Hacker News: ryanblakeley

New comment by ryanblakeley in "Wholesale prices rose 0.9% in July, more than expected"

ryanblakeley — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 14:48:19 +0000

People who have so much in assets that they can live (and support their family) with the interest they earn on those assets, and by a huge margin, not just comfortably retired people. Those are the people who get richer, at the expense of your kids. Inflationary housing expenses are a drop in the bucket when someone's assets are in the billions.

New comment by ryanblakeley in "I avoid using LLMs as a publisher and writer"

ryanblakeley — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 13:23:24 +0000

Creative expression is also about relationships with other people and connecting with an audience. Treating it like product optimization seems hollow and lonely. There's friction to asking another person to read and give feedback on something you wrote, but it's the kind of friction that helps you grow.

New comment by ryanblakeley in "Astronomers race to study interstellar interloper"

ryanblakeley — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:20:22 +0000

There were a number of anomalous characteristics including its shape, acceleration, rotation, origin, and reflectivity.

New comment by ryanblakeley in "Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab"

ryanblakeley — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 15:36:42 +0000

Super-intelligent game-playing AIs, for decades, were trained on human data.

New comment by ryanblakeley in "The impossible predicament of the death newts"

ryanblakeley — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 14:26:29 +0000

I once took a group of young people foraging for mushrooms in the Willamette valley on a farm that had loads of these newts. I warned every body not to touch them.

After preparing dinner, one girl got very ill, as did I, while other people who ate the dinner were fine. I was so worried I'd mis-identified some mushrooms.

But turns out she had handled one of these newts and the bacteria had transferred to the mushrooms she picked. I contacted it from washing the mushrooms. I threw up several times that night.

In hindsight, had we not washed the mushrooms as thoroughly as we did, things could have gone much worse.

New comment by ryanblakeley in "A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine"

ryanblakeley — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 13:05:47 +0000

Sperm bank

New comment by ryanblakeley in "The Pyrex Glass Controversy That Just Won't Die (2019)"

ryanblakeley — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:47:30 +0000

Silicon lids on glass containers are a great combo. I use Weck jars, wide-mouth for easier cleaning, in sizes 1L, 500mL, and 200mL, in my commercial kitchen. And stainless steel hotel pans and lids for everything else.

Consumer-grade stuff is a waste of time for several reasons, but in-particular the lack of standardized sizes. When I do catering and people ask about food storage I recommend those wide-mouth glass jars and 4-inch 1/9th and 6-inch 1/6th pans, and standardized baking sheets (1/2 and 1/4 sizes mostly) with re-usable lids.

New comment by ryanblakeley in "Signs of ritual performed 12,000 years ago"

ryanblakeley — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 03:16:19 +0000

> something belonging to a sick person is fastened to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick is then stuck in the ground and a fire lit beneath it. Mulla-mullung chant the name of the sick person. Once the stick falls, the ritual is complete.

Signs of ritual performed 12,000 years ago

ryanblakeley — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 02:11:30 +0000

Article URL: https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/indigenous-australia-ritual-12000-years/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862183

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Ecology in science fiction: interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky

ryanblakeley — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 19:20:09 +0000

Article URL: https://ryanblakeley.net/p/other-worlds-science-fiction-and

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40215099

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ryanblakeley in "What can LLMs never do?"

ryanblakeley — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 03:42:20 +0000

Just to be clear, these models can answer questions about relationships between people if you mean family relationships.

Answering questions about what you're describing sounds really interesting. What would a training set be like that describes a bunch of complex human relationships and then asks questions about them with objective answers?

New comment by ryanblakeley in "Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, a.k.a. "Masonry" layout"

ryanblakeley — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 19:34:47 +0000

"Dry stack" is another term for that, a stone wall without mortar.

In my opinion, thinking of this as a grid is misguided. It's barely different than flex columns. I would want to be able to have some objects take up more width than one column, or not have clean columns at all. Like "space filling" and "mosaic".

Ant pheromones may help protect hikers and campers from ticks

ryanblakeley — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 14:55:15 +0000

Article URL: https://phys.org/news/2024-04-ant-pheromones-hikers-campers.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40023536

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The headspace of flying squirrels and fossil rodents with 3D brain models

ryanblakeley — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 15:19:47 +0000

Article URL: https://ryanblakeley.net/p/getting-in-the-headspace-of-a-squirrel

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39906750

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Suppressing boredom at work hurts future productivity

ryanblakeley — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 23:29:14 +0000

Article URL: https://phys.org/news/2024-03-suppressing-boredom-future-productivity.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39870191

Points: 84

# Comments: 58

New comment by ryanblakeley in "Ant Geopolitics"

ryanblakeley — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 15:59:46 +0000

Is sexual cannibalism off the table?

New comment by ryanblakeley in "Ant Geopolitics"

ryanblakeley — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 15:20:38 +0000

Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi book Children of Time has a pretty cool take on the future of ant wars. I'm interviewing him in a couple weeks to talk about ecology in science fiction. If anyone has a suggestion for a question I'd love to hear it.

How the Aoudad Invaded Texas (2020)

ryanblakeley — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 03:16:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/01/how-aoudad-invaded-texas/604834/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39366003

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ryanblakeley in "A fuel cell that harvests energy from microbes living in dirt"

ryanblakeley — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 18:25:02 +0000

> generated 68x more power than needed to operate its sensors

> all components...can be purchased at a local hardware store

I can't help but think this would be used for surveillance. All you need is dirt to run a sensor and transmitter. But it's cool science.

It would be interesting to figure out how much does it take away from the soil biome's energy budget. If you did a whole acre of these, would the insects, worms, and millipedes take a hit, and then birds and reptiles etc.?

New comment by ryanblakeley in "Bees have an internal sense of time (2022)"

ryanblakeley — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 21:05:56 +0000

Thanks for the recommendation. I write about animal intelligence and will be keen to pick that one up.

The molecular basis of circadian rhythm has been studied in fruit flies. Every cell has a chemical clock which adjusts for a range of temperatures. They found that calorie restriction and cold temperature extends the life span of fruit flies. But if you alter the DNA of their circadian clock those lifespan increases do not happen.