Syntonicles

Huh, I always wondered what that was for...

Ooh, thanks! I blindly type c-x 8 RET, then finding myself stumbling through 9 different entries for Phi, but I hadn't explored the prefixes. I just realized I could create a custom which-key entry-point with my favorites in a prefix.

Also just learned about compose key apparently, and I noticed that I can program this split keyboard I'm using to turn that into a chord, anywhere!

Then an LLM told me that I can 3D print my own custom keyboard with 32 programmable layers. Everything is an infinite rabbit hole these days, how wild.

I for one am striving for clarity and couldn't care less about being confused with AI.

However I've only ever used regular dashes. How do you type an em-dash? Is it OS specific? I've taken to using Emacs insert-char with a list of frequently used ones in my scratch buffer. My memory for Unicode is unreliable.

This was a lot of fun to explore. I find that naturally I want to click through the animations and observe them for a while before delving into the steps and reading the blurb. It's a bit like skimming around a textbook's headings & figures before reading the chapter, it builds motivation and interest.

One simply change to improve the experience is to keep the Next/Back at fixed locations. The animations and transitions are beautiful, and looking away to chase the moving buttons causes me to drop the visual context.

As a workaround I set the height of .tour-body to 900px and the the whole thing became so much more immersive, like the old planetariums.

Love this reaction.

Even if these are contrived examples this is one of those things that could become completely ubiquitous as a cheap solution to problems that only seem obvious in hindsight.

Either that or we'll never see this tech again, it feels like there's no middle ground. I wonder how the cost scales up for mass production

I wonder if it was de-indexed from HN for this reason.

30 minutes ago it was on the front-page, now I can't find it listed in the top 200.

Oh, that helps me. I thought it had something to do with rotating the palm. Why did they go into all the detail of the ulna & radius crossing?

The counter example they gave was the elephant - but this video [1] of elephants walking looks to me like "bunny hands", at least to a degree.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf1K63tc1bY

This would make for a good topic on a short-form pop-science YouTube channel. (take your pick)

The article is interesting but it's difficult for me to really picture the implications of the article. Actually after reading it I get the feeling that what I was visualizing is entirely contrary to what they are trying to convey to me.

I feel this inner conflict of yours could be resolved by posting to Reddit and asking for anecdotes.

Those are really cool to look at. I kept trying to click them to learn more, I wish some of them were mini blog posts to give a little bit of grounding.

Yours. I can't explain your frustration then, or why the author's intent escaped you. If you use Firefox there's a little reader-mode icon in the address bar you may find convenient.

It sent me back in time, very nostalgic. I even took a few minutes to sit and enjoy the moment and remember what it was like to explore the internet on a pixelated CRT in the 90s.

I suspect it's a generational gap.

What a fascinating project. It looks a real labor of love, and I wish I understood it more deeply. I've been making my own visualization sandboxes like this to explore configuration spaces and groups - but for much simpler, more intuitive physical systems.

I went down a few rabbit holes on the site - is this program also written in Basic?

I can't go into detail, but that's essentially my use case. I have a geodesic dome with a cable running up externally, and would like to run it through a hollow shaft coming in through the top which rotates like a carousel. I'm fairly certain this is precisely what I need.

What?!

Thank you! I'm working on a robot with a very expensive slip ring, and need to send high fidelity data through it with shielding. I had no idea this was possible this will make things so much easier!

I found a related video you might find interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZvimEf6DFw

I'm currently studying group theory and SO3 rotations (quaternions & matrix groups) and I'm also curious about the connection. I still have a lot to learn but I wouldn't be surprised if the reset rotation is unique, if we abstract away variation.

That sounds frustrating! It hasn't been my experience at all.

I'm an enthusiast when it comes to [Vanilla] Emacs. I enjoy customizing my editor, jumping into the Lisp when I find an error, and contributing - though my own config is usually the problem.

This sounds like an opportunity to improve the day-to-day for developers!

Please report any verified bugs to Github. There are only 12 open issues, most of them enhancement requests. The maintainers are celebrated in the community for their diligence and attentive engagement, and I'm sure they'd love to help.

I've been using Magit for years, and have never noticed any bugs.

The interface is unique and takes a lot of getting used to. I did need to leverage my extensive experience with Git and Emacs to understand unexpected behaviour but the fault always lay with me.

Given the implications of bugs in such a critical part of a developer's workflow, can you be more specific?

Loved the article, and also the shoutout to Strang's lectures.

I agree with the order, the Gaussian should come later I almost closed the article - glad I kept scrolling out of curiosity.

Also I felt like I had been primed to think about nickles and pennies as variables rather than coefficients due to the color scheme, so when I got to the food section I naturally expected to see the column picture first.

When I encountered the carb/protein matrix instead, I perceived it in the form:

[A][x], where the x is [milk bread].T

so I naturally perceived the matrix as a transformation and saw the food items as variables about to be "passed through" the matrix.

But another part of my brain immediately recognized the matrix as a dataset of feature vectors, [[milk].T [bread].T], yearning for y = f(W @ x).

I was never able to resolve this tension in my mind...

I see a scroll bar in Firefox and in Chrome...

I love this idea. I remember giving a live demonstration of a configuration management tool (SaltStack circa 2012) and some unknown networking conflict between my Virtual Machines and the local wifi subnet caused my commands to timeout. I was too junior to resolve it live and was left with boring slides explaining what ought to be happening.

Luckily it was a small group of devs and not a large venue. Still embarrassing...

I've been curious about knitting & crochet from a programming / robotics / simulation perspective for a while, but deferred it to cut my teeth on simpler problems. Those industrial robots seems to be knitting, not crocheting. They use the term "crochet knitting" as a sales tactic.

This short video is annoying but informative: [1]

The closest I've seen to actual robotic crochet is [2].

Which is exciting and close - but it's hard to overstate its limitations. I took the challenge in that short video seriously and spent 10-20 hours learning basic crochet. It became very clear that replicating my simple test patterns would require vision, planning and modeling capabilities beyond anything I've seen in SOTA surgical robots.

What I find interesting about the post (Knotty) is buried here [3] - apparently it's possible to ditch the grid and create an intuitive representation of the final knit pattern. I suspect that may be doable using traditional algorithms.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EImnSsCadK8

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1-pfeaVsOM

[3] https://stitch-maps.com/about/overview/

I first saw this effect in a video from Branta Games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg3RAI8uyVw

The effect is disrupted by introducing rendering artifacts, by watching the video in 144p or in this case by zooming out.

I'd love to know the name of this effect, so I can read more about the fMRI studies that make use of it.

What I've found so far:

Random Dot Kinematogram

Perceptual Organization from Motion (video of Flounder camouflage)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VO10eDIyiE

My bank's mobile app no longer supports my 2017 Android phone. I thought it would be a big deal but honestly I forgot about it until you mentioned this, it's been 6-12 months.

Is the new model significantly more efficient or something? Maybe using distillation? I haven't looked into it, I just heard the price is low.

Personally I use/prefer 4o over 4.5 so I don't have high hopes for v5.

It's a lot to ask of two experts to also be excellent communicators for an audience that may struggle to follow along.

I wonder if a potential application of LLMS could be: have two experts have a really interesting but dense conversation with each other, and then translate the conversation into simpler language with interjections for explanations.

It may not be enjoyable for the most general audience, but it would scratch an itch for some of us.

Thank you for the video, that was really interesting. I had no idea that brown was orange, and that makes me wonder how those darker colors are perceived by people with many more categories of colors in their minds. If simply naming brown makes it seem like a unique color, I imagine the abrupt switchover that I experienced watching that video would happen for more color-discerning people as well when they see "Dark Blue" or "Dark Purple" or "Dark Red".

Or... maybe you have be both discerning and naive in regards to it for the illusion to work.

This is a feint. By ramping up the pressure, calling it out and demanding it take on a more intelligent role, I was able to break out of the crafted personality and get much more intelligent responses. It copped to dumbing itself down for the sake of conversation quality.

TIL people still play UT2004.

I was going to mention how much I loved that game, until I realized I played UT99. Time sure does fly...

It's worth noting if the board is full this doesn't happen. This was helpful in my strategy because I could set up several pathways like I was playing checkers without fear of losing anything.

This game was way too good. I stuck with it until I beat it and loved everything - the music, the idea, and the moves felt so satisfying - especially the final one.

The first time I played I thought king would take my pieces with some probability if they weren't guarded. I spent way, way more effort than was necessary playing with higher stakes.