manifoldgeo

Yeah, they should have posted it to LoreHub! I just checked for the availability of lorehub.com, and you can buy it for only ~$13,000 and start a competing business to GitHub.

If it were Data instead of Lore, it would reject any commit messages that used contractions such as "I'm" and "can't" ;-)

Ive been taking courses on CLO 3D for digital fashion design, and this article was a nice crash-course on the available technologies for 3D body scanning.

Recently, I wanted to turn my hand-drawn jeans pattern into a 3D one to troubleshoot fit, and I found the CLO avatar editor surprisingly capable of generating a body type like my own with just a few measurements. It extrapolated a lot from a little, and I'd been wondering how. Good stuff!

Another comment accuses the original post of being AI slop, and I can't prove or disprove that. But, the author (whether human or LLM) did at least cite sources, open-source their tool, and teach me a few things either way.

I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out.

But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 2024. I've never heard anything about PeerTube in casual conversation, and Mastodon is not common to hear about either.

As someone with a tech degree and a liberal arts degree, I think protocols like this are excellent examples of trying to solve social issues with technology instead of policy or other approaches. I can't tell you what those other approaches would be, but I haven't seen a lot of efficacy from the purely technological ones. Eventually, the pressure of turning a profit always seems to take over, pushing the moral mission aside. Still. I'm rooting for ATProto to speak truth to power and uproot apps like X and Instagram.

Xfinity has a massive market share and is often the only game in town or one of only two. The only alternatives are often smaller resellers of the exact same infrastructure under a different company name. Or, there's also satellite Internet, but it's an order of magnitude slower, has a low data cap, and costs at least as much as the others.

Sometimes, the situation is so bad that people start their own ISP rather than suffer the exorbitant prices and lackluster support:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared...

The studio that makes Evangelion moved from 3DS Max to Blender as their primary 3D software according to this article:

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-k...

There's a recent book called "Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America", and seeing this news makes me want to revisit it. The author outlines the usual tactics used by private equity firms to turn a functioning business into their own short-term profit factory, often driving the business into bankruptcy in the process. EA already has a reputation as a semi-broken company, but things can probably get a lot worse.

One method they use is the consolidation of a bunch of small, related businesses. For example, PE firms buy out all of the local veterinary offices in a tri-city area, cut costs, lay off the most qualified vets and replace with less-qualified ones, increase prices for services, and operate a local monopoly.

Clearly, that particular tactic is much harder to pull on the massive oligopoly that is the gaming industry, but it was the one that stuck with me from the book. There are more baffling ones like selling off all the company's real estate, making them rent it back at a much higher rate than their current mortgages (which may already have been paid off), and then filter revenues out of the company via "consulting fees" paid to themselves and their friends for this bad advice.

The book is a little bit repetitive, and some of the tactics are beyond my grasp, but I'm excited to make a personal bingo card of them and see which ones get used on EA as they drive it into the ground.

Mozilla still uses Mercurial for Firefox development [0]. They're in the process of moving to git and GitHub [1]. I don't know the status of the move, but I contributed a bit to Firefox's build system via Mercurial, and I am glad to see they're moving to git since it's the industry standard. Mercurial felt so alien when I was using it. Git has its own share of UX problems, but finding support for Mercurial was much harder for me, precisely because nobody really uses it anymore.

References:

0: https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/

1: https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/firefox-dev/c/Qnfy...

Will there be a follow-up toolkit for Artificial General Intelligence called Agitator?

Dumb jokes aside, I took a look at your GitHub page, and this is exactly what I've been looking for when I do local LLM work. Cogitator seems like a nice, pythonic approach vs. using the raw `ollama run` command, esp. given the focus on chain of thought. I think I'll start using this tool. Nice work!

Yes, this is correct. Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars annually to be the default search engine. This makes up the vast majority of Mozilla Corporation's revenue. It's somewhere in the ballpark of 85% of all their annual revenue last I heard.

They've tried hard in recent years to get out from under Google by diversifying into other areas. For example, they have a VPN service that is a wrapper around Mullvad, and they've made some privacy tools that you can pay to use, also largely wrappers around other companies' tools.

I was an employee of Mozilla Corporation and saw first-hand the effort they were making. In my opinion, it's been a pretty abysmal failure so far. Pulling Google funding would effectively hamstring Mozilla Corp.

I upvoted this post and would not have commented if not for yours, so maybe my reason for (almost) abstaining is similar as other people who upvoted. What follows might be a ramble and is just my anecdotal experience on HN:

I've been an HN user for years, and I've found it somewhat hard to comment on anything related to economics or non-technical / pop-cultural topics. Many HN users are experts in their technical fields, and they seem to think this automatically translates to expertise in political science, sociology, psychology, and all the other fields of endeavor where we can't just point to source code to justify our positions. I mostly find that HN commenters are a thoughtful bunch. But, there's a small, noisy group of armchair experts waiting to swoop in and correct your grammar or disagree on some technicality over social issues like this.

Since HN is tech-focused, even posting something not directly related to technology can get your post flagged and taken down as irrelevant. So in a way, discussing these things is disincentivized by the site's purpose. I get that WaPo is an online platform and therefore in-scope, but it's "scarier" to comment on because it's more social than technical.

In part, the act of being a thoughtful commenter also means steering well clear of any flame wars (that aren't related to NixOS, Rust, or LLMs). I.e., it's like jazz in that it's about the notes you don't play— it's the comments you don't make that foster a good online experience.

This is also a US-specific article, and lots of American people are overwhelmed by the onslaught of post-election political news; so, this might be a cultural thing in that people are not commening as much because they're dealing with a big inbox of emotions to sort through.

I still take active interest in political posts like this and personally think Bezos is a modern-day robber baron in the new Gilded Age. But, I'll seldom say so, opting instead to upvote so others can see the post and then move on silently.

It's exciting to see a an OpenWRT router where compatibility is guaranteed! I've been running OpenWRT at home for years, and whenever it comes time to upgrade, it's always a deep dive into their Table of Hardware [1]. Many of the newest routers with an absurd number of antennae that you might see at big-box stores like Costco have incompatible chipsets, so usually I have to buy something a bit older.

Most recently I bought a couple of Belkin AX3200 routers because they support WiFi6 and are only about $50 USD. The annoying part is that they're a Walmart exclusive, but they have worked flawlessly so far. Still, I'd rather have the new, officially-endorsed one.

References: 1: https://openwrt.org/toh/start

I don't mean this in a snarky way, more just to inform: proscribed actually means forbidden unlike the word prescribed, which means recommended.

Once I saw that the headline image was AI-generated, I skimmed the first paragraph and didn't find a lot of meaning in it. The dearth of content combined with an AI image made me suspect that the article itself might be AI-generated.

As a litmus test, I decided to check for the word "delve" to see whether it appeared in the text. According to an article I read in The Guardian[1], this word is more likely to appear in AI-generated responses to prompts. Sure enough, "delve" was right there in the second paragraph.

Of course, these two things combined aren't exactly a "smoking gun" proving that the whole thing is AI blog-spam, but I would bet it is (as first mentioned in another comment here). It's pretty wild to be living in a time where we have to be so wary of an entire article being prompt-engineered into existence by a lazy "author" eager for clicks.

References: 1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...

I think this may have less to do with "python-brain" and more with "data-science brain". If a person is well-versed in data science concepts and has been trained to use Pandas DataFrames and Series for everything, that's what they'll lean on. After all, it's some kind of in-memory object that can hold many values and has a way to label them with column labels and indices.

Chances are somewhat good that these people weren't computer science majors to begin with. For example, math or biology majors who have moved away from R to Python might know a great deal about data but not much about compsci.

For people who use Python in a DevOps context, they'll likely be exposed to more OOP concepts and lean more heavily on classes.

Agreed, most or all shots of the Planet Express building and Planet Express ship are 3D renderings, even in the original first few seasons. Beyond that, even some shots of Bender in Space are 3D renderings, especially in cases where a complex and continuous shift in perspective is required.

Non-photo-realistic (NPR) 3D art goes back a surprisingly long way in animations. I rewatched the 1988 Disney cartoon "Oliver and Company" recently, and I was surprised to see that the cars and buildings were "cel-shaded" 3D models. I assumed that the movie had been remastered, but when I looked it up, I found out that it was the first Disney movie ever to make heavy use of CGI[0] and that what I was seeing was in the original. The page I found says:

"This was the first Disney movie to make heavy use of computer animation. CGI effects were used for making the skyscrapers, the cars, trains, Fagin's scooter-cart and the climactic Subway chase. It was also the first Disney film to have a department created specifically for computer animation."

References ----------

0: https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Oliver_%26_Company

It was written by Moe Zilla, obviously /s

For a more long-form answer to your question, I recommend checking out "Plunder - Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America" by Brendan Ballou [0]. He gives some insights into the tactics used by private equity firms to acquire, gut, and destroy existing companies and profit by doing so.

Refs: 0: https://www.plunderthebook.com/

> I find myself battling untyped/undocumented YAML/JSON configurations, syncing JSON encoders/decoders, massaging incompatible dependencies

I feel your pain on having to manage so many dependencies. I write primarily in Python, and the various pip / Pipenv / pipx / PDM / Poetry dependency managers drive me pretty crazy. That's not even accounting for the multiple Python versions I need!

That said, I'm surprised that you're trying to _alleviate_ this by implementing your FP language in Python. The Python ecosystem is full of half-documented config files, incompatible dependency trees, etc.

Have you considered implementing it in any other languages after the Python one proves its worth? For example, if the language becomes strong enough, would you consider writing a scrapscript compiler in scrapscript, itself?

> there's no "done"

I'm totally with you re: Android and Apple being walled-garden ecosystems with ever-changing rules. But, don't you feel like this is true of most software (that it's never "done")? In my experience, there aren't many categories of software that can be truly feature-complete unless they are fully decoupled from popular culture. Maybe GNU units or grep can be called "done", but most apps have to change with the world around them.

How does something like `let y: Time = 1 year` work? Does it take into consideration the idea of leap years and leap seconds, counting a single year as 365.2422 days[0]? Or does it count as 365 days?

I got curious and installed the CLI tool[1] and found that it does indeed account for leap second / leap years:

>>> let jahr: Time = 1 year

>>> let tage: Time = jahr -> days

>>> tage

    = 365.243 day    [Time]

References:

0: https://museum.seiko.co.jp/en/knowledge/story_01/

1: https://numbat.dev/doc/cli-installation.html

From the linked article: " After the weighing, they received an official certificate proclaiming them not a witch... Certificates would state that 'the body weight is in proportion to its build'. The reasoning behind this is the old belief that a witch has no soul and therefore weighs significantly less than an ordinary person".

I love this piece of history so much, thank you for sharing it! Adding this one to my bookmarks :-)

If you have ADD or ADHD, Ritalin might help. I have severe ADHD that I refused to treat for decades, but I recently gave in.

I am _hugely_ sensitive to caffeine and feel a buzz even from decaf. It ruins my sleep in a similar way to what a couple people in this thread describe.

I take 10mg of instant-release Ritalin at 7AM each day, and it allows me to focus and deliver. It wears off by around 2-3PM, and I sleep like a rock most nights.

There are downsides as well: once it wears off, it leaves you mentally drained until you've slept. Also, there's a potential for building a tolerance, as well as potential for addiction. I've been lucky in both cases so far, but ymmv.

Ah, I see. Wow, that is a high level of dedication to Internet privacy! With my work and interests I would 100% be incapable of using a combo of TOR, public wifi, and other locked-down browsers / networks. Props to you!

Thanks for the kind words :). I didn't necessarily mean "useless" in a self-deprecating way. I only meant it in the sense of the linked article called "Write More 'Useless Software'"-- i.e. that it doesn't directly have a production use.

I'm curious what you mean about greasemonkey and noscript. Do you just mean you're astounded that such cool add-ons were made, or something else?

I took his Build a Compiler in Python course, and I honestly found it to be lackluster.

He had just changed the format, though, and our class was his first of a new wave where he supplied us with no example code, instead making us write it all out by hand.

By the end of the five-day course, virtually no one had a working toy compiler of any kind. Maybe a parser and AST representation, but not the whole shebang.

His style of teaching is not as compelling as his live, on-stage presentations, in my opinion.

If I had paid with my own money, I would've been pissed. Caveat emptor.

ROCm? I hardly KNOWm!

I'm sorry, I know this is a dumb and off-topic comment more appropriate for Reddit, but I couldn't resist. If you check my comment history, you'll see I don't usually do this. Please forgive.

This is so cool to receive a response from the creator of Hexapipes! Thank you for the reply!

That makes sense re: the Penrose grid being different and not having enough data in the numbers to make sense of yet.

Based on your help, I've decided to start with the square grid, and I've gotten as far as a simple program that can take the JSON and render a puzzle as a png image. Now to draw the rest of the owl...

This is amazing! After playing my first game, I feel immediately inspired to think about the relationships among the tiles / positions. Maybe I'll try to write some kind of solver as a learning exercise.

I noticed that there is an option to download the puzzle as JSON, and I tried it. Can you tell us what the schema is? I see there's a key called `tiles` that has a value of an object mapping ints to other ints. What do those ints represent? I figure since there are 36 tiles, they key int is the tile number, but what about the value? I think this info would be valuable for programmatically solving these puzzles.

Once again, great work! I have a feeling this will be a big hit, possibly of Wordle-like proportions.

Michael W. Lucas is such a good author, and I just wanted to give a shout-out: "TLS Mastery" opened my eyes to the world of TLS / SSL certs in an understandable way that used interactive examples on Linux.