gaoshan (u/gaoshan) - Readit News

gaoshan commented on Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music journals.plos.org/plosone... · Posted by u/gnabgib

tavavex · 2 days ago

This is a really strange comment section. The average person sharing their experiences seems very unlike the average HN user.

I feel like I can barely relate to those people, and understanding what they're saying is nigh impossible. The definitions of most things are really vague - even the article of this thread only defines breathwork as "cyclic breathing without pausing, accompanied by progressively evocative music". So... faster breathing while intensifying music is playing?

One issue for me is how anything connected to these topics seems to attract a healthy mix of rational observation, psychedelic users and religious people (old and new). Deciphering which is which is really difficult without already having a foot in the door on this topic.

gaoshan · 2 days ago

The next steps in this sort of pretentiousness might be, "multi-threaded breathstreams unmitigated by interstitial cessation, conjoined with progressionist effervescent and aurally delivered syncopathic acoustic tunework" and people will act like that is perfectly normal.

gaoshan commented on Building the mouse Logitech won't make samwilkinson.io/posts/202... · Posted by u/sammycdubs

bityard · 5 days ago

My favorite mouse is the Logitech Anywhere MX. It's highly comfortable despite being pretty small. The back/forward buttons on the side are indispensable for web browsing, file management, and switching weapons in first-person shooters. It takes two AA batteries which last for months and take seconds to swap out. The dongle is small and has good range. The scroll wheel switches between clicky and free-scrolling.

It's pretty much the perfect mouse, IMO, to the point that I built up a back stock by hoarding new and open box on eBay. But there are two main problems:

1) The the microswitches go bad after a couple years. It's possible to replace them, but it's tedious and you run a very real risk of damaging the PCB (as I have already done).

2) The dongle is USB Type-A only. Logitech actively refused to make a USB-C unifying receiver. I assume they wanted to shift to bluetooth but they still made unifying receiver devices for years and years after bluetooth was everywhere, so I dunno.

As far as newer iterations, the Anywhere MX 2S is somewhat tolerable, but it has a built-in battery which must be charged every couple of months, which is annoying. All of the newer Anywhere MX mice are even worse because they changed the basic functionality/features of the mouse with each revision. Oh, yes and they cost $90 (!) retail now.

So basically one of my side-projects, one of these days, is going to be to try building an open source Anywhere MX clone. Should be a fun yet challenging endeavour. I know there are a bunch of online communities making their own keyboards from scratch and at great expense, is there such a thing for mice?

gaoshan · 5 days ago

I am a diehard MX Vertical Mouse user. My wrist thanks me every day that I use it.

gaoshan commented on PastVu: Historical Photographs on Current Maps pastvu.com/?_nojs=1... · Posted by u/lapetitejort

gaoshan · 23 days ago

I did pretty much the same thing some 10 years ago but only for my own images and this creator overcame a problem that I could not. I ingested a collection of images, read the metadata and used that to place the images on a map like this. However, I could not figure out how to determine facing. This project has an arrow indicator to show this, I ended up setting it manually. I would love to know how they determined this because I really cannot figure it. Does image metadata contain more information than it used to? Is there a way to use an AI agent to analyze the light/angles/streets/landmarks to approximate this?

gaoshan commented on Show HN: I built this to talk Danish to my girlfriend – works with any language menerdu.vercel.app/... · Posted by u/lil_csom

gaoshan · a month ago

It doesn't seem to work with "any language", as claimed. It cannot process Chinese writing (nor can it process pinyin). "Error processing your text", is the message. Though it's certainly possible the volume of traffic has overwhelmed things and it would work under normal circumstances?

gaoshan commented on Mysterious life form found on ship that docked in Cleveland cleveland.com/news/2025/0... · Posted by u/DocFeind

gaoshan · 2 months ago

My first thought is that it's some form of bryozoan. Seems like most mysterious water located goo is usually that.

gaoshan commented on We’re secretly winning the war on cancer vox.com/health/415812/can... · Posted by u/lr0

leakycap · 3 months ago

I was lucky enough to be seen by MD Anderson doctors for my rare type of cancer. Within hours of the first painless infusion, the large tumors I could feel and see from the outside were completely gone. Hours, truly.

Now, the rest of the chemo wasn't as easy as the first. But the miracles of modern medicine, thanks to dedicated researchers and medical teams, truly blew my mind and that was a decade ago.

I was told I was one of 42 people ever that MD Anderson had seen with this cancer, yet they were able to tailor a treatment. I think Vox is right about the progress being amazing, and I hope it continues.

gaoshan · 3 months ago

>the progress being amazing, and I hope it continues.

and that it does not require being lucky to receive, as you were.

gaoshan commented on Adam Riess and the Hubble tension theatlantic.com/science/a... · Posted by u/samizdis

gaoshan · 3 months ago

The description of how the universe is expanding sounds like how an explosion expands. Rapidly then slower until it settles down and stops (with no collapse at the end, just matter in place where it landed). I wonder if that could be the closest analogy?

gaoshan commented on The Death of Daydreaming afterbabel.com/p/on-the-d... · Posted by u/isolli

switchbak · 4 months ago

My boomer relatives seem especially susceptible to this. As our local community ties atrophy, I find many old folks with less social contact tend to turn to social media to compensate.

I also wonder if the aging brain is particularly vulnerable to some of the darker patterns these platforms employ? It certainly seems like it from the small number of data points I've seen.

gaoshan · 4 months ago

I can tell you that for me (early Gen X) it got bad when my wife was out of town for an extended period of weeks for work. Ours kids have moved out, we have no family in the region, all of my oldest friends live across the country and I'm 20 years older than most of my coworkers. I found myself getting home from work, making dinner and then having absolutely nothing to do for several hours. That's when I got sucked in. Next thing you know I would wake up on a rainy Saturday and just reach for the phone and then it was lunch time and suddenly dinner time. It feels pretty shitty, too.

Recently I've had to find things for myself to do in order to make sure my time is better filled otherwise I will "fill" it with doom scrolling. I don't know that my brain is more susceptible (hard to self determine something like that) but my time is certainly more open than it ever was in my life previously.

gaoshan commented on The Death of Daydreaming afterbabel.com/p/on-the-d... · Posted by u/isolli

gaoshan · 4 months ago

Only recently, like in the last year, have I found my phone just sucking me in. I am mindlessly browsing whatever (TikTok, Xiao Hong Shu, Reddit) and then suddenly my time has slipped away. The thing is, I'm not young by any means. I figured I was aged out of the risk that the phone could devour my time but I was so mistaken in thinking that way. Compared to how I felt my time went and was spent when I was younger (pre-internet days) this feels awful and draining and so damn easy to slip into. Feels like life is on pause yet time is still slipping away as fast as ever.

gaoshan commented on Reports of the death of California High-Speed Rail have been greatly exaggerated asteriskmag.com/issues/10... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

rsync · 4 months ago

One issue with "CA HSR" is that it isn't even "high speed".

We may have happily referred to is as "high speed rail" 30 or 40 years ago but, given a possible completion date of 2035 (or whatever) the 2:40 travel time from SF <-> LA is unimpressive ... and even that will not be achieved:

"California legislative overseers do not expect the 2 hr 40 min target will be achieved."[1]

The simple fact is that the I-5 corridor is the spine of California and should be leveraged for all additional infrastructure build-out ... which would yield economies of scale and network effects for rail, network lines, water transmission, electrical distribution and (eventually) autonomous trucking.

Instead we're spending billions to build a slow, circuitous route to Fresno.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail

gaoshan · 4 months ago

FWIW a train I've taken a few times in China (Hangzhou to Shanghai) would do San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than 2 hours (possibly 1 hour 45 minutes). This would be an express with no extra stops.

With a handful of stops and the corresponding loss of speed (I'm extrapolating as it hits speeds of 350/kph but still takes about 45+ minutes to go roughly 186km) it would probably realistically take more like 2.5 hours.