Hacker News Reader

hmryon The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)

Yeah it seems very clear that the cheapest artstyle of the future will be whatever AI can output with minimal human editing or involvement. And some studios will go that route.

Although I don't see AI in game art becoming accepted by the wider public any time soon, and definitely not by the indie crowd.

I've also been thinking about this for animation. I foresee cheap limited animation (sliding layers, only mouth moving, etc) being replaced by incoherent un-/barely edited AI output instead.

hmryon 27.5KB language-agnostic WebGPU syntax highlighter

Firefox Android doesn't support WebGPU yet

hmryon Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes

Oh, that's really elegant! I've got a whitespace sensitive language of my own, and I think I'll change it to use that rule! Thanks!

(Until now, I went with the standard approach: Remember the leading whitespace of the previous line. Then compare with the new line's leading whitespace: If they are the same, then no change in indentation. If the old one is a prefix of the new one, it's an indent. If the new one is a prefix of the old one, it's a dedent. If neither, it's an error)

hmryon Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes

You're right, mathematically it's undeniably true. However...

One could imagine an even smaller subset interpreter. It's an interpreter for a subset of Python, consisting only of the programs that print "Hello World". Since it doesn't do any error checking, for all other programs the output is undefined. Implementing it is very simple: Just ignore the input file, and print "Hello World". As a bonus, it's an interpreter for the subset of "Hello World" programs in all other programming languages too!

</tongue-in-cheek>

hmryon QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes

In my experience, people justifying their own piracy usually think about it in terms of refusing to give money to unethical/monopolistic publishers. The fact that it results in money not going to the author is sort of abstracted away, by the fact that the publisher is in between. (Some also walk the walk and donate to the artists and authors directly in some way, but many don't.)

The AI arguments I've seen are instead usually justifying it like this: "We're democratizing those skills. You shouldn't have to learn art/writing/coding or pay someone else in order make what you imagine. Therefore, training AI on pirated stuff is worth it for the greater good." So the fact that it will result in artists not getting paid is unavoidable and much harder to ignore in that line of thinking.

hmryon Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

But the person you are responding to didn't say "any and all borders are racist, including borders in your own home". You are the one misrepresenting their argument.

hmryon Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

"Advocating open national borders means you must let random strangers live in your house" a truly reasonable and not at all disingenuous argument. On par with "advocating socialism means you must let random strangers use your toothbrush".

hmryon CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO

Your comment has three hands, that's the kind of collaborative communication style we should all aspire to.

Personally, I suspect good writers will adapt in due time, not because they don't want to sound like AI, but because they don't want to sound cliche. Even the ones stubbornly holding on to their em-dashes.

The ones hit hardest will be the mediocre writers, who have always relied on cliches. Their writing will become indistinguishable from reading chatbot output.

At least that's my prediction.

hmryon Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

> I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)

Hmm I don't think that would be enough. I'd expect that would only make the modifications themselves copyrightable, but not the whole modified work including the AI parts.

Compare for example the case where the US copyright office ruled that, when assembling AI-generated images and human-written text into a comic book, only the human-made elements themselves (text, arrangement) get copyright protection, but not the images.

E.g. if you generate an AI photo and color grade it, i expect only the color grading would be protected (if that is even significant enough to be protectable), not the rest. And someone else could re-color-grade the same image without infringing your copyright.

hmryon Consumer Rights Wiki

"The website search company sells a tool to make websites", just another entry in the looooong list of Google's conflicts of interest

hmryon Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload

I would like to know too, but the author's Github account seems to have been deleted, and the crates.io releases have been completely deleted too (not just yanked) so it seems impossible to view the file :/

hmryon Incident with Github.com

https://vimeo.com/355556831

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

hmryon RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better

ESP8266 uses an Xtensa CPU like the ESP32 (just a non-customizable preset)

hmryon Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

Yeah, that works for making sure the machine isn't constantly crashing.

Although from a security point of view it's still very bad. Every compiler / JIT has bugs, and bugs that let you write to random or arbitrary memory adresses are a rather common kind.

Doesn't really matter for a hobby project though

hmryon Dithered QR Codes

That's absolutely hilarious

hmryon Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

This is about the ACM licensing it to for-profit AI companies, who will then make you pay a subscription to access the knowledge. Not about making it "freely available to the public."

hmryon $100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol

FYI it's not possible to downvote replies to your own comment

hmryon Memory safety absolutists

Sorry for not being clear, I meant the creators of Fil-C and Zig (since those are the ones mentioned in the article)

hmryon Stolen Buttons

Awesome, the Haiku one is my favorite

hmryon Memory safety absolutists

It's annoying how many comment sections online are now just Rust vs Fil-C / Zig flamewars, and the creators of those languages are deliberately fanning the flames.

I also feel there's a second dimension to the politics, where Rust is the "woke" language and C / Zig / Odin are now the "anti-woke" languages. At least, going by their most vocal online communities.

I'm sure offline there's still engineering decisions being made (I hope).

hmryon Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

Thanks, that makes sense

hmryon Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

WebGPU only got started in 2021, so Im not sure what you mean. Could you explain? (Or are you thinking of WebGL?)

hmryon Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

I do agree Vulkan is too cumbersome, but OpenGL is definitely obsolete.

The OpenGL API with its binding-based approach is also very confusing for beginners, but the replacement Direct State Access API came too late (after Apple already decided they would deprecate OpenGL, so it never got supported on macOS).

And the fact that the GLSL parser and compiler are part of the driver means there are tons of hardware-specific bugs and miscompilations. Intel integrated drivers on Windows are notorious for being especially buggy.

All of those make OpenGL a pretty poor target for learning. Personally, I would recommend WebGPU to people who want to get into graphics programming. It's very similar to DirectX/Metal, and like a more streamlined Vulkan. The WGPU implementation of WebGPU has a C API, which also has C++ headers, and a native Rust API. And you can also use WebGPU in your browser from JavaScript, if you don't know any native languages.

hmryon Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

Mesa has Zink which translates OpenGL to Vulkan. AFAIK Asahi uses it because they only wrote a native Vulkan driver for the hardware, no native OpenGL driver.

Apple themselves also don't ship a native OpenGL driver anymore, only a layer that translates OpenGL to Metal.

hmryon Advertise in ChatGPT

"I will disclose, as a personal bias, that I hate ads."

"They fundamentally misalign a user's incentives with the company providing the service"

"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me, I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model."

- Altman 2024

Soooo... No? Sort of the opposite, they confirmed they would do it. ;p

hmryon Advertise in ChatGPT

That's a shame, I love sarcastic posts. Although, when everyone is sarcastic all the time, it does severly degrade the discussion.

hmryon SQLite should have (Rust-style) editions

These proposed editions are per connection.

A system-wide config file in /etc that changes defaults for every program would break any program that assumes the old defaults.

It also wouldn't solve the problem of having to manually find out what the current recommended defaults are. With editions, you can simply enable the latest one and know you've got the right defaults.

hmryon Duskers, the scary command line game, is getting a sequel

It's only easy if you own a mac, otherwise it's somewhere between annoying and impossible.

Last time I tried it, you needed a mac if you wanted to:

- use AoT compilation (IL2CPP) instead of JIT

- use any native libraries (or use any assets that depend on native libraries)

- sign your executable

And that was before Apple Silicon, I would be surprised if it's gotten any easier

hmryon RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

Non-US hedging will be big for RISC-V in the future, but the geopolitics can also cut the other way. E.g. US banning US companies from using Chinese RISC-V chips, to protect their domestic players. Especially now that intel is partially state-owned.

hmryon A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese

It's not running at 400 fps, the UI has the current global listener count next to a button that says "fps". The fps is only shown once you click that button. Weird design, I know.