I don’t even dislike LLMs, but are they the only thing “Hacker” News talks about nowadays? Seriously.

I was going to explain stuff, but given I’m verbose as fuck, it’s simply easier to link Wikipedia. A few highlights:

sees 10 distinct colors looking at a rainbow, whereas the rest of us see only five.

The number of distinct colours you see in the rainbow isn’t just dependent on your colour vision. I have an in-depth explanation here (up to the traffic light), but to keep it short: what you consider “distinct colours” or “hues of the same colour” is largely culture-dependent.

Plus it depends on the rainbow itself; example here

You’re likely to distinguish way more colours for the inner rainbow than the outer one. (For me it’s six vs. three)

“A true tetrachromat has another type of cone in between the red and green — somewhere in the orange range — and its 100 shades theoretically would allow her to see 100 million different colors.”

Emphasis mine. While tetrachromats are expected to have a fourth type of cone between the red and green, people with cones elsewhere wouldn’t magically become “false” tetrachromats.

Unfortunately, in this day and age it would likely be very frustrating, especially since most tetrachromats are likely unaware of their unique abilities.

This was written in 2001. Say hello to 2025. LEDs make this trivial - because they allow you to reliably produce light in narrow wavelengths. For example, a mix of 620nm (red) and 530nm (green) lights would be completely different from 570nm (yellow) light, even if for trichromats they’re the same type of yellow.

To a tetrachromat, television and photography would fail to reproduce colours correctly.

I think a good equivalent would be a TV without one of the colour channels… say, if the TV is missing the green channel it shows purple, green and grey all the same. For tetrachromats all TVs would be like this, since they’d be missing the fourth colour channel.

Further genetic info: humans encode colour vision into the chromosomes 7 (blue opsin) and X (red and green opsins). At least in theory you could have a mutation in one of those three genes, that makes the associated cone cells absorb light in a different wavelength; and, if the person has both the mutant and ancestral alleles of the gene, at the same time, they would be tetrachromat.

In practice this means that tetrachromacy among men is possible, but you’re far more likely to find it among women.

IMO a good summary of the whole thing is “we replaced metaphors that obscure meaning with a simple plan, that boils down to 1) gather info, 2) decide, 3) do it”.

I heavily recommend people interested in bad faith argumentation (how to identify it, how to combat it) to read this text. It’s didactic, because of how obviously the guy is twisting things to prove black and white.

Nicotine contributes to the taste of cigarettes and the pleasures of smoking. The presence of nicotine, however, does not make cigarettes a drug or smoking addiction.

Yeah, and gravity doesn’t work on Fridays. /s

Coffee, Mr. Chairman, contains caffeine and few people seem to enjoy coffee that does not. Does that make coffee a drug?

Interesting fallacy he uses here - it’s like a loaded question, but instead of building it around an assumption, he does it around the connotation of a word (drug), to create a false equivalence.

Yes, caffeine is a drug. Yes, it’s addictive. And abstinence syndrome is a pain. The reason you don’t see it being enforced as other drugs is because it’s relatively benign, but you can’t say the same about nicotine. (NB: this is coming from a smoker who drinks a buttload of coffee and yerba.)

Are coffee drinkers drug addicts?

Chaining another rhetorical question to further impact the appeal to emotion of the above.

People can and do quit smoking

Yeah, people can and do quit crack cocaine too. It doesn’t stop it being a drug.

Smoking is not intoxicating; no one gets drunk from cigarettes and no one has said that smokers do not function normally. Smoking does not impair judgment.

Unless something in the report is suggests that, he’s building a straw man and beating it to death.

Point five, Phillip Morris research does not establish that smoking is addictive.

Yeah, and my cat’s research does not establish that scratching furniture damages it. /s

Bonus - the phonology of two child languages, plus the most important bits of their phonological history.

Old Sirtki

Over the span of centuries, the Cjermizást dialect that gave origin to Old Sirtki got rid of the voiced fricatives. /ɣ/ became /g/; /ʒ z/ were rhotacised into /ɹʲ ɹ/; /vʲ/ was merged into /fʲ/; and while phonetically /j w/ didn’t change, the language was handling them in the same “set” of consonants as /l/, specially after /ʎ/→/j/ made /j/ the “soft” counterpart of /l/.

/æ i/ were centralised to [ɐ ɨ] in most environments, so the distinction between /æ i/ and /ɒ u/ became mostly roundness. That caused the collapse of the vowel system into a vertical one; /æ i ɒ u/ are reinterpreted as /ɐ ɨ ʷɐ ʷɨ/. The labialisation would attach itself to a preceding non-soft consonant (if any), otherwise spawn a /w/. This means the two-way contrast between soft/hard consonants became a three-way contrast: plain vs. palatalised vs. labialised.

/ɹ ɹʲ ɹʷ/ were short-lived; in some cases they simply disappeared, in others they were merged with /l j w/ respectively.

The final result was Old Sirtki having a phonemic inventory that vaguely resembles real life Ubykh:

Classical Tarune

While Sirtki expanded further the soft/hard contrast from Cjermizást, Tarune did the opposite - labials were merged, and the other pairs decoupled. This can be exemplified by the voiceless stops, /p pʲ t tʲ k kʲ/→/p p ʈ t̪ c q/.

The voiced fricatives were lost, but mostly through lenition; alongside a change of the phonotactics to ©V©, and compensatory lengthening, this means Tarune developed a vowel length contrast.

/æ æ: ɒ ɒ:/ were eventually merged into /ä ä:/; however the merge was complicated, and in some cases it spawned a glide.

Consonant nasalisation was further and further delayed, until it became mostly associated with the vowel instead. This caused the loss of the phonemic category of nasal consonants, alongside the vowels splitting into oral vs. nasal. Phonetically there are still nasal consonants, but only as allophones of voiced consonants between nasal vowels; e.g. /ãbã asã/ as [ãmã ãz̃ã].

As of the Classical period, Tarune’s phonology is rather unique, with some vague resemblance to Sanskrit on one side and Kaingang in the other:

I hope this research leads to the replacement of some oil-based polymers. And, additionally, I think we should decrease our reliance on industrial polymers, my balls already have enough microplastics; even if they come from a cleaner source, their presence in nature is problematic.

I think the main difference is that you’re probably focusing on a longer term than I am.

I do think we [humankind] need to get rid of our reliance on petrochemicals, but that process might take centuries; in the meantime, if the tech in the OP gets well developed, we might see the benefits already in our lifetimes. One thing doesn’t exclude the other, so I think we should be chasing both.

With that in mind:

All of the alternatives are not being used today because it’s more expensive. And they’re more expensive because they don’t have a century of research dedicated to make them cheaper like oil has.

Kind of.

Hydrogen from electrolysis is expensive because it relies on huge amounts of electricity; and unless the electricity itself is “clean”, we’re simply shifting the problem elsewhere (e.g. burning natural gas for electricity for hydrogen, instead of simply reacting that natural gas with water). So we actually need to wait until clean electricity becomes even cheaper to solve this.

IMO we should rely more on legumes for nitrogen fixation, but I don’t think it’ll fix (eh) the issue completely. Also note that ammonia isn’t just fertilisers, it’s also everywhere in the industry, from cleaning agents to cooling systems. (It sucks in comparison with CFC, but at least it doesn’t leave a hole in the ozone layer.)

People used to mine sulphur. It costs more, it’s hell for the workers, and deposits aren’t that common.

Ethylene is used almost everywhere in the industry. Not just for fruit ripening and polymers; pharmaceuticals, solvents, even detergent uses it. It’s one of those building blocks in organic chemistry, alongside benzene and inorg junk. Industrially it’s also used to produce ethanol; and while you can produce ethanol from biomass instead, you’ll either need to

1. Rely even more on big sugarcane farms, like the ones responsible for the initial desertification of the Brazilian Northeast. (Sugarcane fucks the environment.)
2. Produce it from maize and other grains. Supply and demand, again - it makes them even more expensive.

Also note how this interacts with the ammonia issue. Like any other plant-based solution; they’re still encouraging monoculture.

We don’t NEED oil. It’s just more convenient, it allows us not to change the status quo, to not think about different ways we should live. With oil, we can put our head in the sand and pretend we’re not careening to our own demise.

Currently we need it to keep our current life standards, and I don’t think most people are willing to give up. And while I do think we [humans] should stop pretending we’re digging our own collective grave, some things are only practical in the long run, but we still need to do things to help out in the short run.

(And by “we” I don’t even mean those parasites wasting resources so they can say “I’m an astronaut now!” or to build memecoin “mining” rigs. We’d solve a lot of the issue if we got rid of them first.)

Uh, today I’ve learned some people have strong views towards… parts of speech. 🤦‍♂️

As the text shows, the issue here are not adverbs themselves. It’s info content; or rather, the presence of pointless elements in a text, just to make it thicker.

Stages of carcinisation in primitive/non-crablike animals.

Hydrogen from syngas (thus ammonia), sulphur (thus sulphuric acid), ethylene, benzene, and so many others, they’re used for absolutely everything: fertilisers, medication, explosives, solvents, detergent, dyes. Even a good chunk of the industrial ethanol comes from ethylene.

And as you hinted, plastics. We still need them for water tubes, computers, and everything else.

So even in a future where we stop doing stupid shit like literally burning old dino juice, and we reduce the amount of plastics to reasonable levels, we’re still going to need petrochemicals.

I’m aware some energy is recycled, and I do think we (humankind as a whole) need to phase fossil fuels out. But even then, we’ll still need petrochemicals - and I’m hoping this sort of membrane eventually makes them cheaper, when used instead or alongside fractioning columns.

Last time I heard about reverse osmosis it was about water purification, exploiting that water molecules are tiny and ions + organic molecules are bulky. I’m glad to see the tech finding its way into other processes though - specially oil refining, the current solution (fractional distillation) is basically “use lots of energy to boil it, then use even more energy to condensate it”.

They achieve this using membranes produced by interfacial polymerisation. This technique, which traditionally involves dissolving the two monomers – one in water and one in an organic solvent – to form a crosslinked polymer at the interface, is therefore highly attractive for scalable production of hydrocarbon-separation membranes.

That’s quite smart.

Yeah… probably “between Antarctica and the South Atlantic” would be the best reference here.

[Now it’s probably not the time for me to ramble on how the Atlantic should be considered two oceans instead of one, right?]

If “north of Antarctica” isn’t enough to narrow it down, here are a few tips: it’s also south of the Arctic, further from the Sun than Venus, closer to the Sun than Mars. Now it’s easy to find it!

We (people in general) are dealing with two sets of crazy people, when it comes to AI:

1. A crowd who overestimates AI capabilities. They often believe AI is “intelligent”, AGI is coming “soon”, AI will replace our jobs, the future is AI, all that babble.
2. A crowd who believes generative models are only flash and smoke, a bubble that’ll burst and leave nothing behind. A Ponzi scheme of sorts.

Both are wrong. And they’re wrong in the same way: failure to see tech as tech. And you often see criticism towards #1 (it’s fair!), but I’m glad to see criticism towards #2 (also fair!) popping up once in a while, like the author does.

…case in point best usage case for LLMs is

• the task is tedious, repetitive, basic. The info equivalent of cleaning dishes.
• the amount of errors in the output is OK for its purpose.

Oh no! Anyway… I’m feeling peckish, does anyone want popcorn? 🍿

This sounds sensible, as long as the library is geared towards the local Māori community.

And, really. The underlying idea of the Dewey Decimal System is solid: have only a few top level categories, but subdivide and number them recursively. However you don’t need to stick to the exact same categories as Dewey did. It’s often good to deviate from them - because those categories depend a lot on the relevance and association between topics, and both things are situational and culturally dependent. Cue to the example - I see no connection between gardening and conflict resolution, but the Māori people clearly do, so if the library is for them it’s sensible it groups both things together.

This is the sort of term begging for a false equivalence: that a social class is as worth existing as an ethnic group. It’s fucking dumb, specially when you use a definition like this:

classicide has been used […] to describe the unique forms of genocide which pertain to the annihilation of a class through murder or displacement and the destruction of the bourgeoisie to form an equal proletariat

Emphasis mine. So, basically: if you want a classless society, by demoting the borghesia to proletariat, that’s literally like genocide? *rolls eyes*

[The fun part is when you realise that the borghesia is the main responsible for the proletarisation of itself. As such it would be committing auto-classicide.]

I should stop talking politics in this account. And in case anyone wonders why I spelled “borghesia” this way, it’s because I’m fucking tired to do it in English, I never get it right the first 2~3 times, so might as spell it as in Italian.

It depends a lot because “simple” and “complex” can be a thousand things. For example, a purely semantic system would be easier to adapt to unrelated languages with wildly different phonologies - because it doesn’t refer to the phonology at all.

But if by simple/complex you’re talking about the number of basic symbols, I guess ~5k phonemes would make the alphabet as complex as a logographic system. But by then perhaps the best solution is neither, it’s a featural writing system.

To the bots. Roboti ite domum!

It would be funnier if he said “robotes eunt domus”, like in Life of Brian. But no, he had to use correct Latin!

Serious now. If I had a website I’d probably try Nepenthes or Iocaine; poisoning those fuckers seems to be way more fun than just restricting their access. I’m glad the guy found a good solution for his problem with the tools at hand.

Now, before checking HN comments, let me guess: at least one will defend those big businesses DDoS-ing the internet for the sake of their models.

You don’t have to fend off anything, you just have to fix your server to support this modest amount of traffic. // Everyone else is visiting your site for entirely self-serving purposes, too. // I don’t understand why people are ok with Google scraping their site (when it is called indexing), fine with users scraping their site (when it is called RSS reading), but suddenly not ok with AI startups scraping their site. // If you publish data to the public, expect the public to access it. If you don’t want the public (this includes AI startups) to access it, don’t publish it.

BINGO!