Moon (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Moon (2024)

ciechanow.ski

267 pointssimonebrunozzi40 comments

I sometimes say "in the style of Ciechanowski" to LLM presentations I make to myself to learn things, and it creates great JS visualizations. Is this plagiarism (... whatever it is) of the style of "in the style of ..." for art neural net models, do you all think? I don't share the things, I just use them for myself, but I sort of imagine sharing them and it may or may not be a great idea

It's not plagiarism at all to openly do something new in the style of someone else, though it would be polite to provide a little credit if you feel like someone could mistake yours for theirs.

The actual LLM benchmark - make a site as wonderful both in visual presentation and in code, while being as factually accurate as ciechanow.ski.

If the LLM can create something that could be mistaken for that work, that's awesome.

Honestly, I wouldn't call it plagiarism. You're using the prompt for personal purposes, to better understand the material. If you were copying his text and passing it off as your own, then yeah, that would be not cool. But using his approach with interactive visualizations as a source of inspiration for your own learning materials is fine. If you ever decide to put it out in the open, just mention that you took inspiration from his style and include a link to his work.

That's pretty clever. They're quite good on their own, but people do use this technique. Patrick McKenzie (patio11 here) says that people do use his voice to invoke assistance with corporations. Personally, I often ask for a UI to learn or (with ChatGPT) a "zine" or "infographic", both of which deliver tremendous utility. They'll have the classic errors of some things being dislocated from where they should be but it's really still quite good.

It's not plagarism, Ciechanowski didn't invent this presentation form. His presentations are examples of "active essays", a term coined by Alan Kay no later than 2006.

(I don't know whether Alan invented the concept itself, I'm not aware of him claiming that)

See: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5350160

No, plagiarism is presenting someone else's work as your own. If they're useful, share them.

If it bothers you, which is a good sign, consider identifying for yourself the key things that make his style and use those in your work.

As a bonus you can evolve some things and make it less derivative, this is how people create own style.

This is probably the healthiest way to use stylistic imitation: treat it as scaffolding, then figure out why it works and throw the scaffolding away

Styles cannot be plagiarized.

Moon (2009)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/

I was just about to say that :)

Moon: Remix RPG Adventure (1997)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon:_Remix_RPG_Adventure

Links you can hear. https://youtu.be/WUraLNrTVeg

Great movie ... directed by David Bowie's son!

Bartosz Ciechanowski really gave us a look at what the future of the web would look like. It seems like these kinda pages are the norm now with AI assisted dev, which I absolutely love. Fully interactive pages are so much more intuitive than static ones of the past. He has my thanks for ushering this in as a standard.

AI definitely lowers the cost of building these, but I think Ciechanowski's real contribution is upstream of the code. Knowing what to visualize and how to make interaction teach something rather than just look impressive is the rare part

(2024)

They're always so detailed I've wondered why he doesn't put a Table of Contents, among other editorial decisions..

Moon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443229 - Dec 2024 (250 comments)

> we can freely pan the camera around to see the Moon

It looks like we can orbit or move around the Moon, instead. Panning usually refers rotating the camera from a fixed position.

I thought panning was moving the camera along the 2D plane at a fixed distance from the subject. Pan left, pan right, etc

That's tracking or dollying, a term from the days when cameras were large and fragile so moving in a straight line meant rolling it on light rail tracks. OP is correct, a pan keeps the camera on top of its fixed tripod and rotates it to follow the action.

Those different perspectives especially from the virtual planet really enlightened me!

Wow, there is SO much to see and know about the Moon!

Cool, thanks!

That’s no…oh wait, yes it is.

Also I was surprised to learn that the mass of the Moon is only 1% of Earth mass. I knew surface gravity is one sixth so I guess I sort of assumed that mass would be one sixth.

It's because you have the radius on the denominator (I think)

  def calc_gravity(mass_1: float, mass_2: float, radius: float) -> float:
      G = 6.67408e-11
      return G * mass_1 * mass_2 / radius**2

  earth_mass = 5.972e24
  earth_radius = 6.371e6
  earth_g = calc_gravity(1.0, earth_mass, earth_radius)
  print(f"earth: {earth_g:.2f} m/s^2")

  moon_mass = 7.34767309e22
  moon_radius = 1737.4e3
  moon_g = calc_gravity(1.0, moon_mass, moon_radius)
  print(f"moon: {moon_g:.2f} m/s^2")

  print(f"earth/moon proportion: {(earth_g / moon_g):.2f}")

prints

  earth: 9.82 m/s^2
  moon: 1.62 m/s^2
  earth/moon proportion: 6.04

One of my guilty pleasures in life is coming up with convincing conspiracy theories. A personal favorite of mine is flat moon theory - the idea that the moon is a thin disc, not a sphere. A surprising number of people struggle to provide convincing counter arguments. Next time I’ll link them this site!

how do you explain moon phases with a disk? also how would a thin disk have enough mass to pull water from the earth?

A flat Moon made almost entirely of iridium could have the Moon’s actual mass if it were about 350 km thick.

And could perfectly hide the secret nazi base on it's back. ;-)

But it would promptly deform into a sphere, since its yield strength isn't remotely high enough to withstand the pressure of its own gravity

These sorts of people do not math.

Lunar libration is easily apparent and actively exploited by amateur astronomers to glimpse more than 50% of the surface.

I’ll be that guy: at the top of the page, the full moon does not show the upcoming lunar eclipse.

Are we supposed to believe this is some sort of magical moon?

Moon autism, nice

damn what an impressive side biz..520 paying Patreons for a site that updates basically once a year . An average of $10 means $5k/month. Even Gwern only has 1000 patrons, but they are not all paying and the subscription range is much smaller..

Almost 20 months since the last post

yeah it's like the AOL business model where people just keep the sub running and don't cancel.

Friend of a friend'a got a Substack with 50k followers at $10/month as a side gig and I'm like, wait what?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com