JR1427 (u/JR1427) - Readit News

JR1427 commented on Programming peaked functional.computer/blog/... · Posted by u/Antibabelic

JR1427 · 16 days ago

> Funnily enough, everything ran at about the same speed as it does now.

I've often thought about how certain properties of humans impacts the tech we make and accept.

For instance, to a human, something happening in a couple of seconds is quick, and in several seconds is fairly quick. Hence, build steps etc tend to creep up to those sorts of numbers.

JR1427 commented on YouTube Just Ate TV. It's Only Getting Started hollywoodreporter.com/bus... · Posted by u/wallflower

speak_plainly · 2 months ago

There was a time when the algorithm was truly amazing and the recommendations were smart, spot-on, and mostly high quality. I don't know what happened but you have to search now for decent content.

The recommendations part of YouTube just seems to give me old content or will show me things I've already watched. Despite it feeling almost user-hostile, I still use Youtube,

JR1427 · 2 months ago

I really wish their was a setting to tune feed "volatility". This also drive me crazy.

Sometimes I'll be marking something as "not interested", but that time with it spent auto-playing is enough for my feed to turn in to the stuff I just said I wasn't interested in.

JR1427 commented on How to Figure Out What You're Not Good At blog.martin-haehnel.de/20... · Posted by u/donutshop

choilive · 2 months ago

What if you don't have any talents. (Or at least havn't discovered it yet) I seem to be quite mediocre at everything.

JR1427 · 2 months ago

There is probably something you are naturally better at, but it might not be something that is very visible, like juggling, or playing guitar. It might be something like being patient with people.

Also, do you have things that you are really interested in, or enjoy doing? I think sometimes the basis for what people call "talent", is really just that some people happen to really like a thing, and then spend a lot of time doing it. )There is obviously also the flip side of this, which is people often prefer doing things they are naturally good at.)

As a final thing, if you really don't have any particular talents, who cares? You are no less valuable a human because of this.

JR1427 commented on Packing the world for longest lines of sight tombh.co.uk/packing-world... · Posted by u/tombh

mrb · 2 months ago

Oh that project is right up my alley, as I did the same! Back in 2021, for fun, I wrote an algorithm to find the longest sightline on earth. And I did find a previously undiscovered sightline.

My code was relatively unoptimized, it ran for 95 days on an 8-core 16-thread AMD Ryzen 5750G to crunch all the data. I have never published my code or results. I should really do it...

I downloaded a digital earth model of about 30 gigabytes from http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/Coverage%20map%20viewfind... which had a resolution of 3 seconds, so I had the elevation of each 90x90 meters "tile" of land. I wrote a simple algo in C that: finds potential viewpoints (mountain peaks or plateaus above a minimum ), calculates the longest sightline 360° around you, taking into account an atmospheric refraction coefficient (I used 0.13 which seems to be a default used by some panorama tools like https://www.udeuschle.de). It's really basic trigonometry: look one tile ahead of you, and the next one, etc, until you find the one with the highest vertical angle of view. Stop one sightline exploration when reaching a certain maximum distance (750 km in my implementation) when it becomes mathematically impossible to find a visible tile beyond this distance. And I found the longest sightline:

In Kyrgyzstan from Pik Dankova (41.059167,77.683333) which is at 5977.5 meters (in my DEM data), you can see 538.1 km into China if you look toward bearing 169.7° (roughly south) as you see some distant minor peak at 36.295364,78.75593 which is 6444.0 meters high. However this sightline is already known. But it's only theoretical. No one ever encountered good enough atmospheric clear-sky conditions to observe it from Pik Dankova. Using the panorama tool maintained by this cool German guy, you can verify it: https://www.udeuschle.de/panoramas/panqueryfull.aspx?mode=ne...

However one notable finding my tool gave me was it discovered the second longest sightline that is competely unknown up until this day AFAIK:

In Colombia, from Pico Cristóbal Colón (10.838333,-73.687500) which is at 5668.5 meters (in my DEM data), you can see 502.6 km over the plains of the Caribbean region all the way to the Colombian Andes if you look toward bearing 206.2° (roughly south-south-west) as you see some distant peak at 6.777286,-75.692304 which is 3347.0 meters high. Here you can verify it here: https://www.udeuschle.de/panoramas/panqueryfull.aspx?mode=ne...

I am not sure if this Comlombian sighline has ever been observed.

As I said I should really publish my code and results. And at some point I would like to optimize it and re-run it using a higher-precision DEM with 30x30 meters tiles instead of 90x90 meters. I think there are a few 30-meter DEMs available but I need to find the highest-quality one.

JR1427 · 2 months ago

This is really cool - thanks for posting!

JR1427 commented on Orcas are bringing humans gifts newscientist.com/article/... · Posted by u/wslh

antonvs · 2 months ago

Given the hundreds of attacks on boats off the Iberian peninsula, including four sinkings, the lack of human deaths is partly a matter of luck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_orca_attacks

JR1427 · 2 months ago

I wonder if they target boats using depth sounders? You could imagine the noise might be annoying or aggravating to orcas.

JR1427 commented on Betty Crocker broke recipes by shrinking boxes cubbyathome.com/boxed-cak... · Posted by u/Avshalom

JR1427 · 3 months ago

So does the mix now call for slightly smaller eggs?

Or has the mix changed to still work with the same number of eggs?

If the former, that is stupid. If the latter, then the flavour/consistency is bound to change.

JR1427 commented on Keeping secrets out of logs (2024) allan.reyes.sh/posts/keep... · Posted by u/xk3

JR1427 · 3 months ago

It feels like it would be better to make strings as safe, and only log ones that have been marked as such.

JR1427 · 3 months ago

EDIT: "mark", not "make"

JR1427 commented on Keeping secrets out of logs (2024) allan.reyes.sh/posts/keep... · Posted by u/xk3

JR1427 · 3 months ago

It feels like it would be better to make strings as safe, and only log ones that have been marked as such.

JR1427 commented on Take something you don’t like and try to like it dynomight.net/liking/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

JR1427 · 4 months ago

I have long been telling people the story of how I taught myself to like tomatoes. It really worked. I have loved tomatoes since that fateful day when I was about 17.

Until then, I would bite something with tomato already anticipating that I wouldn't like it. To teach myself, I would imagine the feeling I had before biting in to something I really liked, and I would think "Yummy! I can't wait to bite this yummy tomato!".

JR1427 commented on The value of institutional memory timharford.com/2025/05/th... · Posted by u/leoc

JR1427 · 4 months ago

"Never remove what you don't understand" also springs to mind.