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sandgiant

802 karma · joined April 14, 2016

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sandgiant··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
I did just that. Took me half a day. I haven't used Spotlight since. I did try alternative launchers, but they are all bloated. I just need an app launcher and simple arithmetic - that's all it does.

https://github.com/askielboe/lightning-launcher

sandgiant··on High-Res Photo Shows Sand-Capped Butte Rising from Mars Plain of Polygons
> NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this sand-capped butte, nicknamed “Miraflores,” estimated to be about 20 feet (6 meters) tall, on June 11, 2026. The surrounding area includes an expanse of terrain covered in surface features called polygons.

From https://www.nasa.gov/missions/mars-science-laboratory/curios...

sandgiant··on The dark side of the Moomins
I highly recommend the 1990 Polish stop motion TV series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moomins_(TV_series). The only one that, to me, captures the magic of the books.
sandgiant··on Magic Links Have Rough Edges, but Passkeys Can Smooth Them Over
Works perfectly in 1Password. One-click sign-in is awesome! I don't understand the hate towards passkeys. Managing passwords for non-techies is infinitely worse in my experience.
sandgiant··on Supernovae evidence for foundational change to cosmological models
This has the same number of free parameters as LambdaCDM. Also this result only looks supernovae, i.e. low redshift sources. LambdaCDM is tested on cosmological scales.

Very interesting, but “more work is needed”.

sandgiant··on Boltzmann brain
Well no, that's not the reason why we're not Boltzmann Brains. A Boltzmann Brain is perfectly capable of believing that it is sensing reality in exactly the same way that your brain believes so.

It is worth reading the section "Modern reactions to the Boltzmann brain problem" in the article to understand why the Boltzmann Brain is a useful thought experiment.

sandgiant··on Biological Miracle – Wood Frog
The content is not available in your location.
sandgiant··on New images show state of preservation of Ernest Shackleton's ship
If you like audio books I can highly recommend the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing, read by Simon Prebble. Perhaps the best audio book I’ve ever listened to.
sandgiant··on New images show state of preservation of Ernest Shackleton's ship
The third one is also very good! It’s the first book I would think of if you asked me about Endurance.

The audio book narrated version by Simon Prebble is outstanding.

sandgiant··on The Unraveling of Space-Time
Sean Carroll (professor of physics, quoted in the article) has a highly-rated book titled "Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime" [1] which discusses exactly these topics. I haven't read it, but it's on my list.

I also highly recommend his podcast "Mindscape" where he discusses this and a range of other topics in science and philosophy. [2]

[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/somethingdeeplyhidden/ [2] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/

sandgiant··on The Unraveling of Space-Time
There are no such things as absolute static things in relativity theory. "Before" and "After" depend entirely on the observer. Energy/matter and spacetime are deeply connected through the Einstein equations, so much so that they may indeed be "the same underlying thing".

Approximate static time and space are convenient illusions/approximations, that happen to be very useful for us as a species when it comes to surviving and replicating, but the Universe has no obligation to cater to our feeble minds or senses when it comes to reality.

sandgiant··on A French village that voted to ban scrolling in public
Sounds like it's more of a campaign than an actual ban.

> It is not enforceable by police – officers could not stop or fine people scrolling in the street because there is no national law against smartphones – but the mayor describes it as an incitement to stop scrolling and guidance for limiting phone use.

sandgiant··on Men hand over Bitcoins worth two billion euros to German federal police
https://archive.vn/nXxs3
sandgiant··on Chess-GPT's Internal World Model
You are probably joking, but I think it's actually very important to look at the language we use around LLMs, in order not to get stuck in assumptions and sociological bias associated with a vocabulary usually reserved for "magical" beings, as it were.

This goes both ways by the way. I could be convinced that LLMs can achieve something the likes of intuition, but I strongly believe that it is a very different kind of intuition than we normally associate with humans/animals. Usins the same label is thus potentially confusing, and (human pride aside) might even prevent us from appreciating the full scope of what LLMs are capable of.

sandgiant··on Notesnook – open-source and zero knowledge private note taking app
What does being a Pakistani national have to do with anything?
sandgiant··on Ertdfgcvb
Pretty cool!

If you go to the index page it tells you what it is; a studio for design and code based in Switzerland.

https://ertdfgcvb.xyz

sandgiant··on Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month
Does anyone outside the US have a great time with Kagi? I tried it for a few months but found it to be very US focused. Perhaps I just didn't spend enough time shaping my queries.
sandgiant··on Touch Pianist
Indeed! I think this is what makes this so fun. I can also highly recommend listening to various recordings of the moonlight sonata and notice how different it is depending on the precise timing the pianist uses.
sandgiant··on AI real-time human full-body photo generator
The only thing I changed from the default parameters was Age == Teenager. That resulted in this error:

We detected that generated image contains nude content. Try changing parameters.

Not sure what to make of this, but it feels wrong, somehow?

Edit: This was the prompt it generated for me on page load: "Minerva McGonagall in Hogwarts, wearing Hogwarts robe and witch hat" - https://generated.photos/human-generator/64e650a39563e6000e0....

sandgiant··on Carl Sagan testifying before Congress on climate change (1985) [video]
Cherry-picking data to support your biases hardly falls under the category of rationalist coverage. Just like the radical environmentalists, Lomborg seems particularly prone to his biases.

Unfortunately, reality is more complicated than what fits in a few tweets about wild fires, polar bears and coral reefs.

sandgiant··on When Stars Twinkle, They Make Music
Link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08023

And a video to hear the twinkling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqQViMPJxwE

sandgiant··on Tarsnap outage postmortem
Curious how much you backup, which version of restic you're running and why you think the deduplication is borderline unacceptable. There were several major (orders of magnitudes) improvements made to pruning within the past ~1 year, that's why I'm interested.
sandgiant··on Evidence for a gravitational wave background from a galaxy-sized detector
Exactly. Space is not static. Also everything is moving relative to each other. Finally distances are measured using the "distance-ladder" of astronomy which depends on a bunch of model assumptions. Therefore astronomers typically report distances in proportion to the Hubble constant. In case your model prefers a slightly different value you can recalculate your distances easily.
sandgiant··on Recovering secret keys from devices using video footage of their power LED
I've often had to tape over LEDs on various external hardware. Some of them will light up my entire room at night.
sandgiant··on Why do recipe writers lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions? (2012)
Sounds interesting! Do you have a link? I can't seem to find it anywhere.

I've had decent success with "The Science of Good Cooking"[1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Science-Good-Cooking-Illustrated-Cook...

sandgiant··on The Joy of an Empty Brain
Fair question. I sometimes envy the amount of time people without kids have. But even for all the time in the World I would never trade the experience of having my three year old daughter. The pleasure I get from her is beyond anything I ever managed to get for myself, even when I had all the time in the World. Whether down to biochemistry or insanity, or both, I don't know. Having kids also helped me value my personal free time a lot more, so in some ways I feel like I'm more aligned with what I want now. Don't read any of this as advice though, I would never recommend anyone having children unless it's something you really want.
sandgiant··on Digital clutter: Learning to let go and stop hoarding terabytes
I get you point, but I'd still argue that SSD+Arq is a lot simpler than any NAS setup. Wether the migration is worth it is up to personal preference I guess, but there's certainly a risk of spending more time and money in the end.
sandgiant··on First image of a black hole gets a makeover with AI
PRIMO is a way to fit models to the data in image-space. Since the models are very expensive to run it's not feasible to sample the model parameters directly in order to find a fit to data. Instead they take a library of model outputs and parameters and do a principle component analysis in image-space. This allows them to very cheaply generate new samples without running the complete simulation for each new set of parameters.

Principle component analysis is an old school analytical numerical method and has nothing to do with AI.

sandgiant··on First image of a black hole gets a makeover with AI
I'm not sure what you mean, but the techniques they are using are not new and are not related to artificial intelligence. They use a 120 year old numerical technique to "super-sample" their expensive simulations, which allows them to "fit" the simulations to data in a robust way. They do the calculations in a computer because there are too many numbers to do it on paper. That does not mean it has anything to do with AI.
sandgiant··on First image of a black hole gets a makeover with AI
This is not the "AI" part though. The thing that the press is calling "AI" is the principle component analysis (PCA) which they use to sample their model without having to generate a full MHD simulation at each grid point.

PCA was invented in 1901. It hardly qualifies as AI.

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