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Hard_Spaceon Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust

It might be a good idea to remove 'One-time purchase • No subscription' from the landing page, as the pricing page instead says 'One year of updates for $99'.

Hard_Spaceon Show HN: SVG Animation Software

'Lifetime' not only has a Legacy meaning of 'updates forever', but is still used in a less disingenuous way by major products such as Plex [1]. The reactions you've got on this page are a clear indication to abandon the deceptive wording that you lead with (the truth being hidden in an accordian FAQ).

[1] https://www.plex.tv/en-ca/plans/

Hard_Spaceon Show HN: SVG Animation Software

I think that this is a disingenuous use of the (legacy) term 'Lifetime license'. No-one who hasn't recently been screwed over by a software house like 4K Video Downloader [1] would think that 'lifetime' only covered the current lead version number.

A new term such as 'All version [n] updates included' (or something less clunky) needs to be found. At least one could Google it and understand the proposition, if its meaning was not clear - but 'lifetime license' is massively deceptive.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/4kdownloadapps/comments/1hbmdpn/really_...

Hard_Spaceon If nothing is curated, how do we find things

I get a lot of movie recommendations from Trakt, for Stremio, at the moment. Besides this, my wife uses Facebook a lot to find new shows and movies for us to watch, which is good, as I only got to FB when my work sometimes demands it.

I do agree with the sentiment expressed in comments here that human>human curation is something AI can't replace. It doesn't understand the relation (or lack of relation) between songs, shows or movies for any one user. The choices we make for these things are usually underpinned by many factors specific to us, and don't represent valid or meaningful 'trends' to be discerned and applied to others.

Hard_Spaceon Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

This was my understanding, which is why I was so surprised to read of Trump's edict preventing state-level AI laws for ten years.

Hard_Spaceon The most annoying video player of all time

Was expecting an article on RealPlayer.

Hard_Spaceon Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’

I didn't realize how many bad movies Italy produces, or at least produced, until I started living there in the late 1990s. Italians often go to the movies every week, and I did too, and then I realized that for every 'Life is Sweet', there were 50 dire entries that were just well-targeted enough to make their money back from a native audience. You'll never have heard of these movies, and rightly so.

Having lived in other countries since, this appears to be a common syndrome. You can't judge a country by its tourists, and you certainly can't judge it by the small number of movies that get past its border control.

Hard_Spaceon Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’

>Because Hollywood today was doing quite well and I don’t think I’ve heard a single industry source asking for this.

Unless the new edict excludes farming out VFX. The VFX industry has been on its knees for years now, in a race to the bottom that has made r/vfx a pretty depressing place.

(Source: Spent the last few years working for a well-known VFX company)

Hard_Spaceon Legal art forgery, for the sake of movies (2014)

As an art student in London in 1982, this was common practice. I remember doing a pastel copy of one of Degas' washing nudes at the Cortauld Institute. You would often see art students set up in a museum like that, though I haven't seen that again in many years.

Hard_Spaceon Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?

No matter how many times I get ChatGPT to write my rules to long-term memory (I checked, and multiple rules exist in LTM multiple times), it inevitably forgets some or all of the rules because after a while, it can only see what's right in front of it, and not (what should be) the defining schema that you might provide.

Hard_Spaceon An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

If Indiana Jones (for example) defines a genre, then 'generic' will produce Indiana Jones.

Hard_Spaceon IronRDP: a Rust implementation of Microsoft's RDP protocol

> Sunshine/Moonlight on the other hand reduce image quality keeping the latency low

You can set it to any speed, including LAN speed, according to the available bandwidth/connection.

Hard_Spaceon IronRDP: a Rust implementation of Microsoft's RDP protocol

I use Sunshine and Moonlight when I'm out away from my Windows laptop in my home office and back near the router in the front room over my Macbook air, it's great when you can get directly on the LAN with it. But then, RDP is also better over the LAN, and casual disconnection is easier.

But if I want to do graphics-intensive work on the headless tower, I'll use Sunshine and Moonlight.

Hard_Spaceon HTTrack Website Copier

I used this all the time twenty years ago. Tried it out again for some reason recently, I think at the suggestion of ChatGPT (!), for some archiving, and it actually did some damage.

I do wish there was a modern version of this that could embed the videos in some of my old blog posts so I could save them entire locally as something other than an HTML mystery blob. None of the archive sites preserve video, and neither do extensions like SingleFile. If you're lucky, they'll embed a link to the original file, but that won't help later when the original posts go offline.

Hard_Spaceon Harvard says AI tutors are better than Harvard professors

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-4243877/v1

Had no trouble opening relevant PDF.

Hard_Spaceon VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

That doesn't work for idioms, certainly in Italian, which has multiple colorful metaphors which would be mystifying if translated directly.

Hard_Spaceon No more needles Tracking blood sugar on your wrist

If you hard-code effective learned distributions from a trained model, I suppose that could be described as an 'AI algorithm', even though the final output is a flat algorithm.

Hard_Spaceon Why we use our own hardware

I moved to FastMail three years ago, and, for a contrasting experience, found that spam filtering was almost on a par with Gmail. I had feared it would be otherwise.

Hard_Spaceon Dumb TVs deserve a comeback

That was a really keyphrase-saturated article - they're really going for SEO capture!

Hard_Spaceon Stanley Kubrick's the Shining Maps of the Overlook

Hence 'loosely'. From your link:

> Clarke offered Kubrick six of his short stories, and by May 1964, Kubrick had chosen "The Sentinel" as the source material for the film

Hard_Spaceon Stanley Kubrick's the Shining Maps of the Overlook

Well, Kubrick and Clarke developed 2001 together, based pretty loosely on the Clarke short story The Sentinel, so I don't think it is applicable.

Hard_Spaceon Forced to upgrade

Specifically because in each case, no updateable web browser was available any longer. To have your main machine increasingly unable to render web pages, and to suffer growing security vulnerabilities, pretty much bricks the machine for any purpose other than a scanning workstation, etc.

Hard_Spaceon Forced to upgrade

This also counts for desktop Macs. Twice in the last 20 years I have had to explain to my elderly Dad that even though his expensive Mac could last another thirty years, it's now a paperweight, or something to be 'repurposed'.

I have wondered sometimes if hardware manufacturers actively seek out significant road-mapped hardware changes (such as Intel>ARM, etc., in case of Apple) in order to keep sales rolling in and stop folks 'sitting on' their well-functioning tech.

Hard_Spaceon Show HN: Voice-Pro – AI Voice Cloning

This doesn't appear to have any training facility, so its misuse would seem to be limited to the pre-trained voices supplied - for the casual user (and the ease-of-use seems to be the central issue in these comments).

Hard_Spaceon The Birthday Paradox Experiment

In the case of my new gym (see my earlier reply above), far as I can tell, they are just saving money on modernization. There are similar other penny-pinching measures there, such as treadmills which apparently offer TV and Netflix, etc., but have no channels, no connectivity and no ability to cast over Bluetooth from your phone.

I asked them about the latter issue, and they said that it might get fixed next year; but there are years-old Google Reviews of the gym citing this promise!

Hard_Spaceon The Birthday Paradox Experiment (2018)

Sadly, my new gym assigns keys in numerical locker order. The Google Reviews are full of lamentations about it. However, the gym is right next door to my new place, so I am inclined to overlook these and other shortcomings.

Logistically, it makes sense for them, as it presumably cuts down on maintenance and cleaning. But it is super-annoying to squeeze past several other sweaty folk when there are two entire locker corridors empty and adjacent.

Hard_Spaceon Meta Movie Gen

Yet another one-shot, single-clip Instagram machine that can't do a follow-on shot natively.

As it stands, the only chance you have of depicting a consistent story across a series of shots is image-to-video, presuming you can use LoRAs or similar techniques to get the seed photos consistent in themselves.

Hard_Spaceon Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT

Human studies participants have a safer job than firemen. The trouble is that it is already woefully underpaid, and unsettled industries will increase supply.

There are crucial quality issues with Mechanical Turk, though, and when these really start damaging AI in obvious ways, the system (and the compensation, vetting procedures and oversight) seems likely to change.

Hard_Spaceon Why I Write My Own Obituary Every Year

My grandfather was a newspaper journalist all his life. When he retired, he took a side-gig back with the paper updating obituaries.