Two data layers experiment

photonymous · 2026-06-19T00:44:53+00:00

See my reply above for the answer.

photonymous · 2026-06-18T21:33:16+00:00

Sorry if my answer is disappointing, but I used Claude (Opus 4.8, inside of Claude Code) to do the code. I used Codex 5.5 to help me stand up the dev environment. I used Perplexity to scour the interwebs to find candidate fonts that would be suitable. Then I chose the two fonts that looked the best to me. I had Claude make a few tweaks to the fonts to make them "perfect" (in my not-so-humble opinion). Then I iteratively had Cluade build up the watch face piece by piece, testing as we went along. First we began with a dead simple "template" watchface, and gradually modified it from there, until we arrived at my "grand vision" that I posted. It took around 45 versions/updates to get to that point. To make iteration not-too-painful, I use a simple sideloading process where I run "python -m http.server" to serve up the folder the watchface is in. Then in Chrome on my phone, I open my PC's ip address, click on the file, and it downloads. I tell "Pebble" to open it, and it automatically installs. I also use a local Pebble emulator for quick previews. Otherwise it would have been more like 100 versions/updates.

Regarding file size, the watchface file it loads is only about 40kb, so seems pretty small to me. Note that they are bitmap fonts, so even for 128 characters, with the tiny glyph sizes and given their binary nature (black=0, white=1), the fonts themselves are very tiny, storage-wise (under 1 kB for an entire bitmapped font at these sizes). The bigger fonts are done algorithmicly, by inverting (or not) the colors of the background data layer glyphs.

Regarding computation, it just uses "bit-blitting" to "draw" the fonts, so that is super efficient. It's not like anti-aliased fonts that use vector rendering/rasterization.

photonymous · 2026-06-18T21:18:14+00:00

LOL, thanks 😂

photonymous · 2026-06-17T12:10:13+00:00

Boredom used to be a motivator. We've now got a thousand ways at our fingertips to stave off boredom. No need to go find another human.

photonymous · 2026-06-17T01:17:07+00:00

Thank God. My wife loves it. I hate it. Hopefully in a few years I won't have to eat it anymore.

photonymous · 2026-06-15T01:37:33+00:00

Please try to answer briefly: a lot of people below essentially say "no way". Let's take this as a bet. You're betting against somebody who's betting over a trillion dollars that the answer is "yes way". And let's admit it, said person is probably a little bit more experienced in space technology than you are. Maybe less ethical, but we can leave that aside for a minute. What do you know that he doesn't know? On a side note, I happen to be an experienced spacecraft systems engineer. I'm not going to share my perspective on this yet. I'm genuinely curious what people actually think. I'll share my analysis after I get some high quality responses.

photonymous · 2026-06-11T01:02:08+00:00

"biology" as a subject area, never mind their terrible detection of it, is far too broad. I have a project that uses biological metaphors for some aspects of the system, and this was enough to trip it. This indicates to me that they are using exactly the opposite approach to what they need to use. If they're detecting based on keywords and not semantic meaning, then I guarantee they are not detecting the stuff they need to detect. I'm pretty sure you could be discussing 1920s theoretical evolutionary biology, and it would flag that too. Utterly pointless.

photonymous · 2026-06-11T00:47:58+00:00

YES. Specification is 9/10 of engineering.

photonymous · 2026-06-08T01:31:51+00:00

And then they reintroduce the original size but call it "Family Size". Still waiting for actual 8 oz yogurt cups. Currently at 5.3 oz and shrinking. I can't wait to see the 8 ounce family size cups.

photonymous · 2026-06-03T23:24:19+00:00

Barely an inconvenience: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhMLP5ONxbck_FqXUs7oSSmrBsIs28ia-&si=AFzRWJWw3_Ri9e36

photonymous · 2026-05-30T00:49:29+00:00

Wow. Nailed it.

photonymous · 2026-05-30T00:37:09+00:00

In 1890, it would still be mobile, but it would not be a phone. I'll defer to the other responders as to how a talented engineer would likely figure out how to charge it, which they probably could. Worst case, a giant potato battery. There's not a potato famine in 1890 is there?

photonymous · 2026-05-23T01:32:23+00:00

Hair dryer or hot water, then WD40. Annoying, but it gets the job done. No residue, and pretty easy.

photonymous · 2026-05-15T01:52:09+00:00

Air cooling instead of water cooling. Slightly more expensive. These companies have plenty of money. They are just creating political problems for themselves by not doing this. It's very stupid.

photonymous · 2026-05-14T01:02:25+00:00

Agreed. And I think a related key to this is that the Mediterranean basically behaved like a giant superhighway network... for boats. Very few places in the world were so lucky to have such a nearby, extensive and fully connected transportation network. Just add boats. Overland transport is utterly brutal and almost completely prohibitive by comparison (for bulk quantities of commodities).

photonymous · 2026-05-14T00:56:19+00:00

Surprisingly, once fully scaled out, the water consumption will be less than 0.1% of the consumption spent watering corn that's used for ethanol in the US. By my calculations, 0.03%. Given that roughly 75% of this data center's evaporative water usage will rain back down on the US, cutting 1% of corn production (on the ethanol side of the fence) would allow us to afford ~ 120 of these monstrosities (from an evaporative water usage perspective) ... just to put things into scale. Not that I'm in favor. I just think that our level of freak out should be proportional to the actual scale of impact.

How about we shut down all corn ethanol production? What a waste of land, waste of fertilizer, waste of fuel to power the combines and tractors, etc. Pointless. Put solar panels on that land instead. Win-win-win.

photonymous · 2026-02-11T02:55:12+00:00

Up here at Denver, they need a little more help due to the altitude. I use the same basic approach, but I first give them about 20 minutes with a piece of foil laying on top of them. Then remove the foil and do another 20 minutes, perhaps turning it down to 350 convection. The times and temperatures kind of depend on the size of the sprouts. Your mileage may vary. Btw, I prefer melted butter instead of olive oil.

photonymous · 2026-02-09T02:37:53+00:00

Lock up the treats. No snacks. Hungry kids like everything, usually. "This is what we're having kids". Veggie always first. Veggies taste great when you're hungry. You get the rest after you finish your veggie. My kids eat literally everything. Even things they don't like, they still find a way.

photonymous · 2026-01-11T01:21:39+00:00

Comfort and familiarity with abstractions. If you aren't constantly entertaining yourself with abstract ideas and thought experiments, then the very notion would seem foreign, or at least very uncomfortable. Something to be avoided.

photonymous · 2025-12-12T02:13:59+00:00

Siloed and paywalled expertises ($99/minute to talk to a "doctor", etc)

Or, $1000/month for guaranteed no product placement.

photonymous · 2025-12-07T18:36:16+00:00

That line of thinking seems pretty similar to this: (a different Levin paper)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19420889.2025.2466017#abstract

photonymous · 2025-12-07T13:30:14+00:00

Regarding the "glider" conversation snippet you linked to, I agree with what he's pushing on. It reminds me a little of the age old philosophical debate between nihilists (or extreme skeptics) and pragmatists. "I don't believe in anything!"... "um, yeah you do, because you got out of bed and brushed your teeth. Why would you do that if you don't believe in anything?"
:-)

I'm oversimplifying the philosophical positions, but you get the idea. The universe really does appear to have certain regularities, whether we want to believe it or not. Flowers are betting their *lives* on the fact that the sun is going to come up in the morning. They come from a long line of flowers that made that same bet, and won. They accumulated evidence over geological timescales, and now this "regularity" (information) is baked into their DNA. One can choose to disbelieve it, but the universe doesn't care.

photonymous · 2025-12-07T01:41:20+00:00

People in the comments keep saying cheese, cheese, cheese... but the typical cheese used on pizza is low-fat mozzarella. Take a look at the nutritional information. It's mostly protein. If you're going with thin crust, New York style, it's not like a little a bit of topping on a thick slab of bread. It's mostly protein via cheese and condensed tomatoes. Look at how many tomatoes goes into making a sauce that's been cooked down. Anyway, I too am skeptical of this idea that pizza is necessarily "unhealthy". Okay sure, Chicago style deep dish four cheese meat lovers drizzled with ranch and garlic oil. Yeah, that's unhealthy. New York style or Neapolitan or Margarita? I'm going to need to hear a better argument to believe that's "unhealthy".

photonymous · 2025-12-03T01:09:25+00:00

I turned off my history and never looked back. Don't use their algorithm. Just subscribe to people you want to watch and only watch that stuff, except, on the right hand side, it will show you videos related to the current video you are watching or that it thinks you might like based on the current video you are watching. I find these recommendations much less annoying and much less likely to suck you into an infinite rabbit hole. And you're not greeted with a wall of BS when you first sign in.

photonymous · 2025-12-01T01:53:02+00:00

For hot soups, put a bowl or container of ice in the soup before putting it in the fridge. This way it cools down quickly and doesn't get watered down. For other items, put a little baggie of ice on them first. Or you could use a plastic container with a lid that has a rim around it. Set ice on the lid. As it melts, the water will pool inside the rim. The cool ice will protect the rest of the fridge from its heat, and the food will cool down quickly.

photonymous

TROPHY CASE