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gfaure

772 karma · joined September 13, 2013

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gfaure··on Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]
The two layers seem to say, superimposed on each other:

Manny doubles back to the car, reaches into Olivia's pile of flowers and finds his gun, the one he'd left there. Something really does go down like in Heat, and he's dead. All right then… I don't hate it. No matter. Ouch!

Manny doubles back to the car, reaches into Olivia's pile of flowers and finds his gun, the… Maybe the really cool thing that happens is you see his shadow traveling through time, and that's how you know he's coming back. And although I'm pretty cool with it… Great ending, ta da.

gfaure··on Mayday Mysteries
Have there ever been sections of this that the community would consider "solved"? If not, these seem less like logic puzzles and more like complete nonsense...
gfaure··on Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it
Cool! Enclitic -que should _not_ be broken off as a separate word, though.
gfaure··on macOS Golden Gate icon comparison
That "Stocks" icon is bizarre -- imagine a stocks app where the marker indicating the queried position on a trendline actually had that superfluous refraction effect on it.
gfaure··on Show HN: I Derived a Pancake
"Ova Sfongia Ex Lacte" seems like a typo of a recipe that originated here (https://historicalitaliancooking.home.blog/english/recipes/a...) and spread around the Internet.
gfaure··on Fluid Simulation for Dummies (2006)
Agreed. I started from this article a few years ago, and was frustrated enough by:

> So that means, while I know what it does, I don't really know how, since all the work is in that mysterious function.

that I spent the time to work it out myself. (answer: It arises from discretising the Laplacian -- 6 is the number of direct neighbours in 3D)

gfaure··on Gemini Omni
The genus of the seahorse is _Hippocampus_.
gfaure··on Show HN: Interactive physics simulations I built while teaching my daughter
I wish it were possible to link to a particular page (e.g. the optics simulation).
gfaure··on Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1
For starters, a Chinese language which preserves final stops (-p, -t, -k) would be a better choice (e.g. Cantonese). These disappear completely in Mandarin, leaving rhymes (the vowel + final consonant) underspecified or ambiguous in many cases.
gfaure··on Sega mistakenly reveals sales numbers of popular games
Don’t give them any ideas… https://taxheaven3000.com/
gfaure··on Math Symbol Frequencies
There is the normal notation for half-open ranges, which would lead to unbalanced brackets.
gfaure··on Show HN: Dia, an open-weights TTS model for generating realistic dialogue
Amazing that you developed this over the course of three months! Can you drop any insight into how you pulled together the audio data?
gfaure··on The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG
> In this instance Standard Chinese or any sort of literary pronunciation is essentially useless to me since people aren't speaking that way

Thank you for creating this! But I'm afraid this is the misunderstanding -- words like san1 cing2 申請 are very much everyday words, even though the reading of the character is deemed literary. You should think of characters like 請 and 聽 as just having multiple in-context pronunciations, some of which you should learn, some of which you probably don't need to.

gfaure··on The Cantonese Scrolls – A Cantonese language learning mental RPG
> - Characters starting with the vowel i sound more an e. Therefore, "to invite", 請 (cing2), sounds more like ceng2, and "to hear/listen", 聽 (ting1), sounds more like teng1.

As a Cantonese speaker, I love the effort here! However, the above isn't correct. This is an example of vernacular vs. literary pronunciation, and 請 has both pronunciations, depending on context. For instance, 請 is ceng2 when used as the verb "to invite", but cing2 in compounds like jiu1 cing2 邀請.

It shouldn't be conflated with the phenomenon later in that same paragraph about 懶音 "lazy pronunciation".

gfaure··on We found North Korean engineers in our application pile
Adoption makes it entirely possible for an Asian-presenting person to have a European first name _and_ surname and, frankly, is not something you should be asked about in an interview.
gfaure··on The plan-execute pattern
I've also successfully used this in production — another side effect is that you can inspect the exact information that each step is using to compute its own output, if you ensure that the output plan is a pure function of the input plan.
gfaure··on The GJK Algorithm: A weird and beautiful way to do a simple thing
A video presentation of the same algorithm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajv46BSqcK4
gfaure··on macOS Sequoia Preview
This is occasionally quite useful. A few weeks ago, my phone's display went haywire, and the only way I could operate it to secure a backup was through the somewhat hidden mirroring functionality via QuickTime screen recording.
gfaure··on A pivot point in Maya history: fire-burning event at Ucanal
The end result seems to have been the intentional desecration of the corpses of a previous ruling dynasty in a massive, public bonfire, and the (probably intentional) use of the undifferentiated remains — jewellery, precious beads and more — as construction material.
gfaure··on Alice's adventures in a differentiable wonderland
In the literature, they're usually called convolutional layers (I think you can pretty much search and replace all uses of "convolutive" in the text).
gfaure··on Bay Area workers charged for building secret apartments inside train stations
This reminds me of an urban exploration video on YouTube taken in a dead mall, where the people found a hidden apartment in a crawlspace where someone had apparently been living — there were signs that the area was being actively used.
gfaure··on Show HN: Parallel Arabic – Arabic reading and writing practice
Both س and ص are transcribed as "s" — is this really a common convention?
gfaure··on XZ Backdoor: Times, damned times, and scams
It's also worth noting that Tan is a Mandarin Chinese surname too (譚) in addition to being a distinct Hokkien surname (the much more common 陳).
gfaure··on The Mongolian Meta
Is there an index of resources that lists metas that people have put together for each country?
gfaure··on Stations and transfers (2022)
I find it exquisite that Paral·lel station in Barcelona really has a parallel platform layout (despite the station name deriving instead from the fact that the street with that name is parallel to the equator). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avinguda_del_Paral%C2%B7lel
gfaure··on How likely are chance resemblances between languages? (2002)
This is clearly referring to 阿姨, which is a vocative term of address for an aunt (in particular, on the mother's side). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%98%BF%E5%A7%A8
gfaure··on Colombia's Special Word for "You"
This is wrong — an entire spectrum of early modern variants starting from _vuestra merced_ to _vuesasted_ to _vusted_ to _usted_ has been demonstrated in written and printed matter across the centuries. It helps that written Spanish has been particularly well documented from the Age of Discovery onwards.
gfaure··on Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union
The docs are unusually unpolished by Apple standards — search for “progess” in this documentation link.
gfaure··on Lilygo T-Deck: 2.8-inch IPS LCD display, mini keyboard, and ESP32 processor
But the backlit screen does make a difference in usability, one has to admit?
gfaure··on Lilygo T-Deck: 2.8-inch IPS LCD display, mini keyboard, and ESP32 processor
This is the hardware that I wish Beepy had: https://beepy.sqfmi.com

By the way, does anyone know why all of these devices use the Arabic BlackBerry keyboard? Was there a particular surplus of this layout?

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