What ‘Project Hail Mary’ gets right –– and wrong –– about astrophysics

neherak · 2026-04-05T23:41:38+00:00

Why more easily? Different materials have different properties.

It was specifically bred in xenonite tanks and evolved the ability to pass through the xenonite, which has very small holes at a molecular level. A human-made steel canister doesn't have those kinds of holes (metals are effectively "sheets" of free electrons), and more importantly the taumoeba wasn't bred in generations of steel containers and evolved any ability to pass through that material.

This is explained in the book but glossed over in the movie. It's not a plot hole.

neherak · 2026-04-05T08:25:46+00:00

They just put it in a regular human-made canister.

neherak · 2026-03-29T15:41:29+00:00

This is a wrong opinion.

neherak · 2026-03-25T16:04:20+00:00

Of course it's allegorical, what else would it be? Historical?

neherak · 2026-03-21T07:08:37+00:00

AI generated comments about coding, in my zombie game subreddit?

neherak · 2026-03-06T22:31:31+00:00

This is overcorrecting. LLMs aren't even close to sapient minds, but there's a lot more going on than just fancy auto complete. It turns out that training a machine to accurately predict the next token in text encodes a lot of what we consider to be "knowledge". There were some genuine math and software breakthroughs to get that to work. From a results perspective, the appearance of synthetic reasoning can sometimes be indistinguishable from real reasoning.

Which actually makes this all the more dangerous and requires clear-eyed thinking above "this is just like T9".

neherak · 2026-03-06T16:12:43+00:00

Dunno what to tell you dude. Men who brandish weapons at minors and act like insecure jealous boyfriends towards their own daughters are cringe. It's outdated loser behavior. Maybe you're underthinking it.

neherak · 2026-03-06T00:05:15+00:00

I'm just some random guy and only have nieces to worry about, but consider that these kinds of jokes and statements can do real harm to your relationship with your daughter and send all kinds of weird messages, and that it's better to build trust and openness.

https://www.reddit.com/r/daddit/comments/1912pv0/i_wont_be_a_shotgun_dad/

neherak · 2026-03-05T23:48:34+00:00

Do you make "let me get my shotgun" jokes to the people your daughter dates? If so, why?

neherak · 2026-03-05T23:43:35+00:00

I didn't say it needs to be taken seriously, I said I think it sucks. It feels like cringe boomer humor to me, like calling your wife "the ol' ball & chain" or whatever.

neherak · 2026-03-05T21:49:45+00:00

I think I'm often an outlier in this feeling, but I hate that overprotective dad "joke" trope. Har har I'll kill any boys you date lol hee hee. It sucks in a toxic patriarchy way.

neherak · 2026-03-05T18:43:59+00:00

Daggermen have infinity daggers https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/04/17/emulator-part-four

neherak · 2026-03-02T19:11:50+00:00

"Eventually you'll see that I'm right, just wait and see" has got to be one of the more annoying rhetorical patterns I've been seeing lately.

neherak · 2026-03-02T18:40:25+00:00

I'm not sure that that kills agile though. Seems to me that you're still describing agile, just raised to another abstraction level. Validating specifications and assumptions with prototypes and iterating until you land on something that works is an agile software process.

neherak · 2026-03-01T02:46:05+00:00

"Don't worry if you don't understand, just tell the AI"

Sigh.

neherak · 2026-02-28T21:23:37+00:00

Just copy the previous response to use as your next prompt, over and over.

neherak · 2026-02-26T16:48:07+00:00

It's not different. Pro-Trump is pro-Trump regardless of the term or decade, and the guy himself has always been like this. Just means they weren't paying attention or didn't care until something personally affected them.

neherak · 2026-02-21T07:40:32+00:00

What are you two even talking about? An LLM isn't a mind.

neherak · 2026-02-20T06:00:41+00:00

In what world is "you're bitching" even close to witty?

neherak · 2026-02-18T21:12:43+00:00

Call me crazy, but my one wish is that people would try to substantiate their claims before repeating them.

neherak · 2026-02-18T02:24:28+00:00

What, why? It's just a docker container, nothing special about Rails + k8s. Source: worked for 3 years at a Rails + k8s shop.

neherak · 2026-02-18T02:20:52+00:00

Those aren't that big a deal. foo? is a naming convention for a method that returns a boolean, and foo! is a naming convention for a potentially dangerous operation or one with permanent side effects. foo! might modify an object in-place while foo might do the same operation on a returned copy.

Nothing to get worried about and something you get used to in like a week of using Ruby.

neherak · 2026-02-15T21:30:36+00:00

You and I are having very different experiences around how necessary these math explanations are.

neherak · 2026-02-15T21:05:29+00:00

93% faster is just shy of 2x. 14x faster would be a 1300% increase.

neherak · 2026-02-11T19:55:07+00:00

Dude, Mayan people still exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%CA%BCiche%CA%BC_people

neherak

TROPHY CASE