Top all-time · #6422
Erich Grunewald
Personal blog · erichgrunewald.comaiphilosophyproductivity
Erich Grunewald's personal blog at erichgrunewald.com covers ai, philosophy and productivity. Since 2021, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “Does Human Purpose Have Anywhere to Retreat To?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Texts on this and that.
Most-linked posts?
- Does Human Purpose Have Anywhere to Retreat To?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-21
- Against LLM Reductionism2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-03-08
- Alpha2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-01
- Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-09-15
- Midihum: An ML-Based MIDI Humanizing Tool2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-12-30
- On Bullshit in Modern Art2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-22
- How Impactful Is Free and Open Source Software Development?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-11
- Gradually migrating Python code to asyncio2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-02
What Hacker News says?
i second this. i recommend, for anyone who is interested, reading their write-ups on the ea forum to get a good intro on the problem (and how they work): - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fd96FtLFACeAshqJP/... - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ErKzbKWnQMwvzRX4m/... or my interview with lucia coulter, one of the co-founders: - https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/interview-with-lucia-co...
Comment linking /posts/interview-with-lucia-coulter-lead-exposure-effective-altruism-progress-in-malawi/
on “Around one-in-three children globally suffer from lead poisoning”Submitted Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American as a story · 612 points
HN discussionsadly, a spanish multinational is planning to open up an octopus farm this summer -- the world's first commercial octopus farm -- which is to breed and kill something like 300,000 - 600,000 octopuses per year. (i wrote about this development here: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/against-octopus-farming... )
Comment linking /posts/against-octopus-farming/
on “The mystery of social behavior in octopuses”Submitted What made World of Warcraft's environments so compelling? as a story · 196 points
HN discussionIMO Chomsky (and Marcus) are mostly wrong on LLMs. Quoting the summary of a post[1] I wrote recently: - LLMs are sometimes said to be “just” shallow pattern matchers, “just” massive look-up tables or “just” autocomplete engines. These comparisons amount to a form of (methodological) reductionism. While there’s some truth to them, I think they smuggle in corollaries that are either false or at least not obviously tru…
Comment linking /posts/against-llm-reductionism/
on “Caricaturing Noam Chomsky”Submitted Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective as a story · 160 points
HN discussionSubmitted Setting up Gmail in Doom Emacs using mbsync and mu4e as a story · 149 points
HN discussionSubmitted How bad is QWERTY, really? A review of the literature, such as it is as a story · 117 points
HN discussionSubmitted Solving Problems with Decomposition as a story · 76 points
HN discussionSubmitted Midihum: An ML-Based MIDI Humanizing Tool as a story · 55 points
HN discussionSubmitted Can a Vegan Diet Be Healthy? A Literature Review as a story · 54 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Prospect of an AI Winter as a story · 44 points
HN discussionSubmitted Utilitarianism Expressed in Julia as a story · 42 points
HN discussionSubmitted Using Scheme to Find the Median of Two Sorted Integer Lists as a story · 42 points
HN discussionSubmitted Emacs Lisp Functions for Easy BibTeX Recording as a story · 17 points
HN discussionSubmitted The American Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation Makes No Sense (2021) as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted How I Track My Hour Balance with a Custom Org-Mode Clock Table as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSubmitted How bad is QWERTY, really? A review of the literature, such as it is as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Impactful Is Free and Open Source Software Development? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Impactful Is Free and Open Source Software Development? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted On Bullshit in Modern Art as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building a Lightweight, Command-Line Newsletter Program as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Not a Meat Eater FAQ as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Gradually migrating Python code to asyncio as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted GDPR: A View on the Ground as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fear of Rediscovery as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Code Purity and Principles as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Four Ways of Not Writing Software Bugs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Contradiction at the Heart of Stallman’s Free Software Argument as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Midihum: An ML-Based MIDI Humanizing Tool as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
