elmomle (u/elmomle) - Readit News

elmomle commented on OS Yamato lets your data fade away github.com/osyamato/os-ya... · Posted by u/tsuyoshi_k

sitkack · 9 days ago

We externalize so much of our cognition, why would you want to give yourself digital Alzheimer's to gain space? Why is void space valuable over memories?

Notes, photos, emails from loved ones, legal documents are less important than unused hd capacity?

elmomle · 9 days ago

Or: this is a system that forces mindful consideration of notes, photos, etc. If you want them to persist, you must at least look at them once a year. No dusty boxes in the attic.

elmomle commented on Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library openculture.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/Anon84

ryandv · 19 days ago

> It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…

You see this idea echoed in Hermetic Qabalah as the "Four Worlds" - the world of action & physical materiality, the world of psychology, thought, feeling, & egoic consciousness, the world of creativity, and the world of archetypal abstraction.

The Hermetic influence comes from the assertion that the three immaterial worlds of the "soul" or "mind" (synonyms with the same referent) are in some sense equal to, or at least intertwined with, the material body, in a mutually reciprocal dance: "As above, so below; as below, so above."

For some 20th century texts in this neighbourhood: The Three Initiates' primer on occult studies The Kybalion, Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah, and the classic Qabalistic reference: Liber 777 by Crowley (or its updated, more legible version, Liber 776 1/2 by Eshelman). The works of Israel Regardie such as The One Year Manual or The Middle Pillar are also good for grounding occult studies in more psychological or psychotherapeutic language which is a good moderating influence when experimenting with pretty out-there material.

Be careful with the meaning of words in this field.

elmomle · 18 days ago

Also reflected in Vedic/Hindu philosophy: conscious experience (cetanā) arises from the interfacing of ātman (the immaterial self / soul) with śarīra (the physical body).

elmomle commented on The fish kick may be the fastest subsurface swim stroke yet (2015) nautil.us/is-this-new-swi... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

GolfPopper · 2 months ago

It seems like the objectively fair solution is that everyone swims the exact same lane in a still pool and is timed.

elmomle · 2 months ago

Or more simply (and with fewer alterations to how swimming competitions work today), just have a couple of unused lanes on the outside of the pool.

elmomle commented on The chemical secrets that help keep honey fresh for so long bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

wtvanhest · 2 months ago

I don’t think these probabilities are correct. Every parent is told not to feed their under 1 year olds honey, many times.

In an extreme example… only 20 parents fed their kids honey and 20 kids contracted botulism.

That would be a 100% risk. Obviously in real life it’s not 100% of kids, but still could be a meaningful percentage and likely higher than 1 in 50,000 for babies that eat honey.

elmomle · 2 months ago

It is correct. They are considering the most extreme case; in the most extreme case, no non-botulism-infected infants eat honey, and honey was the cause of botulism for those 20 infants.

If that is so, then completely removing honey exposure for infants would mean that 80 rather than 100 infants get botulism poisoning.

So the new probability of contracting botulism is (80 / 100) * (old probability), and (80 / 100) * (1 / 40000) = 1 / 50000.

elmomle commented on Dr John C. Clark, a scientist who disarmed atomic bombs twice daxe.substack.com/p/disar... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon

nssnsjsjsjs · 3 months ago

Yes those victorious warriors will find a way to split into 2+ warring factions.

elmomle · 3 months ago

If that were to happen then they would not be this ultimate class of warriors.

elmomle commented on Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency github.com/KoljaB/Realtim... · Posted by u/koljab

bigmadshoe · 4 months ago

"The median delay between speakers in a human to human conversation is zero milliseconds. In other words, about 1/2 the time, one speaker interrupts the other, making the delay negative."

Is that really a productive way to frame it? I would imagine there is some delay between one party hearing the part of the sentence that triggers the interruption, and them actually interrupting the other party. Shouldn't we quantify this?

I totally agree that the fact the AI doesn't interrupt you is what makes it seem non-human. Really, the models should have an extra head that predicts the probability of an interruption, and make one if it seems necessary.

elmomle · 4 months ago

"Necessary" is an interesting framing. Here are a few others:

- Expeditious - Constructive - Insightful -

elmomle commented on Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazarī's Ingenious Mechanical Devices (ca. 17th century) publicdomainreview.org/co... · Posted by u/YoctoYARN

Mainan_Tagonist · 4 months ago

ps: just want to point out that i'm not being snarky, just asking a question in good faith. I heard more than once on TV (incidentally by critics of the catholic church), that Copernicus or Galileo had been burnt at the stake for proving that "the earth wasn't flat".

Knowing that TV and social media do play as large a role as history books or formal education in knowledge acquisition these days, is it really wrong to question whether "the average person" is a valid point of reference when discussing inter-civilisational exchanges of discoveries.

elmomle · 4 months ago

I can't speak to any very recent changes (I'm doubtful anything's changed massively, I could be wrong), but I was educated in the US and went to highly selective schools--and it was only in an obscure, elective history of science class fairly late in my college career that I learned about al-Haytham (who was called Alhazen in the class). Meanwhile, I (and many of my HS classmates) could have told you that Copernicus pioneered a heliocentric model of the solar system, or about Newton's laws of motion, etc., when we were 15.

The Renaissance really was taught as "Europeans rediscovered the great classical thinkers", and it was only through my own curiosity that I learned that Islamic science played a key role.

elmomle commented on Why is the world losing color? culture-critic.com/p/why-... · Posted by u/trevin

delichon · 5 months ago

> It's visually exhausting.

This. It's about managing stimulation levels and contrast. If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.

I bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend. I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.

elmomle · 5 months ago

> I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.

Nowadays literally everything I read is the most egregious overstatement I've ever seen.

elmomle commented on Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads timsh.org/tracking-myself... · Posted by u/apokryptein

jiri · 7 months ago

What does happen if I turn off location/gps? I guess that location has to be quite imprecise.

elmomle · 7 months ago

With GPS off, location can triangulated from cell tower usage to within 3/4 of a square mile (smaller uncertainty in urban areas where cell towers are closer together). I'd heard before that some data brokers do this, but in this article the writer mentions reverse DNS lookup on IP addresses, which they mention is less precise (ZIP-code level).

elmomle commented on Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/lemonberry

tjwebbnorfolk · 8 months ago

point me to handwriting that is 100% legible...

If 100% is your standard, good luck solving anything ever.

elmomle · 8 months ago

Most handwriting is legible to its owner. This would indicate that there is enough consistency within a person's writing style to differentiate letters, etc., even if certain assumptions about resemblance to any standard may not hold. I wonder if there are modern OCR methods that incorporate old code-breaking techniques like frequency analysis.