Hacker News: Kaijo

New comment by Kaijo in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

Kaijo — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:04:55 +0000

I’m similar to you, except to upgrade my practical math skills at college I did cultivate a “liking” for math comparable to other technical areas I pursue. Namely, I started reading popular math books and articles, watching math youtubers, solving recreational puzzles from math periodicals… It was like, half actual interest and half contrived interest, seeing if I could develop in that direction. One summer when I had a lot of free time, with the help of a mathematician friend, I worked through a few advanced textbooks and video lecture series beyond anything I strictly needed. Progress was real but agonizing, and then I promptly forgot everything. It turns out that just maintaining a mid-to-late-undergraduate-level understanding of applied math is all I can be responsible for. It’s a responsibility I attend to, but my brain is only so mathy. At some point it becomes a question of both motivation and ability.

New comment by Kaijo in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

Kaijo — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:39:21 +0000

Authenticity (as Gidon Kremer once said), above all, is what is genuinely felt, and the inner world of a dedicated listener who has built up a relationship with their music over a lifetime is full of genuine feeling. It _is_ participation, not mere consumption. Even if the act of listening is a private one. Art forms need properly attentive audiences.

I say this as a decent pianist who collaborates, performs, teaches, records. And who messes around with AI with great fascination. Music is so broad and diverse in the experiences it can provide and the social functions it stands in relation to. Separate channels and bubbles can be good, the signs of a tree of life diversifying. Your lakeside vignette doesn’t say anything about something wrong in music and culture, it’s just a normal thing that happens whenever people chill out by a lake throughout human history. Off-key singing and dancing to salsa and reggaeton? I wouldn’t be nervous about joining in, I’d be heading to the opposite side of the lake. And that’s good too – how personal music can be, that that’s your thing, not my thing.

New comment by Kaijo in "Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism"

Kaijo — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:35:45 +0000

To drain pasta or noodles quickly, I put it in a colander, hold it above my kitchen sink, and swirl it around in quick circles. I realized about a month ago my circles are always counterclockwise, and very efficient, but that I can't keep a clockwise spin going for more than a few cycles before messing up. Since then I keep trying to spin my pasta clockwise (such are the small excitements and adventures of my wfh life), starting with very slow movements, but I just can't do it. There's something weird about this motor skill specifically that eludes me. I'm left-handed but my right-handed writing is reasonable and I play piano with matched abilities in both hands. Maybe one day, with enough practice, my pasta will go clockwise.

New comment by Kaijo in "I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over"

Kaijo — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:32:15 +0000

Thanks for mentioning this. I have activated a one-month LinkedIn Premium free trial, hopefully as another layer of protection while I re-establish myself and fortify my profile.

New comment by Kaijo in "I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over"

Kaijo — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:24:15 +0000

I hate LinkedIn but need it for a few things, mostly accessing certain clients and projects as a freelancer. Last October my ISP (Vodafone UK) assigned me a datacenter-classified IPv6 address with 80+ abuse reports on reputation databases, for bots, DDoS, crawlers. Before I realized this I started getting locked out, suspended, restricted from just about every web service I use, having to solve captchas for simple Google searches, etc.

I resolved everything except LinkedIn. They required Persona verification to restore access, but I'd already recently verified with Persona, so clicking the re-verification links just returned a Catch-22 "you've already verified with us." LinkedIn support is unreachable unless you're signed into an account. I tried direct emails, webforms, DMs to LinkedIn Help on Twitter, all completely ignored.

Eventually some cooldown timer must have expired, because Persona finally let me re-verify last week. Upon regaining access, I was encouraged me to verify with Persona AGAIN, this time for the verified badge.

I now have a taste of what "digital underclass" means, and look forward to the day when no part of my income depends on horrible platforms that make me desperate for the opportunity to give away my personal data!

New comment by Kaijo in "Mathematicians hunting prime numbers discover infinite new pattern"

Kaijo — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 10:52:49 +0000

Wolfram came to our evolutionary biology department to preach that book about 20 years ago. We all got our heads into cellular automata for a while, but in the end they just don't have the claimed profound explanatory power in real biological systems.

New comment by Kaijo in "How much energy does it take to think?"

Kaijo — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 09:50:54 +0000

It depends on the kind of work. If it's routine stuff, past seven hours or so, I can keep going and not feel tired, but I increasingly don't want to, and the feeling that I'd rather be doing something else becomes very distracting. If the work is technical and intellectually rewarding, I might feel inspired to continue, but I start making mistakes and past a certain point, it becomes counterproductive. If the work requires conceptual or creative insights, my brain stops delivering them for free and my backup methods for squeezing them out start failing too. If I'm speaking or writing, I lose the thread and my words lose their punch and personality. My occasional bouts of insomnia bring a different kind of all-encompassing fatigue. I become overemotional. At my most sleep-deprived, I struggle to operate a kettle. Things were different when I was younger. Writing up my PhD, I essentially slept every other night for months, yet stayed sharp, productive.

New comment by Kaijo in "Withnail and I (2001)"

Kaijo — Wed, 21 May 2025 14:16:22 +0000

I find it impossible to reconcile Monty's character with the fact Richard Griffiths was only forty years old when he played him. Yes, forty. I'm 46 now but however old I get, Uncle Monty will forever remain the archetypal "batty older queen" in my head.

New comment by Kaijo in "The Natural System of Colours"

Kaijo — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 08:41:37 +0000

From what I understand, Moses's major contribution was describing color mixing principles for pigment paints independent of the notion of specially nominated primary colors, showing among other things that a mixture of any two paints is reduced in saturation in proprtion to their separation on the hue circle. I've been exploring classic color theory texts lately and the most illuminating by far as been Michel-Eugène Chevreul's "Principles of Color Harmony and Contrast", which has a wonderful recent translation and commentary by Dan Margulis. The core of the work elucidates what are known today as the optical phenomena of simultaneous contrast, chromatic adaptation, perceptual constancy. There is also a good overview and critique of historical color wheels at https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color14.html

New comment by Kaijo in "Geometric Algebra"

Kaijo — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 08:16:31 +0000

The third video in the "Featured Introductions" section near the top of the page, called "A Swift Introduction to Geometric Algebra", is a very good starting point.

New comment by Kaijo in "Engineer eats efficiently for $2.50 a day (2016)"

Kaijo — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:30:15 +0000

I also have to balance foodie obsessions with being economical and healthy. (Growing up, my extended family had a culture of "living to eat" and they ran several restaurants as a trophy thing, i.e., with negligible profit but acclaimed food.) I'm now an experienced home cook who likes throwing somewhat elaborate dinner parties, but when on my own it still makes sense to just batch cook and freeze. When it comes to that, what I notice is that I'm still making the same dishes I did as a poor student, just augmented. The base dish is quite tasty to start with, but now I can afford to use a few nicer or speciality ingredients that take it up a level. If you're making a cauldron of risotto or tomato sauce or whatever that will yield dozens of servings, it doesn't cost that much more per serving to add the extra thing or perform the extra technique that makes it really delicious or interesting (and compensates for the fact you're freezing it). The same applies to everyday things that I whip up to eat fresh, in terms of keeping a well-stocked pantry of somewhat pricey powders and potions that only get used up slowly.

New comment by Kaijo in "Pigment Mixing into Digital Painting"

Kaijo — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 06:21:28 +0000

The addon you're referring to is already available: https://github.com/rlguy/Blender-FLIP-Fluids/wiki/Mixbox-Ins...

It works as a kind of experimental extension supplied with the paid FLIP Fluids addon. Note that the fluid solver built into Blender is also an implementation of FLIP, but "FLIP Fluids" is a separate product. I've played with fluid simulation in Blender quite a bit. The bundled FLIP is very limited, FLIP Fluids is great, and the color mixing is amazing!

New comment by Kaijo in "Trellis – 3D mesh generative model"

Kaijo — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:00:37 +0000

This is a technical paper, but it has a quite conversational abstract and introduction that is easy enough to follow if you have some experience with mesh modelling: https://www.graphics.rwth-aachen.de/media/papers/337/learnin...

New comment by Kaijo in "Trellis – 3D mesh generative model"

Kaijo — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 22:55:29 +0000

>The next step is to automatically add "nodes" to the 3D images where the model can pivot, rotate and whatnot and then boom, you have on-demand animated, interactive content.

The next step is to generate models with higher quality mesh topology that allows animation and editing without breaking the mesh. I've done a lot of retopologizing and if I (or AI) were to rig these models as-is there would be all kinds of shading and deformation issues. Even without animating they are glaringly triangulated up close. But I suspect really high quality 3D asset generation is just around the corner because all you'd have to do is join up the approach seen here with AI quad re-meshing based on estimated direction fields and feature detection, which is also getting scarily good.

New comment by Kaijo in "Blender 4.3"

Kaijo — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 08:32:54 +0000

One thing that at least doubled my modelling efficiency was my acquisition of a multi-button gaming mouse with a twelve-button thumb grid. In Blender I have that mapped mostly to the numpad which enables 3D navigation at the speed of thought, and without me having to move my other hand away from the cluster of most-often-used hotkeys at the bottom-left of the keyboard. You also get five functions out of the MMB which also can really speed up working in the Node Editor. But. I'm left-handed. The only suitable mouse I can find like this is a Razer Naga Left-Handed Edition, and I don't like the build quality. It's too light and small for my hand, and on the two specimens I've used, the MMB is a little bit glitchy (occasionally registering scrolling the wrong way, and click turns into push-left or push-right). So I wouldn't be without it, but I wish there were better options.

New comment by Kaijo in "Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined"

Kaijo — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 17:05:39 +0000

This is true with some qualifications. If you're interested in the kind of investment grade diamonds that a major auction house would deal with, then you're looking at heavy weights and/or fancy colors that synthetics can't reach yet. In the diamond trade the word "paragon" is sometimes reserved for flawless or near-flawless stones above 100 carats, of which there is a long list of famous examples, but the largest gem grade synthetic is still around 30 carats I believe. Vivid colors top out at much lighter than that. I guess we'll be able to outdo nature within a few decades though (as far as terrestrial diamonds go, anyway -- I seem to recall reading somewhere about the discovery of moon-sized space diamonds).

New comment by Kaijo in "Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items"

Kaijo — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 08:39:29 +0000

I'm a lifelong collector of a variety of (very) niche things, and have at times sold or tried to sell items from my collections, or whole collections at once. You're right about everything, I would only add that each category of thing is its own world in terms of liquidity and how certain you can be of obtaining a guide price. It also pays off to learn about the collector cultures and communities surrounding each type of thing, so you know what obscure periodical or special interest show, etc. to target when you are trying to sell. Never be in a rush, and the other thing that can make a difference is developing good product photography/videography skills.

New comment by Kaijo in "Map of forest sounds from around the world"

Kaijo — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 02:04:06 +0000

I started making a lot of field recordings on my last few expeditions into remote rainforest. This is the soundscape at dawn from a camp in Maliau Basin, Borneo, featuring gibbons, hornbills, elephants, songbirds, insects... https://vocaroo.com/1ofQSNJYXLh2

I've recently upgraded my recording device, and will make a large library available in higher quality one day.

New comment by Kaijo in "Mushroom hunters can't stop finding mysterious fungi"

Kaijo — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 07:30:38 +0000

There are "obviously" new species that do still crop up because undescribed biodiversity is concentrated in little-surveyed tracts of remote tropical rainforest, and the visible spore-producing structures of those fungi might only appear rarely under poorly-understood environmental triggers. So no, they are not all already known about. "Obvious" species new to science are still being described from such locations. Two examples from recent decades I have seen myself, Chlorogaster dipterocarpi, Spongiforma squarepantsii... I know of many more from taxonomic journals. Also I have found some spectacuar mycoheterotrophic plants in the genus Thismia that were only very recently described. Also, there is a high diversity of secotioid hypogeous fungi many of which are "obvious", but you have to be digging around in the soil looking for them to find them, so they are still poorly known.

New comment by Kaijo in "Mushroom hunters can't stop finding mysterious fungi"

Kaijo — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 03:47:09 +0000

It's an especially acute problem for fungi. Fungi defy easy collection. With most animals and plants one can envisage conservation strategies to preserve lineages in artificial conditions. Breeding programmes, seed banks, tissue culture... But whole swathes of the fungal kindgom have such complex ecological requirements and sensitivities that isolating and growing them outside their natural habitat presents huge technical challenges. Even if you can coax them into culture, getting them to complete their life cycle is another matter entirely. And even with our best preservation methods, cultures that are not maintained as breeding populations have an expiry date. I have had a lot of frustration retrieving fungi of conservation interest from culture collections, supposed repositories of biodiversity, that turned out to be hopelessly senescent.