from Hacker News

Shoes, Algernon, Pangea, and sea peoples

by crescit_eundo on 9/25/25, 4:11 PM with 17 comments

• by AfterHIA on 9/28/25, 4:34 AM

  I dig your style. I had a thought:

  "doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks."

  I believe reading books and playing musical instruments are examples of cognitive task that make you better at other cognitive tasks. Also learning other languages comes to mind. I think I'm reiterating your point. It's, "not a wall but a steep slope." Cheers mate.

• by RamRodification on 9/28/25, 4:14 AM

  > But there doesn’t seem to be any cognitive task that you can practice and make yourself better at other cognitive tasks.

  This seems wrong. Doesn't practicing cognitive tasks often lead to improvement in other cognitive tasks?

• by erezsh on 9/28/25, 2:46 PM

  Related interesting fact that I recently learned.

  Supposedly, one people of the Sea Peoples were the Peleset, as the egyptians called them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peleset), which are believed to be the same people as the Philistines, for which the Romans gave Palestine its name.

• by gsf_emergency_2 on 9/28/25, 4:39 AM

  Pre-chatgpt blogposts on well-known topics used to be far better motivated or layman-oriented

  https://ace-pt.org/ace-physical-therapy-and-sports-medicine-...

  which hints that the low 2.7% improvement should not be unexpected of commercializable interventions targeting this joint

  (unlike, say, of obviously illegal (powered or not) exoskeletons)

  https://medium.com/the-bronze-age/the-ships-of-the-sea-peopl...

  Otoh, bona fide connections between Pangaea, Sea Peoples & modern day Turkiye are still discussed on OpenAI-resistant YouTube today

  https://youtu.be/a0LWFt78n7k

  On the first hand, the automaton reminds me that "modern-day philistines settled in the Gaza Strip after their defeat"

• by boris on 9/28/25, 5:18 AM

  > We have been optimized very hard by evolution to be good at running, so there shouldn’t be any “easy” technologies that would make us dramatically faster or more efficient.

  I wonder if these new shoes have the same affect on natural (i.e., non-paved) surfaces? Plus, they all look quite high off the ground (probably all those plates and foam need space) and that doesn't help with stability when running over rocks, etc.

• by ashu1461 on 9/28/25, 7:32 AM

  > In general, that argument is that there shouldn’t be any simple technology that would make humans dramatically smarter, since if there was, then evolution would have already found it.

  With technology we have massively extended lifespan, so does this argument really hold valid ?