zulko (u/zulko) - Readit News

zulko commented on Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy caltech.edu/about/news/in... · Posted by u/dagurp

victor106 · a month ago

For someone in Software what is a good way to learn the fundamentals of this?

zulko · a month ago

Possibly not what you're asking for, but I wrote a generally-accessible intro to why it can be tricky to assemble many DNA fragments with "Golden Gate Assembly", a mainstream method which relies on short sequence overhangs. The Sidewinder method discussed in this thread aims to solve that "short overhang" problem.

https://zulko.github.io/bricks_and_scissors/posts/overhangs/

zulko commented on Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC geacron.com/home-en/... · Posted by u/not_knuth

lippihom · 4 months ago

Wikipedia doesn't have an API?

zulko · 4 months ago

It does, why?

zulko commented on Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC geacron.com/home-en/... · Posted by u/not_knuth

milst · 4 months ago

very cool. Made something with a similar idea, but using timelines instead of maps. I wonder if the two could be combined in some way https://timeline-of-everything.milst.dev/

zulko · 4 months ago

Nice, how does your timeline work under the hood? Does it read from wikipedia? What could be interesting in your project is to be able to compare timelines. See for instance this website specifically for comparing composer works (with timelines pre-extracted from wikipedia):

https://zulko.github.io/composer-timelines/?selectedComposer...

zulko commented on Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC geacron.com/home-en/... · Posted by u/not_knuth

annodomini2019 · 4 months ago

Wow, this is actually so cool. Fantastic idea, I would LOVE something like this in Wikipedia. Nicely done!

zulko · 4 months ago

Yeah it would be nice if Wikipedia would host it, but it would probably require some more serious ground work so the project fits in the wikipedia ecosystem. Could be a pipeline Wikipedia -> Wikidata -> Atlas.

There are many projects that could be done with with wikipedia and LLMs, for instance "equalizing" all languages by translating all pages into all other languages where they are missing. Or, more surgically, finding which facts are reported in some languages of a page but not others, and adding these facts to all languages.

For now, it seems that wikipedia doesn't want to use generative AI to produce wikipedia pages, and that's understandable, but there may be a point where model quality will be too good to ignore.

zulko commented on Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC geacron.com/home-en/... · Posted by u/not_knuth

qq66 · 4 months ago

Cool project. Seems like your link to "wiki-dump-extractor" is broken.

zulko · 4 months ago

Thank you for reporting this!

zulko commented on Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC geacron.com/home-en/... · Posted by u/not_knuth

kbrannigan · 4 months ago

The issue is that the timeline is built in a Eurocentric way. Europe (and the Near East) are shown as the starting point of history, while Africa, Asia, and the Americas only appear when Europeans make contact with them.

This hides thousands of years of independent development in those regions—empires, and creates the false impression that they had no real history before Europe showed up.

It repeats an old colonial story where Europe is the main character and everyone else is treated as secondary.

zulko · 4 months ago

This is also very true of the events reported in Wikipedia, see this animated timeline of (a hopefully representative set of) historical events reported in Wikipedia. Is really is "Europe meets the world":

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1l3xl8x/events_fro...

I agree with others in this thread that this more probably "information-biased" than "eurocentric" on the part of the Atlas creator. Pretty sure they wish non-european history was easier to find and aggregate as it would make the project much more compelling (I certainly had this problem with https://landnotes.org/).

I am hoping LLMs will do a lot of good at bridging gaps and surfacing world historical information that didn't make it yet to centralized projects like Wikipedia.

zulko commented on Interactive World History Atlas Since 3000 BC geacron.com/home-en/... · Posted by u/not_knuth

zulko · 4 months ago

Total plug but this year I scraped 400,000 wikipedia pages with Gemini to create landnotes.org, an atlas where you can ask "what happened in Japan in 1923":

https://landnotes.org/?location=xnd284b0-6&date=1923&strictD...

https://github.com/Zulko/landnotes

My plan has been to overlay historical map borders on top of it, like the Geacron one from this post, but they all seem to be protected by copyright - and understandably so, given the amount of work involved.

zulko commented on Show HN: AfriTales – Discover the Magic of African Storytelling afritales.org/... · Posted by u/ggap

zulko · 6 months ago

Very nice but the fonts render as white on white background on my phone which makes it difficult to read. Screenshot: https://ibb.co/29CqpTx

zulko commented on Wikipedia as a Graph wikigrapher.com/paths... · Posted by u/gidellav

zulko · 6 months ago

Fascinating, I knew about the "Wikipedia degrees of separation" and whe wikigame (https://www.thewikigame.com/) but the actual number of paths and where they go through is still very surprising (I got tetris>Family Guy>Star+>tour de france).

If anyone is looking to start similar projects, I open-sourced a library to convert the wikipedia dump into a simpler format, along with a bunch of parsers: https://github.com/Zulko/wiki_dump_extractor . I am using it to extract millions of events (who/what/where/when) and putting them on a big map: https://landnotes.org/?location=u07ffpb1-6&date=1548&strictD...

zulko commented on Show HN: Verbiage, a Gemini-powered word game verbiage.cc/?date=2025-08... · Posted by u/zulko

JoeOfTexas · 7 months ago

This was actually pretty cool. It's similar to crossword puzzles in how you get a hint. Maybe its too easy though, I got it in 2 attempts. I'm definitely not smart lol.

zulko · 7 months ago

You should try the words from previous days (clicking on the date below the title). So far it’s been pretty random how many tries someone will need to find a word, the same person who needed 2 tries one day might need 10 tries another time. Just like wordle, you might get lucky or unlucky on your first guesses.