This kind of technique can be used in 3D space as well! The analysis here represents Escher's techniques as conformal maps in the complex plane. Conformal maps are also possible, though more limited, in R^3. This is something that I explored some years ago and wrote an article about it, though it focuses more on graphics than math: https://www.osar.fr/notes/logspherical/
So to do this same Droste effect in 3D you would need a self-similar volume? Though since we can't really see 3D, we could never have that "one circle zooms in" effect.
Or could you walk around in such a world? That would be a very cool concept for a game.
Though since we can't really see 3D, we could never have that "one circle zooms in" effect.
Well, the 3D structure just needs to be sufficiently "holey" for the effect to become apparent. For example a cage-like structure, or a house with no roof (when seen from above).
Now that is the coolest fridge I've ever seen. Found a video of it in action (yes, featuring the same dad joke all over the comments but that is not stopping me): https://youtu.be/RoGuvvzHY1A?t=416
Mind-bending indeed, but looks pretty impractical. In an ordinary fridge, if your egg carton is a bit out of place, your door may not close properly. In this one, you're going to have liquid omelette slathered all over the place, and how do you even clean the bottom of that thing?
Any country where eggs are industrially washed before showing up in grocery stores.
Their protective coating (called the bloom, I believe?) goes away when that happens, and they become susceptible to salmonella when they stay at room temperature.
It's true. The bloom on the eggs protects them from whatever nastiness is on the outside.
This includes salmonella, which may be present if your flock is infected in the poop on the outside of the shell (remember hens only have one egress port), plus any other sources of environmental pathogens, of which there are many.
When the bloom is washed off the egg, pathogens have an easier time penetrating the shell and consuming the nutritious yummy bits inside. At room temperature, they can multiply rapidly. Refrigeration slows the rate of growth.
An unwashed egg retains the barrier, and stays fresh longer without refrigeration.
YMMV on household acceptance of dirty eggs on countertops, but they are cleaner than many other items within arms' reach that we are conditioned to not think about. :)
I happily keep eggs in the box on my kitchen worktop for maybe a couple of weeks without them going bad. They'll happily last longer, but the eggs won't be at their best.
Incidentally, I heard somewhere that using a ridge to crack eggs on (like the edge of a frying pan) isn't best as that can possibly drive a bit of poopy shell into the interior though if it's just about to be cooked and eaten then that's less problematic. I use the flat kitchen top to crack the shell instead which leads to the occasional amusing outcome of cracking it too hard and dumping the whole egg onto the worktop.
When we've had "too many" hens, we've had multiple large salad bowls full of eggs on the countertops. And that's after overwhelming our friends and neighbors.
They will easily last 4-6 weeks with no major degradation (i.e. still good for omelets, but use the freshest ones for poaching).
The forest predators eventually help moderate our egg surplus. Free range comes with risks, alas.
Interesting point about ridge-cracking. I'd never thought about it, but it makes sense and I will mend my ways! :)
Many British people and Australians, even though our eggs are sold at room temperature and unwashed. I don't know why, but for most of us it 'feels wrong' to store eggs anywhere else.
The idea is nice, but one thing I use a refrigerator for constantly is putting rectangular things in there. A box of cake, half of the lasagne left over in its oven dish, various containers, et cetera. Even cartons of milk and yoghurt have a square or oblong horizontal plane. Those round shelves are ideal for cilinders with a small diameter; bottles of condiment and beer, basically.
Mostly yes. Upright fridge and freezer designs trade off efficiency for convenience (rooting around in a chest fridge/freezer can be annoying). https://youtu.be/CGAhWgkKlHI
The plugin in that demo isn't by Jeskola, it's by HD (Haldreamer) who I believe is a Russian audio developer who made some nice Buzz plugins in the early 2000's. Source: I have it installed and I just checked the "about" box.
Come on, HN, you can't let this information stay under the front page for 13 hours and everyone's like "ah yes of course". Please don't register the mousemove event handler on window, that old school hack never really worked and was obsoleted 10 years ago when the pointer API became standard.
For some context, the author later became the language consultant for Rings of Power, therefore having to fill a very similar role to David Salo, whose work gets much critique in this essay. Makes you wonder if the ideal of "don't translate English to Elvish" was preserved when faced with the reality of the series production.
I love this and will make it my motto. Scale yourself 100x every 3 years, or you're too slow. If I manage to keep it up roughly 11 years I will finally achieve planet scale.
I would suggest sending this as an email to the mods instead of a reply, what you're doing is practically a bug report to the bot owner right now. The resulting discussion isn't super interesting either (IMO).
I am not signing up to a mini-moderator who has to e-mail dang 5 times a day. I want to not see these messages in the first place, and for that to be possible, the community needs to learn and be able to recognise this for themselves so this spam can be flagged and killed on sight.
If the bot owner happens to waste their time reading the responses to the dozens of comments one of their many spambots made, and improves the bots as a result, so be it. They're already winning the war as it stands, not like things can get much worse. I'd like to at least try to make an effort to make things better.
Maybe the actual answer is that I just need to stop using HN, though, since the spambots are taking over the site and yet people are more concerned with the people pointing that out than the actual problem.
Thanks - this was a good catch, and it makes steam come out my ears to see any account abusing HN like that.
You don't have to email us, of course! But please understand that we're on the same side. We don't want to see HN overrun by generated comments (a form of spam) any more than you, or other users do. Remember that tomhow and I were avid users of HN for many years before we became mods.
All: generated comments and bots aren't allowed here. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you notice an account that appears to be consistently pattern-matching to this, and have a minute to let us know, we'd appreciate a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, but we do monitor the inbox closely (including fishing through the spam bin for real users) and we take these reports seriously.
As someone very engaged in reading HackerNews comments I observed that your comment and the comment you are replying to have that exact same format of three short paragraphs.
The people behind these bots most certainly found that many engaging, authentic comments follow this clever pattern. It is also worth noting that such comments are remarkably digestible – due to their brevity and decomposition into even smaller logical and lexical parts – and swiftly read, requiring only a very short attention span and little intellectual investment from the reader.
This makes me very curious about the statistics on how HackerNews comments are structured and how well different formats of comments perform in the community. I would be thrilled to dive into the data and might write a neat program to analyze this sharing the results with the community.
The data you'd need for that is all available through both the HN Firebase API (which is a bit antiquated) and Algolia's HN Search API. If you find anything interesting, definitely let us know!
Incidentally, both comments were edited after the fact. Neither my nor Dang's comment were originally of this length but we both made edits that ended up there. I did notice the irony :)
OK, I sent the email myself. You don't have to do it. Just once, not 5 times per day. Agree about community awareness, but I think emailing the mods is more effective than responding to one of the 1000 comments this account is making.
That's right—some users vouched for those 3 after we'd killed them.
That makes sense, because if you look at individual posts in isolation you might think they were unfairly killed. One needs to look at the posting history of the account as a whole to understand what the issue was.
(Btw, thanks for explaining the context in those other threads.)
I've had repeated comment and email exchanges with you over the years over whether or not an explicit "killed" or "dead" indicator on accounts and their posts/comments should exist. I understand the reasons against this, and arguably they'd be more relevant in the case of detected bot accounts (the indicator would be yet more training data, assuming feedback training).
I've also been experimenting with my own indicators for specific accounts based on my own criteria and interactions which I've found useful (applied through my own HN tweaks). E.g., if I see an explicit mod note that an account has been banned, I can mark it as such myself, sparing confusion.
How HN can implement a Voight-Kampff test becomes an increasingly relevant question.... One of several HN needs to consider with increasing urgency.
more important than an indicator it would probably be useful to somehow disable vouching for a killed account. i don't know if it is possible to set the flag counter to some high number so that vouching simply has no effect or to an invalid number like -1
That's antithetical to how HN has operated in the past. Vouching for deads is fair when the account is an actual human, and happens to post valid content. I do this occasionally myself (I read with "showdead" on), though not especially often.
Accounts killed for spamming AI content seem to me to violate that premise, and an unvouchable kill does seem appropriate, especially where it's not immediately evident to the casual reader that an account was killed for posting AI content.
I'm thinking of how I'd like to indicate such accounts myself, and am leaning toward adding a robot emogi via an ":after" CSS rule.
i think we are actually agreeing. i am not talking about making kills unvouchable in general but i am suggesting how an unvouchable kill could be implemented without to much effort. the unvouchable kill should of course be only applied to appropriate cases, it's not meant to replace the regular kill.
Yes, we are in agreement here. I was simply noting what HN's past policy and rationale have been.
LLMs change the calculus somewhat in making automated bot-posting far more viable. It's clearly already a problem. I suspect that moderation policies will have to adapt to this. There's also the fact that such a change would make AI-banned discernable from normal bans, in that AI-banned accounts would not have vouchable comments. If explicitly noting AI banning isn't adopted on the basis that this would provide information to either the AI or its operator of the fact / nature of the banning, the absence of a vouch option would reveal the fact regardless.
(A relatively small example of changes we'll see induced by LLMs in the larger world as well. Interesting times....)
my suggestion would not remove the vouch option, it would just make it ineffective. people using it would not notice. the system would still indicate that you vouched for a message.
I thought the charming ambiguity came from "fried" either acting as an adjective or as a verb. These aren't just any shrimp, they're chef shrimp, and they've prepared some delicious fried rice for us. Isn't that incredible? Shrimp fried rice.
Right. It's a noun phrase either way. The question is whether it is rice that were fried by shrimp ("shrimp-fried rice") or fried rice containing shrimp ("shrimp fried-rice").
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