User: Junnn11 | Hacker News Reader

User: Junnn11

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747 pointsoboes101 comments

Wonderful illustrations!

Whenever I see someone that is interested in a very specific niche and obviously expends a lot of effort towards it, I'm always in awe. How did they become interested in the topic? Why choose this specific thing? How do they keep their motivation to continue with it?

I've personally never really felt like I've cared enough about anything this much. Because of this, I've always felt like I'm missing something in life. I would love to be passionate about something as much as Junnn11 is about Arthropods.

People obsessed with niche subjects and go all out on that are the backbone of society.

My mind goes to the guy that packaged 1/3 of all Arch packages in the official repo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqMf6XFacR8&pp=ygUKZGlzdHJvd...

Hell, just this youtuber is a good example of what you are saying. This guy, 'DistroTube', has a ton of entry level videos about seemingly niche linux topics. Even the video you posted has a little command line tutorial embedded into it.

I come across him whenever I am trying to figure out what a specific distro or tool _looks and feels_ like. If you search any distro name plus "distrotube" there is probably a video of him setting it up and playing around with it.

I have wondered about this guys background before and finally looked it up tonight.

> Despite the geekiness of my content, I have never actually worked in IT or a computer-related industry. Although Linux and technology have always been my hobby, I worked in the retail industry until recently. In 2020, with the pandemic and the subsequent shutdown, I lost the job that I had at the time. The retailer that I worked for went bankrupt and cut most of their supervisory positions (including mine). Thankfully, I already had a side job of sorts—making YouTube videos! So since the pandemic started, my full-time job has been making video content.

> I have been strictly a Linux user since 2008. The distro that I currently run is ArcoLinux with the xmonad window manager. Some of the software that I use daily includes GIMP (for graphics), Kdenlive (video editing), Audacity (audio editing), and OBS (for recording/streaming video). I also use a distribution of Emacs called Doom Emacs. It is my preferred text editor, although I often use Vim as well, especially if I am already in a terminal.

from https://people.zsa.io/derek-taylor/

Which still leaves a lot of mystery to the "how did he get into this" question.

Here's another one, apparently the author and maintainer of helm.el is a French mountain guide with no IT history.

https://sachachua.com/blog/2018/09/interview-with-thierry-vo...

I came across a fairly detailed guide to travelling in outback Australia the other day. The site owner/author was an older woman in Germany or similar.

Can you share the link?

https://www.ritas-outback-guide.com/

"Well, my name is Rita Amend. I live in the crowded Rhine-Main-area in Germany. Perhaps that's why I love the tranquillity of the Outback so much."

"Update: Now I am retired, Australia and the vast inland is still in my dreams. At the end of 2018 we spent our 9th holiday in Australia."

Now that I think about it, I can identify. I'm from Australia but have visited Southern Utah many times, think about it often and could write an extensive site about it.

Thanks!

That's amazing. As someone with a non-linear journey into tech, love hearing about people like this. Insane that he's been able to write Linux related YouTube content despite never working in industry.

I wonder how much imposter syndrome one would have to go through to finally feel comfortable after releasing so many videos, with the potential scrutiny of more academic/formal Linux communities.

I'll add this guy, who is building a 1:60 model 777 out of paper, with unfathomable levels of detail: https://www.lucaiaconistewart.com/model-777

That is incredible

We all have weird interest, it's the long tail.

Magic happens when you find someone with the same weird interest: emulation brings innovation through iterations!

Maybe someday I'll find someone interested in running Excel through wine rendering in Sixels within a terminal :)

And before you ask, yes I've enjoyed way too much reading about https://github.com/taviso/123elf and the history behind it!

This is an interesting observation because when I thought about it, I realized that it has basically been the antidote to social media burnout for me.

Most social media (IG, Twitter etc.) - a find to be a total shitshow and I subscribe to the idea that they cause depression, anxiety and tend to make your life worse.

What can be good though is a small and well moderated community that's focused on a particular interest which everyone in it shares. These can be really rewarding to participate in.

In a somewhat different way, the phenomenon also manifests in the shift from public social media to private online e.g. Telegram chat groups - those don't seem to be as soul-sucking as IG or Twitter, either.

I've tried to make 123 work on Linux but it crashes. Maybe because I'm on amd64.

Related to this thread, generally, is Simon Baron Cohen’s The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Seekers-Autism-Drives-Inventi...

Which is terrifying.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dependency.png

Lol conda feedstocks

That is absolutely true. I remember a while back an emulator developer that made the PS2 emulator for mobile phones got bullied out of developing it anymore, so once that stops working then we won't get to play PS2 games on phones anymore which, while not the worst thing ever, definitely sucks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higan_(emulator)#Author

We just recently lost Near, a brilliant person who probably had one of the best understandings of the SNES out there, and built multiple import SNES emulators because they were bullied into suicide for being non-binary.

Linked in the comments is a video interviewing the man, Felix Yan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUDX6amkHOg

It's in mandarin but CC translate works.

Another cool one is this guy's crazy-detailed explanation of mechanical watch mechanisms with interactive diagrams using hand-written WebGL: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

(Previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533)

Yes. Mandatory nerd snip warning for any of Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog posts!

This blog post prompted a deep dive into mechanical watch repair, further online courses and endless reading. I’m now an amateur watchmaker and spend my nights tinkering with and trying to restore vintage mechanical watches. I’ve never been nerd sniped this hard, but I love it. Fantastic hobby (albeit ridiculously expensive)

Oh boy. They’ve made many more interactive explainers. Very impressive.

https://ciechanow.ski/archives/

> I've personally never really felt like I've cared enough about anything this much. Because of this, I've always felt like I'm missing something in life. I would love to be passionate about something as much as Junnn11 is about Arthropods.

I myself have tried to force myself into one (or more) passions. Never works. I'm 34 now and part of me is just (radically) accepting my ADHD. That's not to say I cannot cultivate discipline. Rather, it's just working with what I got and I'm one of the people who like hopping from one thing to the next: T-Shaped.

Yeah, same. I'm just not cut out for the kind of sustained intensity needed to be on a first-name basis with all the arthropods. I really appreciate it, but I cannot match it. I'm ok with that, though. The world needs many different kinds of people.

Thanks for saying this. I suspect I've long dealt with ADHD or some similar neurodivergence as well which, more prominently in my 20's caused me to bounce between so many things that I started to feel overwhelmed with excitement, but ultimately frustrated that I couldn't invest fully into something without eventually feeling bored, almost too early.

Today (34 as well!) I've managed to narrow this down with trying numerous video games and exploring political topics that interest me, and occasionally a few side dev projects.

Finding routines I enjoy has created stability overall.

Probably through academia? If you get a PhD you can spend years working on a very specific topic.

Possibly but not necessary, the more important element of a PhD is its effect on your environment. A PhD is legitimizing your niche interest vs how we treat those with niche interests who don't have a PhD ("obsessed"/wasting time). It's a very powerful effect, and minimizes a lot of the external stress of a niche interest that causes many to lose hope and move on.

That's an excellent point I hadn't thought of before. Thanks for bringing it up.

I don't want to sound negative or discredit this contributor but having Asperger syndrome "helps". I got lost deep diving into several topics to the point where I spent almost all of my free time for a couple of years trying to understand each of them as much as possible.

That can lead to very positive output. The flip side is that my mind starts going in circles repeating the same thoughts over and over again.

The internet lingo for this is "Weaponized Autism".

Nothing wrong with being neurodivergent, don't see why this would discredit the contributor.

I would guess they're an academic in the area (not that that entirely answers how/why they became interested) and so it's kind of like being prolific in open source on the side of your professional SE job.

Reminds me of the George Costanza line from Seinfeld,

Jerry (on Keith Hernandez): Yeah, he's a real smart guy too. He's a Civil War buff. George: I'd love to be a Civil War buff. What do you have to do to be a buff?

go deep enough down the rabbithole of a hobby/topic, and you find the passionate crazies

The animated illustrations of the "arthropod" biomechanics is fascinating. It sheds some light on why arthropods would be interesting enough to draw in their own community of enthusiasts.

Spearing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:20220123_stomatopod_strik...

Smashing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:20220123_stomatopod_strik...

In case they manage to find this thread: @Junnn1, do these biomechanic animations incorporate the dynamics, or maybe just the kinematics of the physical forms? Is there anywhere (i.e. blog) where you discuss the techniques you use to develop your animations?

This is amazingly cool, I've been fascinated by mantis shrimps for a long time. I've been watching these on a loop for a while, the "latch" mechanism is really interesting to me, I've never seen something like that in biology before (not that I've got any real experience with biology, but still, how ingenious!)

I recently needed a 3d model of a crab and found that some similarly obsessive user over at Sketchfab had created dozens (possibly hundreds?) of extremely detailed crab models -- at 500k - 1.5 million tris, so basically unusable for most typical animation needs, but they're beautifully detailed and free for download.

My first thought was that it might be the same person, since they had a Japanese username! But I don't think it actually is; the Sketchfab person has all kinds of natural models. Here's the account in case anyone is interested: https://sketchfab.com/ffishAsia-and-floraZia/models

Holy crap those are amazing! (and some are terrifying)

Are these created or captured with some 3d scanner? Impressive in any case.

These pictures strongly remind me of "Ernst Haeckel: Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) 1899-1904"

https://www.zum.de/stueber/haeckel/kunstformen/natur.html

(unfortunately only the low resolution images (Bildschirmauflösung) are still available on the page)

There's a scan of an old edition on archive.org :

https://archive.org/details/Kunstformen-der-Natur-PHAIDRA_o_...

All of these are in the public domain now, available in high resolution from here:

https://www.rawpixel.com/search/ernst%20haeckel?page=1&sort=...

I've got several of these on my walls :)

This is definitely way beyond a typical Wikipedia user page with all these medal "trophies" and it really looks great.

In my grade school times, we had this really dedicated biology teacher who believed that being able to properly copy illustrations from books is the key element to understand lesson's subject. So we draw all these organisms, bacteria and viruses with pencils and colored em with either gray shades or pencil crayons and described parts.

That sounds like an amazing teacher. In elementary school I remember being extremely frustrated that art classes weren’t about actually learning to draw/paint, just doing silly things out of papier mâché. I went down the science/engineering route, and it’s only as an adult that I finally took the leap and signed up for proper drawing classes.

It’s been mind expanding to say the least - I thought I spent my whole life seeing, but I realized I saw nothing until I took my first sketching/figure drawing class. Drawing is seeing.

In architecture school, we were taught that drawing is a powerful tool for thinking and analysis, and were drilled with different techiniques to articulate our ideas quickly and concisely in an image. Our professors were heavily influenced by the Bauhaus school in this line of thinking (i.e. Paul Klee[1]).

[1] http://ing.univaq.it/continenza/Corso%20di%20Disegno%20dell%...

Whenever you see organic forms, it's interesting to realize the extent to which they are all "programmed" by their genetics into their structure. In their segments, you see the "for" loops of form. In the same manner this art compresses the forms into their essential mechanical geometries, so too does genetic code create essential abstractions that allow the laws of mathematics to guide their structural harmony.

Your comment reminded me of something. I forgot the underlying reason, but in anatomy we learned that for mammals it's evolutionarily 'hard' to change numbers of vertebrae, which is why the giraffe has the same as its siblings and they are just obscenely long. On the other hand, birds with longer necks tend to have more vertebrae.

These analogies do work sometimes, but biologists struggle to fit "computer code" based analogies into what they are studying. As it turns out, biology is rather unlike computers in a lot of ways.

Some interesting videos for laymen:

Michael Levin - Cell Intelligence in Physiological and Morphological Spaces https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLiHLDrOTW8

SubAnima - How NOT To Think About Cells https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhvic-eqbc (this channel has a lot of other great explainers)

Makes me wonder if we can create an unsupervised AI model to "infer" features of an organism through only its genetic code.

this is all I got atm

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...

What a coincidence!

Only yesterday I was reading the WP page on Camel Spiders, saw the chewing animation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Junnn11#/media/File:20220..., and thought it was quite cool!

If you scroll down far enough on the page, you'll get to some neat animated images. Or, search for "movement" or "mobility".

I don't know why, but I got Pokémon-vibes from some of those illustrations. What phenomenal work!

Many of them (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:20190922_Mollisonia_pleno...) are angled similarly to how an opponent would be in-game (I guess prior to Gen 9 with its free camera).

Anorith[1] and Kabuto[2] are based on anomalocaris and xiphosura (horseshoe crabs)

[1]: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Anorith

[2]: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Kabuto

Listing Kabuto last... shameful!

Props for alphabetical ordering though

My first thought was that this person would be an excellent consultant for some arthropod-based game or film (Arthropods Attack?)

I wonder how common it is for folks to try to understand some new field in order to build something vs. the other way around vs. just outsourcing that expertise.

These are really charming illustrations!

It's enough to make you want to have a pet arthropod, or a Pokémon game based on real creatures.

Aren't insects such as beetles somewhat popular pets in Japan, and wasn't catching and collecting a major inspiration for the Pokémon games? (Not to mention the bug catching minigame in Animal Crossing?)

They're kind of underappreciated in the US, which is too bad.

This is awesome! A long time ago I used to browse Deviantart looking for similar stuff. Here's a nice example:

https://www.deviantart.com/albertonykus/art/The-Cartoon-Guid...

DeviantArt has taken a very particular direction! I suspect the advent of ArtStation has siphoned away the creatives posting for their portfolio.

I kept trying to use it for finding reference material for a game I was working on, except every query I tried returned results like I had suffixed porn to the search. Maybe deviant is doing more of the heavy lifting in the name now...

What queries did you use?

I haven’t used deviantart for 15+ years but I still remember the site and a small chain of followers dearly.

I looked at search results and didn’t notice any changes in my sample queries (elf, goblin, potato), they looked similar to what I’d expect 15 years ago.

This certainly led me on a Wikipedia rabbithole into extinct arthopods. My favorite used to be Anomalocaris (anomalous shrimp), until I discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovatiocaris, the "Innovation Crab"

I just see a reference to some "problematicus" species in the article, I wonder what it did to earn that troublemaker rap :)

It's contributions like this that really show the vast amount of knowledge that can be found on Wikipedia.

Thanks for your work, Junnn11!

(if you ever read this:) )

They are interested in the arthropod head problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod_head_problem

it is a long-standing zoological dispute concerning the segmental composition of the heads of the various arthropod groups

Reminds of the user Seedfeeder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedfeeder

Great work of course but damn I could not look at those all day, they look so repulsive. Same as Factorio biters :]

This is a pretty cool user page.

Thank you for your service, Junnn11! This is such a fantastic body of work.

The page on the Arthropod Head Problem was an interesting skim. Nice send.

The image tags on that page need `loading="lazy"`. This made me curious what contributing to the wikipedia application (not articles) is like. Anyone have any insight/info on this?

The application is called MediaWiki.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hac...

Spoiler alert: you need to write PHP.

And?

Personally, I much prefer having the images all download on page load. Lazy loaded images never seem to download before I scroll to them, so I have to keep waiting for them to come in as I go through the page.

Yep, this is one of those issues that get missed because a good chunk of SWEs have fast machines and test the application locally. I've started enabling throttling in dev tools so I can catch these kind of UX problems.

It's also one of those things where no matter what you do, someone will hate it and other will love it.

Lazy load images? People with bandwidth quotas might praise you. Others with sporadic connections will despise it, because they can't load the page once and revisit the already fully loaded tab when internet disappears. People with high bandwidth and no quotas will barely notice anything, unless they are quick readers, then they'll blame you for not loading the images quickly enough.

Not lazy load images? Everything vice-versa.

This is a feature that should be determined by the user agent rather than the server. It's the user agent that is aware of bandwidth limitations and desires of the user, after all.

Believe it or not, but websites could already implement it based on what the user-agent knows about the connection already. `navigator.connection` (returns NetworkInformation - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...) supposedly holds what the user-agent thinks the connection-type is. Although not implemented in Safari nor Firefox.

Although I do think there are concerns around privacy when it comes to adding more bits people can use to track you, which is probably why it's not implemented in Safari or Firefox yet.

Automatically doing lazy-loading of <img/> tags based on information not shared with the websites probably would break random websites that depend on being able to load images outside of the view of the user, for one reason or another, so probably won't be possible to fix by now.

> Believe it or not, but websites could already implement it based on what the user-agent knows about the connection already. `navigator.connection` (returns NetworkInformation - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...) supposedly holds what the user-agent thinks the connection-type is. Although not implemented in Safari nor Firefox.

This is absolutely the wrong way around. I don't care much for lazy loading but if you must add it then use the loading="lazy" hint and let the browser decide based on that. Don't try to be smart, e.g. navigator.connection won't tell you that I'm about to get on a plane where I won't have internet at all.

You can configure your browser either to ignore loading="lazy" completely or to increase the distance below the viewport where images load. Search for "lazy" in about:config if you use Firefox for example.

Sadly I don't think there's any such option in Chromium or mobile Safari, the two browsers I use.

You actually can do that on Safari:

iOS Settings > Safari > Advanced > Lazy image loading

I’m fairly certain you can do it on Chromium as well, but I don’t remember how.

No they don't. When my browser tells me it's finished loading the page I expect the page to be completely loaded.

I'm a mediawiki developer. Its open source. You can certainly contribute things. For something like that the difficult part is convincing everyone that loading=lazy is the right thing to do for body images. There are pros and cons, and a patch changing something without a clear right answer isn't going to get merged without buy-in (i should note im a backend dev, so this particular example is not something i know a lot about)

Anyways, lots of mediawiki devs hang out on #mediawiki on irc.libera.org irc channel. If you want to get involved come say hi.

There's a article on how to get started: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hac...

does anyone have any idea whether this person created drawings for some study book, or otherwise? is this purely for Wikipedia, sounds amazing and very Japanese either way...

I was sort of hoping these would be SVG files based on their style. Impressive illustrations.

This has to be the most in-depth wiki page I've ever read that had so little text.

That's because it's a user page showing the illustrations they created.

I understand what it is. It’s a jab at how useless a lot of the wiki pages can be

My hat off to this very focused & talented man/woman.

The arthropod version of Seedfeeder, I guess.

What a wonderful use of time.

Terrifying drawings

That is cool!

Someone has a lot of time on their hands…

Just wait until they learn about debugging!

Warning that this links to illustrations of bugs. That sort of thing makes me jump out of my seat

Reply on news.ycombinator.com