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madelyn

258 karma · joined August 8, 2019

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madelyn··on More than 75% of Steam games tested are playable or verified on the Steam Deck
It honestly varies by game, but in my experience "Playable" is usually a great to okay experience but has small text, a launcher you need to use a touch screen for, or maybe only partial controller support.

Game breaking bugs are rare in playable titles from what I've seen.

The majority of games I play on SD are "only" playable and it's still a great experience.

madelyn··on Show HN: Text a photo to send as a postcard
Absolutely. This project is super cool!! I'll likely use this to send a postcard to some friends.

Such a cool little website to start and it feels so indie!

madelyn··on Microsoft is slowly rolling out ads in the Windows 11 start menu
More proof that "if you're not paying, you're the product" doesn't hold up.

Companies will put an ad anywhere the market will tolerate it.

madelyn··on Emulating Pokemon Emerald on GPT-4
I think this is where something like the reAct framework would be super helpful.

A human dungeon master doesn't pull a random enemy from the aether super well (or at least I don't!!). When I pick monsters I either logically think what makes sense for the area, pick something that's cool or vaguely humorous that I'm feeling the vibe of, or... use a random encounter table.

For treasure and rewards... if it's not something hand picked, I'm again getting the loot tables out and rolling. And heck even for gold rewards and things, I'm rolling the dice.

After trying basic stuff with langchain, an AI integrated with these types of tools is really promising. I think more systems on top could make it into a passable DM- at least until context becomes an issue.

madelyn··on Joint statement by the Department of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC
I believe they're referring to the bailout YC (and others) were asking for- going so far as to arrange a petition last night.
madelyn··on Launch HN: Second (YC W23) – AI bots that add features to web apps
That seems like the short term future of the profession, at least with a certain class of problems.
madelyn··on Show HN: CodeGPT.nvim – ChatGPT plugin for Neovim
I just tried this out and it's basically exactly what I want! No frills, basic feature set. Was going to make something myself but now I can be even lazier than normal.
madelyn··on Show HN: I trained an AI model on 120M+ songs from iTunes
This is FANTASTIC! There's a ton of naysayers here, but I'm going through songs and having a great time with this.

It seems most forms of EDM work great with this setup! One funny thing is for heavily remixed tracks, all the remixes pop up as suggestions. :)

madelyn··on Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code likely to be buggy
I spent a few days working on using ChatGPT to write code. I've been meaning to write a blogpost about my experience, but here's my synopsis.

Where ChatGPT was best was when I wanted to do generic data structure work with common tools. Prompts like "make a Python class that stores keys in a redis sorted set, with the score as a timestamp, that removes members older than a configured time on access / insertion." I know how that code should work, I know what's correct- but it's nice being lazy and letting ChatGPT spit out a class for me I can clean up.

Anytime I want to do anything weird or nonstandard, ChatGPT is an uphill battle. Try asking it to write a convolution function without using Numpy (say you're using PyPy or AWS Lambda and C extensions are a no go). It will often insist you have to use Numpy- it argued with me at one point it wasn't possible without it! (This has gotten a bit better since, but was still quite interesting)

Working with pre-existing code, especially anything database related, was not worth the time spent at all. Terrible query plans, misinterpreting the schema that was provided, etc. I do love SQL though- I'm quite biased here.

It was interesting in that when it worked best, I needed to know what to ask for. I asked a good friend who started learning to code a few months ago to try it, and she was way less successful with it versus reading documentation.

Ultimately I think with tight text editor integration it will be great, but it's still going to require someone skilled and who knows what to ask for- at least for a couple years. As for how productive it's made me, I've stopped using it for anything except greenfield work with common libraries I already know how to use.

madelyn··on Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now
Wow, incredible. You can't make this stuff up.
madelyn··on Riffusion – Stable Diffusion fine-tuned to generate music
Sound is a lot higher fidelity, it's harder to make the information available to a computer without serious downsampling or simplification.

Consider sounds over 12khz. On a spectrogram during a chorus or drop that area is lit up, with so many things changing from millisecond to millisecond. A lot of AI samples really struggle at high frequencies, or even forgo them entirely.

Midi based approaches have been really great though, and an approach like in the OP is fascinating (and impressive).

madelyn··on FTC seeks to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard
Thank goodness. It's nice to see action here.
madelyn··on CPSC approves new magnet safety standard for certain non-toy products
How many other toddler-safe devices are useful substitutes for stress relief or entertainment?

Now how many toddler-safe alternatives to a knife are there for dicing vegetables?

madelyn··on First Tasting of Plant-Based Oysters in Berkeley, CA
In addition to the points brought up by other commenters, have you had vegan pizza or hot dogs?

Vegan hotdogs are honestly fine and good enough. Thinking back to when I ate meat, I'd rather have a vegan hotdog than a budget one made from who knows what.

And pizza and pasta are quite amendable to being vegan without substitutions if one wishes- don't add cheese and you're done?

madelyn··on PayPal inactivity fee
Nice. Maybe PayPal will be able to close the account I've been unable to close for the past seven years (!!!) that they've still been emailing me about, despite contacting support multiple times to try to close it.
madelyn··on Replacing forks and chopsticks with pincers
I'd actually quite like these.

I have fairly poor manual dexterity (I struggle to use a spoon sometimes!) due to tremors. Chopsticks are really, really hard to use for me, and "trainers" make them about on par with a fork or spoon for my situation. A solid piece of metal would be easier to clean.

madelyn··on Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools
Yeah, it's not like I ever saw a heterosexual married couple when I was 4-7. That'd be traumatic.
madelyn··on Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M°C for 30 seconds
You warm up a piece of metal and pour water on it. The water keeps it cool and makes steam.
madelyn··on TIL: You can access a user’s camera with just HTML
> Ship an entire physical PC to the user pre-loaded with the application?

A phone (hi iOS), a video game console, a smart appliance, etc. are examples of this.

Building cross platform, native applications is expensive (comparatively) to building web applications.

I made an FM synthesizer in the browser using WASM and the webaudio api just for personal use. I wouldn't have made it if I had to write it as a native app, because native apps are a time sink and annoyance to me (I mean, I'm on linux anyways. I probably have to use either GTK or QT anyways!!!)

Demand for software is MASSIVE right now, and making shipping easier, even if the end product isn't as fast, does have value.

Though yeah, I wish Slack was faster too.

madelyn··on Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants
Hey, first impressions- this looks great! I work in the space and know that HN can be quite rough for sms marketing tools. Couple quick questions:

How do you handle offer "staleness" if you're rotating through a set every so often? And additionally do you have tools that automatically remove unengaged numbers?

Is the long term plan to offer Boostly to larger businesses or chains?

madelyn··on Stable Diffusion animation
100% agreed!

My first thoughts when I saw DALL-E were, "Wow, I can't wait to matte paint with this!"

A texture here, something robot like here, some technical or magical doodads there. Smash them all together and even use img2img to blend things, then do the finishing touches and lighting by hand. It's so nice for speed "painting".

As a programmer, it honestly reminds me of the situation with Copilot.

madelyn··on The fight against drought in California has a new tool: The restrictor
Raising tiered rates enough, intuitively, is effectively the same as a cap.

Yes, it's absurd to think about charging ex. $50k a gallon for gallons over 10k, but that's basically a cap. No one has the money.

(But yes, I'd say we should implement caps rather than being ridiculous)

madelyn··on GitHub-Next
I ended up doing this for our python codebases at work.

The AST module was super handy as you'd expect. The script would optionally take some filters to reduce the size of the generated graph, and then it sent all the info to Graphiz (it emitted DOT, too, so it could be version controlled!!)

It was extremely fun, highly recommended.

madelyn··on The downfall of smart TVs: From promises of seamless viewing to ad tool
+1 to Sceptre TVs! Recently (past week) bought a 4k Sceptre TV and it was less than $200. 60hz, looks great, the smartest feature it has is a clock you have to set yourself.

Just make sure not to buy the android or roku ones!

madelyn··on As an artist I am concerned about AI image generation
I think my heuristic is Magic: the Gathering card artwork.

Can DALL-E make set defining breathtaking high res promo art, with fantastic composition, style and proportion? Maybe, but probably not as well as ex. Raymond Swanland right now.

Can DALL-E crank out the 50x lands and commons needed for the set? Almost certainly.

Superstar artists will be fine but I fear the bottom will fall out of the craft.

madelyn··on Ban Bottled Water: Microplastics Reside in Them Globally
Doesn't the underside of bottlecaps have a plastic liner?

Plus, microplastics are a global phenomenon. Like, they're found on the bottom of the ocean.

madelyn··on Algorithms you should know before you take system design interviews
I feel that if more interviews involved this sort of algorithm instead of the ultra-niche / only situationally useful, there would be way less opposition and much more signal.

At work, I have written and then used a bunch of these in production, just for the narrow scope of things I work on. Might be indicative of me being in a bubble though.

Please, ask me to make a bloom filter or show how consistent hashing enables sharding! I'll pass on yet another "Implement String.reverse()"

madelyn··on Disney surpasses Netflix in global paid streaming subscribers
Content is queen.

I cancelled my Netflix but Disney Plus is just worth keeping, even with the price hike coming.

madelyn··on Pig heart transplant failed as its heart muscle cells died
Artificial hearts already exist. But they usually are only used while waiting for transplants, because they're not as good as the real deal.

Hearts are critical infrastructure in the body, with 100% uptime requirements and not-insignificant energy consumption.

madelyn··on Neon – Serverless Postgres
Awesome, thank you!
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