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The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 613 posts.
The concept of recursive self-improvement (RSI) dates back to I. J. Good (1965), where he defined an “ultraintelligent machine” as a system that can surpass humans in all intellectual activities and design better machines to improve itself. Yudkowsky (2008) used the phrase “recursive self-improvement” for a specific…
I’m a big fan of the Zohran Mamdani administration.
AI makes intellectual contribution superfluous.
A reflection on returning to Kagi after trying some alternatives including the much worse search engine called Google.
Why does a five-minute hallway conversation sometimes solve what a week of solo thinking couldn't?
For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully. The only solution has been to start over, to not inherit backup state and to manually delete the old backup. My experience…
"It turns out" became a favorite phrase of mine sometime in mid 2006, which, it turns out, was just about the time that I first started tearing through Paul Graham essays . Coincidence?
I will never be a great snowboarder. For various genetic and non-genetic reasons, my knees are barely capable of surviving a three-hour hike, let alone the landing after a 1080. In fact, I’ll probably never be a snowboarder at all, given my orthopedist told me to stay away from anything that’s heavy on the knees, […]
There they sit, the preschooler class encircling their mentor, the substitute teacher.
if you always wanted to but think it isn't worth telling a speaker you liked their talk, this is your encouragement post to do so.
Paul McGowan makes stereos. To paraphrase his insight: The musicality isn’t a feature you add to an amplifier. It’s what’s left when you stop ruining it. To expand: Customer delig…
Table of Contents: Intro, Morning- Flight Attendant Training, Pilot Training., Lunch- Southwest Store, Social Media Serendipity., Afternoon- Network Operations Center, TechOps Hangar, Herb and Coll...
Updated on June 17th, 21st, 22nd, 24th, 26th, and 27th, and July 3rd. See notes below. OK, so Mythos finds really challenging security bugs, right? That’s why it’s cordoned off from the hoi polloi, to protect the world from such a powerful finder of exploits. But, many other LLMs can find bugs. Is Mythos uniquely…
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now. How fast can we ship this...
Constructing a skyscraper is a massive undertaking. You need architectural blueprints, council permits, and safety audits before the first piece of steel is even ordered. It requires hundreds of people coordinating over months or years. You can’t just throw up some drywall and hope the building holds weight. Then…
Literally no one is uttering what we thought were the immortal lines “learn to code,” right? I don't think that sentence has been spoken for many months now in Silicon Valley
I decided to get evaluated for ADHD. Curiousity struck, and I had the bright idea to capture the page source and any outbound requests.
I think I’ve finally pinpointed why it is that I have an allergic reaction when I’m confronted with a text that has me as the intended recipient, but that has been run through an LLM to change or “clean up” the wording - especially if it’s internal communication or even direct communication. Well, at the very least, I…
Modify your tools more!
A few days ago, I started watching Person of Interest, and I haven’t been able to stop. Aside from the fact that the show feels even more relevant today than...
A sad look at the state of modern programming books.
Why did we all start talking about content, traffic, distribution, and conversions?
A brief explanation of my pessimism about efforts to radically improve education.
6. Snow is heavier than you think. You might think physical strength is useful for lots of things, like overall health or familiar household tasks or picking up dudes (literally or metaphorically.)…
It's been a few months since my post on leaving Gmail which sparked a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Here's an update on how things have been going after my move to Fastmail.
An exploration of how I became a massive geek.
An updated list of design thinking books and papers to understand the principles underpinning the design thinking process and its practice.
KO | EN | Discussions on HN Alexandr frolov (CC BY-SA 4.0) This blog doesn’t use a static site generator or framework like Jekyll, Hugo, or Gatsby. I tried a few of them at first, but they gave me too little freedom to customize, so I decided to build the blog myself. Early on I just wrote posts in ...
In this article, I try to understand why coding agents can be infuriating to use. I think the problem is their conversational UX: they behave enough like helpful colleagues to trigger our social instincts, but they don't learn, adapt, or take responsibility the way people do, which makes their repeated mistakes feel…
