xamuel (u/xamuel) - Readit News

xamuel commented on It’s still worth blogging in the age of AI gilesthomas.com/2025/02/b... · Posted by u/gpjt

simonw · 6 months ago

I find that thing where people say "I'm not going to publish anything creative ever again, it'll just be used to train AI" so depressing.

It feels like such a dismal excuse to avoid andding any value to the world.

xamuel · 6 months ago

To me, the fact that a blog post would be used to train AI is a good thing. Hell yes I want my writing to inform the future zeitgeist! I guess it helps that the things I want to write about are novel things no-one has ever written about. I could see how AI would demoralize me if I were otherwise employed writing Generic Politics Blog #84773. But as someone who writes original unique content, I'm like, hell yes, the more readers the merrier, whether they be human or AI or some unholy combination!

xamuel commented on I've acquired a new superpower danielwirtz.com/blog/spot... · Posted by u/wirtzdan

BenjiWiebe · 8 months ago

If you're distant enough / the people are sitting close enough, you can stereogram two people's faces together. You usually only get fleeting moments of crispness when their heads are aligned correctly though.

xamuel · 8 months ago

Yep! If I knew someone IRL who was into this kind of stuff, I'd really love to experiment with this sort of thing and mirrors. Arrange so that you can stereogram your conversation partner's face with a mirror image of your own face (and that he can do the same with your face and a mirror image of his face). If anyone's in NYC and interested in these sorts of things, my email is in my HN profile "about".

xamuel commented on I've acquired a new superpower danielwirtz.com/blog/spot... · Posted by u/wirtzdan

amingilani · 8 months ago

I'm frequently surprised by the amount of seemingly ordinary skills I picked up as a bored child that other people didn't. This was an obvious way to solve those "spot the difference" pictures in magazines.

I wonder what skills other people picked up that I didn't.

Some recent example of things I shared:

+ When your belt buckle hangs a little loosely on the front of your pants. You can hook the buckle's prong onto the front button of your pants and it'll stay put. So many people are excited to learn this.

+ Putting a jacket or any open-front garment on quickly. I saw someone struggling to maneuver their second arm in a tight jacket behind their back. I explained that if they hold their jacket out in front of them, put their hands in the arm holds, and slide their arm in further as they swing it around their body they'll get it on in a moment. It's also more stylish. They were so surprised.

xamuel · 8 months ago

Ear rumbling: https://www.reddit.com/r/earrumblersassemble/

Eye shaking: https://old.reddit.com/r/Eyeshakers/

Some of us are born with small frenula of the tongue (or we undergo tongue-tie surgery as kids) and can thus perform Khecari mudra without the traditional self-mutilation used by yoga-masters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khecar%C4%AB_mudr%C4%81 This can be useful for cleaning tonsil stones or post-nasal drip, but of course you must do so discretely since people would consider that absolutely disgusting

If you want to read out loud for long stretches of time and you hate taking breaks to catch your breath: you can read out loud while inhaling too! (It feels and sounds super weird though so this isn't very useful in practice.)

And here's a party trick related to OP's super power. Pick a distant object and cross your eyes so as to see it double, preferably with the two doubles distant from each other (i.e., cross your eyes significantly). Then, alternately switch between staring at the left double, and the right double. If you do it right, it will look like your eyes are moving in a bizarre alien way.

xamuel commented on I've acquired a new superpower danielwirtz.com/blog/spot... · Posted by u/wirtzdan

robotguy · 8 months ago

When auto stereograms were all the rage in the late 80's I had a program on my Mac Plus that let me make/edit them and I used to edit for hours WHILE looking at them in 3D. Then one time I was walking down a hallway with a repetitive wallpaper pattern, my eyes did the thing, the entire hallway appeared to shift in front of me, and I stumbled and fell. Still to this day my eyes will sometimes automatically snap into 'alternate' focus when viewing a repetitive pattern.

xamuel · 8 months ago

No need for the Mac Plus program, you can make these in any text editor. Use a fixed-width font and fill a line with a repeating word eg

WORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORDWORD

Then copy that and paste it a bunch of times to make it multi-line.

Cross your eyes so that the WORD's overlap (all except the leftmost and rightmost). You now see two cursors instead of one. Position your two cursors anywhere you want and then insert a space in order to make the corresponding WORD (or ORDW or RDWO or ORDW) sink into the screen. (Or rise if you parallel-view.)

We used to do this in the computer labs back in 6th grade.

xamuel commented on I've acquired a new superpower danielwirtz.com/blog/spot... · Posted by u/wirtzdan

iforgotpassword · 8 months ago

We got a magic eye book when I was maybe 6 - some time early elementary school. After learning how to do it, and also trying it by crossing my eyes to see an "inverted" image, I started doing it whenever I saw some repeating pattern IRL. It was most interesting when it was slightly uneven, for example a fence with sloppily applied vertical planks. Doing the magic eye would make it seem like some of them are closer to you than others. Eventually I tried the same on those "spot the difference" games since well it seemed kinda obvious to try, and I was blown away that it accidentally gave me that "superpower". I think that was pretty smart for a 6yo. Has only gone downhill ever since. ;-)

xamuel · 8 months ago

I wrote a paper about doing this using human eyes as the "repeating pattern" (either someone else's, or your own in a mirror): https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEDSK.pdf ...You can use this trick to make boring meetings or conversations mildly more amusing (but be careful not to look like a clown crossing your eyes).

If you're an expert at this, you can even do it to your own hands. Hold both hands in front of you but with one of them palm-away and one of them palm-toward you, so that they have the same shape, then cross- or parallel-view them to get an illusionary middle third hand. Walk around while focusing on the third hand and it's a seriously trippy effect.

Another "super power" application similar to OP: the ability to confirm whether or not two distant digital clocks' seconds-digits are perfectly in sync. Since they're distant, it takes time to shift one's gaze from one to the other, making it hard to confirm whether they're in sync. But cross your eyes so as to reduce the distance, and voila.

Yet another application: quickly assume the same head-tilt angle as your conversation partner. Suppose they tilt their head to the left by N degrees and you want to tilt yours the same way, how can you be sure you have the exact correct tilt? Easy: parallel-view their eyes (as described in the aforementioned paper). You will HAVE to tilt your head the same as them in order to see their "third eye" (and once you've locked on to their third eye, you can effortlessly adjust your head tilt as they do by using their third eye as the necessary guide)

xamuel commented on Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written? · Posted by u/reverseCh

xamuel · 10 months ago

My Library of Ordinal Notation Systems shows a way you can systematically write more and more complex code, with no end---even if you had access to strong AGIs, they could never "finish" the exercise. https://github.com/semitrivial/IONs

xamuel commented on Playing Sudoku in TypeScript while the type checker highlights mistakes github.com/gruhn/typescri... · Posted by u/mjcurl

harha_ · a year ago

TypeScript is overly complicated and for what? Compile-time "safety". It's better than plain JavaScript, though whatever library I pull as a dependency and peek inside the TypeScript<>JavaScript interface glue, I always find horrors beyond my comprehension.

xamuel · a year ago

Compile error messages in a classical typed language: "Error: Object of type 'StructA' cannot be assigned to variable of type 'StructB'"

Compile error messages in TypeScript when you use a library like React: "Error: Cannot reconcile <5 pages of arcane gibberish> with <5 pages of different arcane gibberish>"

xamuel commented on Dependencies and resilience ingino.me/ideas/on-depend... · Posted by u/sebastianingino

xamuel · a year ago

I wonder how much dependencies could be reduced by systematically searching low-hanging fruit and addressing it ad hoc. For example, if commonly-used library A uses one minor thing from (and thus imports all of) library B, which in turn imports hundreds of other libraries, then someone should add the minor thing in question to A and remove the dependency on B there.

It's interesting to think of how this sort of "neighborhood watch" could be incentivized, since it's probably way too big of a task for purely volunteer work. It's tricky though because any incentive to remove dependencies would automatically be a perverse incentive to ADD dependencies (so that you can later remove them and get the credit for it).

xamuel commented on World's Smallest CSV Parser (C#) github.com/kjpgit/Smalles... · Posted by u/vilark

nrdvana · a year ago

It's a nice tidy CSV parser, but needs a new title. "world's smallest" is never going to happen in C#, for any measure of "smallest". And aside from that, nobody should be rolling their own CSV parsers if they want to solve real-world problems; use the most capable library your language offers you, which will account for a hundred edge cases yours doesn't.

xamuel · a year ago

Funny story re "nobody should be rolling":

When I was switching from academia to industry, I decided, based on HN comments like this, that I should un-publish my CSV parser.

I was worried potential employers would tsk-tsk me for self-rolling.

I promptly got an email from the creator of Ruby asking me why I had un-published my CSV parser, which apparently was being used in Ruby at the time.

(...And then later I landed my current job, a dream job, a large part of which involves handling CSV files in finance!)

xamuel commented on World's Smallest CSV Parser (C#) github.com/kjpgit/Smalles... · Posted by u/vilark

userbinator · a year ago

Do you need more than 1k of additional source to wrap the line parsing in a loop? I doubt it.

xamuel · a year ago

Linebreaks can be escaped in CSV, so splitting a file into rows is actually ~1/3 the complexity of parsing a whole row.

See: https://github.com/semitrivial/csv_parser/blob/master/split....

Though I suppose that's the naive approach. You could combine the two into a single file by, like you say, wrapping the row-parser in a (clever, non-trivial) outer loop, and it probably wouldn't take anywhere near 1000 characters to do that...