ksymph

This is cool... But I feel like having different color/brightness for each symbol kinda defeats the purpose of it being ASCII when the symbols only correspond to different intensities anyway.

Small error: the "Large foods" image section has steak but no fruit basket, while the list includes fruit basket but no steak.

Great article though!

Apologies for the Reddit link, I couldn't find a better source. Direct arxiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948

I've certainly noticed the same. I have two accounts here, a main one, and one that I use as a throwaway for occasional personal/emotional, off-topic, or snarky comments. The latter has roughly 4x the comment-per-karma ratio at the moment.

Though interestingly that's largely due to a few specific comments 'blowing up' -- it's typically either 0 upvotes or 100+. I believe the median is actually lower despite a significantly higher average.

If you don't mind, could you share a bit about those meetups with unstructured conversation? I would like to attend something like that, some keywords to look for would be helpful.

I can't speak for anyone else, but in trying to pursue groups with relevant interests, I've run into one of three issues:

1. The club/etc follows its core conceit closely, and discussions and such naturally don't branch off far

2. Connected to 1, the folks who actively engage in a club are typically very invested in the subject; when my interest is more casual, it can be difficult to connect with those more passionate

And 3., most critically, the things I am passionate about are too niche to sustain dedicated clubs anywhere but the most dense of population centers, which for a variety of reasons I have no interest in relocating to.

I would appreciate a group where a variety of unique interests is encouraged. I enjoy interacting with people who are passionate in their own ways, even when they don't necessarily line up with my own passions; I realize there are clubs and such out there which likely fit my preferences, but I have yet to find one reasonably nearby.

I relate very closely, having had the same thoughts over the past few years. Social clubs sound good in theory, but in my experience it's difficult to connect with people without a central activity or subject to act as a touchstone. It's a frustrating sort of paradox where the best social groups diverge greatly from their core theme, and yet the core theme is necessary to reach and maintain critical mass.

I think it's possible to get around the problem, but it would take just the right structure; there should be activities, but enough of a variety to have something for people from all walks of life. But also not too much of a variety so as not to appeal only to those interested in constantly trying new things. Perhaps a set of some baseline, fairly universal activities, with space for individual members to share their own hobbies and interests from time to time in a group setting? I don't know exactly, but it's something I've been considering for a while, and it feels like there must be an answer somewhere in there.

Wikipedia says 10 inches [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoped

Looks like the whole thing was run through AI, details on her face and scooter changed too.

LuaJIT does have some backported features from newer versions. But Mike Pall -- the mad genius behind LuaJIT -- has made it clear he doesn't agree with many of the changes made in newer versions, hence why it's staying where it's at.

Lua's nature as a primarily embedded language means backwards compatibility is not guaranteed between any version. If 5.2 was a language fork then so was 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, etc. (5.2 did have some more significant changes though)

For that reason luajit staying at ~5.1 actually works in its favor. Rather than trying to follow the moving target of the newest version, it gives a robust focal point for the lua ecosystem, while modern versions can be developed and continue to serve their purpose in embedded systems and whatnot where appropriate.

> for-loop variables are read only

Seems like an odd change, I wonder what the rationale is. Just making it clear to people new to the language that you can't adjust it mid-loop to change the loop count I guess?

Having a certain number in one hand is still a couple steps removed from getting a specific outcome, so there isn't anything inherently 'unfair' about it. My point was more that it's the intention that matters. If you make a split because it feels right, with your question in mind, then it's fine if it's totally uneven and/or you're aware of how many there are. Splits like that do happen from time to time, it's all part of it.

Functionally it makes no difference whether you split near the middle or not -- a truly random selection would sometimes end up with a pile of one, and that's totally fine. As long as you're not trying to game the system by, say, specifically counting out the sticks to get the outcome you want, it makes no difference. (and if you're doing that, then what's the point?)

Splitting closer to the middle does make it easier to avoid unintentionally counting though. If you make the same splits every time, you'll get the same outcome of course.

Philosophically / spiritually speaking, "don't think about it too much and just split wherever feels right" is the simple answer. Keep in mind the question you want to ask when you make the split and let whatever happens happen. Close your eyes if it helps you focus.

There are some funny ones in there:

> Finally mobile Flash video

> Google acquires advertising startup

> Track users' mouse movements on your webpages

> YouTube: identifying copyrighted material can't be an automated process. Startup disagrees.

Also kind of interesting how little HN commenting styles have changed. Aside from the subject matter, it's barely noticeable that the comments are from 2007. I don't think the same would be true of many other places round the web.

Any particular reason you didn't like Bazzite as a daily driver? I've been considering replacing Fedora with it on my main laptop.

For reference, the oldest cave drawings we know of were made by neanderthals around ~70,000 years ago [0].

[0] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2018/02/neanderthals-art....

I've always had a soft spot for Metro design, aka Windows 8 UI. Win8 as a whole was a mess of course -- but looking beyond the glaring flaws, I think the new direction captured some of that Win95-esque spartan functionality while also having its own sense of personality. The modern minimalist UI hellscape is miserable, but overly skeumorphic designs like Win7 Aero (or Apple Liquid Glass) are obnoxious and cluttered to my eye, and I think Win8 Metro is an interesting attempt at a best-of-both-worlds.

Honorable mention goes to the original Nintendo DS UI. For a console so laser focused on the casual market it's weirdly professional looking. A little on the sterile side but it works great for the low resolution.

You make a fair point about cultural conversation being important. I think that conversation is happening, but the focal point shifts from one generation of creatives to the next. It's an important part of cultural dialogue, not just reaching the same targets as previous works, but finding new targets, new mediums and methods of expression.

We saw the shift toward a more fractured landscape happen in music long before movies. If you grew up hearing the Beatles on mainstream radio, listening today might feel like a cultural low point. And that feeling isn't baseless. But treating the Top 40 as the whole of music ends up missing the new developments happening outside that narrow slice.

We're seeing similar shifts in film. The Blair Witch Project and Once Upon a Time in Mexico heralded the age of accessible digital filmmaking, leading to an indie boom that's still rippling out. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once showed that ambitious, effects-heavy filmmaking is no longer tethered to the traditional studio system. Those are the high profile bellwethers -- indie bands that sneak in a radio hit -- but I think they reflect the wider landscape of passionate creatives better than, say, the new Jurassic World.

So yes, blockbusters aren't what they used to be. But judging the health of the entire medium by looking at those is like judging transportation by looking at horse-drawn carriages after the arrival of cars. It focuses on what's leaving instead of what's emerging.

Great post from Adam Mastroianni as usual, lots to chew on -- but to treat deviance and risk as equivalent seems a bit of a leap. The graphs line up, but just about any wide-reaching measure was put on its current trajectory sometime in the 70s-80s (see [0]).

The hypothesis that lower 'background risk' leads to lower voluntary risks (drugs, unprotected sex, etc.) makes sense. But as far as arts go, I think the cultural homogeneity we see is more of a direct effect of globalization than anything else. In other words, the default state of highly interconnected societies is one of convergence; the variety of the 20th century can be attributed to growth in communication and exposure to new concepts. Now that media technology has somewhat stabilized, we see a return to the cultural stability that has defined humanity for most of its existence.

[0] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Wren is the primary scripting language for the Luxe game engine, currently in development: https://luxeengine.com/

I get really terrible jitters and anxiety from coffee, and to a lesser extent tea; yerba mate on the other hand gives me the focus other people describe as getting from coffee. It's in the holly family, and has a pretty different chemical profile.

There's a traditional preparation that involves a special type of mug and filtered straw, but steeping the yerba like tea works fine too. Playadito is a good brand. Anecdotally I find there's a lot of variation between brands in terms of effect/concentration so it's worth trying a few.

The criticisms around Ares sounds a lot like the criticisms of Legacy when it came out so I'm actually pretty excited. Tron: Legacy is one of my all-time favorite movies and it's basically a two hour Daft Punk music video.

That article cites the iea one. Both lead back to this chart [0] which shows total oil demand is still rising.

Demand for "gasoil gasoline and jet/kero" has fallen, but it is offset by still-growing demand for "petrochemical feedstocks". The former is used for fuel, while the latter used for plastics.

[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/components-of...

Most browser apps have an option for this, no? Chrome and Vivaldi have it for sure.

It's still early in development, but the new package manager Lux looks promising: https://github.com/lumen-oss/lux

This series of tutorials might be of interest: https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/30

> It's aimed at programmers who have some experience but are just starting out with game development, or game developers who already have some experience with other languages or frameworks but want to figure out Lua or LÖVE better.

Also on the topic of game engines with lua scripting, the wonderful Defold always deserves a mention https://defold.com/

It's a cool idea to be sure, but I'm skeptical as to how much is actually coming from the plant/fungi. In deciding what signals make noise and what noises they make, the artist could go in with just about any song in mind and work backwards from there to make it fit.

I get that this is an art project and not a scientific paper or whatever, but I'd really like to see some of the raw data and how it's translated. It'd be interesting to hear different interpretations of the same source.

XSLT might be removed from the HTML spec soon, see discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185

I had that thought too. My own blogging engine is ~100 lines of lua that accomplishes the same as you describe, plus RSS, with one additional library for markdown parsing. The author mentions Mustache templates and WebMentions, but ten dependencies still seems like a lot; I wonder what they are.