> Well, I'm not really considering you as a person, any more than you could so consider me, we never having met.

That's a really deranged way to approach interacting with people! It does, however, explain a lot about how you post: you're basically arguing with your internal constructions of how people on Hacker News are and not at all with what they say. Your posts, this one quite specifically, are just you disagreeing with your internal construction of posters:

> Well, I'm not really considering you as a person, any more than you could so consider me, we never having met

I do consider you a person, though! That's just a really weird thing you have decided on and it doesn't extend to everyone else.

> For the same reason, I predict your next effort would have been to claim I have no stronger basis to speak on the topic than do you, and demand I distill the experience of ten years and something like a hundred thousand exposures into a tidy, ChatGPT-compatible bullet list which you can then performatively evaluate and find wanting. Oh, you won't do that now, of course. But you thought about it two paragraphs ago.

I wasn't considering doing that at all! I don't care about challenging your photography knowledge. I don't know anything about it other than you claim to have a lot and I only got that because you made sure to tell me.

> It's rare to see someone claim at once that two other people, strangers all, are both lying.

I never claimed anyone was lying! I claimed, based on your reply implicitly asserting we had already conversed, the logical conclusion that you would have to be the other poster and were using an alt. Why else would someone explain to me what they have already said without having ever said it to me? Now you've explained that: you don't talk to people; you talk to ideas of people that you have internally constructed. That's not typical.

> You having spoken as if from great and very confident knowledge of so complex and nuanced a topic, I suppose it seemed reasonable also to expect at least passing familiarity with the actual conversations among which you were doing so.

I responded to one specific leap of theory of mind! It's actually a really narrow and simple topic: can someone infer from the blogpost that the boys were grimacing because the photographer was fiddling with a camera instead of fiddling with an iPhone. The answer, of course, is you can't with the knowledge presented.

> I do have this regrettable habit of assuming people intend to contribute to a discussion when they choose to participate in it, but I realize you're not alone in appearing to have other reasons.

I did contribute! I even went so far as to watch a large portion of the video you claimed showed that the stated theory of mind could be seen in action. I then wrote that the video doesn't show that at all. That's a contribution and a constructive one!

> you're basically arguing with your internal constructions of how people on Hacker News are

Yes. So are you. That's how language works in humans. This is a website. The words are mostly written by people, but only words are here. Hadn't you noticed?

> and not at all with what they say

Yet you fail to read what I actually wrote, in your haste to call me insane about it because of how much you dislike what you incorrectly assumed it to say. Have fun with whatever it is you're here to do.