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grantsucceededon In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life

this revives my recurring desire to get a good USB microscope. Good, to me, in this context:

a few hundred bucks

able to look at microbes

also able to look at less micro level stuff, like maybe the thing i'm trying to solder or fix

is it wrong to solicit comments/recommendations here?

grantsucceededon Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language

Thanks!

This challenged coincided with my first dabblings into agentic coding. I wrote all my attempts in hand coded assembly, without doing any basic research. but your site is very entertaining and is reminding me of why the connection of ants/swarms cellular automata to gradient discovery to AI always blows my mind

grantsucceededon Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language

Wow. thank you so much for the writeup.

I'm just now (last few months) dabbling with agentic coding, but being an oldschool tech guy I had to dive straight into assembly. It was just too hard for me to level up my agentic skills given the deadline.

grantsucceededon Show HN: Swarm – Program a colony of 200 ants using a custom assembly language

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I'm absolutely having a great time immersing myself in this, but I'm super sad about the day it will be taken down and i cant play anymore. Maybe that day is when the contest is over? Will there be some way i can keep enjoying this beautiful little world after the contest?

I know opening up the source or keeping the hosting up might be really hard to do for legal, security, cost or a million other complicated reasons. so if its not possible, thank you anyway :)

So simple and beautiful. So addicting. Love it! Thank you!

grantsucceededon 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

bravo!

grantsucceededon How Bright Headlights Escaped Regulation – and Blinded Us All

On the advice of a 19 year old (I'm 60) I tried using the polarized sunglasses i keep in my car, at night.

I helped.

Ida know, can someone comment on whether that actually does reduce noise in whatever information is needed to drive safely?

grantsucceededon (Social) media manipulation in one image

yesss! this x 1000

grantsucceededon The Last Drops of Mexico City

pretty sure there is no salt water in the central valley either.

grantsucceededon I spent 18 years in the Linux console

yesssss. 1993 is when linux found me.

i loved alt-F[1-4] on a vga screen i somehow managed to get higher (character based) resolution.

when i started runing xwindows, i still bounced out to the console with (afair) ctrl-alt-f2?

and just a few weeks ago, I forget why, but i instinctively was able to get a console on a messed up (xwindows or whatever it is today) console. good ol console.

grantsucceededon Federal Reserve Bank of NY "Doomsday Book" 2022 via FOIA [pdf]

probably anyone this far in the thread remenbers long term capital managment, I did, but couldnt remenber if it was in the 80's or 90's. (1998)

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/longtermcapital.asp

grantsucceededon Doomsday Book (2006) [pdf]

Blame for using comic sans ? :)

grantsucceededon Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

haha .. but i did work at google before fb.

my memory is hazy, but when i started i was called an sre. Then someone made up the term "app ops". then it was production engineering. then I called myself an SRE when i was interviewing to leave fb.

Oh, and i was called a DBA before being acquired by google.

grantsucceededon Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

Few companies experienced the explosive growth fb did, though many will claim to have done so. Hack made the existing codebase of php scale to insane levels while reaching escape velocity for the overall company to even attempt to transition away or shrink the php codebase, as i recall (i was an SRE, not a dev)

zeus likewise.

grantsucceededon Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta

haha the reason I stayed as long as i did

grantsucceededon GPT-4o

Magical?

the interruptiopn part is just flow control at the edge. control-s, control-c stuff, right? not AI?

The sound of a female voice to an audience 85% composed of males between the ages of 14 and 55 is "magical", not this thing that recreates it.

so yeah, its flow control and compression of highly curated, subtle soft porn. Subtle, hyper targeted, subconscious porn honed by the most colossal digitally mediated focus group ever constructed to manipulate our (straight male) emotions.

why isn't the voice actually the voice of the pissed off high school janitor telling you to man-up and stop hyperventilating? instead its a woman stroking your ego and telling you to relax and take deep breaths. what dataset did they train that voice on anyway?

grantsucceededon GPT-4o

it seems like the ability to interrupt is more like the interrupt in the computer sense ... A control-c (or control-s tty flow control for you old timers), not a cognitive evaluation followed by the "reasoned" decision to pause voice output. not that it matters i guess, its just not general intelligence. its just flow control.

but also, thats why it fails a real turing test. a real person would be irritated as fuck by the interruptions

grantsucceededon A new class of tiny, self-propelled robots that can zip through liquid at speed

so nobody read Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson?

Basically, nanotec bots that spin around on command are put into the bodies of people, so they can be made to spin around and dissolve them from the inside out.