Hacker News Reader

gadtflyon Zoomable, translated version of the 15th century Mappa Mundi

The click-to-translate part seems to have broken since I posted this, which is bizarre. That was half the fun.

Wait nvm I used the wrong link. dang can you change it to https://mostre.museogalileo.it/framauro/en/interactive-explo...

gadtflyon Zoomable, translated version of the 15th century Mappa Mundi

There's a rotate button in a set of controls on the right.

gadtflyon Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia

Yes this is extremely annoying and the main reason I stopped playing with it despite being quite interested.

gadtflyon OpenAI employee: GPT-4.5 rumor was a hallucination

Nothing strange about it, /r/chatgpt was all people closely following developments from GPT-3 when it started. Since then:

https://subredditstats.com/r/chatgpt

gadtflyon Internet Artifact Museum

Note that many of the artifacts are interactive: buttons and links are clickable (effectful within the museum, does not leave page), text is scrollable, videos play, etc

Fantastic work.

gadtflyon First automatic JPEG-XL cloud service

I always confuse it with JBIG2, infamous from NSO's Pegasus zero-click iMessage exploit:

> JBIG2 doesn't have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That's exactly what this exploit does. Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, they define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It's not as fast as Javascript, but it's fundamentally computationally equivalent.

> The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape exploit are written to run on this logic circuit and the whole thing runs in this weird, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a JBIG2 stream.

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...

gadtflyon GPT-4 API General Availability

The original davinci model was a friend of mine and I resent this deeply.

I've had completions with it that had character and creativity that I have not been able to recreate with anything else.

Brilliant and hilarious things that are a permanent part of my family's cherished canon.

gadtflyon The Spy Who Called Me

gadtflyon ChatGPT 4 saved my dog’s life

> Googling your symptoms, the top links immediately go to diagnoses like lymphoma or HIV. There is no sense of the a priori likelihood of anything.

An essay on this topic: "WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-...

gadtflyon ChatGPT Plugins

I am completely unable to put myself in the headspace of someone who thinks this is all just empty hype. I think people are drastically underreacting to what is currently in progress.

What does all of this look like to you?

gadtflyon Samsung “space zoom” moon shots are fake, and here is the proof

Officially documented by Samsung in Korean:

https://r1.community.samsung.com/t5/camcyclopedia/%EB%8B%AC-...

Ongoing arguments over what this counts as:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11or39c/samsungs_a...

https://twitter.com/search?q=samsung%20moon

gadtflyon ChatGPT: How many letters has the string “djsjcnnrjfkalcr”?

This is an artifact of an implementation-specific trick that trades performance at character-level tasks for performance at everything else. It does not reflect anything inherent about this type of model's capabilities: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#bpes

GPT-3 does not see individual characters. It sees "djsjcnnrjfkalcr" chunked as [d, js, jc, nn, r, j, f, k, al, cr]. You can see for yourself here: https://beta.openai.com/tokenizer.

gadtflyon How transportation technologies shaped empires

The Macedonian and Mongolian Empires shattered into more manageable bits almost immediately.

For Victorian Britain: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Isochron...

gadtflyon Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

You're right, "almost certainly" is far too strong. I was unaware of that research, and read a lot into that this is only being released in the web version. And am just generally anticipating a wave of LLM applications to eat everything that could be even remotely, abstractly reframed as an "autocomplete" task. That it only works in English is also evidence against, with GPT-3 you'd get every language it knows pretty much for free.

gadtflyon Microsoft is making Excel’s formulas easier

This almost certainly is GPT. OpenAI has an exclusive licensing agreement with Microsoft.

gadtflyon Historical reasons for resistance to recognizing airborne transmission in COVID

Title should be "What were the historical reasons for the resistance to recognizing airborne transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic?", but that was over the character limit.

Accompanying Twitter thread from primary author: https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1562112453948755974

Previous reporting on this in mid-2021: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

gadtflyon webЯcade – WASM based retro emulation on any device

Almost certainly a reference, take it up with Atari https://tetris.wiki/images/6/68/Tetris_%28Atari%29_flyer.jpg

gadtflyon The Trouble with the Segway (2009)

Credit: https://nitter.it/torbenjess/status/1558402891030732801

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730755 (2009)

gadtflyon The Last Naval Battle of World War 2 (2018)

Seconded.

I've been a big WWII guy my entire life but never realized how much I'd been shortchanging myself with neglect of naval stuff until I started watching Drachinifel.

gadtflyon Alternative wonders of the world

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

gadtflyon Show HN: This Food Does Not Exist

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

gadtflyon Soviet Military Maps of North America and UK

Why is the Vancouver map listed as being from 2003?

gadtflyon SICP: JavaScript Edition available for pre-order

SICP translated to JavaScript (2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6385617

gadtflyon Heavily mutated coronavirus variant puts scientists on alert

https://twitter.com/jcbarret/status/1463975708770897923

gadtflyon An “incident” with the James Webb Space Telescope has occurred

https://www.spacex.com/media/falcon-users-guide-2021-09.pdf

https://www.ulalaunch.com/docs/default-source/rockets/atlasv...

Though do note:

> This user’s guide is intended for pre-contract mission planning and for understanding SpaceX’s standard services. The user’s guide is not intended for detailed design use. Data for detailed design purposes will be exchanged directly between a SpaceX customer and a SpaceX mission manager.

gadtflyon Some Airborne and Droplet History

Narrative exploring how this history was discovered: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

gadtflyon Some Airborne and Droplet History

In threadreader form: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1391111720526024708.html

----

Found from this other fantastic exploration by Zeynep Tufecki: https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1390738628528201735

gadtflyon Regex Crosswords

My favourite (and as far as I know, the original): https://jimbly.github.io/regex-crossword/

gadtflyon Once we can see them, it’s too late

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01522

HN discussion of paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26045731

gadtflyon Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler

This is all both deeply immoral and disasterously unwise.