zhynn

I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can't remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing.

I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file.

But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.

Mu is awesome, one of my favorites. I especially like the "Mu and More" and "Mu and Much More" decks that have other games you can play in the box. It is a bit fiddly customizing the decks for the different games, but it is amazing how much game is in that one box. Njet was mentioned in another comment, and that is one of my go-to games when playing with non-gamers.

Mu is my favorite trick taking game of all time, but it is difficult enough that I don't get a chance to play it very often.

Give it a try: https://fex-emu.com/

Thanks for helping to run my favorite library on earth.

It appears that Hamas struck a deeper blow on October 7th than we realized. Perhaps Israel's humanity was the primary target. It's like watching a family member destroy everything in a fit of grief and rage. Surely there is a wiser path.

My very favorite map projection is the AuthaGraph map: http://www.authagraph.com

It is a novel (I would say amazing) map projection that manages to retain proportional landmass size by using an "ioso-area-mapping" technique. It maps the sphere to a tetrahedron and then slices and unfolds that tetrahedron into a 2d plane.

The method places all of the continents into the map (proportionally!), while also being able to tessellate (so you can move the "viewfinder" to focus on different map subsections without changing the overall map). It's easier to see than describe. The "4" link is an example of modifying the "view" of the tessellated surface to create maps that focus on particular regions.

The downside is that "north" and "south" are rather arbitrary points on the map, instead of being at the top/bottom.

It is still by far my favorite 2D map projection!

This reminds me a little of [Scuttlebutt](https://scuttlebutt.nz) (positive it has been posted on HN before). But I think these little projects are awesome, even if they have a limited audience. Go forth!

If you love hard-science dinosaur books, I cannot recommend Abby Howard's "Earth Before Us" series: https://www.goodreads.com/series/257878-earth-before-us

They are so so SO good, they have so much care about the science while also being delightfully whimsical and the art is beautiful. Please check them out!

Aren't the solvents pretty nasty chemicals? I wonder how they deal with the sodium hydroxide + sodium sulfate saturated with lignin and hemicellulose... maybe it can be turned into a soap or glue? That sounds like a rough biproduct to have to deal with.

I guess those aren't as nasty as I thought, lye and sodium sulfate are pretty innocuous.

It's probably much less difficult to deal with than plastic byproducts.

Or you could just use fossil...

My town has about 500 people, but the really active community is about 50-100 that will show up at the various things we do. I am 30 minutes from grocery stores, and 3 hours from boston or montreal. I have fiber internet because the residents got sick of the telecoms and we built our own. And the forest is more dense than Montana (where I grew up), and doesn't light on fire every summer. Please come to VT. :)

Also, I a bought a ramshackle building at auction that I am turning into a community workshop. It will be fun!

Please come to Vermont, there is a lot of undeveloped land, ample water, and we need people.

I love the feeling I get when I recycle or repurpose something that would have been trash into something useful. Especially if it becomes even more beautiful from its past patina.

This can go too far and put you in a cycle of spending all of your time tending jank (and lowing your quality bar). It's a fine edge to walk. but that pleasure hit that most people get from buying stuff, it doesn't work for me. Buying new things often makes me feel guilty. Re-using or repurposing something though... for me it's one of the best highs there is.

Not sure if the wild milkweed out here in VT is the "big ugly broad-leaf one", but I think they are amazing plants. And I love the alien-looking pods with the almost fractal arrangement of fluff seeds inside. The flowers are interesting too if only because of their brevity, they only last a few days. I love watching the milkweed grow over the summer. Burdock too. Incredible plants.

It's a paradox, expertise will tell you which one to pick (know when to quit | never give up). Tom Sachs called principals like these "Paradox Bullets". The movie: https://vimeo.com/293569057

Thank you so so so much for posting this! I had no idea it existed, and I am so happy that it does.

I also discovered that my home state has ZERO listed green burial sites, which is shocking to me because... I live in VT. I would have guessed it would be the leader in green burial, it is right up our wheelhouse!

Also recommend the Kalevala if you are curious about such things. It's very interesting.

I'll just leave this here:

https://fpr.vermont.gov/recreation/activities/camping/primit...

There are many, and nobody goes there.

I think consciousness is the combination of attention (ability to pick focus), imagination (simulate possible universe states), and reflection (compare what happened to what was imagined to happen and update imagination accordingly).

Attention is just what it feels like to update your internal state deliberately (you are doing it, it is not being done to you). Imagination is the use of your internal universe simulator to predict possible states (sometimes impossible ones). Reflection is what makes you the agent of the thinking or doing, it's the "I" part.

I also think we have neural systems of recognizing consciousness in others. This can be tricked, which is the source of the "machine elves" in DMT experiences. The chemical is poking the brain's "that is a conscious entity right there" button, and you are sure that the optical hallucinations are conscious, but it's just a sensory hallucination on top of the optical one. Interacting with an LLM doesn't poke our "there is a consciousness on the other end of this conversation" button yet, but it will get there since that is in part what we are working towards.

But I think it will not be convincing without attention, imagination, and reflection.

blah blah (which I did in 1988) blah blah (which I completed in 1992).

He has no collaborators. He gives no credit to others. He just relentlessly names things after himself, takes singular credit for everything, and name-drops other famous scientists he bumped into.

I genuinely find the wolfram physics project interesting, but the behavior of wolfram himself sets off all my bullshit alarms.

I suspect that it will be someone else that will take these ideas over the finish line. He seems completely oblivious to the fact that his behavior makes it harder to take the ideas seriously.

My gateway to the ideas was Jonathan Gorard. Check out his videos if you are curious, they are much more accessible than Wolfram's own content.

My snarky take is: Assembly theory is testable, this one isn't.

yeah... you can't unring this bell.

Life creates novelty. Humans are a member of that category, but all life is producing novelty.

More information: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9

There is a spectrum between conscious and unconscious. You could say that under general anesthesia you are a 0/10 on the conscious scale, asleep is 1 or 2, just woken from sleep is maybe 3.... and up to a well rested, well fed, healthy sober adult human near the top of the scale. These are common sense notions of objective consciousness and they are testable and noncontroversial outside of a philosophy argument.

Does this make sense as a rebuttal to your reductio argument?

It should support the work of lee cronin and sarah walker (Assembly Theory), a novel way to identify compounds that are indicators of life by virtue of their complexity (so we don't need to make any dogmatic assumptions about what life can be made of). We still need to detect these things at a distance, so this paper is relevant, I think, but I also love Assembly Theory.

They have a new preprint that argues that Assembly theory can explain and quantify selection and evolution in complex systems: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02279 (I think that it is one of the more under-appreciated papers out there).

Totally agree! And my advice is to find something in the 30hp zone. The yard tractors are not as generally useful from a mechanical advantage standpoint. Tractors aren't just "tillers and mowers". Along with levers and pulleys, the tractor can be seen as a general purpose force applicator.

But it can often be better to get an older tractor, as they can be easier to repair and maintain than the newer ones.

I'll just leave this here, it's a fascinating bit of citizen science:

http://achemicalhunger.com/

That "smarmy psycho liar" was an introverted developer-turned-ceo who was in over his head. He is now beloved by the community. Sean Murray is a legend. They have been over-delivering on NMS for the better part of a decade now without charging for anything but the base game.

And yes, they implemented all of it. Everything that was promised and much much more. Just check out the trailer for Echoes that dropped yesterday (the new update for the game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqpVCwwuyh8

They just released one of the largest updates ever adding a whole new NPC faction and a bunch of features. And it runs better on PSVR (foveated rendering) and switch (AMD FidelityX). It's an incredible achievement, and I keep dreading the inevitable post where Hello Games decides to move on... I hope it never happens.

I have been thinking a lot about the tragedy of the commons (totc) within the context of usufructian socialist services and expanding them beyond their fairly narrow use case currently (public libraries are the biggest example). I was theorycrafting community makerspaces, tool libraries, and public baths, but I was hung up on thinking about totc. Do you have some sources that you would recommend for more detail on refuting or debunking totc? Thanks!