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jvm___

1,366 karma · joined August 29, 2019

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jvm___··on Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
Wikipedia says gutta-percha was a household word as it was a popular material to make items out of. Interesting to see the word distribution in Google books, it was super popular but seems to have died off quickly.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Gutta-percha&y...

jvm___··on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
LLM's can do anything, but the decision tree for what you can do in life is almost infinite. LLM's still need a coherent designer to make progress towards a goal.
jvm___··on AI Mode in Search gets new agentic features and expands globally
The societal impact of that UI design decision will be interesting to watch play out. People are so used to trusting the first Google search result that it now being AI that's sometimes wrong or hallucinated.
jvm___··on Privately-Owned Rail Cars
The bad guys are driving their train when a cop train shows up in the mirrors behind their train.

Cop walks up to the window and asks for their license and registration please. Another shootout occurs followed by a multi-track multi-train police chase, but everyone needs to stay on their respective train tracks.

jvm___··on The forgotten meaning of "jerk"
Apparently the trick for roller coasters is to keep the passengers hearts in the same plane so they don't perceive the ride as jerky.
jvm___··on The new geography of stolen goods
I saw a video of some alpine explorer who recorded a video of himself to be uploaded later. He was on some stupid long 500 mile trek through the mountains when the police texted him. They were paving the parking lot where he'd left his car and requesting that it be moved, so he was hiking towards better signal so that he could start the engine and someone local could move it a few feet.
jvm___··on Walkie-Textie Wireless Communicator
I'm backwoods camping next week, and we have 25 people spread out over three sites. I was thinking it would be funny to bring some old rotary dial phones and some sort of way of hooking them up, and then just have that as the intercom between sites for when dinner is ready or whatever.

It's next week, so unlikely to happen and I'm not sure what technology I would need to make it all work. Something like Lora plus a way to make the phones work.

jvm___··on LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises
What do you do for a living?

I teach math how to be funny.

jvm___··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
Just imagining how you'd test this in America. Just launch your target autonomous flying drone and then have the second one intercept it. Can you book range time at white sands?
jvm___··on GPT might be an information virus (2023)
Agent Smith had it right when he was interviewing Morpheus in the Matrix.
jvm___··on Starlink is currently experiencing a service outage
African or European packets
jvm___··on “Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps
Our local library had a summer reading program. You needed to talk about the book to a librarian, so we were waiting in line. The kid giving the book report was under 3 so it wasn't much of a book report, she asked the usual questions including "what was your favorite part of the book?"

The book the kid had read was Dinosailors which is about some dinosaurs who go on a sailing trip. The memorable part of the book is the page with no words that's just the dinosaurs throwing up because they all got seasick.

So, the non-verbal child happily reenacted their favorite part of the book.

jvm___··on 'Gentle parenting' my smartphone addiction
I have a 30 minute hourglass that I put on my phone beside me on my desk. I can still see and read notifications or change the song but I'm not allowed to pickup my phone and actually use it.
jvm___··on Two-step system makes plastic from carbon dioxide, water and electricity
It's 400 parts per million.

Take a million bags of rice, then take out 400 and dye the grains black. Dump them back in the main pile and mix it all together.

Now process it and extract the 400 bags of black rice. Also there's dust and sand and other colors of rice mixed in.

Wind won't really help you at the volumes of air that you need to capture and filter. Running it in the windy desert will find less C02 than Times Square so where you run your system matters as well.

jvm___··on Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience
That'a a very philosophical question. Insignificant to the universe's total mass I guess.

Are we the chemicals or just the electrical signals, that makes the mass that makes up "you" even less of an thing.

jvm___··on Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience
The Sun: 99.86% of the solar system's total mass.

Jupiter: ~0.095% of the total mass, and ~71% of the non-solar mass.

Saturn: ~0.03% of the total mass, and ~19% of the non-solar mass.

Uranus and Neptune: Contribute a small percentage to the remaining non-solar mass.

All other objects: (inner planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc.) account for less than 0.002% of the solar system's total mass.

Your brain mass is about 3 disposable water bottles in weight and we can debate what parts of that are thinking and actually "you".

You are insignificant on the scale of the solar system let alone the universe.

jvm___··on U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites
What are the chances that the peaceful, think it through, be reasonable crowd is ready to organize the next regime. Or maybe the hotheads with guns are ready to shoot first aim later.

Perhaps forcing regime changes on other countries shouldn't be a quick decision.

jvm___··on Denmark's Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge
Detectorist was the perfect "the world is a normal place" show during the early days of the pandemic.
jvm___··on Social anxiety disorder-associated gut microbiota increases social fear
Do we get gut bacteria from the people around us? Where does a newborn get their gut bacteria from?
jvm___··on New study casts doubt on the likelihood of Milky Way collision with Andromeda
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?si=UMD-FBpBNroELCKE

This video explores what's predicted to happen in the future of the universe. The speed of time passing doubles every 5 seconds. And the video is almost 30 minutes long.

jvm___··on Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%
Is tire wear worse for aquatic life than brake dust?
jvm___··on Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart
The Sun is 99.86% of the mass in our solar system. Jupiter is 0.1% and everything else fits in that last 0.04%
jvm___··on How many supernova explode every year?
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?si=LcVxE3w-ohGqZAr7

If you need some existential dread. It's a hypothetical video to portray the rest of the universe, the time speed moving forward doubles every 5 seconds - and it's 29 minutes long...

jvm___··on 'Minecraft Movie' Leaks Online: Full Unfinished Version Shared
Way back when the first spy kids movie leaked without CGI so the kids were flying Superman style without the associated backdrops.
jvm___··on Peter Navarro Invented an Expert for His Books, Based on Himself (2019)
Why would you stand up a factory based on humans? When widget-businessman calls up the companies that install widget making machines they'll get the latest and greatest automated production machines in the least human labor intensive ways possible.
jvm___··on Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
How free a country is can be determined by this question.

Would you choose to be a randomly chosen citizen? You could be anyone in that country with all the rights, privileges - or lack thereof - that that random person has.

I think I'd rather be a random Canadian with healthcare and education than a random American.

It's an interesting thought experiment.

jvm___··on Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
Freedom from is the American way.

Freedom to is the Canadian way.

That's why Canada becoming an American anything is ridiculous and pisses off Canada so much that, for example, we've reduced our flights to America by +70% over the coming months.

jvm___··on So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
Animaniacs has the same problem, they mock politicians and celebrities from the early 90's, but the person their making fun of is just a drawn version of themselves so you're assumed to know who they are and why their being made fun of.
jvm___··on Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers
Broligarchs
jvm___··on TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users
They want to be able to livestream the inauguration tomorrow on Tiktok.
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