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badmonkey0001

68 karma · joined September 30, 2010

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badmonkey0001··on What would a serious AI product look like?
> It's one of the things that has been rather fascinating about Claude & Co.— he'll come back with things like, "Since you are already familiar with the ESP32…" or, "You already have a heat press from your work with dye sublimation, that will work nicely to set the inks when you screen print t-shirts…"

Amazon's Alexa does this kind of thing a lot based on purchase history. It reeks of upsell there to me. Instead of answering a question directly, it'll add something like "You've purchased ___ so this product should be a good fit for you" like it's trying to "close" the sale.

Phrases like you want are equal parts trying to sell a proposed solution and inventory/capability information in my opinion. Maybe my time in sales long ago made me sensitive to persuasive intent, but it always makes me suspicious.

The YouTuber polymatt recently did something like what you want using local models and a small robot for UI. I find that more compelling than putting more of my data in a public cloud in any form. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxjuEHTKXMw

badmonkey0001··on Inverse Kinematics and Foot Locking
That was really comprehensive. Good read.
badmonkey0001··on John C. Dvorak has died
I sat next to John in our office for a year or so back in the heyday of podcasting. He was quite the character. RIP.
badmonkey0001··on Dopamine Fracking
I was thinking of bananas and banana flavoring too. It may have been a better example than strawberries, but most people don't know how much variety bananas have because they've been so commoditized. It's too good of an example because the effect is complete.

https://10best.usatoday.com/food-drink/bananas-arent-good-as...

badmonkey0001··on Bot vs human traffic
Tiny peninsula; Six datacenters

The geology of the area seems to make for good cooling and DR sturdiness. One DC is even 500 meters under rock.

https://www.datacentermap.com/gibraltar/gibraltar/

https://www.datacentermap.com/gibraltar/gibraltar/continent8...

badmonkey0001··on Mechanical Pencil: An illustrated celebration of the engineering around us
Weird/forced scrolling on FF desktop as well.
badmonkey0001··on PageMaker pioneer Paul Brainerd, 1947-2026
Pagemaker was a workhorse back in the 90s.
badmonkey0001··on Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production
15 years ago... They had just released a remake in 2008 for the Xbox, so the IP was certainly fresh in their minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(2008_video_game)

Did they eventually drop the threat or did something else happen?

badmonkey0001··on NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power
There are dedicated turnkey vendors these days, so there's no need to get elaborate. All you need is a U of rack or two and enough cash.

Example: https://www.accubeat.com/ntp-ptp-time-servers

badmonkey0001··on The gruesome new data on tech jobs
It feels to me like everyone is holding their breath to see how the wholesale "AI can replace people" notion pans out. Whether it proves true or not, betting on the wrong result will hit hard so few want to go all in (outside of the companies that produce the tech itself). If there's anything "AI" has been able to ship at scale, it's uncertainty.
badmonkey0001··on A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors
Could be just plain alphabetical. There's a selector for which color name list to use/examine on the bottom of the visualization. There's also a selector for which color space model to use.
badmonkey0001··on Show HN: EZwurd. The easy way to learn Spanish pronunciation
Cool project!
badmonkey0001··on Developing for old browsers is (almost) a thing of the past
Now the problem becomes mobile browsers... (hover vs. tap, tiny resolutions, differences in form controls, sometimes crippled features that work fine in a "pc" based browser, fluid layout choices, float issues)

There will always be madness.

[edit] Took me a few to find this link again. Do compatibility charts like this look familiar? http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html

badmonkey0001··on Now that people are considering NOSQL will more people consider no-DB
What have you needed out of ANSI SQL that is a gap in its Turing Completeness? Totally serious. A great many things can be dismissed as not being Turing Complete, so please provide us with some examples of why this is bad in ANSI SQL.
badmonkey0001··on Why are restaurant websites so awful? Because of restaurant culture.
These words make me close tab for the site I'm looking at right away: "Click to launch site". I came to your website... shouldn't it have launched already? Oh it's not a website - it's a multimedia presentation? Great. That's not what I came to your "website" for. No thanks.

(Though I have to admit, there was a time when I actively looked for those sites. I made some good money going to restaurants and other small businesses around town offering to convert their sites from un-editable flash to a simple, skin-able CMS I had whipped up. They were always skeptical until I said "never pay for changing text or prices on your site again". After that, they were my customer and no longer the customer of the wannabe-techno-hipster that sold them the original contract for site and "updates".)

badmonkey0001··on The Mysterious Case Of The Craigslist Writing Gig Scam
The phone number and extension is probably what's used to identify where the "sales lead" came from. As for the long-calls, there's probably a minimum connection time before the lead is considered "valid". "aaron" is probably telling everyone 6 minutes keeping in mind that this is a Craig's labor pool and they will probably only really do 2 minutes on average.
badmonkey0001··on Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better
Sorry for the belated reply. Yeah, I saw Atommontage and it's quite interesting. Despite the realism of the track marks left and suspension movement, the truck still seems to exhibit some unnatural "floating" feeling. These are the very pitfalls of dealing with lower-res poly collision that I was speaking about. Kind of an uncanny barrier for movement.

I do feel that this author is a bit further along at something ship-able than the Euclideon folks are though.

badmonkey0001··on Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better
The more I think about it, the more I realize that of the three pure voxel problems (rendering, animation and collision), rendering is probably the low-hanging fruit - Though I'm not sure if creating a hybrid poly/voxel engine is any harder or easier.

Here's to at least getting a hyper-real Myst someday :)

badmonkey0001··on Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better
That and I don't know of anyone (outside of using them as particles) that has successfully created collision models with voxels in real time. The collision calculations of just a few of their scanned rocks and a ground plane would be plenty complex - a whole scene perhaps even a little insane given today's specs.

They might have to resort to polygonal collision models in the same way that polygonal games end up using low-poly collision models (with the same pitfalls such as moonwalking, blocked projectiles or mystery-bouncing).

badmonkey0001··on NewT.js - pure JS templating engine
I don't think you're being too harsh. I agree that newT really doesn't seem like a templating engine - it seems more like a HTML generator. It's a pretty complex hammer to drive a carpet tack. Programmatically constructing DOM from that low of a level is still more trouble than it's worth.

For me, I stick to small chunks I can loop on my own if need be and use a simple tokenizer I wrote (see bpmv.toke() at https://github.com/BrynM/bpmv/blob/master/bpmv.js ). Far simpler and I can have anyone whip up HTML boilerplate to use.

badmonkey0001··on If you develop web apps, don't do this.
POST can be sniffed and is only slightly less vulnerable than GET. HTTPS at a dedicated address should be a minimum level of security for a login form. Anything else is readily vulnerable to sniffing or spoofing.
badmonkey0001··on Peter Tattam created Trumpet Winsock and got very little: Let's set things right
A link to your award sir. Well deserved. Enjoy dinner ;)

http://www.citivu.com/dvorak/95awds.html#winsock

badmonkey0001··on Viz must use Apple's sub service and charge monthly fee for formerly free app.
Seems to me they're charging for value-add services. From the page you linked:

"Building your app is entirely free until you publish it. You do not need to choose your pricing plan until you get ready to publish your app."

And that seems only to apply if you publish through them.

badmonkey0001··on Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)
I contacted Peter and he got back to me. He seems to have settled well with how the cards fell and didn't seem worried about being compensated for things long past.

However, if any of you figure out some grand gesture to show appreciation please count me in. To me, he helped the web get started... An unsung hero. :)

badmonkey0001··on Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 (video)
I thought it a good idea. His name is Peter Tattam (I did some google-leg-work to find it). His site is at http://petertattam.com/ .

I found his name via a report at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.40....

If this is the guy, what should we do? Should somebody ask him what he would like?

badmonkey0001··on The iPad is the new IE6
Thank you for being the one person here that seems to consider point of view without the fanboy-ism. What people are calling "HTML5" and "CSS3" is really getting nebulous. It's almost as if just mentioning something shiny and new somehow makes it part of the spec.

I do think prefixes are better than hacks, but to call a prefixed single-browser feature "CSS3" or "HTML5" kind of blows my mind... no matter how unpopular that view may be here on HN.

"The word heretic ought to be a term of honour..." -Charles Bradlaugh

badmonkey0001··on The iPad is the new IE6
I'm betting he's probably talking about features like having a queue, embed code popups, tweet from within the video and things like that. Such features are considered "basic" in any decent interactive flash based player.

For your YouTube example, don't look at the player while the video is playing... look at the interface between videos. That's an interactive video player.

badmonkey0001··on The iPad is the new IE6
I'll bite: The problem with the implementation is plain to see:

-webkit-transform: rotateY(45deg);

That's a proprietary CSS declaration. It's exactly the same kind of "embrace and extend" kind of stuff that entrenched IE6 so long ago and severly splintered web development. Why, oh why, do I have to prefix -moz- or -webkit- onto CSS instructions in a "standards compliant" world?

Web dev is getting badly fractured again. There was a point of stability about two years ago where all of the IE quirks were knowns and the rest of the browsers followed CSS2/HTML4 fairly consistently. There was a blissful period where you knew something might be borked in IE6, but could almost just assume things would render in most other browsers.

Such a time has now ended. I find myself saying "but that should have worked?!?!" at about the same rate I did when IE6 was new 10 years ago. Sadly now I have to have $$ to spend on testing hardware rather than just firing up an old piece of software.

TL;DR, 3D transform in webkit isn't true CSS3... it's a proprietary webkit feature.

badmonkey0001··on The head of Project Vigilant is a former couch surfer living off $800/month
His name is "Chet Uber"?!?! He's the ultimate Chet?!?! "Chester Superior"

My uncle Chet is going to raise hell when he finds out there's a Chet claiming to be a better Chet than he.

badmonkey0001··on Dev Diary: John Carmack on RAGE for iOS
Speaking of ESRB ratings, how is this going to get on the iOs devices? Aren't the app store rules against the following:

"This is the perfect setup for a quintessential first person shooter game play experience — you pick your targets, aim your shots, time your reloads, dodge the bad guys, and try and make it through to the end of the level with a better score than last time. Beyond basic survival, there are pickups, head shots, and hit streak multipliers to add more options to the gameplay, and there is a broad range of skill levels available from keep-hitting-fire-and-you-should-make-it to almost-impossible." -JC

(off to go look...)

Sure enough, part 15 should prevent this app from ever getting to the public (see http://photos.appleinsider.com/App%20Store%20Review%20Guidel... ). I doubt Apple has the eggs to tell Carmack no. Time to see if Jobs' moral views outweigh his greed. (edit: BTW, I think his greed will win)

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