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axblount

607 karma · joined June 21, 2013

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axblount··on Show HN: A CC0 museum of retro 3D tricks you can paste into a page
Do you have "prefers reduced motion" on?
axblount··on The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization
"Methinks the lady doth protest too much"
axblount··on The “small web” is bigger than you might think
Signatures do have similar problems to certificates. But Gemini doesn't avoid them either and often recommends TOFU certificates. I think the comment's point was that digital signatures ensure identity but are unsuitable for e-commerce, a leading source of enshittification.
axblount··on Four Column ASCII (2017)
Bit-level skeuomorphism! And since NUL is zero, does that mean the program ends wherever you stop punching? I've never used punch cards so I don't know how things were organized.
axblount··on X blames users for Grok-generated CSAM; no fixes announced
Can you not see a difference between someone's imagination and a publicly posted image?

Posting a photo of yourself online is not an invitation for AI generated nudes.

axblount··on Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)
Town, outside, and dungeon represent decreasing levels of safety. In most games, players want a clear indication of how much danger they are in just walking around. Some games, like Dark Souls, do blur these lines. I think it would be easy to go overboard.

This strikes me as one of those things that sounds better on paper than in practice.

axblount··on Writerdeck.org
It's hard for me to see the advantage of using one of these over pen and paper:

- distraction free (except doodling)

- lower power consumption

- expressive in a way that typing can never be

- tends to discourage editing as you write

edit: and less eye strain

axblount··on RISC-V takes first step toward international ISO/IEC standardization
What's the advantage of standardizing through ISO/IEC? Better adoption in industry?

Seems like this would take away a lot of power from RISC-V International. But I don't know much about this process.

axblount··on Meta’s live demo fails; “AI” recording plays before the actor takes the steps
Live demos are especially hard when you're selling snake oil.
axblount··on Eternal Struggle
Does some interesting things if you up the ball speed to 20. The boundary breaks down.

  data.blackBall.v = data.whiteBall.v = createVector(0, 20);
axblount··on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
"When in doubt, use brute force." --Ken Thompson
axblount··on A candidate giant planet imaged in the habitable zone of α Cen A
I was curious about the acceleration due to gravity at the surface:

    G * (120 Earth masses) / (radius of Jupiter ^ 2)
Comes out to 9.7 m/s. Not bad!
axblount··on Build Your Own Lisp
Lisp In Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec

It takes a very thoughtful approach to introducing an increasingly complex Scheme implementation. I doesn't shy away from the complexity that many LISP implementation tutorials try to push under the rug.

axblount··on 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results
They're in the write-ins for their respective categories. Emacs with 0.1%. Clojure with an impressive 0%!
axblount··on ‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video]
I'm sorry but committing genocide is wrong without scare quotes. There is no justification.
axblount··on ‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video]
Arizona has a similar law regarding the Uyghurs. Every contact needs a clause that says no Uyghur "forced labor" was used.
axblount··on Jank Programming Language
Aside from the lack of JVM, what's holding back Jank from being a drop in Clojure replacement?
axblount··on Stuffed-Na(a)N: stuff your NaNs
This is usually called NaN-boxing and is often used to implement dynamic languages.

https://piotrduperas.com/posts/nan-boxing

axblount··on Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature
Syntactic sugar can sometimes fool us into thinking the underlying process is more efficient or streamlined. As a new programmer, I probably would have assumed that "storing" `data` at each step would be more expensive.
axblount··on Ask HN: I miss the internet of the 90s/00s. What should I do?
I'm not sure what you're asking. All those things are still out there. There are IRC chat rooms, forums, communities focused on building personal websites, and more. If you're asking how to feel what you felt all those years ago, I'm afraid you're out of luck. You can blame the world for changing, but you changed as well.

https://neocities.org/ https://tildeverse.org/ https://libera.chat/

axblount··on [dead]
I'm providing you my personal information so that I can train your AI for free?
axblount··on Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech
Hundred Rabbits is like Urbit without the evil aura and digital real estate.
axblount··on In a new book, Christof Koch views consciousness as a theorist and an aficionado
The key similarity between IIT (integrated information theory, for the uninitiated) and string theory is that both are unfalsifiable. Hubris can be forgiven. Unfalsifiability can not.
axblount··on How Olympics officials try to catch “motor doping”
I'm not sure how your extreme example is helpful. No one has made a suggestion like that.
axblount··on What Is Entropy?
Baez seems to use the definition you call erroneous: "It’s easy to wax poetic about entropy, but what is it? I claim it’s the amount of information we don’t know about a situation, which in principle we could learn."
axblount··on Vision language models are blind
Would you say they have Blindsight?
axblount··on All ChatGPT Free users can now use browse,vision,data analysis,file uploads,GPTs
Could be shortened to, "You are the product." There's no commodity quite as valuable as human time and attention.
axblount··on Fairness is over-rated in games?
I think the article makes a good point.

Games have to be fun to play. That's it. Nothing else matters.

Making a game more fair might make it more fun. Or it might not. You might lose 90% of the time, but think about how awesome that 10% could be! Horde mode games (COD Zombies, etc.) are extremely popular despite being unwinnable. Everything is stacked against you, but they're still fun.

axblount··on Wind farms can offset their emissions within two years, new study shows
Many more birds will be harmed by unchecked climate change than wind farms.
axblount··on Reasons not to take Lumina's anticavity probiotic
Off-label drugs are still approved by the FDA for their original purpose.
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