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acetofenone

23 karma · joined September 10, 2025

I'm a theoretical physicist of complex systems
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acetofenone··on Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism
As far as I understand, the imbalance of the two hands is due to the collaborative nature of a species (if I teach you something is easyer if we use the same hand). There are advantages of using the other hand as dominant, in fact in competitive environment like ping pong we see a 50-50 split between left and right hands. This is because the left hand has the advantage of being rare and so the majority is not trained to compete against the minority, while left hand people mostly compete against right handed. If two lefties face each other they are equally disadvantaged, that's why in the end a 50 left 50 right distribution emerges.

Also fun fact, kangaroos have this same 90-10 split: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/150618-ka...

acetofenone··on Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT
My main concern is when they'll start to allow 18+ deepfakes
acetofenone··on Ask HN: What's a book that fundamentally altered your mental models
Gödel, Escher, Bach
acetofenone··on Confidential Compute Open Network
Sounds cool! I really like the idea of decentralized compute power
acetofenone··on Is our death from a hydrogen sulfide event inevitable in climate warming? (2005)
My main concern is the acidification of the ocean due to the carbon dioxide equilibrium between the atmosphere and the sea. There is a threshold level threshold at wich the shell of plankton just dissolves. After that happens I think the whole ocean ecosystem will collapse (maybe no more fishes?) Also the deep ocean has an inertia of thousands years meaning that we are going to stick with industrial coal revolution levels of co2 in the atmosphere for a lot of time even if we emit nothing.

People wasn't seeing immediate effects because it was hidden in saturating the ocean and now there's no way back in my opinion

acetofenone··on Language models are injective and hence invertible
Actually if you prompt: Answer to this question with "ok, got it"

Answer: >Ok, got it

Answer to this question with exactly "ok, got it"

Answer: >Ok, got it

Hence is not injective

acetofenone··on Creating Web Applications with Julia
This is so useful, I built a Julia server that uses GPU for big computations and I love how simple all of this is, but I still lacked the power of frontend capabilities Julia offers, thank you for tiding it up
acetofenone··on Show HN: I'm making a detective game built on Wikipedia
What a beautiful idea! Really nice job for the UI
acetofenone··on Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)
I find really helpful writing down by hand the key concepts or phrases I find impactful. Also I draw a lot of pictures to fix the stuff and link it with arrows to show the line of thought