I can really relate to this — in school, biology felt like dry memorization. It never clicked with me, and I wrote it off for years. If I could recommend one subtopic of biology to math and physic people, it would definitely be mycology!
It's like real-life Pokémon GO and field mycology has a "collect 'em all" vibe. You get out into nature, identify and catalog fungi — it scratches the same itch as exploring an open-world game.
Fungi are discrete, classifiable entities with tons of metadata: GPS location, substrate, time of year, morphology, spore prints, photos, microscopic features. Perfect for structured data nerds.
Unlike many branches of biology, you don’t need to go to the Amazon. You can walk into your backyard or a nearby forest and find species newly known for your country and sometimes even new for science.
Microscopes, macro lenses, chemicals, even DNA sequencing. There’s a hacker spirit in mycology.
Projects like iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, and FungiMap are full of real scientific contributions from everyday people. The barrier to entry is low, the impact can be surprisingly high, and the community is genuinely welcoming. Many leading contributors — even those publishing in cutting-edge scientific journals — are passionate autodidacts rather than formally trained biologists.
High intra-species variance, subtle features — perfect playground for machine learning wich is not nearly "solved" here.
Cordyceps that zombify insects. Giant underground networks that share nutrients between trees. Bioluminescent mushrooms. Many weird stories.
Mycology is also becoming a computational frontier - projects like FungiNet use graph networks to map symbiotic relationships, and citizen science platforms generate massive datasets perfect for ML applications beyond just classification. The unsolved phylogenetic relationships and complex biochemical pathways of fungi represent some of the most interesting computational problems in modern biology.
Over the past 30 years, computers and software have dramatically transformed our world. Yet many sectors remain heavily influenced by their analog history. My understanding is that the HN community has always recognized that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed across work environments, administration, and general processes. Didn't many of us believe that numerous jobs could be replaced by a few lines of code if inputs and outputs were properly standardized? The fact that this hasn't happened or has occurred very slowly due to institutional inertia is another story altogether.
Whether software development will become a "bullshit job" or how the world will look in a few years remains unknown. But those who constantly praise their work as software developers while simultaneously acknowledging that other non-physical jobs and processes could be fundamentally overhauled are living in a cognitive bubble—something I wouldn't have expected in this community.
The Rust Belt's just one part of the story, not the whole US economy. Globalization actually created tons of wealth for the USA, but that money hasn't been spread around fairly. It's all piled up in coastal cities and with rich folks while factory towns got left behind.
Cutting off global trade wouldn't fix anything - it would tank the overall economy while only helping a few powerful players pulling the strings. The real problem isn't trade deals; it's that the USA never properly invested the profits back into the communities that got hit hardest.
I’ve been thinking about the potential benefits of incorporating something like this into VR headsets. Since VR already controls the user’s visual perception, would adding a high-intensity blue light (not via the OLED displays but indirectly) allow for a more effective way to simulate bright daylight conditions? Achieving 10,000 lux at the eye would be much easier this way.
It seems clear by now that the Tesla brand has completely fallen out of favor with the progressive, high-earning, status-conscious demographic in Germany (their main buyer group). While there are tentative trends toward avoiding US products in general, I see little potential for this becoming widespread. Few people are actually boycotting Apple or Coca-Cola, and most continue to make a clear distinction between the American people and culture (which they consider close friends) versus the current US administration.
I wonder how this compares to markets like Canada or Denmark? Are other brands facing similar challenges in those countries as well?
Maybe not exactly the same thing, but obviously the arms industry is going to face some challenges because of the new American foreign policies.
Maybe they will be offset by general increase in arms production, but Europe has alternatives to most of the weapons they currently buy from USA (including strategic air defense). They just need to scale up production.
Where is the line, according to Germans? I would have thought “supporting German far right parties and doing a sieg heil (‘ironically’, ‘unknowingly’, or not)” is pretty close, yeah?
Tesla's EV sales in France decreased by 60% in January. In a context of a stable market for EV. Germany alone is small but the trend is present in a lot of EU countries ( Sweden, Denmark and Norway).
For reference, Germany was the third biggest market for Tesla (1/10 of China). France was 4th (1/10 of China too) and Canada was 5th (1/11 of China).
It's not the end of Tesla, but it's politically related.
In Europe, it's obvious to everyone that he actually did, and deliberately.
He can't ignore the meaning of this.
It's not even a discussion for us. That is fact, you or the ADL (I don't care who they are) can say anything they want, the fact that he did it and can't ignore the meaning of this make him a Nazi. Adding to the context of supporting Neo-nazi political groups and the ideas that he is pushing, there is absolutely zero doubt why he made a nazi salute.
You’re right that "history" starts with writing, but "prehistoric" refers to the human period before written records, starting with the use of stone tools around 2.5 million years ago.
I believe the concept of multimodal token embeddings is quite fitting for my own thinking. Certainly, my 'embeddings' are not always fully formed words, but sometimes they are.
It's like real-life Pokémon GO and field mycology has a "collect 'em all" vibe. You get out into nature, identify and catalog fungi — it scratches the same itch as exploring an open-world game.
Fungi are discrete, classifiable entities with tons of metadata: GPS location, substrate, time of year, morphology, spore prints, photos, microscopic features. Perfect for structured data nerds.
Unlike many branches of biology, you don’t need to go to the Amazon. You can walk into your backyard or a nearby forest and find species newly known for your country and sometimes even new for science.
Microscopes, macro lenses, chemicals, even DNA sequencing. There’s a hacker spirit in mycology.
Projects like iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, and FungiMap are full of real scientific contributions from everyday people. The barrier to entry is low, the impact can be surprisingly high, and the community is genuinely welcoming. Many leading contributors — even those publishing in cutting-edge scientific journals — are passionate autodidacts rather than formally trained biologists.
High intra-species variance, subtle features — perfect playground for machine learning wich is not nearly "solved" here.
Cordyceps that zombify insects. Giant underground networks that share nutrients between trees. Bioluminescent mushrooms. Many weird stories.