Hacker News: immmmmm

New comment by immmmmm in "AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward"

immmmmm — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 20:50:43 +0000

Psychedelics are several orders of magnitude stronger on the plasticity front.

In therapy as well.

New comment by immmmmm in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

immmmmm — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:45:39 +0000

The contributed proposition by the 10 year old kid to make fossil fuel companies pay for solar panels is perhaps the best policy proposal I’ve ever seen.

The second one is to make water companies CEOs swim in the Thames.

That is a program.

New comment by immmmmm in "Fairphone 6 wide camera experimental Linux support"

immmmmm — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 10:32:07 +0000

There are some vendors that have a good variety of IMX sensors boards. Usually labelled Board Level MIPI camera, some with usable v4l drivers.

New comment by immmmmm in "Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks"

immmmmm — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:06:29 +0000

Or maybe just change our habits, travel less and slower.

New comment by immmmmm in "Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks"

immmmmm — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:56:15 +0000

I just love long rail trips, often do Switzerland-Tunis via Palermo to see my in law family. Best trip ever was Tbilisi-Zurich via Batumi, ferry to Odessa Kyiv and Vienna.

New comment by immmmmm in "Unexpected Solidlike Fracture in Simple Liquids"

immmmmm — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:07:12 +0000

Adaptation is not an alternative for mitigation. We have to do adaptation AND mitigation (drastic reduction of emissions).

We can stop CC, science is very clear on this.

New comment by immmmmm in "Unexpected Solidlike Fracture in Simple Liquids"

immmmmm — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 06:46:47 +0000

I have worked half of my life in both fundamental and applied science, I know how this work. In particular you can refuse jobs you deem unethical.

Why not funding energy transition research for instance. It’s know to science for half a century we’ll cook to death if we don’t phase out fossil fuel energy.

And by know, I mean there’s literally millions of papers on the topic.

New comment by immmmmm in "Unexpected Solidlike Fracture in Simple Liquids"

immmmmm — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 06:30:48 +0000

Oh yes, they had some of the best climate scientists back then.

It’s somewhat a scale up of what the tobacco industry did, same strategies, etc

New comment by immmmmm in "Unexpected Solidlike Fracture in Simple Liquids"

immmmmm — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 05:42:57 +0000

> a project in collaboration with the oil and gas company Exxon Mobil

I find it a bit dark that, at a time people, crops, forests and biomes are dying due to extreme heat caused by the fossil fuel industry’s reckless behaviour the last 50 years, the said fossil fuel industry funds research on exotic rheology.

New comment by immmmmm in "Claude Science"

immmmmm — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:29:29 +0000

When I was doing my phd, around 2 decades ago, I was often going to the library’s compactus to fish for a Phys Rev from the 80s. Back then papers were sparse and expensive. But the quality!

The Higgs boson is 3 papers, 6 authors and 6 pages in total!

At the end of my phd, 30++ pages slop papers were the norm.

Nowadays, well..

The paper by Higgs was one page. The guy probably published less than a hundred pages in his career.

One reason that made me abandon a career was the disgust caused by the publishing frienzy.

And now tokens..

New comment by immmmmm in "How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?"

immmmmm — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:30:06 +0000

It’s how gauge theories work:

- fermions (charges) are in the fundamental representation of the gauge group, here SU(3) so 3 Colors

- bosons are in the adjoint représentation, for SU(3) that 8 dimensions

New comment by immmmmm in "The case against geometric algebra (2024)"

immmmmm — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:52:38 +0000

agreed, when you start needing the the hodge star, diff form loose quite a lot of their interest.

i'd add it's quite nice in string theories for RR fields and coupling to D-branes, where writing 10 anti-symmetrized indices quickly gets annoying.. and topological field theories..

New comment by immmmmm in "The case against geometric algebra (2024)"

immmmmm — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:39:13 +0000

from a theoretical physicist point of view, i find GA don't add much to the standard tooling ppl use, i.e. Lie algebras, Clifford and (sometimes) differential forms. while it's always nice to have a formalism that "hides indices", in most cases (for (super-)gravitation at least) just writing tensor/clifford/lie indices is just much faster and less error prone.

i used to use differential form for gauge theories, einstein-cartan gravitation and ramond-ramond fields.

also, in a paper, we used O(D,D) clifford algebras/spinors to represent differential forms, which worked quite well in our very specific case (appendix A)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.1472

ps: i had colleagues that worked on GA for ML in robotics but wasn't really impressed by what it accomplished

New comment by immmmmm in "Scott Adams has died"

immmmmm — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:44:48 +0000

Well congratulations, you just stated the equivalence principle that led Einstein to GR (you need special relativity and a bit of maths and you’re there)!

New comment by immmmmm in "Facts about throwing good parties"

immmmmm — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 14:39:26 +0000

As an occasional organiser of techno parties point 21) made me gently laugh. After decades of experience I’ve resorted to:

1) get the best quality, ultra high headroom, system money can rent

2) get a high quality monitoring system for the DJs

3) find a venue as remote as I can

4) go turn down the master volume on the main desk every now and then :)

New comment by immmmmm in "Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?"

immmmmm — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 17:21:28 +0000

I have a good friend who’s in the “hi end desktop cnc” bizness (with some very cheap models). Asked why he doesn’t do 3D printers (he designed plenty) and he told me the market is SO competitive and products so cheap it’s impossible to compete.

Designing a controller for his machines and as much as I would love to put the thing as OH, I don’t even think of it.

His company:

https://www.badog.ch/

New comment by immmmmm in "Show HN: Chili3d – A open-source, browser-based 3D CAD application"

immmmmm — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 18:00:05 +0000

I’m doing a bit of BREP for GIS and even in 2D with line segments only the problem is really non-trivial, a lot of edge (pun intended) cases to take care of. Type system helps enormously, so probably rust will be a win here (I think I saw a project along those lines).

That being said, for CAD (personal usage) I switched from Fusion 360 to Freecad 1.0 with almost no project and the latter is an order of magnitude faster.

New comment by immmmmm in "A SpaceX team is being brought in to overhaul FAA's air traffic control system"

immmmmm — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 12:48:30 +0000

Looking at some comments suggests quite a few

New comment by immmmmm in "Noether's Theorem Revolutionized Physics"

immmmmm — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 09:22:44 +0000

The beauty and power of the Noether Theorem is what pushed me to theoretical physics.

I consider it one of mankind’s greatest achievement.

New comment by immmmmm in "Conda: A package management disaster?"

immmmmm — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 20:58:02 +0000

I have been using pixi for half a year and it has been fantastic.

It’s fast, takes yml files as an input (which is super convenient) and super intuitive

Quite surprised it isn’t more popular