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dmitrybrant

Show HN: Timeline of the Far Future

https://rivendell.dmitrybrant.com/farfuture/

One of my favorite articles on Wikipedia is called "Timeline of the far future".[0]The only problem with this article is the presentation: it's a gigantic wall-of-text table that does very little justice to the profound, awe-inspiring insights contained in it. This article deserves so much better!So here's my attempt to dress it up a bit. Being a visual learner myself, and wanting an...

( Read More... | 6 comments | 4 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h? on Thursday September 10, 2026 @01:29PM (#49647389)
Thanks! Yes, I'm trying to pay extra close attention to modelling every perceivable effect as closely as possible. The remarkable thing is that none of the mathematics is particularly complicated, so if you get the math right, then all of the predicted effects emerge automatically.
Re:Programming is Art on Monday September 07, 2026 @12:15PM (#49599959)
A hearty +1 to using WinForms (as long as your desktop app targets Windows only, of course). The fact that WinForms has outlasted so many other UI toolkits is a testament to its simplicity and ease of use. I still use it in numerous personal projects, and I don't foresee Microsoft dropping support for it anytime in the near future.
My biggest gripe with these AI film enhancements is that they are adding information that was never there. You're no longer watching the original film. You no longer have a sense of how contemporary film equipment worked, what its limitations were, how the director dealt with those limitations, etc.
Re:When should you give up on a project that doesn't work? on Friday February 02, 2024 @03:55PM (#39234244)
Very cool prototype, and a very interesting idea to sort nearby Wikipedia articles by number of pageviews.

Just a note that the Wikipedia app for iOS does in fact have a map with nearby articles, and we will soon bring the feature (back) to the Android version.

Re:9 years of Apple text editor solo dev on Friday January 05, 2024 @10:19AM (#38879937)
Yep, I'm also seeing a 2px scrollbar that does not expand.
Re:The effects of grounding (earthing) on inflammation on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @08:53AM (#38771731)
In other words, touch grass?
Re:They Want You to Forget What a Film Looks Like on Saturday December 23, 2023 @10:01AM (#38744667)
I approach it not from a perspective of "taste" per se, but from a perspective of purity and truth. All of these techniques (AI upscaling, colorizing, interpolation, etc) are adding information that was never there, which means you're no longer watching the genuine media.

By all means take the original film and rescan it in the highest possible resolution, to capture all the information that was in the film, but to add information that wasn't there to begin with is going too far.

It's like all the modern TVs that have the horrendous "motion smoothing" feature, which is enabled by default, and makes movies look like soap operas. When the TV performs frame interpolation, it's adding information that was never there, and wasn't intended by the director.

Re:Double-Mirror Illusion on Friday December 15, 2023 @03:03PM (#38658149)
Please, for the love of god, stop with the custom scroll bars, and on the wrong side of the viewport, no less!
Re:Werner Herzog on beer, yoga and what he would ask God on Monday October 16, 2023 @10:11PM (#37909622)
I literally just met Werner Herzog on a flight to Chicago the other day. He was flying coach, like a boss.
Re:I stay motivated as a solo-creator on Thursday October 05, 2023 @05:43PM (#37784654)
> I stay active on a Slack community of devs and creators in my country, as well as go to meet-ups and events in interesting communities

How does one find these supposed Slack groups and meetups? I live in a major metropolitan area, but the meetups I've been able to find have been underwhelming.

Re:Fairphone 5 on Wednesday August 30, 2023 @12:19PM (#37324355)
Love the concept, and might even consider getting one. But please, please let me have my scrollbar when browsing your website.
Re:Aromas while sleeping spark cognitive increase: study on Saturday August 05, 2023 @11:07AM (#37012744)
I don't upvote a lot, but this is well earned.
Re:Flux Pinning in sample of LK-99 on Saturday August 05, 2023 @06:24AM (#37010669)
Assuming everything in the video is real, the only remaining question is: what is the actual temperature of that sample?

If all of this checks out, then it's a new era.

Can I ask why we're using a special definition of "levitation" that doesn't really mean levitation? I'm finding it very annoying to click headlines that say "Levitation of LK-99!", and... ohh it's still standing on one end.

I'm sure this is a promising discovery and everything, but saying "levitation" at this stage is very forward-looking, and for me - a bit cynicism-inducing.

In what sense were any of them nut jobs? All of these were traditionally pedigreed scientists, doing groundbreaking research at their institutions, under their own names. I'm asking for a historical parallel of a researcher who published an earth-shattering result anonymously, from their home lab, in a field unrelated to their day job, on a random night off chilling and watching movies?
Can you give an example? I'm struggling to think of historical comparisons. I suppose I can think of a couple of "unlikely" achievers:

- Ramanujan: if he lived today, I could imagine him tweeting some awesome infinite series, which could be verified easily by other mathematicians.

- ...maybe Tesla? But he had a solid track record of invention before becoming a nut job.

But who else?

That may be true, but I'm not seeing 999 other people with geeky interests reporting their failed attempts. We are, however, starting to see actual labs reporting negative results.
Don't get me wrong, I want to believe (tm) as much as anyone, but this particular part of the story has a lot working against it:

- This person is anonymous (account created in Apr 2023), so we don't know anything about their affiliation or credentials. - They do seem to have good knowledge of materials science (although I have no way to judge), but the rest of their twitter history, which is all we have to go on, doesn't inspire confidence. - This person decided to replicate this experiment on a whim, as a distraction (because they couldn't stream a movie that night, according their tweets), while serious labs around the world have been trying frantically for several days, without any results. - This person refuses to submit a video ("bad tone") or any additional footage of their achievement, despite it being the most unique and world-changing compound on the planet.

The "demonstration" is a photo of a single crumb of material inside a transparent pipette. It's claimed that the crumb is "levitating" inside the pipette, but what's stopping a random internet anon from gluing a crumb onto a pipette and taking a picture of it?

I don't know about you, but if I had just succeeded in replicating a literally history-making experiment, I would perhaps take a video of it, and demonstrate how the crumb actually behaves without the support of the pipette.

It seems to be based loosely on this preprint from 2018: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.09376

...which was never peer-reviewed or reproduced. The authors of the patent are also not physicists, chemists, or materials-scientists, with no prior publications related to superconductors. This just came out of thin air.

If anything, this highlights everything that's wrong with the US patent system. (you don't need to have a working prototype to get it patented, and the patent examiner doesn't need to understand anything about the mechanism you're proposing.)

For sure, but it's a bit weirder than that: 1) They applied for the patent in 2021, long before the current hype coming from Korea. 2) The patent was officially granted by the Patent Office on pretty much the same day as the Korean preprints were uploaded. The patent is very clearly bunk, but the timing of the patent approval is an astronomical coincidence.
> Samsung is hoping the launch of its foldables will help level out these losses

Very serious question: Who is asking for foldable phones? Who is saying, "You know what's missing from my phone? More moving parts! A huge hinge for crumbs to get stuck in! I just can't enjoy this app unless it's in a square form factor and a crease in the center!"

Re:Delphi 11 and C++Builder 11 Community Editions Released on Thursday April 27, 2023 @03:57PM (#35733706)
Like so many other programmers of a certain age, I cut my teeth on Borland IDEs in the late 90s, building software for Windows 9x, which was a time when Borland was absolutely crushing it with tools that were light years ahead of Microsoft's own offerings at the time.

It makes me so sad that Borland tools are squarely in the dustbin of history, and are now maintained almost exclusively for legacy customers. I would love to read some kind of retrospective (a book, a series of blogs, etc) on the downfall of Borland and what exact business circumstances led to its irrelevance.

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