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XaspR8d

1,157 karma · joined September 20, 2012

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XaspR8d··on A Year After ‘Pokémon Go,’ Where Are the Augmented-Reality Hits?
I think this is exactly what the media is trying to get at when they refer to Pokemon Go as an "AR" game, and I'm surprised most folks in this thread are missing the mark.

Seeing as plenty of companies are wanting to cash in on the visual definition of AR, perhaps we need a differentiated term here? If you wanted to highlight the locational aspect, perhaps something like "augmented cartography" but I think the idea goes beyond harnessing position data... it's more generally about annotating reality, in a way.

XaspR8d··on Science-based games – a collaborative list
Yeah when I saw the title, my brain immediately went to Sierra Madre Games (particularly BIOS: Genesis and High Frontier), which are incredibly-designed simulation machines under the guise of tabletop games.
XaspR8d··on How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Python and Twilio
Yeah, automating that next step is making the failure mode much worse.
XaspR8d··on Show HN: Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project
I still can't get the GIMP resynthesis plugins to run on most of my machines...
XaspR8d··on How hackers abused satellites to stay under the radar (2015)
1) The satellite system system broadcasts to everyone (apparently poorly/not encrypted) in the area, so it isn't necessary to take over any upstream routing in order to get a hold of the incoming packets. They just arrive at your doorstep, and since you configured them to be rejected by normal clients you know you won't have to compete for the response.

2) The C&C just responds over regular land-line. (Since the satellite service is download-only, this isn't any different from the service's normal clients.)

3) The reply keeps coming back over satellite and they keep grabbing it?

XaspR8d··on Best board games from Essen 2016
The joke, for passers-by: Terraforming Mars was huge hit boardgame last year, and is now in the running for the Spiele des Jahres, the German game-of-the-year which is often considered one of the foremost awards in tabletop gaming. In particular, Terraforming Mars seems to be the preferred choice among most gamers, but the SdJ committee is somewhat infamous for its surprising final selections, often not matching what speculators think of as the intended weight/complexity of the category. So that post's title, "the argument (for|against) Terraforming Mars", is an extremely relevant and current discussion topic in the board game community.

(The real link is, of course, simply about the planet.)

XaspR8d··on Best board games from Essen 2016
There are many many games that embody small parts of economic theory, but few that bother with a "full" simulation. I'd suspect it's a little too fragile to guarantee a fun gameplay (as in, many logical economic outcomes might not be thrilling to simulate). Here's some notables off the top of my head though:

- Food Chain Magnate - interesting recent game that explores some aspects of pricing, marketing, and management structure. A lot is abstracted away, but it does a great job of creating strategic depth off of a few basic tenets.

- Container - cutthroat pricing and resource delivery game about shipping/manufacturing companies. Players must sell to each other and cooperate somewhat to keep the economy viable. One of the harder simulations I've seen; the market definitely can crash or stall in this game, which some people complain about but I find very interesting.

- Stockpile - very basic game about information in the stock market, but handles the ideas quite elegantly.

- Power Grid - one of the best-known and highest-rated of realistic auction games, also features a resource market. To me, Power Grid is most notable as an economic game on a meta level: it's spawned many different maps and expansions and each one plays differently, usually only based on small tweaks to the power plants available or the arrangement of the network or 1 or 2 rules twists.

- "18XX games" - this is an entire genre of "train games" that are generally about building rail lines in the early days or railroad expansion, but often include additional "hard" economic aspects, like the ownership and valuation of stock in the companies (some of them even grant most of the traditional player agency to the companies themselves, and then control is inherited by the majority shareholder, so depending on stock, 1 player could control multiple companies and another could control none). I'm just starting to play these games so I can't give much more detail yet but they are definitely worth looking into.

- Acquire - a downright classic game about mergers and acquisitions between hotel / real estate companies.

- Modern Art - another classic about emergent value in the art industry; very simple design begats complex play.

There's also a whole slate of more generic eurogames that breach into interesting economic areas, Brass, Panamax, Arkwright, and Kanban are some jumping off points there. Even less economic-themed games breach many cool concepts; certainly whenever I play my favorite game, Keyflower, I'm thinking about how to value actions over goods and how the global value of the different currencies (meeple colors) is fluctuating and how much game-end wealth delta an early denial to my opponent is worth to me...

XaspR8d··on Enough with the dead butterflies
> such as how the pyramids of Giza, Egypt are shown in pictures

I was totally on the same wavelength with Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad when he discovered they were right next to the city. It's such a weird censoring -- would people value them less if they knew how close they were to development?

For reference here[1] is a traditional shot of the pyramids, and here[2] is an aerial view of the adjoining urban area.

[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All_Gizah_Pyramids.j...

[2] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giza-pyramids.JPG

XaspR8d··on Going underground: the Moscow metro
Wow, very literal meaning of liquidating government assets...
XaspR8d··on JRR Tolkien book Beren and Lúthien published after 100 years
I felt a few of the homages in And Another Thing were a little too fanservice-y. Sometimes it seemed like the editor said "we could do with another Adams-style rant in this chapter" but it didn't come as naturally as Adams' would. But yes overall it was a quite enjoyable novel in a similar vein as the originals, and ultimately my opinion came from the same kind of bundle of expectations that leads people to read The Simarillion looking for more narratives.
XaspR8d··on Pokémon Go Is Shadow Banning Cheaters
You can't imagine a worse execution? It was the fastest mobile game ever to reach $600 million and has made well over $1 billion at this point.

I understand the design complaints--the gameplay won't resonate with anyone wanting a strategy game of any depth--but saying they did poorly is pretty hyperbolic. It obviously struck a chord with some segments as I do still see people playing in dense areas (and at the local game stores).

I also think looking into Niantic's past work or Pokemon Company's past partnerships would've revealed this game couldn't possibly have the mechanics of the core Pokemon line, but I do understand that the marketing and messaging was very vague.

XaspR8d··on Why UX Design for Machine Learning Matters
They understand when a car or a microwave or a fridge is useful, and why you wouldn't want to use one in place of another.
XaspR8d··on An Indian village addicted to chess
Or perhaps it doesn't matter to them? The orientation of the colors bears no effect on the play of the game.

It might be confusing to people very used to the "traditional" rotation, but maybe breaking free of it is a good mental exercise? ;)

XaspR8d··on Beware of Transparent Pixels
Regardless of how you perceive making it, the representation is still (nearly always) a color underneath an alpha channel.

If you inspect the image in a full-featured editor like Photoshop or GIMP, you can inspect the channels individually or remove the transparency entirely to see this fact.

I think with most GUI programs, the eraser and cut tool will leave color as what it was before it became transparent.

EDIT: saurik has a good point that I forgot about -- many editors may actually throw the colors away when you export unless you ask them not to.

XaspR8d··on Soylent Closes $50M Series B Round Led by GV
Total hypothesis, but don't they not need it since all of the ingredients are already FDA approved?
XaspR8d··on Root – Programmable bank account for software developers
Yeah definitely. The classifications of transactions is generally poor. Even with Simple, which is very generous in allowing you to (re)assign arbitrary tags on the fly and provide nice data metrics, I'd still like to generate different graphs than they choose to present.

The ability to aggregate the data from all my accounts would be amazing...

XaspR8d··on Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)
> People in the US tend to prefer fish that's already bland to begin with (cod, haddock, tilapia, and sometimes tuna or salmon)

To be fair, in the Midwest this is often because there used to be a diet of much more flavorful freshwater fish from local lakes, but overfishing destroyed their populations and pushed prices way up, forcing cuisine to adapt to cheap saltwater fish.

XaspR8d··on The fifty shades of Latin
Well there's a notorious adage, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".

I think academics shy away from attempting to make the distinction except when extremely obvious, and instead talk directly about quantitative measurements and feature overlaps (isogloss is a search term that may be useful here). Dialect/language lines will often have completely different shapes when you look at different distinctions in lexicon, phonetics, syntax, etc. If I had to generalize though, in a particular language "chain", linguists seem to identify an order of magnitude more separable languages than non-academics do. (Consider the cases of huge macrolanguages like "Chinese" & "Arabic", or even "Italian", whose singular labels by laypeople are pretty universally rejected.)

It doesn't help that people are generally unaware of the incredible political pressure most nations put on presenting a singular linguistic front, when the truth is much much more muddled. As a result, the common parlance distinction between dialect & language often verges on meaningless.

XaspR8d··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2017)
FYI this is the "Who wants to be hired?" thread, not the "Who's Hiring?" thread.
XaspR8d··on Send and receive money with Gmail
Unfortunately many banks seem to put up arbitrary hurdles to performing ACH transfers, or obscure the fact that they are available. Certainly I've had this issue with Wells Fargo, US Bank, and BoA.

I assume this is because a number of them use "free, easy transfers between our customers" as a selling point, which would vanish quickly if it were easy to do between anybody. Sometimes it seems like we're even sliding backwards -- for example Chase used to have a fairly nice person-to-person payment system, but they recently locked it down to people with their own Chase account.

XaspR8d··on A vigilante trying to improve IoT security
There's a few things missing in this comparison, most notably the bike manufacturer isn't claiming the bike is already secure ("auto-locking" bikes) or making additional security challenging (bikes that locks are very hard to install on) or generally profiting from an environment of misinformation about bike theft and bike safety.

Additionally theft of property has a personal gain for you.

I'm not sure I ethically support the hacker's actions, but I don't think the bike example has the market/awareness effects that make it at all defensible.

XaspR8d··on Enhancement of human color vision by breaking the binocular redundancy
I guess it comes down to whether you think you can (immediately) process the "red delta", "blue delta", and "green delta" independently. I wasn't stating my assumption that I thought it would be nontrivial for your brain to identify more than the overall distance between the colors. I do agree there are technically 6 information channels; I just wasn't sure if a human could actually use it expediently.

That said, I think I've come around to the idea that we could see multiple signals. I could probably identify "right-brightness" & "left-brightness" as separate from "right-desaturation" & "left-desaturation". But can I also separate those from "right-CCW-hue-rotation"? Can I pair it with "right-greenness/blueness/redness" in a way that I am gaining a full independent channel of information? Maybe it's like 2.2 channels worth. :P

I guess I shouldn't speculate at all; it's easy to be misled in hypotheses about perception.

XaspR8d··on Enhancement of human color vision by breaking the binocular redundancy
As long as you're using 2 filters, you're only adding one dimension to the distinction, so it would remain tetrachromatic. You would be able to distinguish more metamers than the configuration in the article (hence having more utility, probably), but ultimately you're still only gaining the "channel" of your binocular discrepancy as a virtual photopigment.
XaspR8d··on Enhancement of human color vision by breaking the binocular redundancy
Here's filter #1. [1]

Filter #2 was custom-made. Not sure if that's orderable in small quantities outside of academia. But you could try to find a filter that fit their "naive approach", which would be simple bandstop (aka "reject" or "notch") filter that blocks approx 450-510nm. Just looking around the same retailer, maybe something between these two ([2] & [3]) might suffice for experimenting? Ideally it would fit that range precisely AND have a rather absolute cutoff. I have no idea if that kind of arbitrary range selection is available to one-off buyers, I'm just a fan of color theory. :P

The issue with the naive approach is that it skews the white balance of the results a bit by affecting the M&L cone stimulus as well, but that's a lesser issue for playing around with the idea.

[1] - http://www.omegafilters.com/450lp-rapidedge.html

[2] - http://www.omegafilters.com/products/filters/500rb.html

[3] - http://www.omegafilters.com/products/filters/460-od-0-4-notc...

XaspR8d··on Enhancement of human color vision by breaking the binocular redundancy
These filters were already optimized so the sum of their stimuli would match the tristimulus. (So you still perceive the same baseline as normal trichromats but with another asymmetry on top.) By removing a frequency range, you're just losing information and deviating from the standard perception, so I don't think it increase resolution, unless you were proto- or deutero-weak and needed the distinction boost anyway.

They do touch on expanding this by splitting all 3 photopigments, but that would be a much more challenging filter to make.

I was thinking that an active display could add more resolution by adding some time-dependent dimension to colors. Say, "high" reds/blues/greens would pulse quickly and "low" ones would pulse slowly... sort of a fourier transform aspect going on that could get you some scalar gradability rather than a straight up "left blue" vs "right blue" contrast.

It's all really cool though regardless.

XaspR8d··on Enhancement of human color vision by breaking the binocular redundancy
I'm not in the field, but I think the cool thing about this is that it's accomplishable with passive components created with straightforward tech (one filter was off-the-shelf). Most hyperspectral/extraspectral visualization tools require complicated active displays.

That said, it's pretty similar technology to those color-blindness correction glasses [1] -- just filters that accentuate the distinctions between colors you could already see. From a philosophical perspective, it's probably not going to be emergently perceived as a whole new color "dimension", but rather just an augmentation to your preexisting experience.

I do think these kinds of small tools will be a key, but subtle part of AR in the future. I would certainly take a pair myself. I always like wearing polarized sunglasses because you can perceive the extra information of which materials are polarizing or dichroic.

XaspR8d··on You think you can't be phished?
Well it's an extremely challenging edge case to address. As noted, mixed alphabet domains have decomposed to their punycodes for a while, but the single alphabet case is harder to separate malicious from legitimate.

This isn't a full solution yet anyway... a Russian user could still be phished for example, because their locale would match.

XaspR8d··on The endgame for cameras is having no camera at all
It strikes me that, in a world where "photos" are generated from non-optical data, there would likely be a counter-movement of artists who deliberately seek or build scenes that could not be generated at the time. (In some ways this is just a continuation of our current novelty-seeking; "interesting" images are those that you couldn't simply find on the internet.)

I don't disbelieve for a second that the expressiveness and realism of automatically-composed images won't have a huge explosion and become part of popular media. But I think there will be very long period during which some datasets will be much more salient than others. Think of how many orders of magnitude photos we have of dogs and cats compared to frogs and yaks... can they take the camera off of a product that can't image my friends petting a yak? I'm very curious when is enough, because the human ability to contrive absurd scenarios is frustratingly extensive, and unique "outlier" moments are exactly the ones many people want to capture.

Also I think I _have_ seen a similar art project like this, where the artist took a photo album of Paris(?) and gave people "cameras" that just identified the closest image location by GPS and would just keep regurgitating that image no matter how many you took. I can't seem to find it now...

XaspR8d··on An off-grid social network
Yes I suppose I'm targetting the protocol a little too much when I should think about what features clients can implement.

I'm certainly happy with the "gossip" approach; I just see it as challenging for some people to adopt when they are coddled with the idea that they can censor their past.

XaspR8d··on An off-grid social network
Basic question: since the entries form a chain and reference the previous, is there no way to edit or delete your old entries? (I see it "prevents tampering" and there's something of a philosophical question here about whether you're "tampering" with your own history when you editorialize -- I agree with the crypto interpretation, but in the context of offline interaction, social communication isn't burdened with such expectations of accuracy or time-invariance.)

If so I see that as a fairly large limitation for the common user. Even though truly removing something from the internet is effectively an impossibility, I think most non-technical folks aren't actively aware of this, and I'd at least like the option make it harder for folks to uncover.

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