jmiskovic

Maybe? I block popups, use privacy badger to deprive the usual suspects of my data, use one extension for finer control over video playback speed and one more to make reddit redirect back to old interface. I only use 7 of them because of security nightmare they are in general.

I also hate concept of summaries, as well as related concept of AI text inflation.

I'm also against any third party being involved here. I'm pointing out the potential of AI in the browser, but for me it has to be locally run or it is a no go.

My point is that browser plays a central role in our digital interactions. Extensions help with smoothing out the experience. LLMs could write those extensions, or serve as an agent to further make the online interactions more pleasant. I could see myself using it to either optimize my existing experience, or to vastly broaden the communication surface in directions that currently hold too much friction.

The rest was a joke, sorry if it made your day worse.

Right now all the sites I frequent are good enough, otherwise I'd drop them. I don't interact with Discord, Bluesky, X, Instagram at all, and I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of high quality interpersonal communication because I have low tolerance for their UX and their lack of respect for users.

I find it very hard to believe that either every site you interact with works exactly as you want it to work, or that you have the time/capacity to adjust them all with custom extensions. I get that there are downsides but you don't see any upsides?

A browser with current definition obviously doesn't "need" AI. And we also know all too well how it's going to turn out - they will both use the AI to push ads onto us and also collect and sell our personal data.

However, a strong locally-executed AI would have potential to vastly improve our experience of web! So much work is done in browsers could be enhanced or automated with custom agents. You'd no longer need any browser extensions (which are privacy nightmare when the ownership secretly changes hands). Your agents could browse local shops for personalized gifts or discounts, you could set up very complex watches on classified ads. You could work around any lacking features of any website or a combination of several websites, to get exactly what you seek and to filter out anything that is noise to you. You would be able to seamlessly communicate with the Polish internet subculture, or with Gen Alpha, all without feeling the physical pain. With an AGI-level AI maybe even the Reddit could be made usable again.

Of course this is all assuming that the web doesn't adapt to become even more closed and hostile.

I was talking about web as technology stack. The tech is battle proven and capable. I had great success in getting some ancient web projects to run locally, less luck with Windows projects and even less with Linux sources.

You are right that by the nature of web the long term stability is not guaranteed. The ecosystem could do more to encourage decoupling and graceful degradation. About 95% of modern web is competing in sharing your data to even more "parties with legitimate interest".

This is easy to fix with local storage. You reopen the tab and you're right where you left it. Unfortunately the companies see it as an opportunity to lock users in with cloud saving.

The allure is that the web is the most open, most stable and the most cross-device platform we have. Almost anything that was made for web still works today, with Flash and Java applets being the two big exceptions. Following the Lindy effect the self-contained web apps of today will still be operational far into the future.

Contrast this with Android's pathetic record of constantly breaking backward compatibility and restricting what software the users can even run on their devices.

Exactly. They have this text on patreon about page, just not on project readme. The rest is the copy/paste from there:

ACID DROP is a custom firmware designed for the LilyGO T-Deck, an ESP32 microcontroller popular among DIY enthusiasts. Unlike any existing firmware, Acid Drop is built from the ground up in C++, aiming to bring a wide range of features to the T-Deck. Currently in beta and under active development, we have plans to include IRC, SSH, ChatGPT, Gotify, Wardriving, and Meshtastic integration. With a focus on privacy and security, we're implementing features like WireGuard support, MAC address randomization, and secure boot.

We also have big plans and active development underway to make ACID DROP a powerful tool for pentesting. Planned features include creating Wi-Fi access points, executing evil port attacks, performing deauth attacks, and conducting BLE attacks. These tools are intended for testing on your own devices, giving you the ability to explore and understand security vulnerabilities in a controlled and ethical manner.

I don't understand?

"When towing Aerocarts, planes instantly double or triple their payload capacity. This is because their capacity is limited by the takeoff / landing weight – not what they can safely pull through the air."

But later, on "How it works" section it is apparent that the main plane still has to tow the cart behind it when taking off. What's the trick that makes this work? Extra set of wings?

Why such detailed modeling of memory mechanics? Would it really enhance NPC interactions that much to be worth it?

I see how this works for you and many others but I hate this practice. You are not turning strangers away, you just preemptively shadow-ban everyone.

I didn't find any noise or whining in the post. The text mentions "effort to keep the apps updated" which is more than just updating the API number. You are frequently requested to adapt the app, the signing process, fill in the ever increasing compliance data. Every request for change is accompanied with a threat.

My app had no privacy concerns, didn't collect any data or even require internet access. I was still expected to jump through all kinds of hoops every few months. Even after I gave up and my app was delisted I still get regular requests for new hoops they came up with with more threats that they would delist (even more?).

And yes, the app was moved to F-Droid which makes it invisible for just about 100% of Android users. I still think these kinds of posts serve as a good deterrent so others don't invest the effort in the Google Play store. The store is meant for corporations. If you are enthusiast or a non-profit considering the app a one-time investment, it will pester you and wear you down.

Very informative!

How difficult is it to clean the syringe after the liquid passes through it? Does the leftover gum stick to metal and glass? Would it be possible to just pour the liquid into the mold (maybe through a a metal funnel), and use vibration on the mold to make sure all the creases are filled in? How important is the pressure?

You ask for vegan recipes from a website. AI ignores actual content and instead offers "helpful" tip. This qualifies as hallucination. The system should help you access the web and instead it implies that the content is missing. This is actually why I prefer Edge over Chrome, they are similarly hostile to users but they are also utterly incompetent.

I agree about the nutritional yeast. Tastes great but has only a single texture that can't really stand in for most of cheese types. Apparently there was a recent breakthrough with E coli producing milk proteins that sounds very promising.

It felt very different and not pleasant.

The PIC24 was actually my first large project. I learned awful lot from reading its docs, for example setting the DMA to read 32 samples from ADC and let CPU know when done. Putting it together felt like playing with LEGO blocks. There were many annoyances with the toolchain and the clumsy memory addressing but I enjoyed it overall.

The NXP was downright unpleasant compared to it. I don't think a junior could be handed a NXP dev board and all the docs to hone their craft. It requires significant patience and expertise to pick out the relevant details in the vastness of their documentation. Of course the NXP product line is huge and I can only comment on few uC models I had contact with. The sensors and other less complex ICs were vastly better and docs were quite digestable.

Personally I hated the NXP's docs for the ARM M4 core. Bunch of dry tables listing each register in details, lacking the juicy diagrams and descriptions on how the bits integrate to work as a subsystem. I constantly needed to cross-reference 3+ documents (most of which describe the whole family and not the specific IC). Their HALs and code samples were obviously written by students/interns.

I liked working with Microchip uC, but this was back when the whole IC (PIC24) was described in a single ~1000 page document. I found it very readable and instructive in general.

If I had to pick something today it would be with RP2040/2350. The docs look awesome and there's a huge community that is not locked down in some corporate moderated forum but spread organically, with actually useful GitHub projects. It is the only embedded product where it felt like the open source community is along for the ride and not just picking up the scraps. I hope they continue this line of products.

I love this bit <3

    You may not use luxe for the following, no exceptions:
      * military use
      * the gambling industry
      * crypto/NFTs/related

The art style looks really great! It is cohesive and makes the most of the low poly art. I would definitely play this (in single player).

Your stack seems very reasonable and stable. I've also worked on similar things (Gerstner waves, god rays, grass, dynamic skyboxes) from comfort of Lua and nice API over Vulkan. Implementing each of those visual components was very satisfying work. Alas, I never managed to weave more than ~3 together into the same project.

How does the AI work? There must be a lot of it for a factory builder?

I would rather recommend this video [1] from SimonDev. It is much more enjoyable to watch. But all of these explain the exact same approach of rendering instanced geometry, with wind dynamics made in vertex shader.

I used this as reference to implement an infinite grass world in ~300 LoC of Lua and GLSL.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7REZBV4P4 [2] https://github.com/jmiskovic/grassland/blob/main/grass.lua

I enjoyed the "Medieval Demographics Made Easy" (as well as other materials from John Ross). It is a 6-page article made for GMs to aid in crafting believable medieval worlds. It's not enough on its own for your needs but it touches on relevant topics with just the right amount of details.

https://gamingballistic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Medie...

It is a common pattern in rendering. You achieve your desired results, but it is nowhere near realtime. You try to lower the sampling resolution which helps a lot with speed, but you end up with ugly visual artifacts. Introducing the blue noise in the right place helps with attenuating these sampling artifacts. Only usually you would sample the premade "blue noise" texture rather than using the shader to compute it.

This article does a good job of explaining how it helps in raymarching:

https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/real-time-cloudscapes-wi...

The same algorithm is described more clearly in Bridson's paper from 2007:

https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/docs/bridson-siggraph07-pois...

I would rather we just pirate the games of the bygone age and instead spend the money on contemporary indie studios. Why let the publishers profit from others' creations while taking no risks and offering no added value?

IMO the primary reason is the difficulty of supporting older titles across various modern systems, for a too small of an audience. If older games were so popular GOG would dominate the market by now.

Start following the relevant communities like old.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/ and #procgen tag on social networks, read up on techniques others use. Commit to jams and community events such as PROCJAM and GENUARY.

Learn about perlin/simplex noise, Poisson disk sampling, packing algorithms, WFC, boids, inverse kinematics, SDFs.

Choose a style (2D, 3D, animation...) and from that start learning the relevant tool (Blender nodes, Houdini, Processing or something else). This is a decent start and it branches too much from here on, depending on your tastes.

You are already using the IIR filter as part of one-euro filter. The 1€ filter is an adaptive filter that uses first-order IIR, also called exponential filter as its bases. Depending on your filtering parameters you can turn off the adaptive part and you are left with just the IIR.

Sure. Right click the timeline/bars strip above notes to set start and end point and also enable looped playing before pressing play.

The user manual for these things was quite amazing and instructional.

https://cdn.makezine.com/uploads/2011/04/gakken_ex-150_engli...

I have the T-Watch 2020 collecting dust on the shelf.

Biggest downside is the battery which can't last a single day (and has to be charged through USB micro port with a flimsy plastic cap). The "speaker" and microphone are both very low quality. Other than that the hardware works as advertised. It's a complete ESP32 device in a very small form factor that could be repurposed as home automation interface.

Software support is quite bad. The arduino examples are mostly useful to confirm the HW is working. The provided OS with UI and gestures is not robust or pretty. It's best to drop to the toolchain that espressif provides, and there are some repositories that make this easy. Last I saw, there's no good foundation to start writing "apps" on top off, you have to treat it as bare metal embedded system and start from scratch. This is where I shelved it, after about two weeks of board bring-up with MicroPython and C++.

My method is similar to meditation. I focus on my faint tinnitus, and expand the peripheral awareness to any other sounds. When my mind starts wandering I bring the focus back to the sense of hearing. It helps clear the mind and I'm out in minutes, pretty reliably. Only time it doesn't work is when I've had too much coffee (not that I learn from that mistake).

I also tried other methods, like reading a book before sleep, the 4-7-8 breathing pattern, and the white noise generator, but to me they are just distractions.