Hacker News: Biologist123

New comment by Biologist123 in "Show HN: Omi – watches your screen, hears conversations, tells you what to do"

Biologist123 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 02:33:23 +0000

I guess you have to turn it on. Might be handy for things like electrician courses, DIY jobs, maths homework etc. Maybe one day even surgery!

New comment by Biologist123 in "Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?"

Biologist123 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 01:10:51 +0000

Well done. This is precisely what the future will look like. I’ve hacked together my own version of this using N8N whereby I feed in tasks via text or photo through telegram and it outputs a to do list. At some point I’ll link it to my personal wiki and then have it action tasks. This was just a fun project, but one design decision is to keep third party services away from commercially sensitive emails.

New comment by Biologist123 in "Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs"

Biologist123 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:43:15 +0000

Nice. I can see a version of this working for ever more niche areas. Curated reading lists for areas of interest. At which point a curated list of curated lists becomes viable!

New comment by Biologist123 in "How important was the Battle of Hastings?"

Biologist123 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:06:25 +0000

The UK has land ownership inequality comparable to South Africa and Brazil. Quite something.

New comment by Biologist123 in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

Biologist123 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:24:11 +0000

Maybe add climate change is real but there’s little we can do to stop it/change the systems which result in it.

New comment by Biologist123 in "A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times"

Biologist123 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 14:29:39 +0000

Not enough is understood about the replication crisis in the social sciences. Or indeed in the hard sciences. I do wonder whether this is something that AI will rectify.

New comment by Biologist123 in "Erich von Däniken has died"

Biologist123 — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:30:56 +0000

Thank you. This was well-written and made a point I think I needed to see set out in this form.

> We cannot go through our days questioning everything all the time if we want to remain functional, some things we will have to take for granted.

On reading this, it struck me how much of the world we engage with on these terms. And how much of the information soup we live in seems designed to persuade us of things being just so.

Bake Sales to Save Nature: Why Wall Street Conservation Survives

Biologist123 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:06:03 +0000

Article URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dech.70035

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330249

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Biologist123 in "Tech elites are starting their own for-profit cities"

Biologist123 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 21:13:47 +0000

There’s an alternative theory that cities need to be bit chaotic:

“The Uses of Disorder analyzes human development at the personal and collective level in wealthy cities, presenting the thesis that such cities are excessively ordered and thereby enable residents to avoid personal growth or change. Instead of relying on prescriptive plans and rigid self-conceptions, Sennett argues, people should remain open to difference and disorder while city life ought to be more disorderly and decentralized.”

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

New comment by Biologist123 in "Show HN: I built a tech news aggregator that works the way my brain does"

Biologist123 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 20:04:18 +0000

Great idea! May I ask what the information source is?

Coinbase's musical ad satirises the state of Britain

Biologist123 — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 13:04:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/coinbase-musical-ad-everythings-fine/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45082853

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by Biologist123 in "Online news publishers face extinction-level event from Google AI-powered search"

Biologist123 — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 13:23:12 +0000

Thanks. V helpful. Especially the point about dopamine hits.

New comment by Biologist123 in "Online news publishers face extinction-level event from Google AI-powered search"

Biologist123 — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 07:53:46 +0000

Can I sketch out one future of news for input?

- Personalized

- No adverts

- No hidden dopamine hooks

- Assigns probability of accuracy

- Explains relevance to you personally

- Explains emerging news events and context, highlighting propaganda/news manipulation where relevant.

New comment by Biologist123 in "German court rules Meta tracking technology violates European privacy laws"

Biologist123 — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:18:06 +0000

Very interesting. Could become a geopolitical and trade football between Europe and US. Tariffs anyone? Ultimately it’s a question of power: will Europe allow its citizens to be predated upon? My guess is probably.

New comment by Biologist123 in "Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system"

Biologist123 — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:27:52 +0000

My apologies. By available carbon budget, I meant the carbon we can burn before we exceed 1.5 degrees, or 2 degrees etc.

New comment by Biologist123 in "Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system"

Biologist123 — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:01:38 +0000

This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that.

One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this.

[Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKibben only talk about the upside. It can sometimes feel a bit like Kayfabe, playing with the the reader’s emotions. And like my old man says: if someone tells you about pros and cons, they’re an advisor. If someone tells you only about pros, they’re a salesman.]

New comment by Biologist123 in "Are we the baddies?"

Biologist123 — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 08:42:44 +0000

I sometimes think of the internet as an alternative dimension: as mind space; it was Terra Nova and speculators rode in to grab the available real estate. But as the experience also showed us, there are maybe infinite mind spaces, and the job of anyone dissatisfied with the status quo is to open those new spaces where networks can be built around principles other than enshittification.

New comment by Biologist123 in "What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?"

Biologist123 — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 17:52:24 +0000

It’s a fair point, but as a thought experiment, how would you feel about AI writing the essays and simply regurgitating those? Legal but not in the spirit of things I think.

New comment by Biologist123 in "What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?"

Biologist123 — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 17:50:00 +0000

It definitely wasn’t cheating. But I felt it was not in the spirit of the exam system which I believed - maybe wrongly - was designed to test one’s ability to write a fresh essay from scratch under timed conditions.

What would you say about someone getting AI to write high standard essays and simply spend learn those word-for-word?

It’s also not cheating but not in the spirit of the thing I think.

New comment by Biologist123 in "What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?"

Biologist123 — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 14:18:20 +0000

A college-friend from the Unviersity of Oxford, where students write one or two essays a week, got the top first (best mark) in his history degree. Initially impressed, one day I asked him his exam method - where each student must produce 3 essays in 3 hours (or did then) across about 5 or 6 papers. My friend’s approach was to thoroughly research 12 essay questions and pre-write 16 page essays for each paper, which he would then learn verbatim and trot out word-for-word the best fit to each exam question.

This compared to my method of reading widely, learning quotes and ideas and then writing each essay fresh in the exam hall - and I would typically manage about 3-4 pages per essay. (Reader, I did not get a top first).

I relate this anecdote as I don’t really see my friend’s method as being much better than using AI. Although I do acknowledge his 16 page essays must have been reasonably good.