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Have a friend who has never had a headache!

Ooh this is the closest description I've heard to one odd thing I had which was a satisfying feeling associated with two specific thicknesses (one around the thickness of a school copy book, the other around the thickness of a school maths book). At some points it could be activated by thinking about the thickness but long gone now.

Also had 3 more complex emotions/feelings/states that were a blend of certain particular things, not always that connected. For example one was mostly a combination of memories of my grandad's past (he died before I was born), and the Ratchet and Clank level "Metropolis". Similarly, the actual feeling of these is now gone. Anyone else have something similar?

The closest I've heard to that was Brian Eno in his film talking about something similar he seemed to have growing up with the colour purple.

OisinMoranon Bing Wallpaper showing Ad for Harry Potter and Fantastic beasts box set

Recently had to install some stuff on a Windows laptop, test it, then ship it out to a customer, and my god the culture shock coming from Mac (and previously Linux and before that Windows)! Randomly selected (and not particularly good at that) rotating wallpapers, random unrelated facts on the log in page. Had to nuke as many of them as possible, but they don't make it easy.

OisinMoranon Show HN: Alphabet Soup, a multiplayer game, build the longest word to win

Super fun, thanks for sharing! Might be handy to explain the rules up top (can't seem to see them):

- Proper nouns allowed

- Can reuse letters

- Longest word possible might not use all the letters

OisinMoranon Show HN: Make senders work to get into your inbox

Yeah, this gets reinvented every once in a while. I think Balaji’s earn.com was doing this for a while back around 2015/16

OisinMoranon Ice water drowning survival of young patient (2025)

Hmm I wonder if some kind of beamforming would work? I think that's what the Miele Dialog uses to enable you to cook a fish while it remains in a frozen block of ice

https://www.miele.ie/c/revolutionary-excellence-1425.htm

OisinMoranon World Capitals Voronoi

Join the Celtic Union, don't be shy!

OisinMoranon Anthropic's model naming, extrapolated

Fan Fiction: Open weight distillations / riffs

OisinMoranon Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them better

Your last sentence is simply not true. Helicopters are massive in terms of volume and weight, and incredibly loud. You're also assuming our current layout of everything would stay the same. Imagine if teleportation existed, do you think cities, towns, and suburbs would still look the same?

A collision is less likely in 3D than in 2D, and obviously the chicken would be delivered to you via drone rather than the inverse.

OisinMoranon Googlebook

Upcoming launches: Mapsbook, Waymobook, Walletbook, Authenticatorbook, ...

OisinMoranon Googlebook

Google have been terrible at copywriting (at least in their hardware line) for as long as I can remember. Here's an example from 2020: https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1312560706965983234

It's a shame because I love the Pixel series and they're doing it a disservice by not marketing it better. Apple's copy on the other hand is generally excellent.

OisinMoranon Googlebook

Yeah I've been exclusively on Pixels since the 2 and love them

OisinMoranon Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players

This is great, I remember being sorely disappointed by the hyped up Timo Boll vs Kuka robot 12 years ago. I thought it was going to be a real match and seemed like the robot would destroy him, but ended up just being a marketing stunt and felt like a fixed fight, with no real digging into the tech or why the robot "lost". Still some cool footage: https://youtu.be/tIIJME8-au8

OisinMoranon The Theory of Interstellar Trade [pdf] (1978)

“It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.”

Love this paper

OisinMoranon All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

You may enjoy this piece, Domes are over-rated:

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very...

OisinMoranon The Indie Internet Index – submit your favorite sites

Oh delightful, thank you for this! I also maintain a somewhat similar meta-list on my site lynkmi: https://lynkmi.com/oisin/lynkmi%2520adjacent

Going to dig into these soon and will post a few!

OisinMoranon Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game

Ooh this one is fun too! Though it doesn't get quite as hard as the slider one. Breezed through all 47 levels of this pretty easily while there were one or two impossible seeming ones in the slider.

OisinMoranon Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game

This is fun! I just played once and got 0.0016, which it says is "absurdly below the theoretical limit"...

Okay, tried again and got 0.0034 which is still says is beyond the human limit! I'll have to give this to my mum because we often argue about colours and I suspect she might be a tetrachromat.

Both tests on a Pixel 10 btw

OisinMoranon My journey to the microwave alternate timeline

No mention of the Miele Dialog which gets as close as I've seen (though not quite there) to my dream of crispy fried eggs with runny yolk in the microwave. Their big example is being able to cook a fish while it remains in a block of ice. Pretty damn cool!

https://www.reviewed.com/ovens/features/we-tried-an-oven-tha...

OisinMoranon A solver for Semantle

I think the way the similarity is done is based on word co-occurrence and the dataset used is news articles. So you can imagine that not a lot of news articles mention castle in that context.

OisinMoranon A solver for Semantle

This is super interesting, thanks for sharing! I did a similar thing a few years ago which I'd been meaning to properly finish and share, and your post was the inspiration needed to make mine public (albeit still in a state much too messy for my liking, hopefully having it public will force me to improve it).

We took fairly different approaches, but I really enjoy the visual explanation element of yours! Well done.

My investigation stemmed from wondering if the seemingly useless 1st, 10th, and 1000th nearest word similarity scores were enough to uniquely ID the word. Turns out—yes, pretty much! It's effectively just a kind of reverse engineering, similar to how you also made your own version of the game. Can definitely improve on a lot.

Tried today's puzzle and got it in two (first was 999/1000).

Here's my code & write up: https://github.com/OisinMoran/Solving-Semantle/blob/main/Sol...

OisinMoranon Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse

To be fair, I initially had the same thought, and the HN item just two below this as I write also has agent (but the LLM kind) in its title.

OisinMoranon A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

Just on the redaction point, I did notice one email that looked correctly redacted but when zoomed in you could see some pixels from a few letters had escaped a little. It might be possible to reverse engineer the email just from that.

OisinMoranon Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's 'uphill' route

Can vouch for his “Oranges” too! A phenomenal writer

OisinMoranon In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?

I had a very similar issue with Chants of Sennaar (another incredible game), where there were exactly 3 words I was missing, I knew what they were, but couldn't find them. I kept going anyway and found one (by a different method than usual), then eventually after scouring the whole map twice had to look it up and there was just a stairs down the edge of one section that I didn't see at all, but which also didn't respond to the "hint" button that normally shows you any direction you can go or thing you can interact with.

Also very glad I looked up the solution for the Obelisk puzzle in Fez as there was no way I was getting that (seemingly incredibly contrived, but apparently not correctly solved yet) solution.

OisinMoranon In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?

An excellent 3 part video from Elyot Grant [0] introduced me to the term "fiero" for this conquering after a struggle, in contrast to a simple "aha/eureka". The difference being one is transmissible, the other is not. Thought it was a nice distinction. Highly recommend the videos!

[0] Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCHciE9CYfA

OisinMoranon New York Times games are hard: A computational perspective

OT but recently came across this incredible video of a very engaging solve of a very beautiful Sudoku modification.

If you like puzzles this will brighten your day.

https://youtu.be/yKf9aUIxdb4

OisinMoranon New York Times games are hard: A computational perspective

Just Connections, Wordle, and Mini for me (in that order), with the occasional Crossword (tend towards a barbell strategy of just doing maybe Mon, Tue, Sun to get the quick hits and a real challenging puzzle).

Also experience the odd difficulty due to Americanisms, but can't really fault a puzzle coming from something called the New York Times for that. I do however think the puzzle setting for Connections is inferior to The Wall from Only Connect, where they got the idea from. If you haven't seen that yet it's definitely worth a watch (it gets harder as as a season progresses).

OisinMoranon Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

"You have 1 minute to design a maze that takes 2 minutes to solve"

OisinMoranon Prime chains

Fun! If bi-twin chains are those where +1 AND -1 are prime, I wonder what the longest chain is where either +1 OR -1 are prime. And while we're at it, why not XOR too.