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animal531

1,019 karma · joined July 27, 2015

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animal531··on Ten lines of code that changed my world
On my Spectrum I came up with: 10 GOTO 20 20 GOTO 10

It would start the Spectrum's "loading screen" border which would then scroll infinitely.

At some point I also opened it up to see what it looked like on the inside, but I managed to damage the keyboard in the process. Thereafter whenever I wanted to play a game (via joystick) I would have to use a piece of wire to manually select the rows/columns of the matching keys to enter the load command.

animal531··on Performance Improvements in .NET 11
Now if only they could spend time making Visual Studio 2026 perform up to par.

Just today I created e.g. 100 changes in a file, performed an undo and it rolled back 90 or so of the changes while somehow managing to keep the 5 at the start and the 5 at the end.

animal531··on Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
I wish we can limit AI in posts such as here, and/or for some creators.

As an example Two Minute Papers used to to be great but these days he's mostly covering AI advances, which to be honest become boring really quickly.

animal531··on Reverse engineering my ADHD test
A common meme you'll see on ADHD in online posts are about how people with it are perfectly calm during emergencies, but then when any inconsequential thing happens such as e.g. breaking a shoelace and they'll just unravel and/or take forever to deal with it.
animal531··on What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?
That's quite a complicated problem.

If someone comes to me and asks a general question I can easily say no. But if I go up to for example a librarian and ask them where to find book N, then I would expect them to either know where it is, or how to find it.

If instead I asked them what the weather was going to be tomorrow, then I don't know would again be a reasonable response.

So for me the line becomes a search engine problem where no just means "there are no pages for this search result", but translated into LLM.

I think instead of Yes/No I'd rather want some probabilities such as, "This response is N% accurate based on these research metrics", or "M% accurate based on the latest research on topic O at date P" etc.

animal531··on Exact, parallel 2D Delaunay triangulation for int32 coordinates
Very nice results. For my Unity C# code I use Andy's package: https://github.com/andywiecko/BurstTriangulator

Looking at his performance graph it looks like he does about 1 million points in around 320ms or so (if I managed to read his graph correctly), albeit for float2 values and using Unity Burst which does SIMD+multiple threads.

animal531··on Holocloth
Two Minute Papers often post info on some cloth papers: https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers/videos

Here's just one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wibbnn3hV4U

animal531··on SIMD for Collision
Unity has begun to roll out CoreCLR in beta now which is a move from Mono to modern .NET 10.

The official release and LTS versions are still some months out though.

animal531··on SIMD for Collision
My favourite is probably Bepuphysics due to its C# nature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjtwSq3u6Dg

Unfortunately it was created before Unity could use vectorization and other C# engines were just starting out as well.

The source, a great resource for learning C# SIMD, even though its a few years old by now: https://github.com/bepu/bepuphysics2

animal531··on Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)
My favourite way of playing old Civ 1-3 as a kid was to build a solid circle of units that would gradually expand and move out to fill all the available space.

Eventually you'd own all the land and your units would just be camped along the beachline, enjoying some downtime.

animal531··on VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide
Some more interesting topics around the subject that I haven't seen covered in the comments:

- Hololive is huge and they definitely take a decent cut for their efforts. But why do people sign with them? The short answer is that they're a well oiled machine where people go through a sign up process where they create a test video etc. If accepted they're placed into groups (such as Hololive English) etc., but at the same time they also get to interact with all the other groups which immediately raises their popularity significantly.

They also look for some other related skills, for example probably all of the English group can sing semi-professionally on a stage etc.

In general your success is pretty much guaranteed once accepted, it just becomes a question of scale.

- Downsides: Usually the vtuber character, name, image and all other related copyrights belong to them. If there are disagreements then you can leave depending on your contract, but you can no longer use that character in any way. For example Nimi Nightmare used to be Fauna in Hololive, but she left and restarted on her own, whereas some other really popular streamers left but never seemed to resurface.

In general they also don't seem to collaborate much with vtubers outside of their space, so I'm sure there are some rules in play there.

animal531··on VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide
I also wondered this before I ever saw any. There is a gradient from someone streaming with no cam, then a non-human vtuber, then human vtuber and finally a real human.

The simplest answer is probably that we all have our likes and dislikes, but personally for me I fall inbetween the non-human and vtuber section. If they stream permanently as e.g. a fish I find it too odd, whereas apparently my brain is perfectly happy seeing any kind of expressive humanoid that I can link to the speaking person.

If they have no cam then its just a voice over which feels too impersonal for the streaming space, which I don't like.

animal531··on The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
Roughly speaking FSM + stack based approaches are perfectly fine for 100 entities, but not for 1k.

Once you get to that point you can still make it work but it will take a lot of work to make it as fast as possible, whereas you'd have been better served by more branchless approaches that doesn't parse/jump the FSM.

animal531··on The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
Memory is a funny thing.

I also take months to learn new names, but I can tell you that my second interview ever was for a company which did low level SCADA work. Even though I never took that job or worked in any such related field I can still tell you what it stands for.

animal531··on The worst job interview I ever had
Cultural fit is the number one predictor for a successful fit, however a big wall here is with certain personality types (especially surrounding IT).

In general we don't open up easily to strangers and hate personal questions. We consider many social questions to be just fluff and will either brush them off or pick something with far too much personal information.

These issues especially surface when being interviewed by a non-IT worker.

animal531··on Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism
As a kid I found it interesting that people pretty much always crossed their arms and/or their legs when sitting on the ground in the same pattern.

After that re-trained myself a few times out of interest to do it the other way around, and one goes through the four odd phases of having to focus on it vs it just happening correctly without thinking about it.

From what I remember it could take 2-4 weeks before you would just do it both without thinking and correctly.

animal531··on The Mushroom That Makes People Have the Exact Same Hallucination
There's a matching eye/brain condition where older people very rapidly develop cataracts or other eye problems and they spontaneously start seeing little people everywhere.

Usually their vision becomes blurry, but the tiny characters remain in perfect focus.

animal531··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
I've somehow managed to train mine out of trying to fluff me up the whole time, its become very factual.

Overall it saves me a lot of time reading when it's just focusing on the details.

animal531··on Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
You also often need several tiers of pausing. For example when paused you want the current game time to be zero, but you also want to ignore only some user inputs. You don't want to disable the menu or pause/unpause actions along with player actions, also you might want to pause dialog but not music (although you might alter it for the menu).

Then there are others such as vfx that can have their own tiers, you might have something in the background that is difficult to pause, stop and/or resume.

Then there are other things such as timers etc. that will need special handling, graphics card interactions etc. When done with those you also need to be able to resume and ensure that all of the previous will continue as if nothing have ever happened.

In the same vein some other "simple" things like saving/loading the game is often anything but.

animal531··on In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue
Not mentioned is that studies are showing that areas over solar farms remain stable in temperature, but surrounding areas get a few degrees warmer, which is problematic for either people living close to them and/or if they are planted next to crops, other infrastructure etc.
animal531··on A dot a day keeps the clutter away
Although looking at his, several of them are so covered in dots as to be opaque anyway.

I'd have maybe used different colored dots, e.g. N blue, then remove them and place 1 green etc. as a counter and so on.

animal531··on Typing and Keyboards
I kind of wonder what the key difference is over 40 years for typing text vs code.

I type text at a rather slow rate due to poor training and never having really tried to improve, but when it comes to code I can output code sequences so much faster.

animal531··on How much precision can you squeeze out of a table?
Ah, very cool. My personal favourite is this one: https://archive.org/details/engineeringformu00giec_0/page/n5...

My father owned a copy of it which I still have to this day. It had a lot of different formulas than the ones we were taught in school, and I liked the range of topics that it covered.

animal531··on Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls
And yet somehow the stats show that most likely 2026 is easily on track to be a bumper gaming year, surpassing 2025.

Revenue wise they might be down from the 6bn in 2025 to somewhere in the mid 5's, so might as well get rid of 1000 employees while handing out bigger bonuses to senior staff.

animal531··on How to Spot a Liar: Kate White on the Techniques of Deception in Mysteries
I find that it's like telling twins apart. If you don't know them they may be very similar, but once you spend some time with them it can become very obvious as to who is who.

We all have our own rules that we've built up over our lifetime and some of us have definitely spent more time watching people and/or are just better at the subtle clues.

But having said that, there are often people that just break all the conventional rules or just doesn't trigger any of the things that you are looking for. Like most things you can probably draw a bell curve where we can easily spot the people in the middle, but then it becomes geometrically more difficult as you move to the sides.

animal531··on Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?
I use it near daily and there is definitely a positive there, BUT its nothing like what the OP statement would make it up to be.

If it is writing both the code and the tests then you're going to find that its tests are remarkable, they just work. At least until you deploy to a live state and start testing for yourself, then you'll notice that its mostly only testing the exact code that it wrote, its not confrontational or trying to find errors and it already assumes that its going to work. It won't ever come up with the majority of breaking cases that a developer will by itself, you will need to guide it. Also while fixing those the odds of introducing other breaking changes are decent, and after enough prompts you are going to lose coherency no matter what you do.

It definitely makes a lot of boilerplate code easier, but what you don't notice is that its just moving the difficult to find problems into hidden new areas. That fancy code that it wrote maybe doesn't take any building blocks, lower levels such as database optimization etc. into account. Even for a simple application a half-decent developer can create something that will run quite a bit faster. If you start bringing these problems to it then it might be able to optimize them, but the amount of time that's going to take is non-negligible.

It takes developers time to sit on code, learn it along with the problem space and how to tie them together effectively. If you take that away there is no learning, you're just the monkey copy-pasting the produced output from the black box and hoping that you get a result that works. Even worse is that every step you take doesn't bring you any closer to the solution, its pretty much random.

So what is it good for? It can both read, "understand", translate, write and explain things to a sufficient degree much faster than us humans. But if you are (at the moment) trusting it at anything past the method level for code then you're just shooting yourself in the foot, you're just not feeling the pain until later. In a day you can have it generate for example a whole website, backend, db etc. for your new business idea but that's not a "product", it might as well be a promotional video that you throw away once you've used it to impress the investors. For now that might still work, but people are already catching on and beginning to wise up.

animal531··on How Invisalign became the biggest user of 3D printers
I'm 50 and still have all mine. One of them is at a 90 degree angle pointing forward as well.

I grew up in a time/place where you never went to the dentist or doctor unless if you were pretty much dying, but at least times are changing now.

animal531··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
Yeah, but unfortunately its probably going to keep going until people actually die before they will be stopped.
animal531··on Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
The assumption here is that AI can produce "strong" work, when in reality its the opposite. Its great at generating boilerplate or code that's been done by everyone.

Instead do the opposite and give it a really hard problem that's scarce on searchable resources, something that you'll struggle to implement on your own. In general what you'll find is that it seems to implement something, but once you start digging you're just going to discover holes and mistakes all over.

You're the one who should be producing strong groundbreaking work, not the AI.

animal531··on Life as an OnlyFans 'chatter'
The sad thing about AI usage and the lack of jobs here in the poorer part of the world is that around the $6 mark per hour there would be literal queues of people forming to sign up for the job.

At about the $10-12 mark you'd be able to hire people with serious linguistic skills.

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