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oplav

463 karma · joined December 29, 2014

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oplav··on Pirating the Pirates
I started doing this after having a child so that we could have kids movies on hand in Jellyfin, but am now having a lot of fun collecting DVDs and Blu Rays. I’ve also toyed with the idea of using ErsatzTV to have channels to bring the kids back to the old days where things weren’t always on demand.

Thrift stores are a good way to find DVDs (usually $2-4 a DVD, slightly more for Blu Ray). Estate sales are typically better (under $1 a DVD/BluRay).

The most expensive part of this so far has been obtaining storage drives.

oplav··on Music Theory for Programmers
I agree. As a (hobbyist) musician and a (professional) programmer, I would not classify this web page as “music theory” given its widely accepted definition.

At UIUC, we had a class called Electronic Music Synthesis. It’s been over a decade since I took the class, but the first few lectures covered mostly everything in this web page. That content was never presented to us as “music theory”.

https://ece.illinois.edu/academics/courses/ece402

oplav··on High-Res Photo Shows Sand-Capped Butte Rising from Mars Plain of Polygons
> The color was adjusted to match the lighting conditions as the human eye would see it if a person were standing on the surface of the Red Planet.

Is the non-adjusted color version available anywhere?

oplav··on Show HN: Bribes.fyi – Know before you go. New feature added
Another discussion about corruption in India from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20088870
oplav··on Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
I never realized Lenna was a Playboy centerfold until years after I first encountered it, which was part of an MP in the data structures class all CS undergrads take at UIUC.

There’s also the foreman for video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0cdM-7_xUXM

oplav··on Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce
Do you view Microsoft as too big to fail because of the federal governments use of Office?
oplav··on I designed my own fast game streaming video codec – PyroWave
In your experience, how does VC-2 compare to JPEG XS from a quality perspective? The JPEG XS resources I’ve seen say JPEG XS has higher visual quality, but curious what it’s like in practice.
oplav··on When flat rate movers won't answer your calls
Another good option is U-Pack if you have more things that can fit in PODS. ABF Freight drops a container off on your street and you have a couple days to fill it. Then they pick it up and drive it to your destination. You only pay per linear foot you use in the container.

The downside is that it’s a little slower than PODS or traditional moving because the unused space is separated and then resold to a local freight partner going to the same destination area. If you can live with that constraint, the process was very smooth and the U-Pack customer service was extremely good and responsive.

We hired local movers on both ends to just load and unload the container (did the packing of boxes ourselves, left furniture to the loaders) and paid a little under $6K to move a small 3BR house from the midwest to the east coast a couple years ago.

oplav··on Coordinating the Superbowl's visual fidelity with Elixir
John DeMarsico directs the SNY broadcasts for the NY Mets and sometimes posts behind the scenes for how all the cameras come together into a production. I think they are pretty interesting to watch.

https://x.com/SNYtv/status/1832250958258036871

oplav··on Australian Open resorts to animated caricatures to bypass broadcast restrictions
MLB does something similar called Gameday 3D. https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-gameday-3d-guide

The main difference is that it's rendered client side so you can control the camera for yourself. You can watch in real time during the season, the latency is around 30 seconds behind live action.

oplav··on Launch HN: Double (YC W24) – Index Investing with 0% Expense Ratios
If you participate in charitable donations and are able to itemize deductions, after a period of capital gains you can also donate the low basis shares and then rebuy the shares with cash immediately. This is effectively donating cash while stepping up the basis of the asset.

I’ve been doing this cycle for a bit now and while it doesn’t produce life changing savings, it does motivate me to donate more.

Donor advised funds make donating shares pretty easy to do.

oplav··on CT Scans of New vs. Used SawStop
I haven’t used a bandsaw a lot, but I have seen some photos of gnarly lost fingers.

I use a table saw quite a bit and think there are more ways things can go wrong, most of which stem from kickback which happens in a split second. The wood will either fly back and hit you, or your hand will be pulled into the blade and you will likely lose a finger.

Both machines can be safe with the proper precautions. That said, I still enjoy my SawStop as insurance for my fingers since I still write software for my day job.

oplav··on Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
Netflix is trying to expand into live sports. This event wasn’t a one off thing. There is an NFL game they are streaming at the end of the year.
oplav··on Someone hijacked the in-flight WiFi on flight 2416 and tried to used my CC
Lots of discussion inside the comments about how this could have happened, and whether OP just made a careless mistake. Thought some people here might find it interesting.
oplav··on Tesla owners file class-action alleging repair, parts monopoly
I’m running into a similar situation with an electric Ego lawn mower. 1 year old mower stopped turning on, took it to the authorized repair center for warranty work, some PCB needs to be replaced but it’s back ordered for months. I ended up having to buy another lawn mower for the summer.

I’m grateful for the easy warranty process that Ego has, but it’s got me thinking if shifting to electrical means harder to come by parts for repair.

oplav··on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
We do something similar at work. We have a Slack channel and a private leaderboard, but we also have prizes for getting a certain number of stars, and also do "challenges" like most unique languages or using an esolang for a day. We also had some non-software engineering people take part and they had fun too. Last year was the first year we did it and it was well received.
oplav··on Replacing WebRTC: real-time latency with WebTransport and WebCodecs
I believe gstreamer has support for fMP4: https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/fmp4/index.h...

I stumbled upon a MoQ video by kixelated a couple months ago and have been meaning to give the above a try, but haven't gotten around to it yet so not sure if it will do the trick.

oplav··on I Tracked an NYC Subway Rider's Movements with an MTA ‘Feature’
I understand that, but shouldn't OMNY only receive the anonymized static card number?

If I use the OMNY tool [0] and enter in the un-anonymized card number from my physical card, I can still see my ride history even though I paid using Apple Pay.

[0] https://omny.info/trip-history

oplav··on I Tracked an NYC Subway Rider's Movements with an MTA ‘Feature’
Does anyone know how this was done for payments made with Apple Pay? I thought the card numbers were anonymized when Apple Pay is used.
oplav··on Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
I had a similar experience. /r/turning had no memespam and good wood turning content, but I found the actual American Association of Woodturners forum to have very wide breadth and high quality information.
oplav··on The .zip TLD sucks
I think the problem is that zip webpage URL http://familyphotos.zip is a download to a file archive that people will open.
oplav··on We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates
The leagues did. I was never disputing that fact.

There's a common misconception that blackouts are in place to protect attendance, but that is (typically) not the case. The Chicago Blackhawks did that for a while (under ownership of Bill Wirtz who explicitly thought that showing local games would hurt attendance) but when Rocky Wirtz took over the team in 2007, he reversed that policy.

Blackouts exist to protect local media rights, which you correctly pointed out were sold to them by the league/teams.

You'll see though that many local sports networks are in financial trouble, and leagues are looking for ways to reacquire the rights to stream directly to fans.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/35668388/rob-manfred-mlb...

oplav··on We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates
NHL blackouts (at least today’s NHL blackouts) are not for getting fans into arena seats. They exist because local cable broadcasts own the exclusive rights to broadcast games in local markets.
oplav··on My shell setup with Fish and Tmux (2021)
> Capable terminal emulator (macOS’ Terminal.app doesn’t qualify)

Why doesn't Terminal.app qualify? I used to use iTerm 2 because I liked its pane management, but after switching to using tmux several years ago, I've solely used Terminal.app + tmux without any issues in my workflow. What am I missing out on?

oplav··on Zoomable, animated scatterplots in the browser that scales over a billion points
Highcharts has had a "boost" module for a long time (at least back since 2015/2016) that switched the rendering over to WebGL for large data sets, but I don't think it ever got up to 1B points.

https://www.highcharts.com/docs/advanced-chart-features/boos...

oplav··on Airbnb removed my negative review
I used to live in a 4 unit apartment in SF. One of the units in the building was a full time Airbnb. On several occasions, the different Airbnb renters parked in the wrong spot in our small garage, which disrupted the parking situation for the non-Airbnb tenants in the unit. On another occasion, a renter got locked out of the front gate. I watched from my window as they bent the gate bars so they could open the gate without using the key. When I went down to the gate to ask them what they were doing, they denied damaging the property.

Where I live now is area of all single family homes. One house on my street is also a full time Airbnb. There have been fewer issues, but there was one occasion where some people rented the house, threw a party in the house, shots were fired, and bullets went through a neighboring house. There have never been issues at this level in the neighborhood, so this was out of the ordinary.

Not all short term, full time Airbnbs are disrespectful. Not all long term, non-Airbnb neighbors are respectful. But IMO, with non-Airbnb neighbors, you have a better chance of working something out since they are there for the long haul.

oplav··on Pixi3D – 3D rendering library for the web
Our testing showed default full stop.
oplav··on Pixi3D – 3D rendering library for the web
Yes, we thought that was strange too but it kind of makes sense if the process is unaware that the GPU exists because of the OS settings.

As an aside, we also discovered that `powerPreference` is only a hint according to the spec, so there's no guarantee that an implementation will adhere to it: https://registry.khronos.org/webgl/specs/latest/1.0/

oplav··on Pixi3D – 3D rendering library for the web
I'm not the person you are responding to but I've been working on a web 3D rendering focused product for a bit now.

One issue that we've run into is that by default on laptops, Windows will not use an available discrete GPU in the browser. The only way to work around this is if you go to your power settings (not in the browser) and tell Windows to use the discrete GPU over an integrated one.

oplav··on Promotion of alternative social platforms policy
> What is not a violation of this policy?

> We recognize that certain social media platforms provide alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post content to Twitter from these platforms. In general, any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed above.

This looks like a cross post from John Carmack's Facebook post, which is not in violation.

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