Hacker News: bejd

New comment by bejd in "The AirPods Effect"

bejd — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 10:32:25 +0000

After reading about the default mode network here a few times recently, I think missing out on all that critical "daydreaming" time is a bigger problem. I've stopped listening to things while I'm out walking, and I've noticed a lot more solutions and ideas coming to me. The DMN seems to fall into a similar area as meditation (remember when that was all the rage among tech leaders?); the lowered input noise gives the brain time to clear things out.

New comment by bejd in "Show HN: I made a website that makes you cry"

bejd — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:17:04 +0000

Sounds like the "Penfield Mood Organ"[0] from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Characters "dial" emotions, from basic to extremely specific (e.g. "481. Awareness of the manifold possibilities open [...] in the future", or "888 [...] The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penfield_mood_organ

New comment by bejd in "Blender: Beyond Mouse and Keyboard"

bejd — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 12:28:21 +0000

So is Chromium. But, like with web browsers, competition is always good.

New comment by bejd in "A summer intern once saved Valve from a near-fatal lawsuit"

bejd — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:26:32 +0000

Mentioned in the article, but the source is the excellent YouTube documentary Valve released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjNT9qGjh4

New comment by bejd in "Show HN: A tool for creating chord charts on the go"

bejd — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 12:32:24 +0000

>was surprised to read that it was built in Godot, which I'd only ever considered for games

The Godot editor is built in Godot [0]

[0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.5/getting_started/introduc...

New comment by bejd in "Crows are even smarter than we thought"

bejd — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 08:47:19 +0000

>Fawns/calves/... can walk almost as soon as they are born. It takes humans far longer to learn that.

Humans are helpless at birth because we have big brains and walk upright. Which means narrower hips which means we need to be born before the brain is fully developed.

New comment by bejd in "Show HN: I built an animated 3D bookshelf for ebooks"

bejd — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 14:22:08 +0000

The thickness of the book being calculated from its page count is a really nice touch.

New comment by bejd in "Permutation City (1994)"

bejd — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 13:22:41 +0000

Blindsight hit all the right hard sci-fi notes for me. I've yet to find something that scratches that same itch.

New comment by bejd in "Relativistic Spaceship"

bejd — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 16:26:01 +0000

Fantastic book. I read it for the first time about a year ago but I still think about it once every week or two. Thought about it as soon as the "spaceship" started to accelerate towards light speed.

New comment by bejd in "YouTube strikes again, it seems"

bejd — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 11:50:57 +0000

The SponsorBlock [0] addon has already solved that for sponsored/ad segments in videos. Rather than AI, crowdsourced timestamps lets it automatically skip past adverts.

[0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

New comment by bejd in "The "10k-hour rule" was debunked again"

bejd — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 12:02:35 +0000

As do most people who quote the 10,000 hours thing. Gladwell greatly simplified K. Anders Ericsson's work [0]. Most people just read Gladwell's catchy headline and miss the point. Doing something over and over != deliberate practice. In Ericsson's words:

>Expert performance can, however, be traced to active engagement in deliberate practice (DP), where training (often designed and arranged by their teachers and coaches) is focused on improving particular tasks. DP also involves the provision of immediate feedback, time for problem-solving and evaluation, and opportunities for repeated performance to refine behavior.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18778378/

New comment by bejd in "How artists are sabotaging AI to take revenge on image generators"

bejd — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 13:31:45 +0000

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38013151

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37990750

New comment by bejd in "Mechanical Watch (2022)"

bejd — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 14:49:34 +0000

Nice to see this again. Such a clear breakdown of a complex topic, presented beautifully.

Tangentially related, the documentary The Watchmaker's Apprentice [0] is a captivating look at the dedication it takes to create a mechanical watch. It's amazing that it's possible for a single person to craft each tiny cog and spring from scratch and put it all together.

[0] http://www.thewatchmakersapprentice.com/

New comment by bejd in "Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]"

bejd — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:18:58 +0000

Not sure if they're being serious, but there's what looks like a "3" on a distant air-con unit, next to left-most tree. If your viewport is narrow you might not see it [0]

[0] https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/clusters/sale_autum...

New comment by bejd in "Meta pitches EU to charge a $10 subscription for ad-free Facebook and Instagram"

bejd — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 13:48:36 +0000

https://archive.ph/nVivJ

New comment by bejd in "Ask HN: How are so many fake ads allowed on YouTube?"

bejd — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 11:49:10 +0000

You might be interested in AdNauseum [0]

> Built atop uBlock Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on ad networks' databases.

[0]: https://adnauseam.io/

New comment by bejd in "Show HN: Hardcover – Letterboxd for Books"

bejd — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 09:09:08 +0000

Switched from Goodreads to StoryGraph to escape Amazon’s nonsense a while back. Felt like it was missing a few things and found Hardcover recently, and I haven’t looked back.

I don’t really use the social features of these apps, so I’m more interested in the progress tracking and recommendations: I can’t think of any other apps that are working on “AI” recommendations, which so far have been pretty good.

Adam’s email updates are refreshingly non-corporate. Interesting, technical, and honest (he often discusses Hardcover’s finances).

New comment by bejd in "Fosstodon is now invite only"

bejd — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 15:04:29 +0000

I have an account for my game dev projects on https://mastodon.gamedev.place/ and it's a great community for that kind of stuff. People tend to stay on topic: the local feed is almost exclusively videogame related updates, and it's all very positive.

New comment by bejd in "Show HN: I built a multiplayer Gameboy"

bejd — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 15:49:49 +0000

Great work! It would be nice if the demo page had a game ROM ready to go. You could probably find something free and/or open source on itch.io.

New comment by bejd in "Firefox address bar"

bejd — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:22:56 +0000

Right-click on a search box > "Add a Keyword for this Search".

Edit: it then gets saved as a bookmark and you can edit it like any other.