jtolmar

LitRPG fans aren't all young people, it's also weirdly popular with middle-aged women with fond memories of playing World Of Warcraft.

I don't think the phenomenon is young people these days, so much as every online fiction site slowly narrowing in on one subgenre over everything else, and Royal Road's being trashy power fantasies.

I'm on a discord where authors discuss these things, and they talk a lot about the RR community and the hoops they need to jump through to match that specific group's specific tastes, because it's one of the niches where the money is right now.

I don't know if anyone has actually done it yet, but for scans of models in controlled lighting environments, you could use higher dimensional Gaussian Splatting to get more accurate lighting than standard techniques. (Similar to the 4D version with time, use higher dimensions to encode light source coordinates.)

It might end up being used in video games, either because the performance continues pushing ahead, or because someone just wants its distinctive look.

Speaking of uses for gaussian splatting - would anyone have any unique use cases for being able to generate splat models wildly faster?

Space Alert is probably the most highly regarded among board game aficionados, but not the most popular. It's complex and stressful, so not everyone's cup of tea.

The most popular real-time board games are probably Set and Bananagrams.

All three of these games are great, I'd recommend any of them that look appealing to you and that you think you can convince people to play.

Set. Or if you'd like that but faster and dumber, Pick A Pig

Kites if you'd like a cooperative one.

It's very common in RTS. StarCraft 1 and 2 also use rolling lockstep.

I think it's just hype fatigue.

There's genuinely impressive progress being made, but there are also a lot of new models coming out promising way more than they can deliver. Even the Google AI announcements, which used to be carefully tailored to keep expectations low and show off their own limitations, now read more like marketing puff pieces.

I'm sure a lot of the HN crowd likes to pretend we're all perfectly discerning arbiters of the tech future with our thumbs on the pulse of the times or whatever, but realistically nobody is going to sift through a mountain of announcements ranging from "states it's revolutionary, is marginal improvement" to "states it's revolutionary, is merely an impressive step" to "states it's revolutionary, is bullshit" without resorting to vibes-based analysis.

Why would a nuclear reactor blow up? There's nothing explosive in them.

This is very fun.

I managed to make a "Captain Jack Ahab + Draculawhalezilla" that seems to refuse to combine with anything. Maybe because it has a + in it already?

I think for #2, they meant like AI-powered control-F / find in page.

Which is actually the first non-novelty AI tool I've heard someone pitch that actually sounded like a good idea. Way more visible failure mode than summarizing.

I think Godot catching up to Unity is pretty likely within the next 2-3 years. Unity is a mess of tech debt, mismanaged, and has just burned all their good will. Godot should be able to improve much faster due to the lack of tech debt, and a lot of indie devs are motivated to help.

I agree that catching up to Unreal is not going to happen any time soon; they're way further ahead on rendering features, and constantly improving.

The Nth Busy Beaver number lets you solve the halting problem for Turing Machines up to size N.

Only a handful of them are known, for very small N, and they increase incredibly rapidly. For the most common version of the problem (S for 2-symbol machines), they go: 1, 6, 21, 107, some number greater than or equal to 47176870, and some number greater than 10⇈15 (that's up arrow notation on the last one).

I remember seeing people blow up their SVN projects fairly often, usually from trying to move folders around without telling it. Though I don't remember those turning into three developers hovering over one computer the way that git errors so often do.

Is this just

  greeting = capitalize(greeting);
  greeting = greeting.concat("!");
  greeting = await send(greeting);
  greeting = greeting.status;
  console.log(greeting);

but with less accurate breakpoints?

Same, and even more so if it's something that feels like it should be in the library code in the first place.

My most copy-pasted code is projecting a point onto a line segment. I end up needing it all the time, it's never in whatever standard library for vector math I'm using, and it's faster to find on SO than to find and translate the code out of whatever my last project that needed it is. Way faster than re-deriving it.

Your vector math library is probably already code imported from random strangers, likely even imported by random strangers, so adding one more function from a random stranger feels entirely appropriate.

I love that you went to the effort to do brush dynamics for this. It really enhances the joke.

I don't know any more full game examples, but...

Earthbound (SNES, 1994) contains TWO complete scripting systems, one for the dialog system (which is occasionally used for things it shouldn't be; most of shop logic is in it), and one for scripting sprite movement. The dialog script is actually quite impressive and easy to use; I'd consider implementing a similar system even in a modern RPG. The sprite movement script is trash, significantly harder to work with than games that use raw assembly. Apparently that movement script system was actually a common in-house library at HAL, dating back to the NES era, but I don't know too much about that history.

Also most of the game's assembly was actually compiled from C, which was almost unheard of for console games at the time.

A lot of alternative visual designs run into problems with the technical realities of modern UI tooling. I'm going to talk about web tech, but Android layout works largely the same, last I checked (one trillion years ago, to be fair).

The futuristic UI look that Arwes is doing comes with a whole lot of animation, which is very cumbersome on the web. The CSS transition property is good, but it works on a very narrow range of properties, and anything involving inserting/deleting/adding elements needs a whole song and dance to trigger the animation then go clean it up when it's done. You can do it, but it's a whole lot of extra work.

Most other stylized looks involve big chonky stylized borders and background graphics. But we generally want the same style to work on mobile, and the chonkier your borders, the harder it is to cram it into reduced space. (Also CSS still doesn't have native 9-patches for some absurd reason. It used to be how everything was done, until the world agreed to stop abusing tables.)

Meanwhile the modern flat look is easy to implement in CSS and doesn't have any trouble scaling down to mobile. And it's still a good enough look, it'd even be kind of striking if it wasn't ubiquitous.

> "Great heavens, what poor specimens of humanity the men were! Their entire bodies formed a pattern of livid bruises. Their backs, which bore the marks of the whip, were not so much covered as shaded by torn shirts of patchwork cloth... They had letters branded on their foreheads, half-shaved heads, and chains round their ankles. Their faces were a ghastly yellow, and their eyes had contracted in the smoke-filled gloom of that steaming, dank atmosphere, making them half-blind. They resembled boxers who coat themselves with dust when they fight, for their bodies were a dirty white from the oven-baked flour."

> Apuleius, The Golden Ass

Being sent to become a mill slave was considered one of the worst punishments available for Roman slaves. Essentially a slow death sentence where you turn a millstone in an unlit chamber until your lungs give out from breathing flour and stone dust.

Mining held a similar status.

I think you're imagining a far greater degree of fine-grained control over what these models output than is actually available. These companies are just trying to implement a broad-based "don't say anything racist" policy in the hopes that their AI products don't say anything that make them look like a liability. They're not implementing a nuanced sense of ethics into what's still just an advanced text-prediction model.

I got to 327, but then suddenly lost without seeing why.

That was horrible, thanks!

Hilarious idea, very nice.

A dumb thing I found - If you move the knight's pawn, it's just barely possible to, over the course of many moves, slip your rook diagonally through to that pawn's former space.

I noticed that every scheme after BTFNT kept state. Did anyone ever come up with a better stateless branch predictor than it?

A highly successful worker coop leads to a bunch of people with comfortable lives and steady jobs.

A highly successful privately owned company leads to a handful of people with a ton of money and free time, which they can use to found other privately owned companies.

A union is a democratically-run tool. Every tech employee I talk to hates the idea of compensation being based purely on time in role, why would they democratically vote for that to be the rule?

A source speaking contrary to its own biases is very likely to be notable, and a source speaking along with its biases is essentially information-free. This implies that understanding a source's biases is crucial context to evaluating what they have to say.

It's not really a problem that some specific AI can be prompted to produce hate speech or give you recipes for drugs or whatever. But we should also be able to make AIs that can't do these things, if we want that sort of AI, and it's a problem that we don't actually know how.

This is very neat!

I don't think traditional board games would be interested unless you got the price down very very low ($2/unit or less).

I think you could make something happen if you marketed and packaged it as a "board game console" though. Like a fixed number of cards and larger boards, plus some sort of base station or phone app that'll flash everything to the starting state of a game of your choice. Then people buy new games digitally from you, same as a modern video game console.

(I'd be interested in the game dev facing API and writing some games for such a thing, so let me know if you're pursuing it and we can swap contact info.)

In games, you can use a generator function for stuff that's supposed to take multiple frames. Saves you from either having to write a whole state machine system, or extracting all the state for every multi-frame action out into the object.

All the communist subreddits are in constant hot water with the admins. They banned ChapoTrapHouse when it was one of the biggest subreddits. When a bunch of moderators tried to protest against reddit hosting antivax content, the admins took control over those subreddits.

So no, you're just factually wrong here.