munchler (u/munchler)

munchler commented on A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/selvan

pavlov · 2 days ago

Digital photography is one of those innovations that wonderfully ages pre-1990s science fiction where people of distant futures still fiddle with film chemicals.

The first book of David Brin’s Uplift series was written in 1980 and takes place on an antigravity spaceship carrying alien ambassadors that can penetrate deep into the Sun. Yet one of the major plot points is someone using the onboard darkroom to develop pictures that reveal something essential.

I’m hoping someone would make a new sci-fi movie with a vintage aesthetic that would intentionally emphasize and magnify this old-school analog awesomeness of galactic empires that seem to entirely lack integrated circuits. Apple TV’s “Silo” has a wonderful production design but it’s too claustrophobic to fulfill my wish.

“The Mote in God’s Eye” would be my pick if I could get any IP developed with this approach.

munchler · 2 days ago

Battlestar Galactica (2004) has an aesthetic like that. While they do use mainframe computers, they avoid all networking due to the risk of being hacked. Galactica is the only Battlestar to survive the first episode specifically because it’s the only one that still uses this outdated technology.

Plus, it’s just one of the best TV shows ever made in any genre.

munchler commented on Microservices should form a polytree bytesauna.com/post/micros... · Posted by u/mapehe

muvlon · 3 days ago

Avoiding cyclic dependencies is good, sure. And they do name specific problems that can happen in counterexample #1.

However, the reasoning as to why it can't be a general DAG and has to be restricted to a polytree is really tenuous. They basically just say counterexample #2 has the same issues with no real explanation. I don't think it does, it seems fine to me.

munchler · 3 days ago

Came here to say the same thing. A general-purpose microservice that handles authentication or sends user notifications would be prohibited by this restriction.

munchler commented on Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence whitehouse.gov/presidenti... · Posted by u/andsoitis

chrisjj · 3 days ago

> Earlier this week, he reiterated that sentiment in a post on Truth Social, saying: “We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors

Has Trump IDed the alleged bad actor states?

munchler · 3 days ago

It’s the blue ones, of course.

munchler commented on String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt

yablak · 3 days ago

I thought that what constitutes a measurement is well understood; it's just the entanglement between the experiment and the observer, and the process is called decoherence - and the collapse itself is a probabilistic process as a result.

AFAIK an EoT is not required to design experiments to determine if it's a real physical phenomenon vs. a mathematical trick; people are trying to think up those experiments now (at least for hidden variable models of QM).

munchler · 3 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem

munchler commented on String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt

yablak · 3 days ago

What's the "quantum measurement problem"? And why is it a problem? I get the wave function collapses when you measure bit. But which part of this do you want to resolve in a testable way?

munchler · 3 days ago

It’s the question of how the wave function collapses during a measurement. What exactly constitutes a “measurement”? Does the collapse happen instantaneously? Is it a real physical phenomenon or a mathematical trick?

munchler commented on String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt

jfengel · 3 days ago

No Theory of Everything is going to make realistically testable predictions. That's a problem of the domain, not the theory. The unification energy between the graviton and quantum field theory is on the order of 10^19 GeV, over a dozen orders of magnitude beyond anything we can generate.

We might get lucky that some ToE would generate low-energy predictions different from GR and QFT, but there's no reason to think that it must.

It's not like there's some great low-energy predictions that we're just ignoring. The difficulty of a beyond-Standard-Model theory is inherent to the domain of the question, and that's going to plague any alternative to String Theory just as much.

munchler · 3 days ago

I think that’s highly debatable. For example, dark matter particles with testable properties could be a prediction of a ToE. Or the ToE could resolve the quantum measurement problem (collapse of the wave function) in a testable way.

munchler commented on String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt

ekjhgkejhgk · 3 days ago

> That’s just piggybacking on a prediction of special relativity itself.

Let me stop you right now to inform you you don't understand how scientific theories are structured. Special relativity is not a prediction of special relativity. Likewise, 1+1=2 isn't a predict of arithmetic, it's the starting point.

munchler · 3 days ago

If you are suggesting that string theory is somehow more fundamental or powerful than special relativity, and so SR is a mere consequence of ST, that’s a claim that probably requires more explanation or evidence.

munchler commented on Google releases its new Google Sans Flex font as open source omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/11/g... · Posted by u/CharlesW

lucb1e · 3 days ago

Where possible, I've stopped picking fonts that don't distinguish lowercase l and uppercase I. Words virtually always have redundancy (or context in the sentence) and it's fine in 98% of cases, but too often someone sends a token, password, name, or other string where you need to copy it out to another application to see it and just... why? Why bother?

I/O test for Sans Flex: https://snipboard.io/wXCQq5.jpg

It passes the O0 distinction but not the Il one

Example of a font that passes, Ubuntu: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Ubuntu?preview.text=10%20I... (custom license but looks similar to GPL in that you can do what you want besides relicensing it as proprietary or removing credits)

Another one, Nunito Sans, using the Open Font License: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nunito+Sans?preview.text=1...

IBM Plex Sans is another Open Font License option: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IBM+Plex+Sans?preview.text... (it has an unusual capital Q style though)

munchler · 3 days ago

That’s a lowercase “L” vs. uppercase “I” for those of you as confused as I was.

munchler commented on String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt

munchler · 3 days ago

That’s just piggybacking on a prediction of special relativity itself. If string theory predicted something novel that’s testable, that would be a lot more noteworthy.

munchler commented on Show HN: Detail, a Bug Finder detail.dev/... · Posted by u/drob

drob · 6 days ago

As far as we can tell this is a github-ism, and any OAuth permission is a form of "acting on your behalf": https://dappling.medium.com/a-github-app-would-like-to-act-o...

munchler · 6 days ago

That's good to know, but I would still suggest an on-ramp that only uses GitHub for authentication (i.e. no permissions needed). To that end, it would be nice if I could also authenticate with other OAuth providers instead, like Google, etc.

Again, I understand that this would limit me to scanning public repos, but that would be fine.