mncharity

> US textbooks wanted you to succeed. Whereas [...] Norwegian ones were pretty lousy, especially in history. I particularly remember they loved to hide crucial details in margin notes or image texts.

Some years ago, at a first-tier US university, with students tending wealthy, it was suggested that they had long had such well-resourced supportive excellent teachers, explaining things so organized and clearly... that the incoming students now lacked both the skills and inclination, to wrestle with a body of knowledge and extract their own understanding.

As we work towards AI for excellent teaching, it's perhaps worth thinking of that as an incomplete goal.

> don't truly realize how utterly dense and populated[] Chinese cities are

- A US and a Chinese professor are talking in a bar. "We have about 10,000 students" they agree. But no, one is thinking of their university, the other of their department.

- Population of Wyoming < Louisville, KY (KY's largest city). Pop KY < NYC. Pop US Northeast < Pearl River Delta. PRD is sort of like a 20x compressed US Southeast, with 3x lower GDP.

> no real reason [...] still coated in whatever was floating around the environment

I wonder, might one instead make an argument that it's not currently economic-technologically feasible to avoid artifact surface information destruction and contamination, at any stage of the dig-to-archival-conservation pipeline, nor to extract whatever information might be there, outside of very rare cases? Rather than there's no information there to lose?

Perhaps it becomes possible-and-affordable at some point, to frequently check, say, "oh neat, here are some 10 um notches on the surface, with some nice yeast, and some pollen, and oh, maybe that's a bit of calcified biofilm for nanopore DNA?"? Does automated lab tech progress, someday make "brushed, handled, dusted, washed, and shelf in the basement" start sounding like 19thC "we accessed the site using dynamite"?

Fruitfulness of discussion might be aided by bearing in mind that US and European copyright law traditionally come from very different perspectives. Basically, societal utilitarianism vs work-is-an-inalienable-part-of-the-artist author's natural rights. "Copyright should last 5 years because starving keeps artists productive. And copyright owners have no say at all in their works being used for LLM training because it's good for society" is consistent with US foundations, at least pre-Berne. "Authors are not permitted to give up their right to personally refuse a use of their already-sold work, nor to give anticipatory permission for use in future technology" is IIUC unremarkable in a European context. An AI suggests[1] as philosophical background. People are coming at this from vastly different places. Bearing that in mind might help avoid talking past one another. IIUC.

I also note, when the internet was just catching on, and email was becoming less niche, but copyright law had not yet established sending email as an implicit grant of permission to make copies, most all use of email violated copyright. Network->disk->memory - all copies without permission. I'd get email with footers vaguely like "You are hereby granted permission to <do email> for the purposes of XYZ Corp - all other use constitutes infringement". There was a multi-year lag between accepted practice and legality. IIUC, forwarding email is still problematic today. Having lived through that, "Arg! <New tech> violates copyright!" gets less traction with me. And with copyright term extensions, and Berne on the US side, having a taint of unprincipled corruption, that also makes it less compelling.

[1] https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/iptheory.pdf

Ah. I was picturing downloading pre-autotools C programs. You'd ftp a tar file, find build notes or hopefully a Makefile... and watch the compiler errors go by. Seemed like everything was always written for some version of unix other than the one you had, or for a somehow different C compiler. Then you'd work the error list, translating library and system calls, tweaking C constructs. Eventually, hopefully, you could get it to compile, and maybe not segfault. Usually.

Later on, you'd hope the author created a `make.yourunix` or `INSTALL.yourunix` or README section for your unix, and that was nice. Then being able to simply say `./configure; make` and have it mostly just work... magic wonderful. Then basically "$ gimme name-of-the-thing", first for Perl, and then more and more others, eventually even python (but not C) - next level. And now we're at "Minion, build me an X", with an "and install whatever it is we need" implicit, quiet. That's, just, wow.

So from Objective-C and proto-C++ C-with-types, created hoping software might someday, maybe, be reused like hardware components... to now? So very living that dream.

And there can be fast paths. An electron app, watching evdev directly, full-screen under a generic X11 window manager, running 60 or 120 Hz or more, on a fast display or ignoring vsync, can be... sprightly.

> I'm not sure we have been living the dream [of software reuse]

But would you give up packages, central repositories, downloads that Just Work without patching, public version control systems, open-source software, ... , and much of what they enabled?

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." - Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

Getting packed into 2026 airline seats can be a "miserable experience". But that taken-for-granted human flight... a cramped seat in the effin clouds... is what? A century or two of focused effort, eventually massive effort, building that dream? Another century pursuing the dream of compact mechanical power? 10 millennia on metallurgy? So one's flight may have sucked, and there are many downsides to aviation existing... but living the dream of human flight, isn't living in a dream of no problems and effortless happily ever afters.

But yes, I'm so looking forward to agentic full-stack-ish rewrites, slashing through decades of accumulated stagnant cruft. Laptop-like angular-resolution HMDs are this-year-ish (though expensive, not mass market). And doing such rewrites by hand is a pain. Someone reports a Claude one-shot which installed a PICO Space Pro dev env, created a simple app, uploaded the apk to the headset, and responded with "ready for you to test"... and it was. Wild ride incoming. Though that's perhaps not a minimalist/efficient renaissance you had in mind? Still, in the midst of upset, there's opportunity to pursue visions which might not be viable in more settled times.

> there are multispectral sensors from ams osram []

"Spectrograph" on a chip! Tnx!

[1] sensors (click a "Select Product" button for url-too-long product search) https://ams-osram.com/products/sensor-solutions/ambient-ligh... [2] ~14 channel https://ams-osram.com/products/sensor-solutions/ambient-ligh... https://www.adafruit.com/product/6477 $20 [3] ~18 channel https://ams-osram.com/products/sensor-solutions/ambient-ligh... https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-triad-spectroscopy-sensor-... $70

410-940 nm. There's a UV[ABC] chip in preproduction.

70's software is closed-source bespoke reimplementation; 80's Dream of reusable software components; 90's Building the Dream; 00's Living the Dream; 10's Everything is amazing but; 20's transition to...; 30's what??? Open-{source, reference implementation, tests, specs, design docs, gist, ...?} bespoke reimplementation?

中国特色. And an even larger gap vis optimized-for-pharma US IP config (Industrial Policy).

You might explore "gray" semi-formal bus networks. Where the on-the-table gap is sufficient to fund businesses. And where the efforts to shut them down, provide insights into mechanisms, incentives, and players, around in that inefficiency.

2 of the 3 responses to your comment are [dead], and it's not clear to me why.

Fwiw, to elaborate on mine, a small fast 8B-ish model should be able to few-shot simple text style transfer, such as converting one model's complex careful style to another model's punchy compact style. Perhaps also a 2B fine tune. So you might tweak your harness to transfer and present a preferred style.

I visited Spain at the tail end of Franco. Interminable great inequality had left ruins bare, in long slumbering decay, preserved by poverty. A kid could crawl out on sketchy crumbling walls, on stones perhaps last touched many centuries before by builder's hands... or perhaps by another kid in the last few. A couple of decades later, something rather different stood there... stabilized, safe, "restored", Disney-ified, and far less compelling.

And in addition to variance among institutions, there variance in practice at each. The best groups have a consummate professional's focus on reducing their own. But even at another "one of the best", let alone at the merely good... my impression was "there's lots of holes in the cheese around here", and left me wondering whether/how a transient outsider might usefully help folks towards more of a safety culture. It seems a reoccurring opportunity.

One role I didn't see was patient advocate/representative? That might be another approach to non-convergence - "how is this going?" and escalation.

Tnx. HN post discussions include: How to store your app's entire state in the url https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34312546 ; Storing State in the URL https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31312680 .

> basically lost it all

Last week I worked up this one-liner: "Great Britain extracted the wealth of a vast empire, far less wealth than might have been created, pissed most of it away through bad domestic policy, and transferred the rest to the USA to pay for one-and-a-half world wars."

A failure to reinvest in domestic industrial tech; a painfully high-value currency; and low-mobility economic stratification. History does love its rhyming slams.

> Building intuition for Brownian motion

Pollen grains are 10's of um, H2Os are 0.3 nm - 10^5 smaller. 10's of ng, vs 3e-14 ng - (10^5)^3 lighter. H2Os moving 600 m/s.

Imagine your body jerking around under a bombardment of relativistic bacteria.

The nanoscale mosh pit from hell.

Years back, a leading MEMS engineer giving a survey talk paused, and said with a deep deep well of feeling, "Brownian motion is the devil. The DEVIL."

Any learnings from pushing the envelope on URL payloads? Years ago I prototyped a customizable Powers of Ten-ish zoomer, with the stack of images/videos/maps/molecules specified in the URL. I should reprise it at some point if no one else does - wondering if you encountered anything unexpected, or Just Worked?

> American friendliness

I'm hesitant to move further from TFA, but a brief one-shot: Among Boston people who returned after "trying" SV/SF/California, I repeatedly heard of struggling, amidst an unfamiliar ambient "friendliness" culture, to recognize social signals around "actual" friendship - was someone "really" interested in becoming friends, or were they merely performing "friendly". AI tells me this is called peach vs coconut, nice vs kind, guess vs ask cultures.

Similarly, someone (with no family connection to China) learned Chinese, later married into a family from/in China, and would describe "Chinese" culture. Someone else from China glossed their insights with a dismissive 'their friends are criminals [sic], and they're over generalizing from that subculture'.

So amidst country-level cultural themes, and regional variations, and generational differences (and gender, hukou, ethnicity, etc), and subcultural diversity, it's sometimes a challenge to tell what is which.

Yeah, the onboarding process for independent research needs work. Especially with various disruptions coming for existing settings. The Gap by Ira Glass pops to mind.[1] We need a bunch of those. Analogous to the conversation around becoming a writer or other artist. Or to starting a business. With lots of insights into what needs doing, how, and how to sustain. With its fun parts, tedious parts, grueling parts. The universal challenge of crafting a life which sustains, but encompassing the research. Imagining and pulling into existence the rhythms, constraints, network/village, the exoskeleton to usefully produce. As a DIY project, rather than "here's your ID, desk, mentor, advisor, lounge, whiteboard supplies, schedule, the person to see if you need anything done, and the weekly lab social is today at 5". Also the "I imagined myself a freelancer, but find myself a sole proprietor" twist. Maybe some of this is starting to exist? Perhaps there are blogs out there? I've not looked. A survey of that might make for an interesting blog post or HN discussion.

[1] https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/the-gap-by-ira-glass-9651...

> unless you're running something like a high-refresh-rate gaming monitor that's still 1080p or less.

Or HMDs. Upcoming high-resolution PICO Space Pro is said to be ~45 pixels/degree max. Versus ~50 ppd for a 1080p laptop. Formerly known as Project Swan, its September global release announcement was postponed until... unclear.

"What does this independent research look like?"[1] - timestamp link into Implicit Surfaces & Independent Research (2025) on that research page.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGxsGnbyJ4&t=2150s (I started the clip a few seconds early as teaser for rest of talk)

> My favorite project along those lines is Kartik Agaram's Mu[3], which wraps emulation, tracing, and time-travel debugging around a subset of x86 assembly language.

From https://akkartik.name/code : Mu[1], a safe, hackable computing stack that builds up from raw machine code (guided tour[2]; paper '20[3]; talk '20[4]; sample app[5])

[1] https://github.com/akkartik/mu [2] tour https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/tutorial/index.md [3] paper https://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200315.pdf [4] talk https://vimeo.com/416363066 [5] sample app https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-2021-08-15

Fwiw, top of my own pain-point list (I suppose given the first item, that's a pun) includes:

External/policy-based throttling for temperature control. Unthrottled, my laptop bottom goes skin-burn hot. But fixed compute caps can have non-linearly dreadful performance impacts in particular cases. Plan is a runtime knob, to replace manual limits-kludgery.

I'll use models which barely fit in VRAM+RAM, and are order-1 tok/s slow. So tool call step overhead can be painful - a world where `ls` costs tens of seconds. Plan is blending harness plugins with inference loop, for "no, don't stop - I already have the call result for you - just keep going" (and also some logit games).

Fun: 116 d/s with Earth/etc selected, gives a Sun "orbiting" the Earth/etc effect.

Bug: ISO DEB at 17 min/s looked normal, but at 2.8 h/s it became a solid-ish (lots of crossing lines) red ellipsoid on the opposite side of the Earth. Upon returning to 17 min/s, it snapped back, after some delay. Current-ish Chromium on linux/X11.

Feat: Pressing ESC deselects.

Feat: Perhaps spacebar could pause/unpause time? To avoid fiddly "note current time ratio by counting arrows or hovering, then click pause. Afterward, click the right place to restore time ratio".

UX: Would you believe I wrote a Feat for 'add a "Now" button to date popup', not "seeing" the current button? Hmm, perhaps move it between date and time ratio?

UX: Just now for me, upon page load, nothing is moving and the Earth seems a black ball (night over Africa, with night lights obscured by satellite dots). So I could spend several minutes exploring, without being both close enough and oriented to notice there's a texture map. Perhaps start positioned over the terminator (interestingly pretty) and with scaled time (interestingly moving; demos motion; draws attention to time zoom. Maybe 17 min/s?).

Issue: The planets maps are true-ish color, modulo intensity and shadow. The Sun is... not. Given that "the Sun is some color other than white" is so pervasive a misconception, reinforcing it seems... sigh. Can I interest you in a white field with a few pretty sunspots? Perhaps with limb darkening and tint?

Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things[1], which adds relative placement constraints, and provides agent skills. Nearby on the front page just now, fwiw.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858513

> map!

Maps.[1][2]

Too far south for an ice bridge - Newfoundland is south like modern Florida - tropical. And it's the Jurassic, hot with high sea levels, so even though its continental shelf extends out towards Spain, there are no ice ages to bare it (as was the Eastern US shelf a mere 12k years ago). But Pangea is ripping apart, it's a mess with crust blocks variously uplifted and tilted, massive weathering and sediment fluxes, so...

From the TFA paper[3]:

During the early Mesozoic, North America and Europe were connected to form the western and central part of the supercontinent Laurasia. With the opening of the North Atlantic during the Late Jurassic and earliest Cretaceous, the region fragmented into smaller tectonic units55–58 that might have periodically formed contiguous land masses57,58 during sea level low-stands, characterized by exposure of continental margins and draining of continental interior seaways55–58. The presence of a land bridge between North America and Europe during the late Kimmeridgian-earliest Tithonian13 might explain similarities in some dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus59 and Allosaurus60. However, the absence of turiasaurs in the Morrison Formation suggests that this clade dispersed into western North America after the mid-Tithonian. Thus, unless we wish to argue that turiasaurs were actually present in the Morrison Formation but have not been found yet, a second later land connection between Europe and North America is required. Specifically, during the mid-Valanginian (c.137Ma), a dramatic drop in sea level7,55,56 potentially reconnected Europe and North America and so permitted a fi al exchange of vertebrate clades across the Atlantic. Th s Valanginian event could also explain apparent faunal exchanges between these continents proposed for the late Hauterivian-early Barremian13. Taxa that seem to disperse in the Hauterivian/ Barremian might actually have done so during the Valanginian lowstand, but gaps in the fossil record mean that the results of these dispersals might not be detected until we access better sampled post-Valanginian deposits.

58 is available with a plate.[4] 57 is old, with only low-res global plates, ggl books preview has 138 Ma on p42. 56 I skipped. 55 is available[5] but is temporally low res.

There's a 2016 paper Late Mesozoic North Atlantic land bridges[6], Elsevier paywalled with excerpts, and on sci-hub.

And that's my time budget.

[1] https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=topo_recon [2] rocks: https://portal.gplates.org/cesium/?view=GeologyR key: https://portal.gplates.org/portal/geology/ [3] quote is on page 9: https://dinodata.de/bibliothek/pdf_d/2017/001_s41598-017-146... [4] paper ref 58, 150/136 Ma plates on page 31, key on page 29, 3 MB but downloads slowly: https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00117/22805/20913.pdf [5] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Golonka-Jan/publication... [6] Late Mesozoic North Atlantic land bridges (2016). Available on sci-hub. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...

ERRATA: Those google book links now do have hits for "bound" and "round". Also "range" and "interval". The searches really didn't before, thus the reference links. Perhaps the absence should have failed sanity check, but given that one hit... partial failure of Google Books search wasn't something I recall noting previously. Oops.

Does European public dialog do much causal comparisons among states? Does somewhere else?

Or do you mean professionally... Instead of merely searching for "ways to do X", one might translate the query into a couple of languages, and translate the results, to get a broader culture sampling. Hmm... That seems something an AI-based search could integrate smoothly - cross cultural insights as a normal part of search results?

While there's a lot of diversity in policy and culture among US regions and states, contrasting them isn't leveraged much. Perhaps failing a "that's analysis, not news" threshold for being part of public dialog? So maybe it's not "non-English cultures" neglected as much as comparative discussion in general?

One "criminally underutilized" which really struck me, was Japan having a far more sensible and powerful COVID safety one-liner than the US managed - "Three C's" (Closed spaces, Crowded places, and Close-range contact - poorly-ventilated / crowd / conversation-contact - avoid overlapping all three) vs "6-foot rule".

Oh, good point! Something to check. I've been thinking of Chinese as a strength of Chinese models, but other languages might be sufficient here.