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ics

3,276 karma · joined February 10, 2013

NYC - Art / Architecture / Engineering / Design

hn at ianxx.com

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ics··on Biscuit: Scaffolding LLM-Generated Code with Ephemeral UIs in Notebooks
Slightly edited title due to length limit. Interesting that the authors are all from Apple. Found via the citations in user wddlz's paper, Dynamic Prompt Middleware: Contextual Prompt Refinement Controls for Comprehension Tasks (https://www.iandrosos.me/images/chiwork25-27.pdf)
ics··on Beyond Text: On-Demand UI Generation for Better Conversational Experiences
Very neat paper, thanks for sharing. Being able to interact with a model through, say, Jupyter Notebook in this way would be amazing especially.
ics··on Ollama's new engine for multimodal models
I'll have to try this later but appreciate that the article gets straight to the point with practical examples and then the details.
ics··on TikZJax: Embedding LaTeX Drawings in HTML
Jim Fowler seemed like Calculus' biggest hype man when the MOOC ball was just starting to roll. If you're looking to brush up and like the more energetic/engaging style I'd recommend checking out his videos on YouTube or elsewhere.

> Using web2js, the Pascal source of tex is compiled to WebAssembly; the latex format is loaded (without all the hyphenation data), and [...] is executed. Then core is dumped; the resulting core is compressed, and by reloading the dumped core in the browser, it is possible to very quickly get to a point where TikZ can be executed. By using an SVG driver for PGF along with dvi2html, the DVI output is converted to an SVG.

This is the kind of hack I'm here for.

ics··on Mark Klein, a Whistleblower Who Revealed Domestic Spying, Dies at 79
What source can you find for John Young? Except for one extremely dubious blogspam link I can't find anything confirming this.
ics··on Why are Japan streets devoid of US cars? It's no mystery, theyre not good enough
Do American car manufacturers make right side drive vehicles for any country at scale? (I wonder how many postal vehicles are ordered these days...) Besides size, reliability, etc. that's something that Japanese manufacturers have figured out so they can export anywhere. The last thing I'd want to drive in Japan is a wrong side drive oversized American import...
ics··on Show HN: Clawtype v2.1 – a one-hand chorded USB keyboard and mouse [video]
That’s interesting, thanks. I a word and meant to ask which you use more, oops. The strap says that it works better on hard surfaces which makes me wonder about how it fares on say, a leg, stiff cushion, or things like that. Also if it’s not using an optical sensor, I wonder what happens when you try playing an instrument with it on. Might have to give it a try.
ics··on Show HN: Clawtype v2.1 – a one-hand chorded USB keyboard and mouse [video]
Learning about this for the first time, do you use the TapXR or the Tap Strap? Are there any tasks you do/not use it for, or environments where it functions better or worse? Can it work single hand or with both hands (and a second device)?
ics··on Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
Using certain family members as a personal rubric, fluoridated water has been a right-left issue for at least 2.5 decades. I think it’s been pretty polarized for longer, though it may have taken a long time to gain steam in mainstream “discourse”.
ics··on I don't think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore
I’ve introduced it to a small number of friends who do more research-oriented search (programming, law, building code, etc.) and the response has been positive. Paying for search is a difficult hurdle even for me as Google is just so deeply ingrained. Those who reached a tipping point with Google recently, thanks in large part to the terrible AI answers, are the ones who’ve stuck it out with Kagi. If you’re going to try it I recommend sticking with it for a week or so before fussing with any settings.
ics··on The belay test and the modern American climbing gym
Anecdotally the climbing gym is the only semi-public place in which I've walked past someone browsing HN; without material stats I would still guess developers and people in tech vastly outnumber other fields among climbing gym members.
ics··on Claude Tried to Nuke My Home Directory
It's a bit funny that between trolling and innocent "screw it, burn everything and start over" that every beginner has been through, this is obviously going part of the learning experience... whether you're human or machine.

(No, I wouldn't seriously rm -rf ~/ intentionally in most cases but it's not so insane when you imagine creating a new user for project separation. For those reasons it's probably good to keep the agents separate too...)

ics··on Ask HN: How Do I Escape Homelessness After Rebuilding My Mental Health?
It depends, the programs offered by companies are definitely a risk and many of the independent schools are predatory in their own ways. Many states and cities may have their own free or low cost programs to get into the industry for low income folks. However the bigger hurdle will be the behavioral health history. Such history may be disqualifying for those programs; even more likely if you are taking medication; more if your medications are a banned substance. If you're not currently on medication but have any medical record of being prescribed or diagnosed with a mental health issue at any point then be prepared for a great deal of pain. Then begins the kafkaesque ordeal of finding medical practitioners who will work with you through the process instead of just tossing the hot-liability-potato. (Source: me, a recent CDL permit holder who happened to experience some burnout in the past and not simply ignore it.)
ics··on Jeep owners fed up with in-car pop-up ads
The fact that it was bailed out says something about its place in American society. Stable might not be the best description but it does seem to be one thing which is taken for granted.
ics··on The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils (2022)
Interesting, I hadn't noticed that! While responding to your comment I searched again and found a clue that they lived in Ann Arbor, MI, which then surfaced an obituary for Dennis B. Smith who certainly sounds like the author. https://www.familylifefh.com/obituaries/Dennis-Smith-62/#!/O...

I wish I had found them sooner to express thanks. If it's possible to reach their family I'd still like to revive the site another way; for a drafting junkie it really was one of the best things on the web.

ics··on The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils (2022)
This article reminded me of another great website which sadly has been offline for several years now. Thankfully it seems to be pretty well archived.

Leadholder - The Drafting Pencil Museum: https://web.archive.org/web/20170617140127/http://leadholder...

Example: https://web.archive.org/web/20160629142925/http://leadholder...

ics··on Johnny.Decimal – A system to organise your life
I feel you; as a pretty happy user of Johnny.Decimal over 7-ish years, I’ve preempted this a bit with symlinks. It reduces the available assignment space but saves time when brain goes alt-brain.

One observation from over the years which matters because I keep separate sustains for personal (including freelance work) and employee office work. I usually can pick just one place and remember it for the latter whereas personal is a land of struggle and experimentation.

ics··on Web awesome: "Shoelace 3.0" open source web components
Asking this to gauge sentiment or become better informed, not because I believe it outright...

Could it be that people with more backend-oriented skills are better compensated, or have better market-job-security, than those with frontend-oriented skills on average with respect to regular employment or contracts? If it were so then the usefulness and/or marketability of a project might matter less to respective creators in how to offer their work to the public.

Jankily expressed as backend can afford to produce more for fun and/or street cred, frontend wants both but feels pressure to demonstrate value on top.

ics··on Building Personal Software with Claude
I have been using Cody with VSCodium and it uses Claude by default. I appreciate that it’s not in my face too much, it’s easy to use either the chat interface or in-editor commands/completion. I paid the $15 one month when I was trying it out more heavily and switched back to free for just the occasional chat.
ics··on Audiocube – A 3D DAW for Spatial Audio
Digital Audio Workstation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation
ics··on Boom XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
For those wanting to jump to where it goes supersonic, it happens a little after minute 11 on the flight time. The camera shots are clearer during subsonic flight, then it gets fairly blurry. The takeoff and climb were interesting to see; also before it goes supersonic the shots from the air are remarkably clear.
ics··on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon

    Where's the paper bag that holds the liquor?
    Just in case I feel the need to puke
    If we'd known what it'd take to get here
    Would we have chosen to?
    
    So you wanna build an altar on a summer night
    You wanna smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch
    Aintcha heard the news? Adam and Eve were Jews
    And I always loved you to the max
David Berman, from Punks in the Beerlight
ics··on OnlyFangs has made 'World of Warcraft' into Twitch's best soap opera
Also “Grand Theft Hamlet” which I learned about during the trailers at a recent visit to the theater.
ics··on Sora is here
There’s also a huge difference in what people, even children, expect when sitting down to watch a movie versus seeing a clip of some funny cat/seal hybrid playing football while I’m looking for the Bluey episode we left off on. My daughter is almost five and cautiously asks “is that real?” about a lot of things now. It definitely makes me work harder when trying to explain the things that don’t look real but actually are; one could definitely feel like it takes some of the magic away from moments. I feel alright in my ability to handle it, it’s my responsibility to try, but it isn’t as simple as the Looney Tunes argument or, I believe, dramatic effects in movies and TV.
ics··on Researchers use AI to turn sound recordings into street images
I don't know about just wind by itself but temperature and humidity changes during night can affect how things sound.
ics··on Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing
What similarity does it bear other than... stretching here... the victims were both likely wealthier than the killer?
ics··on Salmon return to lay eggs in historic habitat after dam removal project
I like the sound of running water from a fountain. But if I hear it inside, I assume there’s a leak and I go looking for it to fix. Maybe the beavers just need to visit the zen garden.
ics··on SpaceX just got what it wanted from the FAA for Texas Starship launches
Everybody else is gonna point to politics but how about inspiring Grimes’ cringiest single ever?
ics··on SOYO – Stream on Your Own
I’ve been doing something similar for about a year by uploading files to Backblaze/B2, mounting it as a virtual drive with Mountain Duck (macOS), and having a single HTML file to browse and play videos. I have a server running Jellyfin on the same files but one day wanted split screen, tried this as a hack, and it just… works? There are multi-gig files, numbering in the hundreds, and all I did was append a video tag for each one to scroll through, play, and style the whole viewer with some really basic CSS. Why isn’t t this more common?
ics··on We are shutting down Ondsel
Definitely having built-in symbols for it would be nice. Regarding a titleblock, I found that custom data attributes on symbols and page backgrounds can accomplish as much as I would even need.

Create a page in your document called "Titleblock", format it and place dummy content if desired. For each "sheet", just select it from Page Background (you can set an image, URL, or another page in the diagram). For filling out information which varies, just have one titleblock symbol and add Placeholders for the custom data attributes which you add to it as well. (See: https://www.drawio.com/blog/placeholders) This is a common workflow in CAD as well just with different terms; i.e. a linked titleblock layout used for all sheets and a block inserted into the actual drawing with the attributes filled out.

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