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akarlsten

124 karma · joined January 5, 2022

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akarlsten··on Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX
Starlink constellations will lead to a world where there is absolutely nowhere you can go where you cant see man-made junk. No truly pristine wilderness anywhere without being able to see formations of glowing dots helping "off-grid" idiots stream Netflix. It's spiritually harmful if nothing else.

Also who said pollution has to be harmful? Light pollution is a thing, and this is the same class of problem.

Why dont they dip the satellites in vantablack to make them truly invisible?

akarlsten··on Super ZSNES – GPU Powered SNES Emulator
I don't think this is necessarily good or even desirable, a lot of the SNES music was composed with the compression in mind and sounds off and weird when "remastered" like this.

Like this Pitchfork writer expressed it here about a classic SNES track from Donkey Kong Country:

Take one listen to “Stickerbush”’s fan-made “restored” version and you’ll understand why these compositional limitations are so integral. Here, the instruments appear uncompressed and reproduced through FL Studio. Wise’s wistful songwriting is retained, but completely missing is his intentionally impure palette. The instrumentation turns flat and unimaginative. Once-heavensent piano timbres are suddenly as ordinary as any run-of-the-mill ’90s new age track; the alto sax lead actually sounds like an alto sax, losing its unreal texture. Wise’s essential deployment of tension is absent without the compressed grain that elevates it. The idea of restoration is a “misnomer,” Wise said. He always meant for the song to be tethered to the restrictions of the SNES; he wanted to make limited sounds feel limitless. Like the comments section of the internet checkpoint, “Stickerbush” is a living time capsule.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/david-wise-stickerbush-...

akarlsten··on CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font
Cool, obviously a lot of people are going to quibble about the default lineup (wheres Iosevka?) but for anyone who hasn't nailed down a preference it seems great!
akarlsten··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Do you go to the doctor if you get a cold? Why would these things show up in your medical journal?
akarlsten··on Wasp Blower
We had a wasps nest last summer inside the wall under the eaves of our house, some kid from the exterminator's came with a long telescoping rod and puffed some kind of white powder into the opening. He explained that it was something like a slow-acting poison (or maybe like diatomaceous earth) that would cover the drones when they left or arrived at the nest and that it was enough for one of these drones to brush up against the queen to kill her. They swarmed around for a few hours then we never saw them again, so it apparently worked.

This was after attempting to spray the opening with regular wasp spray a few times. Sure, it killed a dozen or so drones each time but never really put a dent in the population.

akarlsten··on Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study
The outdoor air isn't really relevant, the issue is human activity (breathing, showering, laundry, etc.) raising the indoor humidity when combined with low indoor temperatures causing surfaces to approach the dew point. Particularly external walls or windows that will be a lower temperature than the room as a whole.

At 70% RH and 15C air temperatures, the dew point is 10C - which could easily be achieved along the exterior walls of an older more poorly insulated house.

akarlsten··on Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study
10C is a great indoor temperature if you want condensation everywhere and eventually mold, but that's a price worth paying to not be considered "wimpy" I suppose? https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/advice/minimum-house-temperat...
akarlsten··on Node.js is able to execute TypeScript files without additional configuration
No, it has good defaults. See also: https://prettier.io/docs/option-philosophy
akarlsten··on "Just Fucking Ship It" (Or: On Vibecoding)
Poorly made slop aside, your framing of this just makes it look and sound like you're extremely bitter over losing a hackathon (?) to this guy. I think you should've focused on the company solely and dropped the snide and sarcastic references calling the CEO/dev a "hero" or "mastermind". It's not particularly mature or productive.
akarlsten··on Huawei releases an open weight model trained on Huawei Ascend GPUs
Judging by his name, Turkey
akarlsten··on The cultural decline of literary fiction
They mostly seem interested in JRPG anime slop, and even then Expedition 33 was released just this year and is probably the best example of that genre from the last 20 years? That's also by a relatively small studio though..

I would agree that big AAA studios are basically entirely creatively bankrupt at this point, but that's not exclusive to games, the same trend is apparent with movies (remakes of Disney movies, Star Wars sequels, etc.).

Another end-of-ZIRP casualty?

akarlsten··on Kagi Reaches 50k Users
Presumably that's how many users they had 2 weeks ago, as indicated by the giant "Recent" indicator and the dates? You can always switch to "All Data".
akarlsten··on The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates
I have never been able to understand the argument about the supposed high water use - the water doesn't magically cease to exist after it's been used to cool a datacenter. You put freshwater in and get the same, but warmer, freshwater out. Probably doesn't require much (if any) in the way of treatment to become potable again.

Am I missing something or is it a bit of a disingenuous argument?

akarlsten··on America's premier pronatalists on having 'tons of kids' to save the world
You need to realize that open palm slapping your 2 year old (in public, no less) for accidentally kicking a table is not an "obvious attempt to generate outrage" when the act itself is obviously outrageous to anyone from a place where such things are illegal and seen as morally abhorrent.

Not to mention the fact that when they're not busy slapping their kids around they seem content to leave parenting up to an iPad.

IMO, these people are clearly, obviously unfit to be parents, and the state should intervene before more harm can be done. The children's names alone are tantamount to abuse, honestly..

akarlsten··on Real estate giant China Evergrande will be liquidated
Canada allows medically assisted suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada
akarlsten··on 15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps
I don't mind the widgets, but agree on the colors. The water being teal and non-built areas being mint looks both unnatural and has worse contrast, at least to my eye. It's like they wanted to go for a pastel theme but didn't dare go all the way.

At least there's always the 3D globe/satellite view, which I still think is a marvel. Especially if you're looking up walking directions to somewhere unfamiliar, since you can rotate around and see all nearby buildings, landmarks, etc. hope they expand the coverage!

akarlsten··on Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music
I conversely think it's much better that it's made by just one very opinionated person. Sure, one could argue that some stuff is "wrong" but does it really matter when it's all so arbitrary anyway? I'm more interested in Ishkur's take on things than 100% correctness.

FWIW I also don't think artists themselves should be some kind of final arbiters on what genre their music is; "death of the author" and all that. Early italo disco musicians would probably not "correctly" categorize their music as something new and separate from the disco they were trying to emulate, for example.

akarlsten··on Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind
In my experience there is practically no need to use multi-cursor editing if you're extracting components or partials where appropriate, as is usually the case nowadays.

There's also a difference between naming things of actual significance, which as you say may need to be localized, labeled, etc. and having to name arbitrary CSS junk like .button--state--success, which is painfully annoying. Type it up in the CSS file, switch over to the markup file (another annoyance that Tailwind helps you avoid), paste it in, repeat.

akarlsten··on Your brain on emoji
From my old WoW-playing days, I was given to understand that : was awkward to reach on cyrillic keyboards, so many of the russians skipped it and just used ) or even %) sometimes (which sort of looks like eyes and a nose if you squint)
akarlsten··on Windows NT on 600MHz machine opens apps instantly. What happened?
The real reason people moved to the infinite ones is that the determinate progress bar is almost never accurate or representative, hence useless.

Like beyond truly "dumb" tasks like downloading a file it's basically a guessing game how long it will take anyway, right? Say you split the whole loading bar into percentages based on the number of subtasks, suddenly you end up with a progress bar stuck on 89% for 90% of the total loading time.

Obviously you could post-hoc measure things and adjust it so each task was roughly "worth" as much as the time it took, but people rarely did that back in the day and my boss would get mad at me for wasting time with it today. Hence, spinners.

akarlsten··on Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
That's not the fault of the underlying technology, if anything it will be EASIER for predatory adTech to display such things when the entire UI is rendered in an opaque <canvas>-equivalent. How do I get uBlock to block specific elements (like a video player) when there is no longer a discrete video element to block?
akarlsten··on Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
Yeah, that's why absolutely nobody bought color TVs back when those first became available.. /s

People care about things looking nice. In particular, people who pay others to create websites also obviously want their stuff to stand out, look nicer, and "pop" more than the competition - and the things the person you replied to listed is part of that.

akarlsten··on Rebuilding a featured news section with modern CSS: Vox news
> you say that like I am the only person who does this.

Essentially, yes: https://caniuse.com/usage-table

akarlsten··on Rebuilding a featured news section with modern CSS: Vox news
I'd be very shocked if the percentage of all human users that have JS disabled is more than <0.1%. Even web crawlers and other bots can (and do) execute JS these days.

I don't think the demographic is realistically relevant.

akarlsten··on Check if your IKEA chair is compatible with your screen
Had the same issue a while back, had a hell of a time figuring out why one of my screens would flicker or shut off momentarily whenever my girlfriend sat down at her desk (which is next to mine). Even initially figuring out that it was the act of her sitting down that caused it took some time, with a lot of jokes about her telepathically messing with my setup in the meantime.

Turns out that the gas piston in her chair (not an IKEA chair in this case) has a bit of "give" to cushion oneself when sitting down, and that compression caused some kind of electromagnetic pulse (I assume?) strong enough to mess with the monitor.

I do wonder if it's perhaps bad for the monitor's lifespan, but it only affected my cheapest one, and with the cause found I can live with it.

akarlsten··on WebGPU Fundamentals
I don't understand how you can possibly say this with a straight face.
akarlsten··on How to start a React Project in 2023
Next adds all the "missing pieces" that you would otherwise need to cobble together yourself when using just plain React to create a production-grade and ready web app.

Obviously these things can be done without using Next, React or even Javascript, like you say, but it all comes in a really well-integrated solution that mostly just works.

akarlsten··on A Love Letter to Geocities Sites
What a shame that you're taking something beloved and nostalgic and turning it into yet another rent-seeking crypto project.

https://neocities.org/ has been around for years, is the same exact concept and doesn't come with any crypto-related baggage.

akarlsten··on Docusaurus 2.0
I don't know if this is just performative boomerism on your part, but I don't see how generating a PDF is a "very basic requirement" in 2022.

What are you going to do, print it?

akarlsten··on Buttery Smooth “10fps” (2020)
60hz vs 120hz is also obviously apparent if you have them next to eachother (when using multiple monitors, for example). Just jiggling the cursor around or scrolling a webpage makes the 60hz look almost stuttery in comparison. Same goes for UI stuff like the animated dropdown of a menu.
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