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lewispollard

1,123 karma · joined August 19, 2012

Games developer and software engineer based in Sheffield, UK
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lewispollard··on Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi
To be fair, most of the complication there is because it's dynamically generated in 3D, where moving the camera makes the dithering unstable. In 2D hand-drawn art, it's a skill, but it's not quite the same challenge as described in that post.
lewispollard··on Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made
I mean, he's still going to be paying 30% to Steam.
lewispollard··on Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
Yeah it only seems to show small station near me, and not the main city stations, not sure why but it's very incomplete, and not related to age. For example Sheffield station isn't on the map, and that opened in 1870.
lewispollard··on HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88
Depends how "unfiltered" you consider LLM output to be.
lewispollard··on If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
That's like saying that low effort human-generated posts are worth your time because the phones and computers they're writing on take a lot of time and effort to build from scratch.
lewispollard··on Ferrari Luce
I noted that in the linked Top Gear review, they state "Ferrari won’t confirm the drag co-efficient", which makes me wonder about that claim
lewispollard··on Where are all the UK red telephone kiosks?
The red phone box is a type of phone kiosk. The design of the phone box is designated as K1-K6, where the K stands for kiosk. I believe the term comes from the time before phone boxes were ubiquitous, and public phones were found in small buildings/rooms called kiosks.
lewispollard··on Architect of the UK Online Safety Act Calls for Its Complete Repeal
But the US does jail people for posting objectionable content, the FBI surveil people posting extreme and objectionable stuff on social platforms and it's led to jail time in at least some cases, one that comes to mind is Lucas Nevcherlian
lewispollard··on Spam in conversational replies to blog posts
Happens a lot in meditation/spiritual videos on YouTube, spam promoting some AI-generated "manifest riches with the power of your mind" type book.
lewispollard··on Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games
My bad, it appears you're right, an Irish national based in London.
lewispollard··on Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games
The developer is also British; it's a pun because you roll sausages in the game.
lewispollard··on Most people can't juggle one ball
I think the use of the word "ends" rather than "end" makes it sound like you're making 2 snips on each balloon.
lewispollard··on Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis
Definitely post-COVID. I remember going to see bands in between or just after lockdowns ended, and even the bands were taken aback by the change in audience behaviour, commenting on it. Lots of self-entitled behaviour, talking and even yelling out during quiet moments, people walking up to the stage during a seated Nick Cave concert demanding to hand him stuff or shake his hand - I remember him saying "wow, you guys really forgot how to behave over the last couple of years". Now it just seems to be normalised that crowd behaviour is worse, more self-entitled. I'm not sure what's driving it - whether people who previously weren't going to gigs decided, during lockdown, that they wanted to go out and do stuff more, but just had never learned the etiquette, and/or social media making the experience about the individual rather than the performance.
lewispollard··on Iran-backed hackers claim wiper attack on medtech firm Stryker
The drones Iran are using are actually relatively small, you can fit 5 of them into a medium sized truck and they can launch in-situ, which is how they've been using them in ground operations. Doesn't seem that much of a stretch to put a bunch of them into shipping containers.
lewispollard··on You Just Reveived
It's a common abbreviation for significant other, i.e. one's husband/wife or partner, but never seen it abbreviate "someone" before.
lewispollard··on Layoffs at Block
Yeah, mid-late last year was one of the worst markets I've seen in my career, but the last couple of months things have really seemed to pick up speed.
lewispollard··on Claude Code is being dumbed down?
Etymologically speaking, "scapegoat" does mean "escaped goat" so it's not a crazy mistake to make.
lewispollard··on GOG: Linux "the next major frontier" for gaming as it works on a native client
Yeah that's a good salary in Europe. It's only slightly less than I make in the UK as a senior.
lewispollard··on Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
The point is that you don't need an LLM to pilot the thing, even if you want to integrate an LLM interface to take a request in natural language.
lewispollard··on KORG phase8 – Acoustic Synthesizer
Says right underneath:

> Beyond adjusting parameters, phase8 invites physical interaction. Sculpt sound by touching, plucking, strumming, or tapping the resonators – or experiment by adding found objects for new textures.

Like prepared piano.

lewispollard··on I designed and printed a custom nose guard to help my dog with DLE
Yes, but it's published there under a restrictive license which doesn't allow sharing of derivative works.
lewispollard··on Steam Controller
To be fair, it didn't originally support it, a firmware update came out some time after release that enabled BTLE connection.
lewispollard··on Valve is about to win the console generation
It's the only controller I use (bar the Steam Deck's built in controller) despite owning plenty of other conventional controllers. Once you get used to it and make use of Steam Input's per-game customisation and mapping it works really well, especially if you treat it as a mouse-like input rather than conventional gamepad.

The only place it suffers for me is games that aren't coded to support simultaneous gamepad and mouse input, which you can work around by mapping the joystick as a keyboard input. Otherwise it's great.

lewispollard··on Marble: A Multimodal World Model
The page shows, near the bottom, how the main output is gaussian splats, but it can also generate triangular meshes (visual mesh + collider).

However, to my eye, the triangular meshes shown look pretty low quality compared to the splat: compare the triangulated books on the shelves, and the wooden chair by the door, as well as weird hole-like defects in the blanket by the fireplace.

It's also not clear if it's generating one mesh for the entire world, it looks like it is - that would make interactability and optimisation more difficult (no frustrum culling etc, though you could feasibly chop the mesh up into smaller pieces I suppose).

lewispollard··on Sam Altman's Lies About ChatGPT Are Growing Bolder
Seems to be referencing this Forbes article, specifically talking about The Wonderful Company:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2021/11/21/how-m...

lewispollard··on Merlin Bird ID
WhoBird is much better for this, as it's realtime and processed on-device. It stores a log of each bird identified along with the percentage match, and can optionally store a clip of the audio that triggered the match.
lewispollard··on Compressed music might be harmful to the ears
This seems to be referring to the audio effect known as a compressor, rather than data compression techniques, for what it's worth.
lewispollard··on RPG in a Box
If it's a Godot "game" then it should be pretty easy to mod that kinda stuff in, there are plenty of tools to do so.
lewispollard··on About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)
I can confirm that I got the "extension disabled" notification for uBlock Origin, clicked to re-enable it in developer mode, and then had to also toggle it to enabled after it had been added to the list - still works fine after that.
lewispollard··on Partnering with the Shawnee Tribe for Civilization VII
It's easy to slap an LLM in there to make contextual conversation with the player, but how do you go from what the LLM says to actual gameplay mechanics? The LLM can come up with basically anything to negotiate a deal with you, but then that deal has to be made explicit from natural language into game mechanics, and that's tricky.
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