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nuclearsugaron A Man Who Saw Humanity from Two Billion Years Away

The book that he wrote next, Star Maker, is a wonderful read and is quite early for the genre of scifi. Incredible scope and I still think about it often.

nuclearsugaron A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

> “None of our data acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.” German booksellers are not convinced. They are sure, based on the vast orders, that the process is happening anyway via third-party service providers.

nuclearsugaron Flux 3

Hope the open-weights reduces the VRAM requirement compared to Flux 2.

nuclearsugaron Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail

This script will extract all of the attachments from a MBOX file - https://gist.github.com/georgy7/3a80bce2cd8bf2f9985c

nuclearsugaron Why I email complete strangers

I agree with this and have received insights on difficult challenges, but I've found that each year it gets more difficult to find an email address for someone.

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

The VJ Curator app is a fork of VLC where you can press the 0-9 hotkeys to easily curate the video clips. After pressing a number key then the video clip will be automatically moved into a folder with a matching number - https://github.com/wivy1/vj-curator

Collection of JSX scripts for After Effects which automate repetitive production tasks since I often work with hundreds of comps in my projects - https://github.com/nuclearsugar/AfterEffectsScripts/

nuclearsugaron Astronauts on ISS told to shelter as repairs under way to fix air leaks

A bit of a tangent, but the fictional book "Children of Time" takes this to wild extremes. Really fun read

nuclearsugaron Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app

For anyone seeking more info, check out these articles -

https://www.patreon.com/posts/apple-has-its-on-148395613

https://www.patreon.com/posts/128473586

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?

I love my Logitech Lift Vertical Ergonomic Mouse since it completely fixed my wrist pain. Also it can memorize 3 different Bluetooth connections and toggle between them via a small button on the bottom.

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/shop/p/lift-vertical-ergonomi...

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://www.jasonfletcher.info/

VJ Loop Artist experimenting with 3D animation, machine learning, and compositing.

nuclearsugaron Maggots, an efficient source of protein

Why'd y'spill yer beans?

nuclearsugaron Meta Segment Anything Model 3

Here are two plugins for After Effects - https://aescripts.com/mask-prompter/ https://aescripts.com/depth-scanner-lite/

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

Just finished generating alien bugs and then rigging/animating by hand. Loads of fun and very satisfying to visualize the ideas in my mind. https://youtu.be/sMYmnQlF_Ww

And here's my tech notes - https://www.jasonfletcher.info/vjloops/insectoid-protocol.ht...

nuclearsugaron Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default

Those of us doing creative production work really don't have a chance since the majority of apps only support Win/Mac. I understand the tech but cannot escape it.

nuclearsugaron A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

Assume an average user that doesn't understand the core tech, but does understand that it's been trained on internet scale data that was created by humans. How can they be expected to not anthropomorphize it?

nuclearsugaron Gödel's theorem debunks the most important AI myth – Roger Penrose [video]

I've never heard of Godel's beliefs before. Where did you learn of this?

nuclearsugaron Show HN: I've made a Monte-Carlo raytracer for glTF scenes in WebGPU

I think there will certainly be an AI 3D render engine at some point. But currently AI is used in 3D render engines to assist with denoising. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.92/render/layers/denois...

nuclearsugaron Llama.cpp Now Supports Qwen2-VL (Vision Language Model)

I recently fine-tuned the Qwen-Coder-7b-Instuct model to generate Milkdrop presets. Pretty amazing to see what can be done locally. https://huggingface.co/InferenceIllusionist/MilkDropLM-7b-v0...

nuclearsugaron MilkDropLM – an LLM for generating MilkDrop shader code

Several years ago I curated through all 52K presets, selected the very best presets, and then organized them into categories and subcategories. So I've been curious if an LLM could be fine-tuned on this dataset.

When the Qwen-Coder-7b-Instuct model was released, it seemed like open-source models have matured to the point that it's worth trying out. I teamed up a InferenceIllusionist and started fine-tuning the model. The results have been exciting to play with and so we've released the model for anyone to experiment with.

nuclearsugaron Show HN: MilkDropLM – generate presets for the MilkDrop music visualizer

I've been obsessed with MilkDrop for a long time. Several years ago I curated through all 52,000 presets, selected the very best presets, and then organized them into categories and subcategories. So I've been curious if an LLM could be fine-tuned on this dataset and then generate new presets. When the Qwen-Coder-7b-Instuct model was released, it seemed like the open-source models have matured to the point that it's worth trying out. So I teamed up a InferenceIllusionist and started doing some fine-tuning experiments of the model. The results have been exciting to play with and so we've released the model for anyone to experiment with.

What is MilkDrop? It’s a music visualization engine which reacts in real time to the music. MilkDrop has a long 23 year history, has been ported to numerous systems, and a robust community of users that have made tons of original presets. Today, there is a new generation of artists using the NestDrop app within their live concert performances. I'm one of the developers of NestDrop.

Feel free to ask me any questions.

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?

Star Maker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon

nuclearsugaron Please stop putting cookie pop-ups on your website (2022)

I think its ironic for these pop-ups to frequently only offer "accept necessary" or "accept all"...

nuclearsugaron I put a toaster in the dishwasher (2012)

I've always figured any device containing a capacitor would fry some part of the board when water short circuited it. Wrong thinking?

nuclearsugaron Majority of sites and apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscriptions

While Patreon is often to support an individual artist, it's still a subscription. I wonder how often people sign up and forget they're a member. If your email inbox has 10,000 unreads and you don't check your bank statement, it'll just keep you on as a member forever. Especially since expiring credit card numbers are automatically relinked.

nuclearsugaron Cancel Adobe if you are a creative under NDA with your clients

Plus there really is no replacement for After Effects.

Also I have 14 years of prior projects that I sometimes need to reopen, so canceling just isn't an option.

nuclearsugaron Simulating Jupiter

Very interesting work! The end result looks fantastic.

On a related note, here's an experiment I did using fluids in Maya to create a closeup of Jupiters bands. It was created while I worked at a planetarium - https://thefulldomeblog.com/2014/01/30/jupiter-bands-simulat...

nuclearsugaron How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

Milkdrop, the music visualizer bundled with Winamp, is still alive and well in the VJ community through the NestDrop app. (co-developer here) https://nestimmersion.ca/nestdrop.php

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: What movies changed your perception of reality or life?

Bokeh (2017)

Premise: Everyone disappears from Earth without a known reason, except for 3 people.

This movie made me realize that everything we do is connected to other people. That awareness changed everything for me.

nuclearsugaron Motion blur all the way down (2022)

Related: Gotta love the ReelSmart Motion Blur plugin for adding motion blur based on the automatic tracking of every pixel from one frame to the next. It's not always perfect but still does an amazing job. Sometimes I get experimental and crank the calculated motion blur way past the default value and it looks surreal!

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2024)

Position: Motion Designer

Location: Austin, TX

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Maya/Redshift, After Effects, StyleGAN2+3, AnimateDiff, Stable Diffusion

Portfolio: https://www.jasonfletcher.info/