wenderen
Re:Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:01PM (#50276787)
I've heard (but not tested this myself) that you can add red chilli powder to birdseed to dissuade animals that can taste capsaicin (like rodents). Birds can't taste it.
Re:Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline
on Monday October 26, 2026 @01:31PM (#50247616)
I've been in the hobby for a little over 5 years and the gulf between me when I began and me now is huge. And then I look at people like the experienced guides you mentioned and it's night and day again!
They have access to the same information as the rest of us (sight, sound, general awareness of season and habitat) but their inference is so amazingly fast and accurate.
Re:Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline
on Monday October 26, 2026 @01:29PM (#50247578)
Knock yourself out, if you prefer the VR version
Re:Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline
on Monday October 26, 2026 @12:13PM (#50246263)
> So if I swapped the birdwatching with watching horses run or pigs fornicate with everything else being the same (hiking, breathing in fresh air, the eyes seeing natural sunlight etc), I would enjoy the exact same benefits the article claims birdwatching results in?
Those activities typically don't require observation and inference. A big part of birdwatching is identifying small, fast-moving animals that exhibit specific combinations of behaviors at specific times of the year based on specific climatic conditions. That sort of rapidfire pattern matching from video and audio info is probably a big contributor to what keeps the brain sharp.
Re:Solving Project Euler #2 in J
on Thursday June 25, 2026 @03:59PM (#48678473)
Thanks, it looks like it's only visible if you're signed in. When signed out, only a few of the FAQs are shown.
Re:The Website Specification
on Sunday May 31, 2026 @05:19AM (#48344211)
From the about page (https://specification.website/about/):
> Not a framework. Not a guide. A spec — what is required, what is recommended, and what to avoid.
It's hard to tell how much of the site is LLM slop, but some of the copy sure is.
Chained Assignment in Python Bytecode
Re:Solving Project Euler #45
on Sunday November 16, 2025 @05:25PM (#45949013)
Neat! I translated my code to Rust line-for-line and the iterator approach significantly outperforms it.
Rust newbie q - why use `x.wrapping_sub()` instead of regular old `x - 1`? Seems like we're never going to underflow `usize` for any of the 3 formulae?
Re:Solving Project Euler #45
on Sunday November 16, 2025 @04:45PM (#45948697)
To help debug - which browser are you using and on which OS?
Solving Project Euler #45
Re:I hate screenshots of text
on Monday November 10, 2025 @09:05PM (#45883320)
This article is a specific case of a more general piece of advice: ask questions well (provide context like clickable links, trim down your query to the minimal reproducible case, pose high-precision questions, etc.).
Re:Gmail AI gets more intrusive
on Friday November 07, 2025 @03:04PM (#45850421)
In addition to the feature being auto-on (for me, at least) and unasked-for, you also need to perform multiple clicks through non-obvious menus (I think one of them was "Audio track"?) to get to the original audio. Another layer of obnoxiousness.
Re:Everything Else
on Thursday July 24, 2025 @12:41PM (#44672845)
> I scrolled back, thinking I had missed where they described that
The explanation of that phrase is in... the very next three sentences.
Re:Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more
on Monday February 10, 2025 @07:06PM (#43007033)
Lawrence => Law => Lawson
Re:Advent of Code 2024
on Sunday December 01, 2024 @08:39AM (#42288401)
Anecdote to support your comment: The Chinese Remainder Theorem has featured in Advent of Code at least twice IIRC. Not an algorithm the average programmer (average is a very fuzzy term, yeah) would know.
Re:The Uncomfortable – a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects
on Thursday January 25, 2024 @02:38PM (#39134090)
Re:X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle next to pro-Na...
on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @07:14PM (#38372620)
(genuine question) Were their ads being placed next to pro-Nazi content at the same rate a few years ago?
Re:X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle next to pro-Na...
on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @07:13PM (#38372603)
I'm seeing multiple examples of it in this thread at the time of writing! It's baffling. Do they not know how humans brain generally work or are they just being willfully dishonest?
Re:X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle next to pro-Na...
on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @07:07PM (#38372528)
I'm no adtech expert but I suspect that potential customers would form mental associations between two things that often show up together, like pro-Nazi content and the ads I'm sponsoring, and I wouldn't want that.
Re:World's Most Popular Painter Sent His Followers After Me Because of...
on Tuesday October 31, 2023 @01:56AM (#38080819)
> The contrary is almost certainly true: picking fights with well-selected made up enemies is an effective way to promote a brand that is based on virtue.
I concur. Anecdotally, I see lots of content from TikTok creators replying to negative comments. At first I wondered why they seemed to be only amplifying negative responses instead of their fans, and then it hit me - those were the videos that did well (i.e. those videos got the most likes, views, shares). Showcasing a "hater comment" turns on the video viewers' tribal instinct. We want to side with the creator, to show the hater their place.
Re:Ricochet Robots Solver
on Thursday September 07, 2023 @05:53PM (#37426117)
Another cool solver for the same game https://www.michaelfogleman.com/projects/ricochet-robot/
Re:Can You Understand Bird? Test Your Recognition of Calls and Songs
on Monday July 24, 2023 @05:33PM (#36854517)
Merlin's pretty at good at identifying mockingbirds by sound alone but once in a while it outputs a bird that's not even expected in your area. It rarely makes the reverse error (identifying the call of a non-mockingbird as the call of a mockingbird) in my experience!
Re:Can You Understand Bird? Test Your Recognition of Calls and Songs
on Monday July 24, 2023 @03:53PM (#36853358)
Caution for folks learning about the Merlin app from this thread: it's good at identifying bird calls, especially in North America, where there's a lot of training data, but it's not conclusive and can sometimes lead you astray by misidentifying a common bird as something exotic, or getting confused by birds that mimic other species (like mockingbirds). Treat Merlin Sound ID's suggestions as just suggestions, and use multiple inputs to identify a bird - appearance, structure, plumage, time of year, time of day, behavior, habitat for example.
Re:Show HN: I made a website that color-codes the world by language
on Friday July 14, 2023 @02:17PM (#36727844)
Collecting some of the points other posters made:
1. Languages don't always neatly map to country borders.
2. Linguistically diverse / multi-ethnic countries can have multiple official languages, and some of those official languages are spoken only in a geographical subset of the country.
3. Languages can be mutually intelligible. Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible and you can get by speaking Urdu in most parts of North India. The Balkan languages are largely mutually intelligible - correct me if I'm wrong.
Cute visualization, half-baked idea.
Re:Noulith: A new programming language by the current Advent of Code l...
on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @02:17PM (#33988604)
Would you happen to have a link to your solutions (Github, Gitlab, wherever)?
Re:Google Is Done
on Thursday December 01, 2022 @02:13PM (#33821146)
https://twitter.com/jdjkelly/status/1598143982630219776/phot...
I went and checked out the Borges fable mentioned here: https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf
Looks like the ChatGPT summary is completely wrong? The map gets discarded instead of rendering obsolete the territory.
Re:Finnish as a world language?
on Friday August 26, 2022 @02:00PM (#32610736)
Love this satire. Especially the ominous but completely unhelpful "be very, very careful with this one."
Re:Twitter Notes
on Wednesday June 22, 2022 @04:56PM (#31841765)
Yeah. "Twitter reverts back to the algorithmic timeline after you're away for a while. You need to perform the above steps again to see the chronological timeline."
source https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-use-twitter-timeline-algorit...