This sounds like the premise for a fun sci-fi/horror move. Uh-oh; we accidentally trained GPT6 on the Necronomicon!
Readit Newsjrussino commented on Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library openculture.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/Anon84
jrussino commented on What medieval people got right about learning (2019) scotthyoung.com/blog/2019... · Posted by u/ripe
NASA Video on how hard it can be to learn to surf
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wn5KqWwP6uQ
Basically lots and lots of lots of practice.
Just wanted to point out - because I was curious as to why they would post a video about learning to surf - that this is NOT a NASA video. This is from the channel of someone named "Tom Sachs", who happens to be using the NASA logo as his youtube avatar image.
> These films are required viewing for Tom Sachs' studio. They comprise guides to studio practice and documentation of specific projects and installations. The movies represent aspects of the sculptures that exist in time. These films will enhance your experience with the work and are the prerequisite for any studio visit, employment application, or interview. Most were made in collaboration with Van and Casey Neistat.
jrussino commented on Scapegoating the Algorithm asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/fmblwntr
America has been in a class war since the beginning. It just refuses to call it that.
Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it.
Phase One: 1770s
The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, but it was anti-hereditary elite. Thomas Paine writes Common Sense. Not just your uncle's holiday rant, but part of Scottish Realism. "Self-evident" meant truths visible to anyone, no credentials required.
Phase Two: 1820s–1830s
Jacksonian democracy recasts the conflict: common man vs. entrenched elites in law, banking, and bureaucracy. Aristocracy = lawyers, bankers, judges. Clergy = newspapers and journalists. Populist epistemology: trust your own judgment; they're out of touch.
Phase Three: Mid-20th Century
Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus. Main Street is now the beacon of folk wisdom.
Phase Four: 2000s
Old media's monopoly dies. The internet gives Main Street a megaphone as loud as any newsroom. The Reformation comes again. Swap religion for epistemology, the printing press for the internet. When the epistemic monopoly falls, chaos follows until a new regime of knowledge stabilizes.
Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option. Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime, or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize. Pick one. Then ask yourself what that choice means for what happens next.
> Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus.
> Aristocracy (from Ancient Greek ἀριστοκρατίᾱ (aristokratíā) 'rule of the best'; from ἄριστος (áristos) 'best' and κράτος (krátos) 'power, strength') is a form of government that places power in the hands of a small, privileged ruling class, the aristocrats. [1]
It seems plain to me that in no sense have "scientists, engineers, policy wonks" been the "privileged ruling class" in the USA.
Senators and presidents and the executives and board members of multinational corporations and other large institutions are the "elite ruling class" you're looking for, and they're not scientists and engineers and academics...
High density (20 points per m2) LIDAR view from the French geospatial agency
https://diffusion-lidarhd.ign.fr/visionneuse/?copc=https:%2F...
Wow, thanks! I feel like this resource deserves its own HN discussion. Bookmarking this to explore later...
jrussino commented on Show HN: I built library management app for those who outgrew spreadsheets librari.io/... · Posted by u/hmkoyan
I just want a simple/quick/easy way to scan all of the books in my house and print spine labels like the ones they use in a library.
Dewey decimal or Library of Congress or whatever. We just have too many books (mainly children's books) and I want an easy low-thought/low-friction way to identify exactly where each book should be put away.
Would this help with my problem? Is there already a solution for this?
> Most library management apps are either too basic or designed for institutional libraries with rigid workflows that don't fit personal use.
That what I concluded after a cursory search of this space as well.
jrussino commented on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/minimaxir
The glasses with a HUD are a different product line, latest ray bans are just camera mic and audio, but I still count them as AR because the AI voice in your ear can see what you see. I tried them for a few months and returned them, not a good enough camera to enjoy the hands free snapshots I was looking forward to, and just didn’t have a use for a q&a bot attached to my ear.
For what they are I’ll give them props for a nicely designed product, the charging case is clever and works well. I liked them for music with the Apple Watch, pretty slick combination. Maybe if I could stomach giving a llama bot access to email and calendar etc etc to have a real personal assistant it would be an attractive offering in a world that accepts being watched 24/7 by AI/billionaire overlords
> Maybe if I could stomach giving a llama bot access to email and calendar etc etc to have a real personal assistant it would be an attractive offering in a world that accepts being watched 24/7 by AI/billionaire overlords
I share this general point of view but take it further: I really want something in this direction (a quality AI assistant that can access my communications and continuously see and hear what I do) but it MUST be local and fully controlled by me. I feel like Meta is getting closest to offering what I'm looking for but I would never in a million years trust them with any of my data.
My wife has the first-gen raybans and they're great for taking photos and video clips of e.g. our kids' sporting events and concerts, where what it's replacing is a phone held up above the crowd getting in the way of the moment. But even with that I feel icky uploading those things to Meta's servers.
Related:
I find the simulation and visualization of the same topic (albeit for US only) by DataFlow much more engaging and comprehensible. The project is based on data of a US survey.
https://flowingdata.com/2015/12/15/a-day-in-the-life-of-amer...
I find it neat that the simulation appears to "pulse" almost like a heartbeat, because so many of our activities are tied to the clock and state changes disproportionately occur on the hour or half-hour. It's especially noticeable when using the "fast" playback option.
How different this would have looked before the invention of mechanized timekeeping!
jrussino commented on Mathematical Problem Solving cip.ifi.lmu.de/~grinberg/... · Posted by u/ibobev
Everyone should see the notes linked to on this page: https://www.cip.ifi.lmu.de/~grinberg/t/20f/mps.pdf
They seem delightful
> 1.1. Homework set #0: Diagnostic
> This is a special problem set: Its main purpose is to give you an idea of what is to come in this course, and to give me an idea of your level of familiarity with certain things (including proof writing). Do not expect to solve all these problems
I love this, and I wish I had seen more regular calibration-type assessments in my own education.
> 1.2. Homework set #0B: Additional problems > The following problems are not solved in these notes; they shall be used for future homework sets.
Here's a set of problems that are representative of the prerequisite material, to give us both a sense of how well your foundations match what I'm assuming at the start of the course. And here's a second set of problems that represent the sort of things you can expect to be able to solve once you've completed this course.
What a beautiful way to start.
jrussino commented on Waymos crash less than human drivers understandingai.org/p/hum... · Posted by u/rbanffy
This statistic could be misleading, because not all miles are equally dangerous. Google is very careful about selecting where it deploys and tests Waymo, preferring flat, safe, well-designed areas. Routing is also closely monitored and I would imagine that problematic roadways are avoided. The article says they compared it to human accident rates "on the same roads" but doesn't clarify their methodology for "same"ness. It also doesn't factor in driver experience. A taxi driver who has memorized a particular route is likely going to drive safer than a tourist who has never gone on that same road before. Waymo may be safer than the average driver on X road but that doesn't mean it will have the same comparative performance if you drop it onto a random road it has never driven before with no assistance from human support staff.
> The article says they compared it to human accident rates "on the same roads" but doesn't clarify their methodology for "same"ness.
Reading your comment before the article, my first thought was that "on the same roads" must mean literally the same roads - right?
But the article actually says:
> Using human crash data, Waymo estimated that human drivers on the same roads would get into 78 crashes
I agree that this is unclear. What data did they use, and why did they have to estimate at all? Shouldn't they be able to get the actual data for how many human drivers got into such accidents on this same exact set of roads over this same exact time period?
jrussino commented on Waymos crash less than human drivers understandingai.org/p/hum... · Posted by u/rbanffy
Waymos choose the routes, right?
The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and provider-chosen routes; (2) how failures are correlated across machines.
In safe driving failures are uncorrelated and safety procedures generalise. We do not yet know if, say, using self-driving very widely will lead to conditions in which "in a few incidents" more people are killed in those incidents than were ever hypothetically saved.
Here, without any confidence intervals, we're told we've saved ~70 airbag incidents in 20 mil miles. A bad update to the fleet will easily eclipse that impact.
I wonder if you can decrease the impact of (2) with a policy of phased rollout for updates. I.E. you never update the whole fleet simultaneously; you update a small percentage first and confirm no significant anomalies are observed before distributing the update more widely.