The cantor set exists in a real phenomenon? Any real phenomenon? That makes me feel like we live in a simulation perhaps more than anything else I’ve heard. This story is a nice description of the people, but I want more on implications. What is going on here?
Readit Newshawkjo commented on 'Ten Martini' Proof Uses Number Theory to Explain Quantum Fractals quantamagazine.org/ten-ma... · Posted by u/pseudolus
Naive question here: Why can't new antibiotics be developed by just spraying fields of mushrooms or petri dishes full of fungi with antibiotic resistant bacteria and seeing which ones come up with novel ways to fight them?
Producing large quantities of drug resistant bacteria sounds at least BSL3. The principle might make sense, but one wouldn’t “spray the fields” of something like that.
Nice article, but framing it around the doomsday clock felt like the author just needed to express his angst on whatever page was in front of him
hawkjo commented on Apple squandered the Holy Grail xeiaso.net/blog/2025/squa... · Posted by u/caust1c
"Clean Up is best explained by this famous photo editing example . . . This tool allows you to capture a moment in time as you wish it happened, not as it actually happened."
FALSE. Apple defines a photo as a record of something that actually happened. iPhones take photos. They doen't auto-swap a high-res moon in for the real one like Samsung phones do.
Clean Up (like crop) is just an editing feature, manually applied after a photo already exists, and using it effectively changes the image from a photo into an "edited image", the same way using Photoshop does.
Definitions of What a Photo Is:
Apple - "Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened. Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated." - John McCormack, VP of Camera Software Engineering @ Apple
Samsung - "Actually, there is no such thing as a real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop." - Patrick Chomet, Executive VP of Customer Experience @ Samsung
Google - "It’s about what you’re remembering,” he says. “When you define a memory as that there is a fallibility to it: You could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and completely wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond." - Isaac Reynolds, Product Manager for Pixel Cameras @ Google
Definitions via https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/23/24252231/lets-compare-app...
This comment and the article they came from are a perfect snapshot of this moment. The fact that major players at each company have made public statements about the philosophical definition of what a photo is. I mean, of course they have. Of course. The times be wild.
Very cool to see no variance in the outcome. But that also makes it feel like there should be a strategy with better expected return due to the unique problem structure. Do we know if the Kelly strategy is optimal here?
hawkjo commented on The backlash against the world's most hated font may be ending theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/fortran77
Comic Sans getting all this hate… Papyrus is feeling left out
hawkjo commented on Meditations on Moloch (2014) slatestarcodex.com/2014/0... · Posted by u/abhaynayar
Beautiful
hawkjo commented on Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public domain wandering.shop/@therotund... · Posted by u/ruph123
On the albums page, the link for "The Remains of Tom Lehrer (disc 1)" RAR file has a typo. It should be https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/trotl1... (replace the last lowercase L with 1).
The contents of disc 3 are the same as disc 2, even though the file is named correctly. Is there another link for that one?
hawkjo commented on Mars’s Soundscape Is Strangely Beautiful theatlantic.com/science/a... · Posted by u/fortran77
link to the video with the sounds:
https://youtu.be/lX5iVyfF3N0
Thank you! Frustrating this was not obvious in the article
"how many 3mm circles pack in 15mm circle"
WA offers answers with drawings. Google cannot do that.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+3mm+circles+p...
This is amazing! The rest of this thread completely buried the lead. Delightful.