greggman3

Sabine Hossenfelder had a pretty good video about the issues not yet solved with renewables. In particular we don't have viable method for storage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo

The short version, when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow you need storage. How much, in many places you'd need several weeks of storage.

One way to do storage is to pump water into a reservoir. That is currently 80% of our storage. We'd need 500x what we currently have in that kind of storage to cover our needs. For batteries, we'd need 250,000x the amount of all batteries the currently exist in the entire world. She goes over other methods of storage.

She also goes over how much energy we get from things. Examples:

1kg of oil generates 13 kWh (13 kilowatts for 1 hour or 1 kilowatt for 13 hours)

1kg of coal 8 kWh

1kg of lithium battery 0.2 kWh

1kg of water 2.7 Wh (not kilowatts, watts so 1000x less)

1kg of uranium 24 GWh (24 gigawatts, so 1 million more than oil kilo->mega->giga)

She also goes over how much pollution the storage itself makes.

The code being compiled, when run, could do anything. As for build time, nearly all the build systems that people use in languages like C, C++, Java, Node, etc can do nearly anything.

Saying the compiler can't run user code and make system calls while compiling is is like plugging a whole the size of a bus with your pinky. You prevented absolutely nothing. You just make devs jump through hoops (external tools in their build) to do the things they need to do and in doing so force them to add dependencies which expand their surface area of attacks.

Maybe a command-line switch to say which files can execute code at compile time but still, having worked on a lisp system that ran code and made system calls at compile time it was a huge time saver. Example:

    constexpr max_buffer_size = getSizeOfLargestFile("assets/*.gltf");

    enum Modes = enumerateSupportedModes("modes/*.el");

The OPs comment was about 3D. Today, browsers have the Canvas API that makes it trivial to draw on pretty much any platform. Way easier than it was in the past.

I have zero problems with 3D in the browser and I love it way more than native. I can edit/refresh way faster than native, it works across all platforms (Linux/Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android). And I can share things with a link, I don't have to build/sign/noterize/distribute for 5 different platforms.

Most browsers render nearly everything with the GPU. Chrome and Firefox render most of the browser via Skia and Skia can render with many different native GPU APIs or fallback to software rendering. Safari renders via Core Graphics which is also GPU based.

> If I need to touch 3D hardware, I now have to deal with different API's on different platforms.

Been programming since late 70s. Graphics in many ways WAY easier than they were in the 70s, 80s, 90s. Sure there's Metal, DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL but you can still use OpenGL on pretty much all platform or use something like ANGLE.

Back in the 80s, 90s, you didn't even have APIs, you just manipulated the hardware directly and every hardware was entirely different. Apple II was different than Atari 800, which was different than C64, which was different than Amiga, which was different than CGA, and different than EGA, and different than Tandy, and different than VGA, and different than MCGA. NES was different than Sega Master System which was different the SNES which was different than Genesis which was different than 3DO which was different than Saturn which was different than PS1 etc... It's only about 2005-2010 that it all kind of settled down into various APIs that execute shaders and everything basically became the mostly the same. The data and shaders at an algorithmic level that you're using for your PC game are the same or close to it On Xbox 360, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Mac, Linux. Where as all those previous systems were so different you had to redo all a ton more stuff.

On top of which there are now various libraries that will hide most of the differences from you. ANGLE, Dawn, wgpu, WebGL, Canvas, Skia, Unreal, Unity, etc...

what part of taxes can't be done in paper and basic math? Sure there's possibly 100s or 1000s or tens of 10000s papers to read and basic math to do but haven't personally run into anything other than addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division doing taxes

I agree USA taxes are ridiculously over complicated and there's tons of tax corruption

This appears a choice by Europe or at least some cities.

Pictures of how bike unfriendly it was in the 70s

https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...

Unfortunately, letting the assholes win breeds a world full of assholes. I don't want to die and I'm not going to assert my right of way and risk my life, but, the laws need to be enforced else we get lawlessness and a world of whoever is most aggressive wins.

I'd be curious to know what countries don't start the year January 1st and where the origin of their chosen day comes from.

I know China's new year is different by a ~3 weeks?

Also, I only know a little USA and Japanese culture but it's interesting various calendar related things like where I grew up, SoCal, elementary, middle, and high school school started 2nd week in September. College also started around the same time. In Japan it starts first week of April and so do new jobs for college grads (Japan generally makes a distinction between no-experience college grads and experienced employees and job listing will often say which one the job is for)

I have that issue with many appliances. Both the washer and drier in my house buzz so loud when they are done I'm surprised my neighbors 2-3 apartments away have not complained.

Also have that issue with MacOS!!!! If you have headphones on (so volume not zero) and you need to reboot it will Chime out loud via the build in speakers. that sound does not go through the headphones period. So you're sitting near someone sleeping and for some reason you need to reboot and PPPPPPOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNN! Thanks Apple! >:(

I'd prefer to just disable it 100%. Maybe some mac guru knows how. You have to remember to set the volume to zero before you reboot. Maybe Apple should make iOS and iPad OS also have startup sounds just to be consistently annoying.

On the one hand I hate help vampires who appear to show no effort and just want "gimme da codez!"

On the other hand, it's impossible to remember what it was like to not know something. So often, just giving hints isn't enough. When I used to spend too much time answering S.O. questions I tried to, as often as possible, include a working snippet. One, to prove the solution worked, but two, so the questioner could start with working code.

Starting with working code is the number 1 thing for me because then I can start adding to it until it breaks and can always go back to working.

I'm curious what you see as wrong there?

The original study said that 50-55% made it back into prison. The new study says it's more like 33% that make it back into prison. Yes, 1 of 3 is better than 1 of 2 but it's still 1 of 3. I'd call that high personally. In what other circumstance would I take a risk of something bad happening if the bad outcome happpened 1 out of 3 times?

I've argued that Likes are evil and should be banned. I've tried in some places to remove them from my life. Via ublock-origin I have them blocked from HN beacuse I feel the rush of elation everytime I see I've posted somethign that gets even a few up votes and I can feel it addicting me to wanting to seek out more of that.

I've done the same on stackoverflow when I used to post their a lot. I hid other people's scores as well as the answer scores.

I'd go so far as to say I believe it's possible the like button is large percentage of the cause of all the various problems with social media. Likes on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc... I feel like remove the like button would go along way of removing the addiction and the attention seeking behavior of all the various social medias

I guess I'm not aware of their history. I thought they (Carmack and Romero) were indie bootstrapped business. Their success is being repeated today by 10x to 20x the indie teams, or so it seems to me.

this might sound selfish but for me I think part of it is it's no longer special. In 2002-2003 I was having fun doing something semi-rare, post thoughts online. That all changed with Facebook and Twitter. Suddenly everyone was doing it so it was no longer special or at least that's how it feels.

It's also that I have nothing to say anymore. I'm not sure which is the bigger reason. I didn't have all that much to say in the past I think. I just found random stuff interesting and wrote about it. But that goes back to the top issue. Anyone can tweet or post to their facebook in moments so it feels mostly pointless to try to share in an ocean of sharing.

At the moment having a well made Youtube channel seems like the new similar outlet. It's hard enough that it's semi rare. Sure anyone can post themselves just talking about stuff but not everyone can make Veritasium, Primitive Technology, Kutzgesagt, CGP Gray.

Let me also add, at least for me, it wasn't a small amount of work. A typical post took ~8hrs. 4~5 writing, editing, correcting and another 2-3 hrs editing images. There were shorter posts but the ones that made it feel worth doing were the longer posts.

I re-watched Sneakers a few months ago based on comments like this. I didn't really enjoy it when it came out and I didn't enjoy it this time either. Not sure why it doesn't work for me.

What part of their story are you referring to? There are lots of indie devs that appear to be having great fun making games and doing well to boot. Valheim, Black Rock Galactic, Celeste, Dead Cells, Papers Please, Stardew Valley, Enter the Gungeon, Don't Starve, Undertale, etc. were all pretty bit hits, certainly made their developers millions of dollars, and AFAIK the developers were having fun making them.

Expo: Magic of the White City

https://youtu.be/f6HuBYiQEeM

I'd have never even gave it a 2nd thought except it is narrated by Gene Wilder and he retired in the late 80s so I though "wow, I wonder how this would bring him out of retirement???"

The first 10 mins are hokie but it was great after that.

It's about the 1893 Chicago Exposition (think Worlds Fair) where electricity was introduced to the public and many other things

other wxWidget apps running in the browser?

I'm not. But my iPhone can't run an app as sophisticated as 3DSMax and it doesn't multitask to the same level as that 1995 machine.

It's kind of insane to me that my phone (Android or iOS) requires 2GB of ram and 16GB of storage given that in 1995 my WindowsNT 4.0 PC with 128Meg of ram and maybe 2gb HD ran 3DStudio Max to render 3D effects and movies and and ran Photoshop and MS Office (Word/Excel/Powerpoint) and now it takes 2GB to just write messages, and share photos :P

It's not just accessabilty, nothing but English works. Even the keyboard doesn't work as it's hardcoded to keycodes so click the top of the track and click "Name..." and try to enter é and nope let alone 音

I'm not trying to knock the app or the work put into wxWidgets. But, we need to not regress in supporting the entire world and not just the English speaking subset. I don't really want to go back to the 80s/90s. I like that in general, with HTML, international text input/editing just works.

What affect will it have on kids? Every kid can now just stick figure draw into painting or else ask Siri "draw me a picture of Trogdor holding up a sword" etc... I can imagine that having some kind of large influence on creativity (not sure negative or positive)

Reading about how it's done it's not so clear those other things are close at hand. Most of these SD things generate very low-res images and then use upscaling to make them high enough resolution that they don't look like crap.

Apparently the computational power required to make them larger grows exponentially (or geometrically?) so until we find new algorithms it might be a long time before the same technique can generate whole films and games and any coherent way.

Of course maybe that breakthrough will be announced tomorrow.

Be aware, the code is not framerate independent. Maybe that was intentional? Put up a PR to make it framerate independent but also just wanted to pass it on, if you have code using requestAnimationFrame and you want your effects/animations to run at the same speed across browsers you need to compute a deltaTime between frames and use that to calculation your animations. Otherwise, people on different devices will get different effects/experiences.

In this case I'm on a M1 Mac and Chrome runs requestAnimationFrame at 120fps, at least on the built in display (external displays get whatever they're set to. I have one at 60 and one at 72)

I agree with the idea, at the same time I'm sure there's some income vs expense graph that shows expenses raising faster than income and at some point surpassing it.

I wonder when it will hit github. At the moment they offer free hosting for open source projects, including github actions. It seems pretty clear at some point they'll have to back off in some form or another. Maybe the "open source" part is enough of a filter?

I very much disagree with JBlow because I came from games, I had similar opinions, and then I worked on "real software" (Chrome) and I had my thinking corrected. The problems JBlow and similar game devs are solving are not the same problems being solved elsewhere if you they really tried to solve the *same* problems I strongly believe they'd change their minds.

IIRC one example he once brought up was a text editor written with a small amount of code. Yea sure, I also had a word process that fit in 16k (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtariWriter) but we're not on ASCII based computers with only text mode. Just a full unicode font takes 10s of megs of space. We're asking our software to draw fonts in any size, in several styles, in any language, and with emoji. That alone would break most of his assumptions because you can't just put them all in memory as pre-rendered glyphs, your user's don't have enough memory. Yet in games, most game devs would just basically say "F-that, you only get ASCII" or "F that, we're only supporting EFIGS + Katanana" and we only need 1 style.

Two good articles on the issues of text that games never deal with

https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/

https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/

The point being, it's the same all the way down in all areas. Game networking is not nearly as complicated as say the networking in a browser, that has to be able to run N video streams + M audio streams + X WebRTC video chats + Y Websockets, and video capture + audio capture and sending that data over the net, etc vs some game which if it ever plays video (many don't) only ever plays one video at a time, in known sizes and formats, and usually not streamed over the net but read directly from storage, etc...

Or take just displaying images. Most games know up front how many images will be displayed. You might even give your artists a budget, no area of the game can use more than XX megs of image data. A browser can't run with those limits. Go look at imgur.com or scrolldit.com or pinterest. Situations games never deal with.

And on top that there's just getting shit done. If I can write an app in a high-level system and ship on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, iPadOS, I'm going to. I don't care that it's more bloated than if I hand coded assembly language for each one and neither do my customers. Sure they care if my app is buggy or the UX sucks but that's got nothing to do with whether I squeezed out every last byte and cycle out out of it. HNers like to rant about apps that use some kind of less than native framework but nearly all them are using well made apps that use those frameworks, they're just not aware of it because the people making them did a good job.

Strange then that this company based in Germany is full of these dark patterns

https://www.internations.org/about-internations/

see the reviews complaining about them

https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/internations-or...

https://www.reviewopedia.com/internations-org-reviews

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/internations.org

> And exploit that difference whenever you can.

no thank you. I'd rather live in a world where we try to make it better not race to the bottom