Top
Best
New

Posted by dmitrybrant 12 hours ago

Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?(rivendell.dmitrybrant.com)
I've always wanted to make a visualization where the speed of light was scaled down to human speeds, so that we could intuit relativistic effects with everyday objects. Here is the first version of it!
455 points | 186 commentspage 7
TZubiri 9 hours ago|
cool idea, but being vibe coded doesn't inspire much confidence on whether the math or author subject understanding is correct.

As such I wouldn't base my understanding on the subject on this as-is. Which is a shame as, if it was actually hand coded I might actually use this to learn relativity, something which would otherwise be out of my reach.

A note on source code, I think committing the actual javascript code and such is a mistake at the level of committing compiled binaries to a repo. It's more useful, correct and genuine to upload the prompts used, which are the source code that generates the target code, and upon which the author and others can study and modify the program.

That said, as an idea, it reminds me of Kay's dynabook example ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800193.1971922 ) :

"Here look." Her fingers started to fly on the DynaBook's keyboard, altering the program she had·written several weeks before .. You justact as though the ship is pointed towards the sun and add speed!· As she spoke her ship started to fall, but not towards the sun. Oh no!..·"

If we want to move closer to that ideal, of interactive education, I don't think we can just apply the old forms and use the LLM to aid one in being the allmighty program-creator, the LLM needs to be placed at the service of the user. I can't help but seeing the usage of LLMs to generate code as misplacing this power. It's as if a new powerful metal were discovered and smiths can only think about making hammers and foundries and casts with that metal, considering it too valuable to actually use it for the products being smithed.

sim04ful 6 hours ago||
Now I'm curious what the evolutionary ramifications of this would be.
nekusar 10 hours ago||
Would mean the biomolecular computers would be faster than electronics.

Electronics wouldnt work at all.

fuzzfactor 11 hours ago||
Can't see your website but I would think everything you see would have so much latency it would be worse than today's internet with dialup using 2GB of RAM on an Atom CPU ;)
scotty79 11 hours ago||
Next step, taking into account effects of acceleration according to general relativity.
aghilmort 10 hours ago||
this is really great
shevy-java 8 hours ago||
I think this is not possible. There is most likely a reason as to why light has this speed. Naturally it must be tied to energy and interaction of energy with other things. I also don't think "human speeds" applies here because it assumes that humans were decoupled from this, which I don't think we are at all. Besides, humans also use fairly fast things once you go down to the level of molecular biology and chemistry; the chromophore 11-cis-retinal is quite fast in its changes, for instance, and various enzymatic reactions such as by the carbonic anhydrase - up to 10⁶ reactions per second for the latter (assuming there is a sufficient amount of substrate available). That's not slow.
jrflowers 8 hours ago|
You wouldn’t be able to see shit OP