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pilafon When did Google get so weird?

Sometime last year I googled for a comparison between two rockets, one of which is nicknamed "Escorpio", to which Google's AI overview assumed I wanted a comparison between a space rocket and a small arthropod, complete with detailed stats about max speeds (thousands of km/h vs. a few meters/h), cost (several millions of dollars vs. a few dollars at a pet shop), etc.

pilafon GPT-6 Astra on OpenRouter

Interesting how the background is almost identical to two of the Astra pelicans'.

pilafon Extinct Media Museum Tokyo

Been there. The place is tiny, but very well curated, and packed floor to ceiling with interesting gadgets, some of which you are even allowed to touch. They also sometimes organize small flea markets, the one time I visited they had one for vintage headphones going on.

pilafon Blender 5.2 LTS

Soccer is hard because it's competitive though. Kicking a ball around and putting it between two posts is easy enough, but it gets hard as soon as you have someone trying to do the same in the opposite direction better than you.

Tools should be as easy as they can afford to be without making serious compromises. I have no idea how much room Blender has for becoming easier, but if there is any it should be taken.

pilafon Show HN: What was the world listening to? Music charts, 20 countries (1940–2025)

Very nice project! That browser tab is staying open for days.

I found a small mistake, the Argentina 2000 list [1] shows "Babasónicos - Ella usó mi cabeza como un revolver", but the actual song by Babasónicos (the one that plays) is titled "Cómo eran las cosas", and "Ella usó mi cabeza como un revolver" is a song by Soda Stereo.

1: https://88mph.fm/ar/2000

pilafon Don't create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead (2023)

This Rails commit from May 2010 mentions gitkeeps and it's a few months older than your SO post, so it seems you're absolved from guilt:

https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/785493ffed41abcca0686b...

pilafon List animals until failure

I entered plankton, which technically isn't an animal and so it rejected it like any other random word, but then after I lost it offered me a link to the Wikipedia article on plankton. Very thoughtful.

pilafon List animals until failure

It pulls its data from Wikidata, which is very thorough, so I'd be more surprised if you managed to enter an animal it didn't know.

pilafon 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found

Perhaps the key word is "wooden"? Which is not to say much older wooden tools didn't exist, but it's likely extremely rare that they would be preserved this long.

pilafon Level S4 solar radiation event

Hokkaido got some back in November: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16155623

pilafon Can Bundler be as fast as uv?

https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/comparison-to-asdf.html

> mise can be used as a drop-in replacement for asdf. It supports the same .tool-versions files that you may have used with asdf and can use asdf plugins through the asdf backend.

> It will not, however, reuse existing asdf directories (so you'll need to either reinstall them or move them), and 100% compatibility is not a design goal. That said, if you're coming from asdf-bash (0.15 and below), mise actually has fewer breaking changes than asdf-go (0.16 and above) despite 100% compatibility not being a design goal of mise.

> Casual users coming from asdf have generally found mise to just be a faster, easier to use asdf.

pilafon Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

Why into Word specifically?

pilafon Egyptian Hieroglyphs: Lesson 1

> You might have noticed that there aren’t any vowels in the alphabet

Then in the next table:

> 𓄿 is pronounced “ah” as in “yacht”

> 𓇋 is pronounced “ee” as in “feet”

> 𓅱 𓏲 is pronounced “oo” as in “blue”

Are those vowel-sounding hieroglyphs only used in special occasions?

Also, does anyone know what the reason for omitting vowels altogether may have been?

pilafon Mozilla's New CEO Confirms Firefox Will Become an "AI Browser"

I'm also still a FF user, but I'm eyeing Waterfox [1] and Floorp [2], both FF forks. Waterfox has the stronger privacy focus out of the two, but Floorp doesn't strike me as being any less private that vanilla FF.

1: https://www.waterfox.com/

2: https://floorp.app/

pilafon GNU Unifont

That's awesome, what size did you print it?

Are the random sparse Chinese characters floating around the main spiral a natural part of Unicode, or did you put them there for effect? I like how the whole thing looks like a galaxy and those characters like background space debris.

I also like how emoji fall neatly around the outer rim. I had fun finding the Earth emoji.

pilafon Bruno Simon – 3D Portfolio

Weird, I had no issues playing it on FF.

pilafon Willis Whitfield: Creator of clean room technology still in use today (2024)

It looks pretty but it's so low resolution I can barely make out any words. Found a higher res version though (embedded in a PDF, page 7):

https://www.sandia.gov/app/uploads/sites/194/2022/01/GIANTS_...

It's interesting that all lines in the sketch are straight, and circles are perfect, so it seems Whitfield took a ruler and a compass on that plane.

pilafon Compiling Ruby to machine language

If you want to compare it against other languages you could look at The Computer Language Benchmarks Game [1], which is an ongoing comparison of various programs written in various popular languages. You should always take all these benchmarks with a pinch of salt though since they are never truly apples-to-apples. That said, Ruby seems to measure slightly faster than Python and Lua, slightly slower than PHP, and maybe 1 order of magnitude slower than Node.js, just to compare it with other similar languages.

Compared to itself from 10 years ago I think it's made great progress. Can't put a number to it but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 2x or 3x faster, especially with the "new" JIT (YJIT) enabled. The JIT comes with a memory usage penalty though. You can see some benchmarks over time (although not going back as far as 10 years) at https://speed.ruby-lang.org

1: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

pilafon 3M Diskette Reference Manual (1983) [pdf]

I get a 403 error. Any mirrors?

pilafon Milei Wins Mandate for Free-Market Revolution in Argentina's Election

It was a legislative election, Milei's party won 26 new seats between senators and deputies, which compared against the next most popular party (peronists) which had a net loss of 18 seats, landslide seems appropriate.

pilafon MAML – A new configuration language

Also Ruby doesn't have triple quotation marks (""") string literals.

pilafon Ladybird passes the Apple 90% threshold on web-platform-tests

Last I heard they were planning to move to Swift [1] partly because of the safety features. Apparently there are still some blockers [2] preventing that move though.

1: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

2: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933

pilafon Blender 4.5 LTS

This more than doubles the usefulness of Blender for video editing, glad they finally got around implementing it.

pilafon YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers

Many youtubers have sponsorships though, and their viewership stats come into play when negotiating with potential sponsors.

I guess if everyone was hit equally across the board then those sponsors will eventually adjust to the new metrics, but I assume some genres have more tech-savvy audiences which are more likely to use ad-blockers, so I'm not sure how evenly distributed this penalty falls.

pilafon Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction

This is tangential, but I recommend Katsushiro Otomo's (of Akira fame) dystopian take on large-scale automated construction, the short movie Construction Cancellation Order, part of an anthology known in the west as Neo Tokyo[1], released in 1987 (Akira was released in 1988).

I won't link to it here, but it seems someone uploaded it to archive.org (most likely illegally).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Tokyo_(film)

pilafon Million Times Million

Yeah, I too think that's likely the direction we're heading, and I'd be fine with either option as long as it was consistently used, this transitional phase is just painful.

pilafon Million Times Million

Spanish uses the long scale, but lately I've been noticing people mistakenly using the short scale in Spanish more and more, likely due to the influence of English and the internet, sometimes even in news articles and other "professional" publications. You may see someone speaking of "un trillón de dólares" (a trillion dollars), which while it makes sense in English when speaking of federal budgets or the market cap of FAANG, in long scale that's more than the world's entire money supply.

It's especially annoying because it creates ambiguity and renders the *illón-words fairly useless.

pilafon Studio Ghibli marks 40 years, but future looks uncertain

I think GP meant "his kid's movies", as in movies directed by Goro Miyazaki, the son of Hayao Miyazaki.

pilafon Photographs of 19th Century Japan

There are several other colorized versions of that same photo online, all with very different color choices, so I wouldn't be too sure about the accuracy of TFA's version:

https://www.meijishowa.com/photography/6451/190102-0009-pp-b...

https://sekiei.nichibun.ac.jp/KSA/en/detail/?gid=G0203359

https://www.album-online.com/detail/en/NDAzZGUwMA/two-buddhi...

There's also more information about the exact version from the article here [1], although it doesn't clarify whether the photographer and the person who colorized it are separate people.

1: https://sova.si.edu/record/fsa.a1999.35/ref484

pilafon Photographs of 19th Century Japan

These photos look colorized. Likely not the original colors of those robes.