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litenboll

285 karma · joined January 19, 2023

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litenboll··on Three sites made 215,128 “best software” pages for AI. Perplexity cites them
The other day Gemini gave me the correct answer, but cited an outdated Reddit thread which basically said the opposite.
litenboll··on Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back
I can buy that argument, basically what you are saying is that the intention is that you need to keep yourself "two bad pieces" ahead all the time. It caters to a more hardcore audience, which is totally fine :)

Thanks for the discussion, I think you have a very good and open mindset. Good luck!

litenboll··on Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back
Thanks for the answers! I just want to point out that I don't think a reminder to use powers is enough. Right now you can lose on the next piece after using a power since it resolves it before you get the chance, which feels unfair. I think you should have the option to use a power as a last option always. It's technically one of your available moves, so it shouldn't matter that the piece you are on doesn't fit, in my opinion.
litenboll··on Show HN: Linex – A daily challenge: placing pieces on a board that fights back
Very nice job, got hooked immediately!

Some feedback/thoughts:

1. I don't think the current approach to difficulty is fun, its just feels limiting without any interaction or ways to turn it into an advantage. Some other ideas would be to have non-tetris pieces that are more difficult to place (but might be very good if you find agood placement), or temporary board obstacles that you can work around until they are gone/removed. Or pieces that do something else when placed like become obstacles until adjacent pieces are cleared. There are many ways to find a more fun difficulty approach :)

2. As others have pointed out it's frustrating to lose when you have "powers" left

3. The difficulty progression vs leaderboards are not clear to me. Am I only competing against players in the same difficulty? Can I choose a lower difficulty? (I would rather get the difficulty from competition than the fixed blocks on board)

4. Getting "holes" in normal tetris feels a lot less punishing than in your game. Here it almost feels unrecoverable at times. I don't have suggestion, and maybe it's not even a problem. Just wanted to mention it.

5. The powers feel a bit "meh". They are useful sure, but seem pretty similar in a way.

litenboll··on Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball
Great idea, simple and effective. Tiny bit of feedback: seems like some listings use "unit count" for the number of balls, look at the most expensive listing for an example. Annoyingly the second most expensive balls have the number of dozens in the unit count instead.
litenboll··on Jujutsu at Google [video]
I think what people usually mean is "scary" or "it's easy to mess up". Git is very easy to use until you mess up, then it can become complicated, and certain actions may have devastating consequences.

Two examples from recent memory:

Someone merged the develop branch into their branch, then changed their mind and reverted the merge commit specifically (i.e. reversing all the incoming changes), then somehow merged all of this into the develop branch, undoing weeks of work without noticing. I had to go in and revert the revert to undo the mistake. Yes they messed up, but these things happen with enough people and time.

Another very interesting issue that happened to a less technical person on the team was that their git UI somehow opened the terminal in the wrong folder. They then tried to run some command which made git suggest to run 'git init', creating another git repo in that wrong location. Fast forward some days and we had an issue where people had to clean their repos, so I was in a call with the person helping them run the clean command. The UI opened the wrong location again, I helped them put in the command and it started cleaning. The problem was that this git repo was essentially at the top level on their disk, and since was a fresh repo every single file was considered a new file so it tried to delete EVERYTHING on their disk. This was of course mostly my fault for not running git status before the clean command, but this potential scenario was definitely not on my mind.

litenboll··on Trump directs nuclear weapons testing to resume for first time in over 30 years
According to what law exactly?
litenboll··on Trump directs nuclear weapons testing to resume for first time in over 30 years
That article has no real arguments for the bias. And if you are trying to make a point, at least to to cite a somewhat neutral source, Elliott Abrams is very pro-Israel.

You could also argue that for such as small country Israel has managed disproportionate amounts of suffering and should be treated thereafter. I'm so sick of people taking the Israeli side as if they are some innocent nation being harassed by Hamas. They are ruthlessly killing Palestinians and the world is mostly acting as if this is a proper response to a single incident killing just a fraction of people. What Hamas did on the 7th of October 2023 was terrible, what Israel has done since then is way way way way worse, not even comparable. And going back in history it looks the same. AI and HRW is taking a stance against these terrible crimes, while the rest of the world is cheering on.

litenboll··on Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret
Source?
litenboll··on Amazon strategised about keeping water use secret
They are replying to talking points of the dairy industry.
litenboll··on From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
Same story for me at a game studio bought by Microsoft. It was simply not worth the hassle. As an employee I still had to sit through the same customer support as anyone else, talking to some person at an Indian call center with a bad line. After some failed attempts I just gave up and lived with my misspelled address.
litenboll··on I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again (2023)
I hate standups, but I also hate no standups since most people are unable to grab people and sync when needed. Currently my team has two morning meetings, first the forced full team one which is 100% useless since it's just status reporting and most people do not care what most people do. Then after that we have a sync between devs (we are 6 devs in my team). That's where useful things happen, we allow it to be a bit more than a standup, so we discuss issues, solutions etc and make sure backend/frontend is aligned etc. Anybody is free to leave if the topic doesn't concern them and this meeting usually runs 15-20min max, compared to the big standup that can run for 40min+ (yeah...).

A tech sync that is more than a standup, to allow for discussions, is the most useful way I know to align devs and make sure we are building things in a good way. It's something I usually advocate for, not because it's ideal, but because people are bad at syncing/discussing spontaneously thoughout the day.

litenboll··on Bird-inspired drone uses legs to walk and jump into the air
First thought when reading the title was that it will look very fragile and clumsy when walking (even real birds do) and that was confirmed by the first video. What's the purpose of actually mimicing bird legs and feet? Why not use something more simple like wheels on a board that has a spring for example? I expected the article to justify why, but to me it seems like the big thing was the jumping itself, which does not require complex bird anatomy necessarily. There's probably a good reason that I missed, but this feels like a too direct translation of the bird feature, unless the purpose is specifically to make it look and move like a real bird.
litenboll··on The trap of "I am not an extrovert"
I agree that making an absolute statement like that is not great. But surely, if you understand the concept, you also know that it's way too common for extroverts having zero understanding that some people need to be alone to recharge. They'll call you boring when you don't want to go out after being at the office for 8 hours already, for example. "Come on, it will be so much fun! What will you do when you get home? Play games lol? Come on get out in the world and meet some people!!" It's also very common for extroverts to assume that just because you need to recharge by not being with people that introverts don't like being with people in the first place.

Social energy for me is a bit like physical energy. I love working out, but then I get tired and need to rest. In this analogy the extroverts somehow gets more energy while working out. That part is very hard for me to understand.

The pandemic was a total eye opener for me. I always thought that (ever since I started working) I didn't like to go to after works, nor parties in the weekend. What I realized was that I really love those things, but that my social battery drains completely at the office so I needed the evenings and most of the weekend to keep running. Hybrid work has complete changed my ability to socialize outside work.

litenboll··on Always go to the funeral (2005)
I shared your opinion until I attended my first funeral as an adult. They are very important for the grieving process, at least to me. That doesn't mean much money needs to be spent, I've only been to scaled down funerals where there's a short ceremony and a meal afterwards.
litenboll··on Save Music, Save the Archive
In jazz it's more common to see multiple recordings of the same song by the same artist. Bill Evans recordings of Autumn Leaves opened up my mind for exploring this.
litenboll··on What TDD is good for
That's the only type of test I know for sure has value, which makes them easy to write. At work I feel a certain pressure to test more or less everything, but personally I much prefer a "common sense"-approach: Writing tests is motivated by either bugs found (including any issues you run into during the initial implementation) and/or complex operations that are easy to get wrong and could need the extra documentation that tests provide. I dispise aiming for 100% code completion, so much of that is just idealism and wasteful.
litenboll··on Show HN: My party game where AI decides if you’re funny
Greenlight has not been a thing for 7 years or so, you can just pay a fee and publish your game.
litenboll··on The US copyright office has struck down a major effort for game preservation
I hope that if they manage to wrestle your retro games from you that you would explore some indie games instead. There are many small companies that make high quality games, usually in the spirit of popular retro games.
litenboll··on Translating My Grandfather's Biograpy
I thought about something similar today. My kid (2.5 years) watches some stuff on Netflix which is translated to Swedish from English. It's very obvious that the voice over and subtitles are done by different teams/companies, because they often mismatch. What I find more interesting is how they differ, and it's related to the "slang vs academic" but it's about culture and context. Stuff like word puns that doesn't work when translated directly, or named being "translated" in one but used directly in the other. Honestly I think it's extremely lazy and cheap on Netflix' part, for adults it's one thing, but for kids it's pretty confusing. (My son is not reading the subtitles yet though)
litenboll··on Why I hate the index finger (1980)
Similar on guitar with bends I think. I feel like using the index finger is very awkward, I use the middle finger or ring finger (when what I'm playing allows it) rather than the index finger. Typically with the next finger behind to guide and provide stability/strength.
litenboll··on Leaving and Waving
Very touching and beautiful. Just now, this year, I started taking pictures of my parents waving me away on the platform.
litenboll··on Virtual Windows 3.11 Computer
Not even a little! I can get nostalgic, sure, but I wouldn't want it to be part of my everyday experience.
litenboll··on Did too many games release in Q3 of 2024?
I use the two hour return policy on Steam to make sure I avoid paying for bad games (and get out before I spend too much time on it as well)
litenboll··on My first game with Carimbo, my homemade engine
Very cool to see someone actually making a game in their hobby engine!

Regarding the asset prefetching, you mention that they are loaded lazily. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but to me prefetching and lazy loading are the opposite (i.e. you would prefetch during a loading screen in order to avoid loading things on demand since it could affect the game loop). Could you elaborate?

litenboll··on Please stop putting cookie pop-ups on your website (2022)
The important part here is that it's at the browser level, IMO. Then it's the user's choice to either reject/accept all by default or get prompted once per page. I'd guess that 99.9% want to set it globally and never think about it again.
litenboll··on Things to know about the Great Wave
I feel really dumb, but I have never even noticed the boats. In the reversed I see them very clearly, but in the original the wave is completely dominating the view (now I see the boats of course, but my focus is completely on the wave by default).
litenboll··on Open source laser microphone picks up laptop keystrokes
> > "For example, if you type only "the" all day, then when you press the letter 't' the letter 'h' will be on the home row."

> 'h' is already on the home row on most keyboards.

For some reason this made me think about our unit tests at work :)

litenboll··on US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button
Yeah I agree with this, it's a very good point. Of course a real law needs more narrow wording. The spirit of it should be more about not allowing companies to have different means for subscribing and unsubscribing. Then there can be additional rules that prevent them from convoluting the process more than necessary.
litenboll··on US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button
Yes, that's true and it's good for those who know about it. It's not enough though, companies still have super easy sign ups and then refer to call customer service to unsubscribe (usually the case with cell phone plans for example). And many companies have no email or contact form, only a phone number available on their site. So there's still lots of room for improvement.
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