rznicolet (u/rznicolet)

rznicolet commented on AI is killing the web – can anything save it? economist.com/business/20... · Posted by u/edward

watwut · a month ago

> Because this romantic view of the web as this "ocean of free information" has been dead for a very long time.

That part is just not true tho. There is still ocean of free information on web. It is literally there and easy to access.

rznicolet · a month ago

Yes... but that ocean has a lot of trash and algal blooms to work around. If you're not careful, you end up the sea turtle with a stomach full of plastic.

That issue of varying quality of web-based information (and varying ability to assess said quality) has also been the case for a long time.

rznicolet commented on The New Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Is Smaller or Rarer Than It Looks avi-loeb.medium.com/the-n... · Posted by u/TheBlight

rznicolet · 2 months ago

Watch the source - Avi Loeb has a poor reputation among solar system astronomers _and_ scientists who work on SETI and exobiology, due to poorly supported claims of alien (meaning intelligent) origin for many different things, including 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object found.

We'll get more data on this object as it comes deeper into the solar system. There's a lot of speculation going around, so don't over-index on any one person (but especially not this one). Odds are good it's "just" a very interesting comet.

rznicolet commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025) · Posted by u/david927

rznicolet · 2 months ago

Writing SFF novels!

I need to put it up on the ol' blog-thing, but I've signed a contract with a small press for a debut novel, which is highly exciting. That one's urban fantasy from the point of view of the wizard's magic cloak. (You better believe it has opinions.)

Meanwhile, I've been working on a novel about a group of time travelers who accidentally get stuck in the Permian, well before the dinosaurs. Surprise! There are still big animals that can eat you, they're just more weird (and not as big). The research for that one has been wild.

The ol' blog thing, where I post story-related tidbits and such: https://rznicolet.com

rznicolet commented on How people get rich now (2021) paulgraham.com/richnow.ht... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

rznicolet · 6 months ago

The 100 richest people are (by design) going to be very unrepresentative of the whole, depending on how "rich" is defined. How does the balance between inheritance and other sources of wealth shift if we look further down the list?

I suspect the late 1800s, another era when inheritance was a lesser source of extreme wealth, may also be unrepresentative of the "typical" state. Massive upheavals in technology (mass production, computerization/Internet) seem to me to be more likely to be exceptions, rather than the rule, over very long time horizons.

Regardless, we may be entering another era of consolidation since this article was written. It will be... interesting... to see how it shakes out.

rznicolet commented on Ask HN: What's your favorite text-based adventure game? · Posted by u/ranuzz

rznicolet · 10 months ago

Galatea is an old one I enjoyed, essentially as a character piece: https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/emrhyy7pp0c8bjkjeuhs...

I'm not sold on generative AI for this purpose -- maintaining a consistent character who remembers and reacts appropriately given past interactions seems tough.

rznicolet commented on Small asteroid to hit Earth's atmosphere today earthsky.org/space/small-... · Posted by u/dgacmu

wantsanagent · a year ago

Astrophysics peeps, why is it that the danger seems to be only tied to the mass of the object. Given p=mv is (relative) speed essentially the same for all of them or otherwise inconsequential?

rznicolet · a year ago

Everything coming in speeds up when it falls to earth.

Tiny stuff burns up completely in the upper atmosphere, where the pressure is low, because they have low surface area per mass -- the atmosphere can stop them entirely. Their terminal velocity is low. (That is, when the velocity through air is high enough that the drag prevents gravity from speeding up the object any further.)

Medium objects have a higher terminal velocity get deeper into the atmosphere before exploding. Fragments from these (which now have higher surface area per mass) can then be slowed further by the atmosphere and make it to the surface, but not so dramatically. Bits of the Chelyabinsk impactor fall into this category.

Big objects have a high terminal velocity. They make it to the ground largely intact... and without being slowed as much by the atmosphere. That gives you craters and bad days for being a dinosaur.

rznicolet commented on Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)? · Posted by u/david927

rznicolet · a year ago

Aside from bog-standard machine learning for work purposes -- novels! (Because I apparently can't restrict myself to just one.)

You can see some of my world-noodling about aliens that don't need to breathe at: https://rznicolet.com

I've been plotting a series of hard sci-fi novels entirely from the point of view of very not-humanoid aliens. In this case, hard SF = all real physics except for FTL. First manuscript complete. Humans not included in the main series, except as passing footnotes. Let's just say that when I originally started, the pandemic had me feeling a touch misanthropic. We'll see when/how I actually publish these.

I write fantasy stuff, too, though since the blog is relatively new, I haven't started adding that in yet. I'm currently wrapping a sequel to a finished fantasy work (again, publication approach TBD) before switching back to relatively hard sci-fi.

rznicolet commented on I don't want to spend my one precious life dealing with Google's AI search aftermath.site/google-ai-... · Posted by u/awkwardpotato

rznicolet · a year ago

I wonder how this is going to play out. At a company I previously worked for, we ended up not rolling out personalized on-site search because while the results were better in theory, in practice it was so slow nobody wanted to use it.

Then again, Google is so dominant that many folks won't quickly bounce to an alternative...