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Pulcinella

3,765 karma · joined January 19, 2017

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Pulcinella··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
The iPhone keyboard "intelligent" tap target size is independent of autocorrect, however, and you can't turn it off or adjust it's behavior.
Pulcinella··on Show HN: 1080p is 920px tall – 1k real browser viewports
And sharing of scientific information, the original purpose of the web, is largely done using PDFs rather than HTML documents. Truly a big mess.
Pulcinella··on After Math
Focus instead on attribution. Yes, OpenAI took the last tiny step in the process of solving this problem (= proving it). But it cannot attribute credit to all the mathematicians whose chat logs from the past few months were fed into its training data. Unlike a human, it can't even remember where it learned things from! In my mind, this makes it unfit to deserve any credit at all -- it cannot give credit to others, so it deserves no credit itself. It took the last tiny step, but certainly not any of the important ones.

Yes I fear a lot of doom and gloom around AI is unearned and only really serves to prop up the valuation of AI companies. It's still very much unclear how much work OpenAI actually did versus just copying the nearly complete homework of someone 5 minutes earlier.

Pulcinella··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
Do you not log the training data? Seems like you should be able to just check what was in the training data. To not keep track is just sloppy work and certainly unprofessional science.
Pulcinella··on Banned Words List
No it's the government deciding what you are and are not allowed to say in your grant.
Pulcinella··on Banned Words List
the mention of which can now result in research grants or other agreements with the federal government getting nixed.

That sounds like censorship to me.

Pulcinella··on The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
"Exert some willpower!"

People exert willpower through the democratically elected legislature

"No not like that!"

Pulcinella··on Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok
Go a little further. Think about "how." How do slot machines get people to waste their money for hours-on-end? How does TikTok use short-form video to get people to scroll for hours-on-end? What is the mechanism?
Pulcinella··on Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok
Counterpoint: The format is bad. The constant stream of videos, skipping between videos at (relatively) your own pace, the anticipation about the next video; it's similar to electronic gambling machines.
Pulcinella··on Bugs Apple loves
Apple devs are probably doing something with the touch returned by the touchUpInside callback. This is an extremely, extremely common bug in iOS apps, not just with Apple developed software.

Devs love the symmetry of their touch handling code and often have the finger-down, finger-moved, and finger-up callbacks from the system all call the same handleTouch function they wrote. As you can tell, however, the touch from the finger up callback is often better discarded or handled differently otherwise you get these sort of bugs

Pulcinella··on Improving the usability of C libraries in Swift
Ehh I have been using Swift from the beginning and I disagree with you and the parent. Swift was "good" before the addition of property wrappers and the result builder syntax. That's when lots of the weird "features" started being bolted on.

Before that it just felt like what a modern OO language with reference and value types, type safety, some very light "not truly functional but nice to have" functional programming features, and readable, "normal", dot syntax would be like. The language was basically complete at that point for the purposes of writing UI apps with the existing Apple frameworks.

Pulcinella··on Games using anti-cheats and their compatibility with GNU/Linux or Wine/Proton
PS5 completely supports mouse and keyboard at a hardware level. It's up to the game though if they support it. The new Doom games don't support it on console even though M&KB are obviously supported on Windows for example. Other games do like the Quake 1 & 2 remasters. I think even Monster Hunter Wilds does if you really want to.
Pulcinella··on How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
Awesome! Do you have any resources on, uhhh, "hardware accelerating" a software renderer. i.e. using SIMD (or math hardware like the vector hardware you can access with the Accelerate[0] framework on Apple devices).

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accelerate

Pulcinella··on How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
SceneKit is actually just straight up deprecated now: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/scenekit/

I imagine it will still be around for a long time because Apple and a lot of large third party apps use it for simple 3D experiences. (E.g. the badges in the Apple Fitness app).

Apple wants devs to move to RealityKit, which does support non-AR 3D, but it is still pretty far from feature parity with SceneKit. Also RealityKit still has too many APIs that are either visionOS only or are available on every platform but visionOS.

Microrant: I absolutely loathe when I am told "move to new thing. Old thing is deprecated/unsupported" and the new thing is incredibly far from feature parity and usually never reaches parity, let alone exceeds it. This is not just an Apple problem.

Pulcinella··on Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem
Yeah @IBOutlets are generally the one thing that are allowed to be implicitly-unwrapped optionals. They go along with using storyboards & xibs files with Interface Builder. I agree that you really should just crash if you are attempting to access one and it is nil. Either you have done something completely incorrect with regards to initializing and accessing parts of your UI and want to catch that in development, or something has gone horribly, horribly, horribly with UIKit/AppKit and storyboard/xib files are not being loaded properly by the system.
Pulcinella··on Show HN: Browser-based interactive 3D Three-Body problem simulator
There actually is an analytical solution using a power series that actually converges (Karl Sundman's work). Unfortunately, the universe still mocks our attempts. Though the series converges, it does so incredibly slowly. From Wikipedia:

The corresponding series converges extremely slowly. That is, obtaining a value of meaningful precision requires so many terms that this solution is of little practical use. Indeed, in 1930, David Beloriszky calculated that if Sundman's series were to be used for astronomical observations, then the computations would involve at least 10^8000000 terms.

Pulcinella··on AI workslop is driving me insane
It worries me how many people prefer using AI over doing their own thinking. How much of your life will you "live" on autopilot? Hollowing out your own soul little-by-little when you do things like that.
Pulcinella··on Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
But will it actually get better or will it just get faster and more power efficient at failing to pair parentheses/braces/brackets/quotes?
Pulcinella··on JIT: So you want to be faster than an interpreter on modern CPUs
And emulation.
Pulcinella··on JIT: So you want to be faster than an interpreter on modern CPUs
Those operating systems allow it, but Apple does not. Agree that it is a total waste.
Pulcinella··on America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
Yes that is my point. What business owners consider "significant" and what sane people consider significant are often quite different.
Pulcinella··on America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
We need actual data to decide how significant is "significant." Otherwise you will just have businesses complaining no one wants to work for "significantly" higher pay (a whole $0.05/hour more).
Pulcinella··on Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toys
Perhaps by the time someone's at the shitting at the seat phase of a gambling habit the neurological feedbacks arising from the intermittent reward schedule have become too strong for him to resist on his own.

Bingo. The machines don't play themselves, of course. But at the same time, the manufacturers and casinos know exactly what they are doing. I would say:

We've utterly lost the capacity for describing deficiencies of the conscience.

applies to those the manufacturers and casinos as well.

Pulcinella··on Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toys
Why would many, many, many people choose to piss and shit themselves in public instead of stopping for a few minutes to use the restroom? Why would someone choose the push a button every 5 seconds to the point where it ruins their life?

Put it another way: why would gambling companies continue to develop gambling machines? Why not stop with the mechanical, one-armed-bandit of the early 1900s if what they do has no effect on people?

Pulcinella··on Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toys
So why do you think people continue to gamble, even after it has ruined their and their families lives and finances? Slot machine addicts will literally void their bladder rather than stop playing for 5 minutes to use the restroom.
Pulcinella··on We Found a Hidden Camera in the Bathroom of Our Airbnb
How many cameras do your lodgings have?
Pulcinella··on Microsoft only lets you opt out of AI photo scanning 3x a year
Why don't you just explain what you want people to know instead of making everyone else guess what you are thinking?
Pulcinella··on AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline
The hardware 3D audio acceleration (basically fancy HRTFs) is also really cool, but almost no 3rd party games use it.

I've had issues with Xbox instant resume. Lots of "your save file has changed since the last time you played, so we have to close the game and relaunch" issues. Even when the game was suspended an hour earlier. I assume it's just cloud save time sync issues where the cloud save looks newer because it has a timestamp 2 seconds after the local one. Doesn't fill me with confidence, though.

Pulcinella··on AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline
I would agree with this. A lot of PS5 games using UE5+ with all it's features run at sub 1080p30 (some times sub 720p30)upscaled to 1440p/4K and still look & run way, way worse that TLOU2/RDR2/Death Stranding 1/Horizon 1 on the PS4. Death Stranding 2, Horizon 2, and the Demon's Souls remake look and run far, far better (on a purely technical level) than any other PS5 game and they all use rasterized lighting.
Pulcinella··on AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline
You still have to manually place lights. Where do you think the rays come from (or rather, go to).
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