Similar to the author’s story, I crashed on my bike going pretty quickly on a busy road. No serious injuries but I ended up with scrapes and a softball-sized bruise which lasted over a month. But after I fell and got off the road a man sitting on his porch eating dinner asked me if I was ok. I told him what happened and he quickly grabbed some tools to fix my bike and alcohol and bandages for the wound. His roommate came home and assumed we knew each other but nope he was just my guardian angel. I hadn’t thought about this in a while… now I’ll be sure to remember it again.
Readit Newsgradascent commented on What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you? louplummer.lol/nice-stran... · Posted by u/speckx
gradascent commented on NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper Awards blog.neurips.cc/2025/11/2... · Posted by u/ivansavz
From the figure in the first paper listed:
> Responses to the query “Write a metaphor about time” clustered by applying PCA to reduce sentence embeddings to two dimensions. […] The responses form just two primary clusters: a dominant cluster on the left centered on the metaphor “time is a river,” and a smaller cluster on the right revolving around variations of “time is a weaver.”
I just gave Gemini 3 the same prompt and got something quite different:
>Time is a patient wind against the cliff face of memory. It does not strike with a hammer to break us; it simply breathes, grain by grain, until the sharp edges of grief are smoothed into rolling hills, and the names we thought were carved in stone are weathered into soft whispers.
gradascent commented on The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/bookmtn
Also this is how the protomolecile from The Expanse feeds. It can absorb pretty much any radiation across the whole spectrum.
I was thinking the same thing. That one accelerates its growth in the presence of radiation. But it also seeks out human flesh and brains to build its biomass intelligence blob, unfortunately.
gradascent commented on Which year: guess which year each photo was taken whichyr.com/... · Posted by u/trymas
Hi, I made this game. Really appreciate the feedback! Seems like older images tend to be frustrating, so I think I'll use them less going forward.
Also, older photos are scored more generously, so being a few decades off won’t tank your score nearly as much as it would on a newer one.
Adding to the chorus: I like the older images and the precise year is important! The underground shelter is something that wouldn’t exist just a few years after that photo, or before.
Great deep dive. I've learned a lot already and haven't even finished the introduction
gradascent commented on Tracing the thoughts of a large language model anthropic.com/research/tr... · Posted by u/Philpax
So many highlights from reading this. One that stood out for me is their discovery that refusal works by inhibition:
> It turns out that, in Claude, refusal to answer is the default behavior: we find a circuit that is "on" by default and that causes the model to state that it has insufficient information to answer any given question. However, when the model is asked about something it knows well—say, the basketball player Michael Jordan—a competing feature representing "known entities" activates and inhibits this default circuit
Many cellular processes work similarly ie. there will be a process that runs as fast as it can and one or more companion “inhibitors” doing a kind of “rate limiting”.
Given both phenomena are emergent it makes you wonder if do-but-inhibit is a favored technique of the universe we live in, or just coincidence :)
Then why do I never get an “I don’t know” type response when I use Claude, even when the model clearly has no idea what it’s talking about? I wish it did sometimes.
gradascent commented on Basis of the Kalman Filter [pdf] github.com/tpn/pdfs/blob/... · Posted by u/fzliu
See also
Kalman Filter Explained Simply (2024, 89 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39343746
A non-mathematical introduction to Kalman filters for programmers (2023, 97 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971975
I've found this "book" (series of jupyter notebooks) to be a fantastic course on the Kalman filter from basics to advanced topics.
https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Pyt...
gradascent commented on Elasticsearch is open source, again elastic.co/blog/elasticse... · Posted by u/dakrone
what.... are those random words... in brackets??
They're all names of popular Kendrick Lamar songs. Don't ask me why though
gradascent commented on Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders ID'd in WA plane crash fox13seattle.com/news/wil... · Posted by u/TMWNN
Dying in a last scream of fear, angst and struggle regretting a thousand things that may have gone wrong or maybe were just your fault, without having the chance to tell your loved ones how much you love them, and being remembered not only by the incredible flights where no one had gone before, but finally and uttermost by the one that ended your life which will be replayed endlessly in the internets.
Not sure what would be fitting to be honest.
Or maybe the final moment was a sigh of acceptance and gratitude for the live he lived. Nobody knows but him.
gradascent commented on Ask HN: Why do games companies not release source code for old games? · Posted by u/nomilk
On a similar note, I really hope that the AI companies that don't make it, but have invested a lot in curating and annotating high quality datasets, would release them to the public. Autonomous car and robotics companies in particular since that kind of data doesn't exist on the internet as abundantly as, say, natural language text.