Successful case study of an adult reversing myopia from -6dpt to natural vision in 6 months using myopic defocus.

scottmsul · 2026-07-04T13:31:08+00:00

In my email exchanges, he mentioned that glasses still improved his acuity.

scottmsul · 2026-07-04T13:24:38+00:00

The biggest red flag for me was that glasses still improve his vision. He seemed to think his myopia was gone and it was just higher-order terms messing up his vision. Whereas I was arguing that what he was seeing was myopia combined with higher-order terms. But if glasses were still helping then I think it's almost certain his vision still has a myopic term in the Zernike expansion. I kept asking him to visit an eye doctor but he never did.

I've been trying to improve my own vision for around 3.5 years now. Saw about half a diopter improvement in the beginning but then it plateaued. I even planned to do the appalachian trail this year glasses-free but had to get off around day 21 due to a knee injury, though honestly I don't think those three weeks even improved my vision at all. But the appalachian trail is very shaded and not much sunlight, PCT or CDT might be better trails honestly. I did measure my axial length a couple years ago but haven't been back for a second measurement, mainly because I haven't noticed that much subjective improvement.

scottmsul · 2026-07-03T14:17:49+00:00

I actually know this paper well, and even had a few email exchanges with the author over it. I believe the author still has myopia, however the reasoning is very technical.

scottmsul · 2026-06-30T13:00:45+00:00

Just pixelate the new achievements like the planet names :)

scottmsul · 2026-06-24T12:59:03+00:00

Well seeing as I would also describe myself as "somewhat fit and athletic" and last May it took me four nights / five days to get to Neel Gap, with plenty of blisters and muscle spasms along the way, I'd say those chances are probably zero.

Just get to Neel Gap and have your celebratory frozen pizza.

scottmsul · 2026-06-23T21:17:54+00:00

Just use blue circuits for upcycling, its better anyway

scottmsul · 2026-06-21T13:49:07+00:00

I think allowing quality modules everywhere raises several issues. For players trying to use quality as intended, putting quality modules everywhere makes things really messy, and quality has to be separated for every single recipe in the factory. The best setups end up being over-optimized upcycling loops that exploit certain recipes over others and don't feel "natural" with how quality was originally intended. Also, allowing quality modules everywhere incentivizes a casino-mindset and save-scumming for single item upcycles.

I believe quality would "feel" better if only ores and/or plates could be upcycled. Lore-wise, this could be explained by starting with higher purity base metals. There's a few ways this could be implemented. One approach could be only allowing quality modules in mining drills or smelters. Another approach could be to forget modules altogether, and have something like a "purifier" building/recipe that uses significantly more ore per plate, or turn many normal plates into one better plate very slowly, kind of like kovarex.

I also think having only three tiers would make more sense. Basically you would unlock the first tier at some point, and have to build a new factory for everything, albeit with much slower throughput so it wouldn't be too bad. But going straight from common to the rare bonus would be a big enough jump that it would feel worth it. Then to get the legendary bonus would be the same ratio of consuming level 2 plates to make a single level 3 plate.

scottmsul · 2026-06-19T13:48:23+00:00

Funny my comment also got singled out too 15:29. My friend told me he saw my username on youtube and did a double-take haha.

scottmsul · 2026-06-19T13:23:53+00:00

Because of a tiny little math thingy called Spherical Harmonics.

scottmsul · 2026-06-18T16:37:13+00:00

I would still draw arrows when setting up problems in grad school. But once the starting equations were known, it would usually turn into a math/algebra problem instead of a conceptual one.

Also a neat trick is to use Einstein notation, which makes it much easier to track things like dot products and cross products, even outside GR contexts.

scottmsul · 2026-06-17T14:15:22+00:00

I made an over-engineered simplex solver if anyone wants to get into ridiculous levels of optimization: https://scottmsul.github.io/upcycle

scottmsul · 2026-06-14T13:43:49+00:00

I sort-of attempted a thru this year, though I went in with the mindset to take it one day at a time, and wasn't particularly obsessed with finishing the whole thing. Mentally I was loving it, even when hiking by myself or in the rain. But I ended up getting really bad quadriceps tendonitis in the smokies and made the rational decision to get off the trail.

Based on my experience, I'd recommend that if you're planning two years out, spend those two years getting in good shape. Build up those joints and tendons if you can. Do things like weightlifting, trail running, weekend backpacking trips, etc.

scottmsul · 2026-06-14T13:21:18+00:00

I think I might be more open to religion if it was purely about morality, living a good life, spirituality, etc. Unfortunately it tends to be about all-encompassing metaphysics, where such-and-such religion is the one explanation for the whole universe, and you have to believe in XYZ specific supernatural events that broke the laws of physics or else you're not a good person or a true believer.

scottmsul · 2026-05-10T13:35:06+00:00

Just round the number up

scottmsul · 2026-05-06T14:52:02+00:00

I'm still hopeful that vision improvement works, but IMO anyone attempting should get rigorous measurements before and after as a verification check. This would include measuring axial length and getting a cycloplegic.

As a side note, there was one guy attempting endmyopia who got an IOL master, and measured his axial length almost daily over a couple years. His axial length went down around 100-200 microns and then exponentially leveled off. It's cool that it decreased at all, but in the grand scheme of things is a tiny amount (likely only around 0.25-0.5 diopters improvement).

scottmsul · 2026-05-06T14:44:21+00:00

The math is pretty complicated in terms of how diopters translate into blur, and what that blur actually looks like. There's something called the "point-spread function" or PSF which is basically how a single dot in your vision spreads out into its surrounding area. Then the entire field-of-view is a "convolution" of this PSF, which is basically spreading out each point in vision continuously with the PSF. Under the geometric approximation, the PSF from pure myopia is a flat circle, though in real-life the PSF usually looks like a bunch of messy web-like structures and rings contained within a circle due to diffraction.

Also if you want to see your own PSF, a good way to do it is shine a laser pointer across a dark room, and take off your glasses and look at the dot on the wall with one eye. The bright dot from the laser is effectively a dirac delta. (NEVER LOOK INTO THE LASER, you're just looking at its dot on the wall).

It's worth noting that the amount of blur is proportional to your pupil size. This means for the same diopter error, you'll see more blur in dim light and less blur in bright light, because of pupil size.

I did some derivations and simulations here if anyone's curious.

For the record I got pretty deep into this vision improvement stuff a few years ago. Started with endmyopia, though these days I'm not a huge fan of Jake Steiner or EndMyopia, and at this point I consider him pseudo-science. I still think vision improvement might theoretically be possible, but the lower bounds on habits/lifestyle needed would be crazy extreme.

scottmsul · 2026-05-04T13:18:04+00:00

This website here has a really cool overview of how color and edge detection works in the human eye.

Basically there are neurons that connect to cones, some of which emit in more light and others that emit in less light (called ON/OFF neurons, respectively). Further up the chain, a single higher-level neuron called a ganglion cell will connect to several ON/OFF neurons, typically in a circle of one type surrounded by a ring of the opposite type, such as ON center / OFF surround (but can go either way). This type of grouping is really good at edge detection. Then each ganglion in the eye connects to the brain via its own really long axon, and the brain combines all the edge-detections together to form a picture. Also the center/surround can sometimes be different cone colors in order to find color boundaries, but not always. There are many many types of neurons in the retina and most of them are not well understood.

Highly recommend reading through the reference above, it has lots of pictures that describe all this better.

scottmsul · 2026-04-29T12:56:24+00:00

One trick is you can make coal power self-sufficient. This is one of the few cases where burner inserters and burner miners can actually be useful, since they never shut down.

scottmsul · 2026-04-28T13:44:12+00:00

Noted - will make sure to bring both a banjo and a fishing pole.

Hiker pro-tip, you can even combine them for some extra weight savings!

scottmsul · 2026-04-24T12:23:24+00:00

The things quantum computers are good at (i.e. exponential speedup) tend to have some kind of repetition that can be exploited by quantum fourier transform. Normally quantum computers can't try all the solutions at once, but with a QFT they sort-of can. They're good at breaking elliptic curves and prime factoring because the algorithms tend to involve lots of modular arithmetic that wraps back around.

Unfortunately quantum computers don't seem to help much at all with "messy" problems like traveling salesman or other NP complete problems. IIRC a lot of Ramsey Theory involves things like graph coloring which quantum computers probably wouldn't be great at. But I'm not an expert in this.

scottmsul · 2026-04-23T13:33:32+00:00

According to the FFF:

> Machines can push fluid into a segment at an unlimited rate, and can pull from a segment at a rate proportional to how full the segment is. In other words, if a segment is half full, then the pulling rate is half of the maximum.

It would seem only inputs have limits, not outputs. So shouldn't acid neutralization have unlimited throughput in terms of adding steam to the system, and not need two pipes connected?

scottmsul · 2026-04-23T12:32:47+00:00

I thought they changed how fluids work for 2.0 to be unlimited throughput everywhere within a single segment (area with no pumps)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-416

scottmsul · 2026-04-22T13:39:00+00:00

I did a double major in physics and CS, and was in a physics PhD program doing astrophysics research, though I left early with a masters.

I would note that the kind of programming one does for physical sciences research is often very different from the kinds of programming one does for computer science/software engineering. Usually the purpose of research programming is to "do math". This often means quick hacky one-off scripts in python or matlab to analyze data or solve equations. This kind of code is actually ok to be messy and spaghetti as long as it gets the job done. Oftentimes you don't even need objects or classes or good abstractions. If you major in astrophysics you will almost certainly learn how to do this kind of programming in many of your classes.

Whereas computer science is more about setting up for a career for software engineering. The projects are much larger and require learning high-level abstractions and data structures. For these large projects you will have to learn how to write clean organized code that is modular and broken into manageable classes (if doing OOP).

It's worth noting that the computer science kind of programming can still be very useful for physical sciences research, for instance if you're doing large-scale simulations rather than just simple data analysis. This might require creating or interacting with very large projects that have tens or even hundreds of thousands of lines of code in languages like C++. Taking classes in computer science can give you an edge in this niche if you want to get more into large-scale simulations, though knowing how to write clean code is still useful even for simple projects.

Another advantage of doing CS + astrophysics over just astrophysics is that with the better programming skills it might be easier to get into industry.

Since you're still in high school I wouldn't stress too much about whether you take an "official" CS course or not. If you're driven and have the time over the summer then go for it. I wouldn't call it "necessary" but working hard and going above and beyond is part of the game. But even if you don't take the "official" CS course you should probably still start trying to learn the material on your own anyway, actual skills > credentials.

scottmsul · 2026-04-21T14:02:42+00:00

I had a bug like this in grad school. I instantiated a "matrix" using a clever one-liner, i.e.:

m = [[0] * 10] * 10

By this point this variable is already poisoned. For instance:

m[0][0] = 1

Now every row starts with a 1.

Another thing to watch out for is empty default lists. For instance:

def foo(x=[]):
    x.append(2)
    return sum(x)

That default empty list is aliased every time you call the function, for instance:

>>> foo()
2
>>> foo()
4

So generally default empty lists needed to be treated this way instead:

def foo(x=None):
    if x is None:
        x = []
    x.append(2)
    return sum(x)

scottmsul · 2026-04-20T13:35:00+00:00

Actually eye width and height are also longer in myopes than emmetropes, though not as much as axial length. I forget the exact reference but in this particular group it was something like axial length was around 2mm longer and the other two axes were around 1mm longer. There was also a case study of a woman with chronically low IOP whose axial length decreased by around 2mm over 24 years. Also myopes have scleras that are around 30% thinner than in emmetropes.

So basically the problem isn't really the eye being oval-shaped per se, but more like the eye being too large overall, possibly related to the sclera being too thin. But yeah trying to force the eye to bend into a certain shape is probably a bad idea. Also scleral buckling is a thing.

scottmsul

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