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carra

219 karma · joined April 21, 2022

I am the creator of Vircon32, a virtual 32-bit game console (www.vircon32.com)
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carra··on America.gov
It would help to have a title that tells us what this is about...
carra··on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
I mean, if people start living forever, they better stop having kids... at least until we colonize other planets.
carra··on Telling a Computer to Do Things
I was sure this article would be about how we tell computers to do things now (writing prompts to an AI in plain English). I was wrong. Interesting nonetheless.
carra··on Vircon32 Games: 93 free homebrew titles, playable in the browser
Now you can try out Vircon32 without downloading anything! Note that you will need a keyboard to play (there are no tactile controls), so games will not be playable on a phone.
carra··on Google Maps changed to show Lake Ontario as Lake America
Absolutely. My point was not to agree with the new name, but to say that USA should not call themselves America (which is not just arrogant, but plainly incorrect)
carra··on Google Maps changed to show Lake Ontario as Lake America
This is a good moment to remind everyone that the USA is not "America". Not even North America. Just a part of it.
carra··on About the security content of macOS Tahoe 26.6
Are there no versions between MacOS 15 and 26???
carra··on Using an open model feels surprisingly good
Yes, but are self promotion posts not required to use "Show HN"/"Tell HN"? Or at least a disclosure on the comments...
carra··on Claude Opus 5
While this is certainly impressive, I believe it is not a good answer from a user's perspective. Instead of having Claude automatically spend tokens in an unrelated task, I would have preferred it to first tell me: "I can't view the drawing. Would you like me to build a computer vision pipeline to do it"?
carra··on The World's 2,400 Castles
I would take it as just rounding 2,435 -> 2,400. No big deal.
carra··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
Several comments here talk about "nearly" having a heart attack. But I wonder: since it's happened to so many people, chances are someone had a heart attack for real. Can they legally be made responsible for that?
carra··on Running Gemma 4 26B at 5 tokens/sec on a 13-year-old Xeon with no GPU
> Some ppl don't like to hear it. But I would assume that token costs when using an inference provider are cheaper than electricity of using locally.

Maybe, but for how long? Prices keep going up, and every new model eats more and more tokens...

carra··on 45% of Enthusiasts 'Seriously Considering' Leaving Sony for PC
> Premium gaming and premium content of any kind seems unsustainable.

That's one of the main problems of current gaming. Games have become just "content". And as such they are disposable. Why replay (and appreciate) something you liked? Just play something else.

carra··on l: A new runtime for k and q
Quite the cryptic tytle. Were they trying to save tokens?
carra··on A 2048-spin bulk acoustic wave Ising machine for number partitioning and Sudoku
Yes, reading those in the same sentence I also thought about a spin on 2048, the game.
carra··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
People have got too used to Steam doing things well, but don't forget that: 1) that's not the norm, and 2) there's no telling when it will change. Gabe Newell will retire not too long from now. Will the next one in charge be so lenient? Don't forget what happened with Unity, for instance.
carra··on The case for physical media ownership
> The tension is that digital goods are somewhere between.

That's the thing. If they are truly goods, they cannot be in between! Otherwise they are being handled as services and as such they will be terminated at some point. So unless we redefine the word, a true "purchase" can never depend on future actions from the provider (like renewing some DRM).

carra··on The case for physical media ownership
If they have no DRM, I would say it does!
carra··on The case for physical media ownership
This article is quite right, but there's even more to it than that. Why should we need to hold ANY kind of relationship with the seller/provider of an article we bought? You certainly don't need a bookstore account to buy a paperback book. Nor do they get to keep your contact information. You get your article and a ticket. They get your money. End of story.
carra··on You can't unit test for taste
So now we need a framework for unit tastes
carra··on I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle
Careful! Some of the scenes you would think as CGI are actually using practical effects. Even a couple of scenes with liquid metal on screen were using models.
carra··on Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures
And would that really be a bad thing?...
carra··on Python 3.14 garbage collection rigamarole
I see in the front page Pyodide 314.0 and now also Python 3.14. Is it a coincidence or is there some meaning to these "pi versions" in Python?
carra··on The death of the brick and mortar toy store
I am surprised to hear this. In Spain there are plenty of physical toy stores. I can easily think of a few not too far from my home. Not only that, it's also common here to see entire aisles full of toys in some big supermarket franchises, like Carrefour.
carra··on AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise
Not just AI. Every subscription in general can be a time bomb. You grow more dependent on it, and the provider can disappear or take it away at any moment.
carra··on I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows
I always see the same when someone says things like this in any article, video or comment. There will be like 20 replies saying that it's because they chose the wrong linux distro. And of course each of those 20 will recommend a different one! Sometimes distros that I had never even heard about before...
carra··on Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
Unfortunately no, Unicode is not simply a mapping of bytes to characters. It is a mapping of numbers to code points, and in some cases you can even get the same characters with multiple code point sequences (not a very good mapping!). Then you need to convert numbers to bytes, so aside from Unicode you also need an encoding. And there are multiple choices. So what would be "plain text" then? UTF-16? UTF-8? If so, with or without BOM? It can't be all of them. For something to really be "plain text" it has to be the same thing to everyone...
carra··on Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
I read that article long time ago, and for me it's a hard disagree. A system as complex and quirky as Unicode can never be considered "plain", and even today it is common for many apps that something Unicode-related breaks. ASCII is still the only text system that will really work well everywhere, which I consider a must for calling something plain text.

And yes, ASCII means mostly limiting things to English but for many environments that's almost expected. I would even defend this not being a native English speaker myself.

carra··on The ANSI art "telecomics" of the 1992 election
Indeed it seems I was not well informed. Back in the 90s I did see several pieces of ANSI art, but even then the people and magazines I knew always called all of it ASCII art. In fact I don't think I had heard the term ANSI art before today.

I guess this may similar to how we usually call all tracker music "MODs", though in fact there are MOD, XM, S3M, IT...

carra··on The ANSI art "telecomics" of the 1992 election
It's weird to see this called "ANSI art". Is that an American thing? I don't think I've ever heard that in Europe, everybody calls it ASCII art.
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