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BorisTheBrave

642 karma · joined October 28, 2018

boristhebrave.com
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BorisTheBrave··on The Culture novels as a dystopia
I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true. I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it and relied on an LLM too much. That was a mistake.

Some of these were my own supposition - 1% felt about right for how casually they are mentioned in story.

> Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.

I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.

BorisTheBrave··on Blender 16yo winner of UK young animator of the year
Impressive stuff. I wonder if he's inspired by Ian Hubert's work?
BorisTheBrave··on Computer scientists discover limits of gradient descent (2021)
A better example I've seen for the theorem is that if you take a paper map of a country, messily schrunch it up into a ball and drop it somewhere in the country, there will be at least one point on the map that is exactly above the corresponding real point in the country.

As others have said, it's meant for mappings of the space to itself. So stirring the water, but not moving the glass.

But anyway, the theorem works only for continiuous mappings. The moment they started mentioning "water particles", instead of some hypothetical fluid that is a continuous block, the theorem no longer applied. You could break it by mirroring the position of every particle. There's still a fixed point (the line of mirroring), but there's no obligation that there's a particle on that line.

BorisTheBrave··on Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused (2018)
Do you have a recommendation for how to get into ASP? I've read the clingo docs, but it has never clicked.
BorisTheBrave··on Meta AI Unleashes Megabyte, a Scalable Model Architecture
I think you've misunderstood. Megabyte scales better with context window length. I don't know if they're saying the training data / compute are any more efficient.
BorisTheBrave··on The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble
Ah yes, AI doesn't have any significant use cases and is only good for party tricks, but also it's going to be used by paymasters to erode wages.

If it's useless, it can hardly replace jobs, can it?

BorisTheBrave··on Tattoos on ancient Egyptian women appear to ask for protection during childbirth
I expect it's impossible to do so without damaging them, and it's no longer necessary with modern imaging techniques.
BorisTheBrave··on You have to pay a subscription to use Pantone colors in Photoshop now
I know programmers are prone to legal hacks that don't make sense, but I'm curious whether the following would work.

As I understand it, it's ok to reference a Pantone Color by name without a license (nominative fair use), but that gives you no idea how to use or display it. So photoshop files could store both the pantone color name (for printing and profressional color matching purposes) and a substitute color for display on screen when unlicensed.

The UI would either prompt users for the substitute color, or automatically fill it if they did have a license at the time they selected the color. That way files wouldn't break quite so horribly when licenses expire.

BorisTheBrave··on Rooftop wind energy innovation claims 50% more energy than solar at same cost
It means round-the-clock as in "it works during the day and night", rather than literally non-stop. For example, if I said that security did "round the clock patrols", you wouldn't assume they patrol every second of they day, but rather regularly through the night.

The fact a few people might misinterpret it is a marketing bonus, but surely negligable, because no one could believe that.

BorisTheBrave··on Why do arrays start at 0?
In Europe, the floor level with the ground is called "ground" or "0".
BorisTheBrave··on Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
So, just to be clear, you have almost no Unity objects in your scene. The tree renderer reads data from your core game lib, and draws it. Which Unity API do you use for the actual drawing?
BorisTheBrave··on Better.com CEO Vishal Garg says he is personally liable for $750M SoftBank loan
Net worth is the more relevant value for a loan guarantee.
BorisTheBrave··on The history of the end of poverty has just begun
I don't think you've really thought about how awful the middle ages are.

> The Kings had access to much more information than they cared about already.

Royals used to have portraits painted and transported just so they could get an idea who the person their arranged marriage with actually looked like. Bet they'd like Facebook.

Louis XIV commissioned a more accurate map of france. It took 4 generations to make.

The first semaphore was so valuable it was initially reserved just for government use.

Oops, no wait, these are all post-medieval by a few centuries! Things were even worse before.

> The King could do the same, all day, every day, with personal chefs familiar with their preferences, and without fear for the expenses...

The king would be stuck with local food, in season only. At least he'd probably be able to afford some foreign spices. And they probably couldn't get food in an hour, due to the less efficient kitchens of the time, and not having thousands of restaurants already on standby to serve every kind of meal.

> Oh, how Kings would be jealous of the magic of Uber...

That device that travels twice as fast as a horse for hours without break, and at more comfort? I think so.

> As for Kings who didn't die in guillotine

England has never had a king live past 81. It's even worse if you look at medieval kings. US Life Expectancy is ~79. Even ignoring life expectancy, pretty much all illness was vastly more unpleasant. As a king, you'd likely have gout (called the "disease of kings") or an StD.

> Who wants to be a middle class schmuck

The purpose of the exercise is to determine who is poorer in terms of what is available to them. Kings are no doubt more important and powerful, but can we agree that's besides the point? I for one, would take the quality of life of said schmuck.

BorisTheBrave··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
I sell an game development tool on the Unity Asset store. Since the peak died down, it's now somewhat under $500/mo, but still does well in occasional sales.
BorisTheBrave··on Why general inheritance is flawed and how to finally fix it
In most languages Subset would be called a trait or interface, rather than general inheritance. You've picked an example with no fields or overriden methods, so it's impossible for it to demonstrate the shortcomings of inheritance.
BorisTheBrave··on Cardstacker Bryan Berg
I see he often places multiple cards flat against each other - probably gives the structure more weight against random gusts and jostles.
BorisTheBrave··on Generation of advanced Escher-like spiral tessellations
You might also like these cool tessellations: https://twitter.com/TilingBot
BorisTheBrave··on Townscaper Running in the Browser
It only appears in certain rare configurations. You need a section of town with no exterior corners.
BorisTheBrave··on Robot Uses Lasers to Kill 100k Weeds/Hour, Saving Land from Toxic Herbicides
> Weeds are getting harder to kill as herbicide-resistant varieties survive

Surely it won't take long for camera-resistant weeds to evolve? They will learn to avoid detection via camoflage and mimicry. Still, I guess it's a better problem to have than a chemical arms race.

BorisTheBrave··on A Japanese company cut 80% of the time needed to manually count pearls
You don't mean 100% accuracy, that means mistakes are impossible. Perhaps your error rate is very rare, but it's a bit concerning you don't attempt to quantify it.
BorisTheBrave··on SQLite Plus: Missing SQLite functions
MIT is already an extremely permissive license. Seems kinda mean to complain that something is merely 90% good because you are comparing to something 99% good.

What sort of problems do you envisage having with an MIT license that public domain would fix?

BorisTheBrave··on Free Software: An idea whose time has passed?
Strangly fixated on how "free software" is not a metonym. I wonder what the author would make of free speech, let alone the fact that grammer is completely irrelevant to the point at hand.

It then marshalls enough other bad arguments in a short enough period to be a gish gallop, and I gave up halfway through.

Honestly I felt the presise had some promise, software has changed and the FSF not so much, but this article does not convince or educate me of it.

BorisTheBrave··on Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
Or, people have already seen transplants and prosthetics, and it's easy to observe that the pros outweigh the cons.
BorisTheBrave··on GME stock halted trading after +103% daily
Timing and legal obligations mostly. Share issues require a lengthy process to get approved. GME actually had one pre-approved, but they still couldn't use it, as they may not legally do so while the executives have material information the public does not. GME had an earnings announcement that was unforunately timed.
BorisTheBrave··on How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars
Can someone explain the phyics of flying a helicopter in such low density atmosphere? It must be less efficient than on earth, but evidently efficiency isn't proportional to density or else it could not fly at all.
BorisTheBrave··on Spotify Optimized the Largest Dataflow Job Ever for Wrapped 2020
I'm having a hard time understanding this article. It seems to be a bit too low level on the specifics of Beam for general consumption.

From what i undestand, Spark has the same feature built in. If the planner knows that the source data is partitioned and/or sorted appropriately, it can skip shuffling/sorting it, instead having each executor directly requesting the one file it needs.

It's a nice optimization, but it's not game changing. You often end up having to shuffle anyway, as you are joining on a different key, or for performance reason you need more executors than the set amount of partitions, or the shuffle needed to write the data doesn't justify the savings on the readers.

Maybe it's better with their additional optimizations? Spark does not do those, mostly.

BorisTheBrave··on Factorio 1.1 stable
I think it is more complex in most dimensions, except for render pipeline and asset size. Physics engines are off the shelf, even in AAA games, they're not really where the bulk of time is spent coding. Not to mention all the games you described have fixed maps and no multiplayer.

Really, most of the budget of AAA is spent on art and level design. They have sophisticated tech, but often it is not on an unreachable level.

BorisTheBrave··on Problems with AI-based monitoring startups (2018)
> If I have one NOC for all of my services and they’re chasing their tail trying to figure out root causes and who is responsible for each service… you have a management problem.

Is it inconcievable to the author that buying software may be easier than fixing a management problem, at least in the short term.

BorisTheBrave··on Gary Numan: 'One of my songs got over a million streams – I got £37'
Given videos are usually 10mins and music 3.5 mins, and youtube adverts are both more frequent and more targeted, that might even explain the last factor of 10.
BorisTheBrave··on Show HN: Il2cpp-modder – Generate DLL injection projects for hacking Unity games
+1 datapoint: I've decompiled several to find out how they work, and found most use mono. Maybe it depends how indie your game is?

My dcompilation writeups can be found here: https://www.boristhebrave.com/category/level-generation/

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