nothis

I don’t care about search. This should be about chrome.

I guess a mathematician might look down upon sticking with 2d and 3d stuff because it leaves out all the interesting things that happen at 92382 or negative infinity. But yea, matrices are basically just a convenient way to write rows and rows of "ax + by + cz...". In linear algebra, you just do it so often, people made up their own syntax. And nothing can visualize it like transforming graphics, IMO.

You don't even have to go 3D, just starting with the points of a rectangle in 2D and asking, "how do you put the edge points of this rectangle 10px to the left, rotate them 45° and stretch them 200% vertically?" and you've applied a matrix. Even if you're not using the fancy brackets, you're using a matrix, and understanding it.

Not sure if you were asking, but it looks the new MS Flight Simulator returns to hardcore simulation territory.

Does Community Edition have all features?

IMO it's the best side of Microsoft. It's something Apple would never do because the result might be too unpredictable and messy.

Why is the tangential, unsourced stuff always longer than the actual article?

I can defend their "chassis" as being ahead of the competition and you basically paying for the time they spent shaving shit off until it's perfect. But that damn touch bar. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the most custom of custom random hardware part, adding like half a smartphone's production cost to it. How much productivity can that thing possibly add? Who on earth says, "yea that touch bar, certainly worth more than 1TB of SSD space and 16GB of RAM!".

>IMO pagination is garbage UX, any sane GUI tookit can render more then 100 items on screen.

Well, I guess that's the web in 2020 in a nutshell, lol. What would you do with a list of 100,000 items? Just slowly scroll them out, one by one while your scroll gets faster and faster? At one point, are you just a billion pixels down? What does "scrolling up" even mean down there? Or do we just limit all lists to 1000 items, period?

>I don't understand what kind of apps people are building with React that incur these significant rendering performance costs? I could understand it if you're building a realtime cryptocurrency exchange dashboard but I don't think most people are doing that?

I think it's just easy to make mistakes (bad loops, overly trigger-happy interpretations of "state change", etc), especially for all things "lists" (which make up half the web). Since people make mistakes, I'd always consider easy-to-make mistakes a design flaw, in this case affecting performance.

Also there's a psychological cost to making incremental "loading" operations visible. Although some mysterious "research" is frequently cited that people just fucking LOVE spinning loading icons and gray placeholder boxes that are never where the actual content will pop in, it's just instantly making my perception of a site slower. If a website just takes 5 seconds to load, okay. If, during that time, it just pops in and out 50 components, 3 different loading bars, spinning whirlies and blurry placeholder images (where the one I actually want to see always loads last), I'm suddenly having a "delay experience". It's like a whole firework of bullshit happening to remind you the site HAS NOT loaded yet.

With Catalina, I'm also not seeing any major benefit to upgrading. The features list is thin and no 32bit programs kills a lot of random stuff that I can't find a quick replacement for. This is the first time I'm not upgrading macOS in 15+ years.

Don't forget that, with the Switch, there was the opposite argument: "Smartphones are so common, nobody would buy a separate gaming device! If you want gaming on the go, you just download Candy Crush on your iPhone."

So the "lateral" thinking, here, was actually... quality. Smartphone games suck. The monetization strategies are downright predatory and touchscreens are a bad input device for a majority of game genres.

So what Nintendo did was make actually great games for a tablet device. Being able to put it on the TV and detaching the controllers is secondary, it's mostly about having great games!

This is why I'm a little pissed at marketing analysts turning this into some kind of stroke of business genius. The Switch is basically a Wii U with the GPU moved into the tablet part and the Wii U flopped hard. No market analysis could have predicted the Switch's success. It was a stubborn believe in quality, the worst thing they could do, what every "business advisor" would have warned them against. Market analysts were hilariously wrong and that's the history lesson to learn here, not "predulating quadrilateral core-market flibbugasting". The Switch is not a win they can claim, it's a win for quality and idealism.

>Perhaps it's as simple as: people that are born blind are to some extent insulated from risk factors that are conducive of schizophrenia.

Isn't that as interesting, too? I admit, I thought it was the takeaway of the article.

Frankly I don’t get what the complaints about RAM usage are all about. With video, high res images, megabytes of javascript and 30 tabs open, modern browsing simply takes a lot of resources. I rather have the browser use a lot of cache than having to reload shit constantly.

It's not like the masses aligning with one side or the other is a new invention, it's how politics works and always has worked. So, in a way, what's "causing it" is humanity being stupid and measures against it are attempts at managing stupidity. Nobody wants to hear that. Because everybody is too stupid to drop their ego.

That being said, there's about three articles a week that blame the unchecked spread of stupidity on the internet for the uptick in bizarre fringe ideologies. And they're probably right. One of the best explanations of how this happens I recently found in a comment thread – unfortunately I don't remember where (I assume tildes.net). In short, social media tries to find patterns in what people like and documents/encourages them. Content creators then try to make money from following those trends very quickly, which artificially accelerates and grows them. It used to take a while for some random, weird ideology take over, now it only takes one viral youtube video or tweet, even if people initially just watch it ironically.

It's no different than it always was, it just runs way too fast.

I'm glad the top post in here kind clarifies it as "walking through situations in your head in which you have to explain things to people". Because I constantly do that but I don't need to "talk to myself" to make sense of abstract concepts. I tend to just visualize them however convenient. The "inner voice" part is just for preparing to having to explain the process to someone else, which can be helpful to order your thoughts but it's more of a byproduct than "the only way to think" for me.

I'm not sure if there's any science to this and I have doubts the questions about it have ever been formulated clearly enough for people to have an exact idea what we're even discussing here. I imagine most people can play through a potential interview in their heads and most people can think through an abstract problem (i.e. something with math/geometry) without having an inner monologue about it. It's more about how important it is to you to prepare for hypothetical conversations.

Actually, their individual console logos are some of the best designed logos out there. Like absolute graphic designer porn.

IMO vanilla Half-Life 1 is still amazing. Every gun, every enemy has a unique idea to them and requires you playing differently. HL2 kinda streamlined that aspect in favor of “cinematic” presentation which was built around a graphical wow-factor that’s hard to replicate today. HL1’s gameplay is still fresh. In fact, because it was in development for (over?!) 10 years, Black Mesa suffers from a similar “1,5-generations behind” vibe, visually.

Same. The issue probably isn’t Windows 10.

Economics in a nutshell: "There must be a single number that explains all of this!" It can't possibly be that Germany actually built its exports based on quality. That can't be replicated by tweaking some tax laws.

Right! It's just... the internet isn't exactly in beta anymore. You'd think there's a timestamp type value that just tells you the date of an article or forum post that's linked. But no, we have to run a sophisticated algorithm to search for it on the page – and fail.

Honestly, my second theory is that google knows exactly when a given reddit article was posted but doesn't trust the user to judge the relevancy of that information. Which might even be reasonable in many, many cases. But it's also annoying. I'm definitely seeing a trend towards "editorializing" search results on Google, where often the first half of the page isn't even websites anymore but some random info box and whatnot, and your search terms are interpreted very liberally, even when in quotes. It's one of those things that is probably better for 99% of users/uses but super annoying when you actually want precise results.

I'm a bit cynical with this but I believe a lot of the "super smart" AI tech they no doubt run over all their search these days isn't actually that super smart. If we actually handled metadata properly "last month" would be a trivial, "dumb" thing to search for but apparently that's broken. Why?

Replace "cool" with "actually working great" and I'm with you.

If you don't consider social aspects to be a reasonable argument for drinking, then there is no reasonable argument for drinking. I think the article has to be read in context of how drinking is perceived when discussed in seriousness, which is mostly with sheepish guilt. His argument is, essentially, that the social aspects are valuable enough to justify drinking within reasonable limits. I don't think he argues it's necessary for society to function, it just might be more beneficial than people generally dare to admit to themselves.

There's something deeply ironic about reading this post as a Twitter thread.

I feel like there's about 1000 hours of high quality AI lectures available for free on the internet and while I do believe in a certain amount of selflessness in education, I am skeptical that any of that is providing more than a glimpse of what you need to know to be productive at it. In other words, there's a thousand hours of material out there, which probably takes 10000 hours to actually get into so you might as well put all that effort into properly studying it at a university, getting the knowledge not covered in the lectures alone and a degree to prove it in the end.

If you're just "curious" about AI, a really good half hour lecture should get you up to speed.

Wasn’t there an article, recently, maybe for another website, that these were generated client side with Math.random()?

So we finally got a goddamn proper standard and we're already cheering for the next API to throw in front of it to make it "cleaner"?

Wow. Rest assured, I still consider these cultural practices mystic bullshit.

What's the correct answer?

The real headline is that VR is finally confirmed to have hit a major roadblock. If John Carmack gets frustrated with its progress, there's something up.

I've long thought that the issue with VR is a conceptual one, not a technical one and maybe that frustration comes from there. "Running forward" is an unsolved problem in room scale VR. For a seated experience, you're basically back to a neat display gimmick + accurate hand tracking.

Any real solutions need, on the one side, real-world physical constructions (think running threadmills) that soon hit holodeck-level limitations and, on the other, software that actually benefits from the real technology VR brings to interactive media: super accurate hand- and head-tracking. The first gets impractical/impossible soon, the second limits development to a few niche genres: Shooting ranges, cockpit sims, dance/party games and some vague "experiences" where the actual tech is pretty much ignored and you just say "but it feels so immersive!" (honestly, it does work for horror games!). It's basically motion controls 2.0.

The only place I could see the technology shine is, oddly enough, AR. It has way less mainstream hype to it but it makes much more sense because you actually benefit from the tracking of your real-world movement: You're still a part of it! The holo-lens demos that pop up on youtube might seem clumsy, but I can totally see a use case for replacing physical monitors with arbitrarily sized and positioned displays you can virtually move in any office space. There's rumors of Apple working with Valve on AR tech. If there's any technology that could follow the smart phone, AR is my bet. I'm honestly surprised Carmack didn't move in that direction rather than deciding to become a general AI guru.