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danjl

939 karma · joined January 15, 2023

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danjl··on Show HN: Mystral Native – Run JavaScript games natively with WebGPU (no browser)
Here's a dawn implementation with support for ray tracing that was implemented a number of years ago but never integrated into browsers. Perhaps it will help?

https://github.com/maierfelix/dawn-ray-tracing

Yes, chessboard3d.app is written with raw JS APIs and raw WebGPU. It does use the rapier physics library, which uses WASM, which might be an issue? It implements its own ray tracing but would probably run 10x faster with hardware ray tracing support.

I think you'd get a lot of attention if you had hardware ray tracing, since that's only currently available in DirectX 12 and Vulkan, requiring implementation in native desktop platforms. FWIW, if the path looks feasible, I would be interested in contributing.

danjl··on Show HN: Mystral Native – Run JavaScript games natively with WebGPU (no browser)
Love it. Double bonus points if we could somehow add hardware ray tracing, which is missing from the browser WebGPU implementations. I'll definitely give this a shot with my 3D interactive WebGPU chessboard. A desktop implementation opens up the possibility of publishing on steam and other services which all expect a desktop app.
danjl··on After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
"I really hate this damn machine. I wish that they would sell it. It never does what I want it to, only what I tell it."
danjl··on Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
Add vscode. Add a list of models, since many tools allow you to select which model you use.
danjl··on How I estimate work
Bravo! Not a single mention of LLMs changing the calculus.
danjl··on My first year in sales as technical founder
Creating a good product requires lots of interaction with your target customers. You can call the "sales" in the beginning, but it's really understanding how to tweak your product from an idea to solve a problem into something that fits into the customer's workflows and solves their problems. The only way to really validate the product is to see who pays money for it.
danjl··on Why do commercial spaces sit vacant?
What about incentivizing switching the building from commercial to residential? Given that commercial brick and mortar are generally on a downward trend, and the need for housing continues to increase, it would seem better to switch the property zoning in the long run. Since I'm clueless about the financial details of commercial real estate, I'm sure this proposal is full of holes, but, as a rule, I prefer incentives rather than penalties to motivate change.
danjl··on Living Particle System
More details!? What are we looking at? Why is is breathing? I love these artistic uses of interactive 3D and want to know more about how it works and what motivated the artist.
danjl··on Pro-democracy HK tycoon Jimmy Lai convicted in national security trial
I did some consulting for Jimmy at Apple Daily, and he took me out to the best street-food lunches I ever had. His car took us to a busy street corner, where four of us had a huge lunch for two hours while the car disappeared. When the car magically showed up at the end, Jimmy told me that he paid ~$20 for that amazing food for all of us. No pretense. A lovely man. Very sad.
danjl··on AMD GPU Debugger
For NVIDIA cards, you can use NSight. There's also RenderDoc that works on a large number of GPUs.
danjl··on Most technical problems are people problems
Or, perhaps "Technical Debt Is Really a People Problem".
danjl··on Most technical problems are people problems
There are plenty of actual "technical problems" that have nothing whatsoever to do with "technical debt".
danjl··on Isn't WSL2 just a VM?
Agreed. No way to really test WebGPU, for instance. You can't really test GPU drivers under Linux or using the native Windows browsers. Lots of incomplete attempts to make this work, none of which are reliable or easy to use.
danjl··on I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
Excel is programming. Spreadsheets have been full of bugs for decades. How is Brenda any different from a developer? Why are people scared when the LLM might affect their dollar calculations, and less bothered when it affects their product?
danjl··on The illegible nature of software development talent
You can always ask for consent. Really, you can usually get the info you need from the provided references.
danjl··on Apps SDK
If only this somehow resulted in fewer, better apps. <sigh>
danjl··on "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore
> Where a great idea in a space once had 5-10 competitors

This article feels like it is targeted at drop shippers, competing on brand or maybe derivative features, rather than ideas.

danjl··on Increasing your practice surface area
Or, you can live a balanced happy life with relationships and touching grass where you are "in the moment", and not always distracted.
danjl··on Xcode Is the Worst Piece of Professional Software I Have Ever Used
Dunno. Not sure you can so easily slice off Swift as "outside of XCode", since it isn't used by anything else and is basically required for any Apple development, and only Apple development.
danjl··on Trump's $100k H1B visa: big tech wins, startups lose
Startups never use H1B visas. At least not until they are big enough to drop the adjective "startup".
danjl··on The Last Programmers?
We're also at the peak of "mt. stupid" in the Dunning-Krueger graph of LLMs for programming. All prognostication is suspect.
danjl··on Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs
As a much lower bar, I'd love it if more of the LLMs used for coding were actually multimodal, accepting images of games as part of the context. In general, LLMs are far better at generating web apps than they are at pure 2D or 3D games that use graphical APIs. There's far less training data, and there's no way to test anywhere close to what you can do with testing on a DOM. In an interactive game, with physics, animations and game logic, the AI just falls on its face because of the complexity.
danjl··on Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs
The LLM started with a three month headstart, both in terms of code, using the previous game as a template, and more importantly, all of the learnings and mistakes you made in the hand-coded pass.
danjl··on Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation
If you actually want a good multi-GPU system, just get an NVIDIA-designed system. There's no good reason to try to design and build one yourself when you will be relying almost entirely on NVIDIA cards and their multi-GPU communication.
danjl··on Developer's block
Many plumbers start their own business, or work on contract. As a startup founder, I gained a huge respect for anyone, in any industry that managed to create a business where people pay them money. From Mom&Pop shops, to plumbers, to tech founders. Most of the real problems are the same.
danjl··on Developer's block
Both are crafts, full of art and love.
danjl··on Developer's block
Naming was often my biggest block. I often know the project topic, but cannot choose a name. Then, of course, there's variable, function and file naming. Turns out the AI is fantastic at choosing good names, so that block is largely obviated these days.
danjl··on Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero
The folks that think they can now suddenly program without any experience, and not need understand how their product works, are suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Actually, it is a much broader segment and includes product managers, executives, VCs and the general public.
danjl··on 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report
3D apps are particularly bad for AI. The LLMs are fantastic at web apps that produce an HTML DOM. But they suck at generating code for a 3D app that needs rendering, game logic, physics and similar stuff. All of that is much more complicated than a DOM. Plus, there is 100x the amount of training data for web apps. It is similarly harder to test 3D apps. Testing web code is glorious. You can access the UI via the DOM, execute events, and then check the DOM for success. None of that is possible in 3D, where there is just an image and a mouse, and no way to find and push a button or check the results. A few of the LLM IDEs allow you to add images, which could really help cross this gap, but most do not, and those that do are not designed to be able to detect rendering artifacts, or detect if a given object is in the right place.
danjl··on What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?
Those three companies have products outside AI and won't die quickly. The ones that will collapse are betting exclusively on improvements in AI. It will be fun to watch the VC money burn.
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