangerous our models are!"

I'll wait for someone more thoughtful than ClosedAI to comment on this complex topic.

Thanks for elaborating. I totally agree with you. I wasn't implying that funding the LHC itself was misguided, for the good reasons you articulate so well.
Re:CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3 on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @07:58AM (#48745307)
I know what you mean. I was recently at lunch at a (non-physics) tech conference and an ex-physicist (now a systems developer) sitting next to me responded the same.

I think (physicists in the room, please correct me if I'm making assumptions here) this is a classic "falsification" trap. Just because you can propose a hypothesis / prediction that is "falsiable" doesn't make it a worthwhile one to pursue. "Hypotheses" are dime a dozen. The art and wisdom is in choosing what to pursue.

Re:CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3 on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @06:27AM (#48744659)
I see; thanks for expanding on it so honestly.
Re:CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3 on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @05:36AM (#48744328)
> felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact

Your comment above makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder[1]. I'm sure you must've heard of her. I know she's somewhat of a "polarizing" figure. As a former "insider", do you think her core point stands? (Which is, the particle physics field has largely nothing to show for after spending billions of public money. Some particle physicists have even predicted so-called "unparticles", which almost sounds like trolling!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder

I see, fair point. Sorry for taking a dig at you. Please know that I do appreciate a lot of work that you do. I was just worried for a moment when just reading that bit.
Totally. I thought Simon was wiser than this; even he couldn't resist getting swept up by breathless hype. The moment you start typing "LOC as a metric", alarm bells should go off in your head.
Re:Stop Using Ollama on Thursday April 16, 2026 @08:54AM (#47792311)
Thank you; it's an educating read for me, as someone who doesn't dwell in this space, but cares about FOSS in its true spirit.
Re:Stop Using Ollama on Thursday April 16, 2026 @08:51AM (#47792274)
> No mention of the fact that Ollama is about 1000x easier to use.

The point of the article is not to expound on how user-friendly "Ollama" is. It's about exposing the deception and shameful moral low ground they took.

You seem to see a "pretty strong case" from a bombastic press release.

Don't get me wrong, I do know the reality has changed. Even Greg K-H, the Linux stable maintainer, did recently note[1] that it's not funny any more:

"Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality," he said. "It was kind of funny. It didn't really worry us."

... "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Security teams across major open source projects talk informally and frequently, he noted, and everyone is seeing the same shift. "All open source security teams are hitting this right now."

---

I agree that an antidote to the obnoxious hype is to pay attention to the actual capabilities and data. But let's not get too carried away.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/greg_kroahhartman_ai_...

Re:Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all on Sunday March 15, 2026 @05:50AM (#47385804)
I recently heard a new (to me) excuse:

When in the middle of a group text-chat, someone replied with AI-generated blather. It was dead-clear with the usual sterile vocab, structured buzzphrases, and other LLM "tells".

I politely called him out and asked to use his own voice. In public he insisted that it was his voice and that he used AI only for "formatting". But in private he admits that he created a "gem to assist with multicultural comms", which generated the text. He claims he did it because "not everyone can take the native American English well". A load of bovine manure. I nicely told him to cut this crap and just write as it comes to him. (Basic spell- and grammar-check is fine.)

Re:John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists on Friday March 13, 2026 @08:17PM (#47371824)
Well said. Some people are misparsing your core point here.

Skrebbel is largely referring to the OSS projects that need people to do consitent grunt work like shipping predictable releases, stable branch maintenance, backporting security fixes, etc. This is the kind of work maintains that the internet's infrastructure.

A bit like the Nebraska guy from the famous XKCD, dependecy: https://xkcd.com/2347/

Re:RISC-V Is Sloooow on Thursday March 12, 2026 @03:19PM (#47355756)
> I've found this fails on my 16 GB P550 Megrez with swap disabled but works quickly and uses maybe 50 or 100 MB of swap if I enable it.

I see, I don't have a Megrez at my desk, only in the build system. I only have P550 as my "workhorse".

PS: I made a typo above - the P550 I was referring to was the SiFive "HiFive Premier P550". But I know you figured it out, based on your HN profile :)

I'm tickled pink to read this! I very much support this move. HN is one of the few internet forums I use. It'd be awful to see this riddled by bot spew.

This rule will atleast partly stem the danger of HN getting turned into what dang calls a "scorched earth" situation.

Re:RISC-V Is Sloooow on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @08:03AM (#47334511)
They haven't produced any chips.
Re:RISC-V Is Sloooow on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @07:20AM (#47334176)
Great point; I only know about MIPS legacy vaguely. As you imply, don't listen to the "hype-sters" but pay attention to what silicon is being produced.
Re:RISC-V Is Sloooow on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @06:24AM (#47333796)
Please skim the thread :) We've already discussed it twice. Fedora "mandates" native builds.

Build time on target hardware matters when you're re-building an entire Linux distribution (25000+ packages) every six months.

Re:RISC-V Is Sloooow on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @06:15AM (#47333741)
A couple of corrections (the blog-post is by a colleague, but I'm not speaking for Marcin! :))

First, we do have a recent 'binutils' build[1] with test-suites in 67 minutes (it was on Milk-V "Megrez") in the Fedora RISC-V build system. This is a non-trivial improvement over the 143-minute build time reported in the blog.

Second, the current fastest development machine is not Banana Pi BPI-F3. If we consider what is reasonably accessible today, it is SiFive "HiFive P550" (P550 for short) and an upcoming UltraRISC "DP1000", we have access to an eval board. And as noted elsewhere in this thread, in "several months" some RVA23-based machines should be available. (RVA23 == the latest ISA spec).

FWIW, our FOSDEM talk from earlier this year, "Fedora on RISC-V: state of the arch"[1], gives an overview of the hardware situation. It also has a couple of related poorman's benchmarks (an 'xz' compression test and a 'binutils' build without the test-suite on the above two boards -- that's what I could manage with the time I had).

Edit: Marcin's RISC-V test was done on StarFive "Vision Five 2". This small board has its strengths (upstreamed drivers), but it is not known for its speed!

[1] https://riscv-koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=91...

[2] Slides: https://fosdem.org/2026/events/attachments/SQGLW7-fedora-on-...

Re:RISC-V Is Sloooow on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @08:40PM (#47330584)
On benchmarks, for more precision details, I recommend the RISC-V Vector (RVV) benchmarks[1], maintained by Olaf Bernsten. He only covers the Vector stuff, but with great depth.

[1] https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/

Re:RISC-V Is Sloooow on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @08:33PM (#47330531)
Arm had 40 years to be where it is today. RISC-V is 15 years old. Some more patience is warranted.

Assuming they will keep their word, later this year Tenstorrent is supposed to ship their RVA23-based server development platform[1]. They announced[2] it at the last year's NA RISC-V Summit. Let's see.

The ball is in the court of hardware vendors to cook some high-end silicon.

[1] https://tenstorrent.com/ip/risc-v-cpu

[2] https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/riscvsummit2025/e2/Unl...

Re:RISC-V Is Sloooow on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @08:23PM (#47330464)
Near as I know, Fedora prefers native compilation for the builds.

Your question made me look up Arm's history in Fedora and came up on this 2012 LWN thread[1]. There's some discussion against cross-compilation already back then.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/487622/

Re:How Will OpenAI Compete? on Thursday February 26, 2026 @08:31AM (#47165824)
> Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue.

Maybe you're overestimating their "moat" and stickiness. The dust is still settling on this madness and "OpenAI"[1] creates a lot of noise in the market.

These LLMs are being rapidly commoditized, very soon they will become as "boring" as virtual machines or containers. Altman has the exceptional skill to dupe people into giving their money to him. The "infinite money glitch" that he has been exploiting isn't really infinite.

I just hope there'll be a breakthrough with truly transparent LLMs that will stabilize this madness. As I've griped[2] two years ago, I find OpenAI too scummy, and it is unlikely that they will "win" with their sleazy ways.

[1] Air quotes because of their persistent abuse of the word "open"

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425735

Re:An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me on Thursday February 12, 2026 @02:30PM (#46993810)
Pretty sure he's not talking about the physics of stochastic chaos!

The context gives us the clue: he's using it as a metaphor to refer to AI companies unloading this wretched behavior on OSS.

Re:How Will the Miracle Happen Today? on Saturday January 10, 2026 @03:33AM (#46563911)
> what the people doing him kindness got in return was that they got to do something kind for someone

Yes, there is something to that but he gives too much credit[1] to his own "willingness to be open".

I don't know if KK has taken it too far or not, but the way he expresses it all is not inspiring. It carries an air of pretentious wisdom.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46561144

Re:How Will the Miracle Happen Today? on Friday January 09, 2026 @07:03PM (#46561144)
Yeah, while the article is beautifully and poetically written (he's a reputed magazine editor after all), it comes across naive to extrapolate his good fortune to "you just have to be open enough to let the miracle happen to you". (I know, I'm simplifying here a bit.)

Obviously, there's some truth to it, but there are many unspoken variables that worked in his favor that he doesn't bother to acknowledge them. Some other comments also touched on it.

I'm not being cynical here. I myself have had incredibly good fortune in experiencing the kindness of strangers, both in the East and the West, and I do my best to reciprocate. But I'm acutely aware of how invisible factors that are not in my control helped facilitate some of the good fortune that came my way. I can't merrily attribute it all to my own "openness to experience"!

KK inhales his own good fortune too deeply.

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