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laserDinosaur

643 karma · joined July 26, 2011

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laserDinosaur··on The new Firefox design is here
It really bugs me that the tabs now look identical to their text input fields. If I go the homepage I see a rounded pill shaped search input field- then above that is the browsers rounded pill shaped address bar input field, and above that a rounded pill shaped tab.
laserDinosaur··on I'm becoming AI-blind
I once heard on a podcast about comics that an artist ran into someone who couldn't read comics. Not that they didn't like them, but they claimed that they just didn't understand how they worked. When the artist explained 'well each panel shows an illustration of the events in the story', the other person was confused - "each panel is connected to the previous?" they asked. They just couldn't wrap their head around the fact that each of the panels was connected in some way - their brain just refused to interperate them as anything other than 4 separate completely unrelated panels.

When I see AI animated videos, that's how my brain feels. It's this strange brain-fog that I just cannot connect together the sequences of images being shown into some sort of chain of events. My brain just refuses to see them as anything other than a disconnected series of 2-3 second videos, even if the same character(ish) appears in them all. It's very strange.

laserDinosaur··on Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
In that case, please, define "developed the game" for us. Is doing all the programming "developing" the game? Is coming up with the game design and hiring programmers "developing" the game?

sits back with popcorn

laserDinosaur··on Resetting Xbox
>The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter

I wonder how are they taking in 5 billion per quarter when their latest console barely outsold the first Xbox. I doubt it was making a bit less than 5 billion per quarter with quotes like "Ultimately, Microsoft lost an accumulative total of $4 billion from the Xbox, only managing to turn a profit at the end of 2004." on wikipedia.

So how are two consoles with roughly the same sales numbers so far apart in revenue?

laserDinosaur··on Have you restarted your computer this week?
I remember a big debate "back in the day" about the effects of shutting down your PC at night and the effect on the health of the CPU. The theory at the time was that by shutting down your PC every night, the temperature fluctuations would put more stress on the CPU, shorting its life span. However, the other side said that leaving on your PC all day and night would spend more time running and reduce its life span, so only having it running when you needed it was better. I think a website did a test and found it makes no difference, but I remember it being a big topic around the 2000's (it might have been related to AMD chips at the time running extremely hot)
laserDinosaur··on I am a person who will look at the Steam Machine and cry
I'm sure that the steam machine will sell out just because A) it's a small batch B) It's Valve C) It's a neat form factor.

But as someone who was originally going to pick one up (thinking it was going to be a great little gaming PC powerhouse), seeing it come in close to last in most of the GamersNexus benchmarks was pretty disheartening (pulling 20-50FPS at 1080p on most recent games).

I was hoping that they were going to bring a console mindset to PC building to create something that exceeded what a DIY-er could do with off the shelf parts. But the fact you can make a faster DIY machine for cheaper right now feels...eh, what's the point?

My guess is they sell the first few batches, then Steam Machine goes on a small vacation for a few years while they wait for prices to come back down.

laserDinosaur··on Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct
From the followup article "Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank"

>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"

Who needs paying customers when you have AI?

laserDinosaur··on Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism
I'm goofy footed as well - skate boarding with my left foot forward is like trying to throw a ball with my left hand. I also found that if I was rollerblading or ice-skating, turning to my left (counter clockwise) with a foot-over-foot action I can do super easy, but turning turning clockwise I always struggled with.
laserDinosaur··on [dead]
I wonder if this comment thread is going to go better than your "I wrote a DOOM clone in my own programming language" from 9 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932974
laserDinosaur··on I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?
The Pro plan quota seems to be getting worse. I can get maybe 20-30 minutes work done before I hit my 4 hour quota. I found myself using it more just for the planning phase to get a little bit more time out of it, but yesterday I managed to ask it ONE question in plan mode (from a fresh quota window), and while it was thinking it ran out of quota. I'm assuming it probably pulled in a ton of references from my project automatically and blew out the token count. I find I get good answers from it when it does work, but it's getting very annoying to use.

(on the flip side, Codex seems like it's being SO efficient with the tokens it can be hard to understand its answers sometimes, it rarely includes files without you doing it manually, and often takes quite a few attempts to get the right answer because it's so strict what it's doing each iteration. But I never run out of quota!)

laserDinosaur··on Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward
Do you have a Gigabyte motherboard (perhaps a B550) by chance?
laserDinosaur··on Show HN: Move to dodge the bullets. How long can you survive?
For some comparison of difficulty, there's an old game called Squares which is very similar to yours. It does a good job of ramping the difficulty up pretty fast, but it allows the game have fun short gameplay loops because of the extra gameplay mechanics (ie, you are not just moving but collecting squares too).

Gameplay Video: https://youtu.be/n8nRCyjCy_Y

Apparently you can still play it online at: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/squares2

laserDinosaur··on Fandom sells gaming media brand Giant Bomb to long-term staff
"It would never occur to me to watch someone else talk about or play a game online, let alone pay for the privilege"

I think that's specifically what made GiantBomb so different in the first place - people were tuning in for the personalities, more so than the game news. There were already a lot of places you could just go for game news and updates (like IGN and Gamespot), but GB had decades of industry stories that were worth tuning in for. All sorts of 'behind the scenes' stories and faces would show up, Jeff finding out about the Dreamcast being cancelled in a conference call while on the toilet with food poisoning, Drew going to a Starcraft tournament in South Korea when they were still fairly new, the crew getting blind drunk at a birthday where they duct taped whisky bottles to their hands, stories of the sheer nightmare of lugging equipment and setting up for E3 every year with Drew and Vinnys video diaries. It was a peek behind the curtain into how the industry works with a group of very likeable people that made it different - more than just a place to go and watch people play games.

laserDinosaur··on Why that one coworker got fired for no reason
I once heard someone say a phrase which feels relevant to this article:

"If you know nothing of what they are doing, you suspect them of doing nothing".

I've used this sentence to catch myself over the years where I've been quick to judge someone as doing nothing at their job or day-to-day, and then used it as motivation to (if possible) learn about what their days actually look like. I'm almost always finding out I just didn't know enough about what they did.

As the article points out, this goes the other way too. It doesn't matter how good you are at your job if nobody at a decision making level understands what you are doing.

laserDinosaur··on Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels
>Another thing, although probably outside your control, is that I use a Firefox extension called "SoundFixer" that I use to force the youtube audio to mono

In windows you can also go to "Ease of access audio settings" and click "Turn on mono audio". Useful for games which have positional audio which gets annoying (sf6 training room for example).

laserDinosaur··on Captain Disillusion debunks David Beckham beach kicks [video]
"Whereas if you have to fake the bins, you also have to deal with camera zoom, exposure changes, etc. that happen throughout the clip."

Oooh true, that makes sense. Cheers!

laserDinosaur··on Captain Disillusion debunks David Beckham beach kicks [video]
One thing I didn't understand about the original video - why didn't they just CG in the bins instead? Why go to all the effort of CG'ing out the ball, changing the trajectory etc? It seems like it would have been easier to have him make 3 random kicks then add some bins in where they landed. But, maybe there's something obvious I'm missing.
laserDinosaur··on I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
somepx on itch.io also makes some really nice fonts: https://somepx.itch.io/
laserDinosaur··on PostgreSQL and UUID as Primary Key
>they stopped production

Oh I see, we're talking about two entirely different worlds here, lol.

laserDinosaur··on PostgreSQL and UUID as Primary Key
>And they managed it just fine despite working with auto-incrementing big ints.

I wonder how. I've had to do several big merges in my career, and it was always a nightmare because of all the external systems which were already referencing and storing those pre-existing ints. Sure, merging the databases is easy if you don't mind regenerating all the Id's, but it's not usually that simple.

laserDinosaur··on PostgreSQL and UUID as Primary Key
>Call me old fashion but I really like integer autoincrement primary keys.

Just hope you never have to merge tables from two databases together.

laserDinosaur··on Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows
The video seems interesting, but I gotta say the constant hands-on-head, "you wont BELIEVE what happens NEXT" lines, the over the top sound effects, it seems modern-day-discovery-channel style is kind of silly. I can't tell if it's intentionally being a bit silly and having fun, or it's trying way to hard to 'youtube' it up.
laserDinosaur··on Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
Pretty close to me too. 98th percentile for Internal Verbalization, 88th percentile for Visual Imagery, average for all the others.

I'm constantly talking to myself in my head as if I'm talking to a duplicate of myself. Asking questions, providing answers, having full back and forward conversations (especially with programming). There are certainly days though where, if you have a lot going on, you can start to burn yourself out with conversation (since every single action of the day comes with a conversation). Even if it's just "Oh I should make a coffee. Did I have a coffee yet? No, I think you had one this morning. What about if I made one anyway. Yeah I think that would be fine. Oh do I need to boil water? I suppose I should check if the water is hot. Yep looks like I do have to boil some". and after a while you just get sick of talking to yourself. But you can't switch it off and it drives you a bit batty sometimes.

I asked my wife once if she constantly narrates her own day, she said absolutely no. She said she only really has an internal monologue when reading things from text. And she writes down a lot of stuff on text. But other than that, she answered confused by my question "...nothing? I guess? Quiet?"

Brains are interesting!

laserDinosaur··on Show HN: Mazelit - My wife and I released our first game
In the screenshot of the DLC it shows GDScript.
laserDinosaur··on Edgar, build a Dyson swarm
I have a 4070 and the site is using 97% of the GPU (in Firefox). What the heck is it doing?
laserDinosaur··on EU to hit Apple with first ever fine in €500M penalty over music streaming
Percentage wise: If you were earning 150K per year, this fine would cost you $3,750.
laserDinosaur··on Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
"Unlimited free trial"

I finally found the pricing page (it's strange only having it in the footer and not the top of the site), and I guess you are referring to the free tier. Which is both NOT a trial (it doesn't expire) and NOT unlimited (there's a 10K block limit).

The copy there is confusing since it's actually the opposite - a limited free tier.

laserDinosaur··on Blender 16yo winner of UK young animator of the year
When I was a kid, it took me about a week to model a single wineglass in Bryce3d.
laserDinosaur··on Five years after it took on Steam, Epic Games Store is yet to make a profit
From a cold start, to open steam on my PC: 3 seconds for my account to connect, about 2 seconds to open and get to landing page.

From a cold start, to open Epic store on my PC: 1 minute and 19 seconds of staring at a loading bar before getting to the landing page.

laserDinosaur··on The Miracle of Photography
I think they got the stat from this article: https://fstoppers.com/other/stats-how-many-photos-have-ever-... , which claims they got the stats from this other article (which ublock origin blocks for me, so I didn't open the link) http://1000memories.com/blog/94-number-of-photos-ever-taken-...

According to this page, the number is closer to 12.4 trillion: https://photutorial.com/photos-statistics/

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