Hacker News: tonymillion

New comment by tonymillion in "The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)"

tonymillion — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:36:20 +0000

The fact there is still coal(and oil) in the ground pretty much rules out any "advanced" industrialized civilization that came before us.

I also use the Carboniferous Period as a metric as to why "Advanced alien life" isn't more abundant (and I believe it should be factored into the Fermi equation)...

All those trees growing, soaking up sun, dying and just laying there to be compressed and buried without anything to decompose them, and then humans using them like solar batteries to power civilization (i.e. burning the coal), is one of those million-to-one things that enabled the human race to develop beyond basic society.

We needed all that coal and oil (and gas) based power to get to the point - industrially and technologically - where we could even build solar panels or nuclear to replace them, so its not like you could start from first principals and jump straight to modern power generation either.

The odds that the same sequence of events - fungus and bacteria not having the tools to decompose lignin (or whatever the alien equivalent is) - to happen on an extra-solar planet is ... pardon my pun ... astronomical :D

(yes, I used a dash to separate ideas in a sentence, deal with it...)

New comment by tonymillion in "Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)"

tonymillion — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:23:26 +0000

> Thats’s comparable to a single strand of spaghetti holding up about 3,300 one-pound bags of sugar

Is that cooked or raw spaghetti?

New comment by tonymillion in "Autonomous flying umbrella follows and shields users from rain and sunlight"

tonymillion — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 18:00:41 +0000

Or the Nixie [1] (actually nixie was earlier, but went out of business in 2017)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_Labs_Nixie

New comment by tonymillion in "Genuinely, my all-time favourite image: Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis"

tonymillion — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:09:48 +0000

Life imitates art imitating life: The story [1] of the Brontosaurus is an interesting one...

[1] https://obscuredinosaurfacts.com/blog/post/2019/08/31/bronto...

New comment by tonymillion in "Fuzix OS"

tonymillion — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:54:14 +0000

Except it’s not…

https://codeberg.org/EtchedPixels/FUZIX

New comment by tonymillion in "It's all a blur"

tonymillion — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:02:27 +0000

I believe Microsoft of all people solved this a while ago by using the gyroscope in a phone to produce a de-blur kernel that cleaned up the image.

Its somewhere here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computation...

New comment by tonymillion in "Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings"

tonymillion — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 01:05:10 +0000

That almost looks like a scene from half-life 2

New comment by tonymillion in "When ChatGPT turns informant"

tonymillion — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 17:11:30 +0000

Or… and bear with me on this…

They could just read your text message and browser history

New comment by tonymillion in "Grief gets an expiration date, just like us"

tonymillion — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 15:14:39 +0000

That actually happened with texts to a grandmothers phone number that was (eventually) reassigned.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/family-sho...

New comment by tonymillion in "Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%"

tonymillion — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 01:18:38 +0000

Honestly, the first article about peacock feathers having laser cavities was far more interesting and completely distracted me from the "Cat facts vs AI conundrum" article.

New comment by tonymillion in "TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale"

tonymillion — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 03:20:08 +0000

The best use of the SMS in the MacBook… or should I say SMACKbook

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uvQTTPr9Rw

New comment by tonymillion in "Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff"

tonymillion — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 17:24:28 +0000

Schizophrenia is the price we pay for owning a Cat

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38041862/

New comment by tonymillion in "Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure"

tonymillion — Sun, 18 May 2025 22:53:31 +0000

And let’s not forget “Ken Lee”

https://youtu.be/vUAaHkGpJy8

New comment by tonymillion in "Why Fennel?"

tonymillion — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 22:09:22 +0000

At that point you’re almost, but not quite into the realm of “forth”

New comment by tonymillion in "I tasted Honda's spicy rodent-repelling tape and I will do it again (2021)"

tonymillion — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:54:02 +0000

Amphetamine Dopamine Ketamine

Now thats a party!

(and as I said in another reply) Strychnine

New comment by tonymillion in "I tasted Honda's spicy rodent-repelling tape and I will do it again (2021)"

tonymillion — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:34:55 +0000

Strychnine

side note: It kills you by making all your muscles tense so strongly that you can't breath any more. The muscles in your face tense in a way that it gives you whats called a "Strychnine Smile".

New comment by tonymillion in "Reflect Orbital: Sunlight after dark using a constellation of spatial reflectors"

tonymillion — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 04:08:44 +0000

Or just put mirrors on the ground to reflect the sunlight back out /s

New comment by tonymillion in "British Placename Mapper"

tonymillion — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 19:52:11 +0000

Also doesn’t help that it’s actual name is “Worcestershire sauce” which is even more difficult to say.

New comment by tonymillion in "FindMyCat – Open-Source Pet Tracker"

tonymillion — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 19:13:21 +0000

Enjoy your toxoplasmosis, and subsequent schizophrenic symptoms… but at least your cats got to hunt all the diseased rats they like, right?

New comment by tonymillion in "Connecting two dial-up modems using a VoIP ATA"

tonymillion — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 16:32:55 +0000

It would still be encoded, assuming your (analogue) POTS call traversed more than one exchange then it would have been coded to g.711 (ulaw or alaw) for that inter-exchange. Although (from memory) that would be 10ms packets.