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simojo

286 karma · joined June 21, 2022

wannabe physicist
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simojo··on Canada fast-tracks Pacific oil pipeline to reduce US dependence
So many people come and give doomer statements on the reality of the US and Canada becoming increasingly at odds.

As a US citizen, I just want to add that I hope some day we can reestablish a healthy relationship with our neighbors. These articles are saddening.

simojo··on Behold the pawpaw
I'm a little worried all of this recent pawpaw fame will make them harder to find or worse, blight them in some regions. Some people will keep their pawpaw patches secret for this reason..
simojo··on The Shadows Lurking in the Equations – Underwater Islands
These visualizations are cool, but I feel only a little misleading. Any 2D relation can be plotted in 3D, and setting z=0 shows the original line in 2D. The whole notion of fuzzy is really just saying "let's make a heat map of how far z is from 0". That said, I can see how for some people, thinking about the roots of a function in 3D this way _could_ help unlock deeper understanding of where your roots are at than just staring at 3D graph.
simojo··on Branchless Rust: Making a Filter 4x Faster by Removing an If
> The predictor is like a barista who starts making your usual order the moment you walk in. If you are a regular, this is fantastic: the coffee is ready when you reach the counter. If you order something random every day, the barista keeps pouring drinks into the sink.

I laughed out loud reading this. Interesting writeup. I wonder what kinds of tricks like this exist for computation graph compilers like JAX.

simojo··on Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick
https://a.co/d/0fnDxZAG
simojo··on Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick
I'd be very interested to see it if you still have access to it.
simojo··on Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick
We purchased a Chinese-made projector from Amazon, which was surprisingly inexpensive (~40 USD). Upon connecting it to the internet, it placed a constantly running feed of ads on the corner of the screen, even while movies were playing. There was no way to disable it either. Even though it's not a stick, it's a similar principle.
simojo··on U.S. science is in chaos
From what I understand, Spain has their own set of politics worth losing sleep over; perhaps as an expat you won't be as attached though.
simojo··on Easyduino: Open Source PCB Devboards for KiCad
Recently, I made an Arduino UNO that I showed to have better switching characteristics than a commercial board. It was a great project to help me understand how seemingly inconsequential routing practices can lead to issues down the line.

http://www.simonjjones.com/#/posts/golden-arduino

simojo··on A soft robot has no problem moving with no motor and no gears
Liquid crystal elastomers will most likely never be used in humans because, in order to drive the phase transition (mematic mesogens going from isotopic to anisotropic phase) necessary for macro scale work, the LCE has to be heated well beyond 100C. Even in non-thermal contexts, you need kilovolts to influence a doped bulk LCE. I just don't see it happening.
simojo··on Inside Nepal's Fake Rescue Racket
to be fair, the approach is usually covered in snowpack for most of the year, so impact is minimal by foot traffic. However, most of the protection is fixed, which could have lasting effects if something were to rip out.

For other mountains with dry summits in the summers, I would agree: the effects of erosion are frightening

simojo··on Email obfuscation: What works in 2026?
GitHub has a spot to display your email on your profile; is this obfuscated as well? Most of my current spam is from putting my email on there..
simojo··on “Disregard That” Attacks
Today I scheduled a dentist appointment over the phone with an LLM. At the end of the call, I prompted it with various math problems, all of which it answered before politely reminding me that it would prefer to help me with "all things dental."

It did get me thinking the extent to which I could bypass the original prompt and use someone else's tokens for free.

simojo··on I haven't used a mouse for 14 years
One of my buddies has beaten minecraft many times using only his mac trackpad. In fact, he's better than I am with a mouse.
simojo··on The American Healthcare Conundrum
What do you see as the bad part of this? That the user is trying to farm points by copying patterns of upvote-winning users, or that there's a flood of inauthentic new users? Genuinely asking.
simojo··on A basket of new fruit varieties is coming your way
Not if you have a local amish plug
simojo··on The Mathematics of Tuning Systems
I suppose that's why the harpejji [0] has recently gained popularity? I too have wished for an isomorphic keyboard. All of the non-stacked ones become either too wide or the keys become too skinny. Example: Dodeka Keyboard [1]. I know that the Lumatone [2] exists too, but it is too progressive for my taste :)

As a side note, the traditional keyboard size is not representative of the average pianist's hand size. David Steinbuhler [3] has been making modified traditional keyboard layouts by varying the width of the keys slightly, and people rave about it. I've had the chance to visit his shop in Titusville, Pennsylvania, where he designs them. It's a totally enhanced playing experience, even for someone like me who can play a 10th without difficulty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpejji [1] https://dodekamusic.com/ [2] https://www.lumatone.io/ [3] http://dsstandardfoundation.org/the-standards/

simojo··on Soldering Prototypes with Enamel Magnet Wire (2020)
This is orders of magnitude more complicated and risk prone than wire wrapping due to the possibility of cold joints, but as I understand it, this look is what people dig these days (just watch any EE youtuber). I too used to think that soldering on porto board was a great way to go about prototyping sans SBB, but you can't ignore the bomber connections that wire wrapping gives you.
simojo··on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
I'm curious as to what kind of control stack Waymo uses for their vehicles. Obviously their perception stack has to be based off of trained models, but I'm curious if their controllers have any formal guarantees under certain conditions, and if the child walking out was within that formal set of parameters (e.g. velocity, distance to obstacle) or if it violated that, making their control stack switch to some other "panic" controller.

This will continue to be the debate—whether human performance would have exceeded that of the autonomous system.

simojo··on Bugs Apple loves
Had a similar thought today while marking up pdfs with my iPad. Half of the time I'm fighting with Files' ability to persist my changes after it frequently crashes. Why market it as an iPad if marking up pdfs is so scuffed? this has been happening for years, it's like Apple's desire to add new features tops the desire to fix long lived bugs.
simojo··on Self Sanitizing Door Handle
You have to let the engineers over-engineer. It's a healthy release.
simojo··on NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power
I guess that explains why they had no qualms shutting down half of Boulder's power with a vague time horizon. After losing everything in my fridge, though, they finally turned it back on today.
simojo··on Microscopic robots that sense, think, act, and compute
I highly recommend looking into Marc's work [0]. I would say he's on the sharp end of lithography for microrobotics. As soft lithography catches on more, work like his will become only more common to see.

[0]: https://miskinlab.seas.upenn.edu/

simojo··on Podcast industry under siege as AI bots flood airways with programs
When searching for podcasts that interview researchers I'd like to hear about, I often have to scroll past many AI-ingested arxiv summaries before finding what I'm looking for. It's not inherently bad to have those TTS summaries, but they should reside in their own place rather than the general podcast space.
simojo··on I successfully recreated the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
I see this as a logical rebuttal
simojo··on Energy Department Renames NREL 'National Lab of the Rockies'
This is a joke right?
simojo··on Eating stinging nettles
Why the hate on the alcachofas?
simojo··on It's better to be rich than right
What would it take for something like the stock market to become illegitimate in the world's eyes? To the point of not investing, that is
simojo··on Become unbannable from your email
There are online services where a bad actor can enter your email to automatically sign you up for hundreds, thousands of marketing emails. In the event that that happens, given that you have full control over the domain, you could just divert whatever <x>@yourdomain.com to a black hole. What will happen when email attacks become more advanced--to the point of signing up thousands of different <x'>@yourdomain.com? What strategy would one have then? You would most certainly have to part ways with that domain.

The author makes a good point, your email address is (arguably) more important than your home address. Perhaps there already are, but I hope for better safeguards against these kinds of attacks.

simojo··on Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?
Running with an idea and starting a business. Some people are naturally entrepreneurs, but I don't feel that I have the bug for it. I'd like to find a niche in soft robotic actuation and run with it, renting a garage somewhere in my hometown after I finish my PhD.
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