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royaltheartist

136 karma · joined July 22, 2019

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royaltheartist··on Asian governments roll out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis caused by war
WFH doesn't actually stop driving. They don't commute, but they do run errands and other stuff during the day. This can actually result in more traffic during high peak periods since it can cause congestion build up to start earlier
royaltheartist··on Show HN: Tramway SDK – An unholy union between Half-Life and Morrowind engines
That's why I think really good art direction beats raw graphical power any day. Source was pretty impressive back in the day, but the bit that's stood the test of time is just how carefully considered the environments and models are. Valve really put their resources into detailing and maximizing the mileage they got out of their technical constraints, and it still looks cohesive and well-designed 20 years later
royaltheartist··on FCC votes to limit prison telecom charges
The government is the one contracting them out, seems fair for them to set a minimum standard of operation to prevent exploitation of a vulnerable population
royaltheartist··on Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products
don't we already have farming?
royaltheartist··on 4B If Statements
well that's odd
royaltheartist··on B&H Photo Published an AI-Generated Guide Written by a Fake Person
Real Principal Skinner saying he only went to the bordello to get directions away from the bordello energy
royaltheartist··on RealFill: Image completion using diffusion models
Oh yeah, what about this old Kodak I found in my grandpa's attic that prints pictures showing how people are going to die?
royaltheartist··on Bitsummit 2023: Steam Decks everywhere, no VR, and impressive indie games
I've personally been hesitant about VR for a few reasons. As someone with glasses, I'm not comfortable with purchasing something that won't easily accommodate without requiring that I continue to pay a premium for prescription insets. It's a deal breaker, honestly.

But then there's the price to value ratio. There doesn't seem to be anything that is a must-play killer app, and while the catalog seems to have some gems it still leaves me with the impression I might drop a few hundred dollars for a couple hours of entertainment. VR seems like a radical change in design philosophy from the last 30-40 years of game development, and devs are still working out the specific language and techniques that are pertinent to it as a medium

While the Quest 2 is the cheapest on on the market, I'll be damned if I'm giving money to Meta and from there headsets start to ramp up drastically in price, and still have inconveniences like needing to be tethered to a PC

Really it isn't any one thing that's an issue so much as a bunch of smaller issues that make it seem like it's just not worth at the moment unless you got to drop on an item that's still at the niche phase. This will all probably improve over time though, and more people might start adopting

royaltheartist··on Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript (1995)
Really hope no one uses this to mess up the behavior of anchor tags
royaltheartist··on Is Design Dead? (2004)
Personally it feels like modern management and organizational practices have prioritized feature velocity over a lot of other concerns. Business likes this because they can come in, request X number of features and then everyone works like hell to get those features in

Then, seeing the speed with which those first X features got implemented, they now request Y features and the cycle repeats.

But constantly measuring feature/release velocity means that things that do not directly benefit new features/releases get de-emphasized, such as encouraging developers to not just implement a feature, but go back to their code and try to disentangle the code they just wrote from any other code they may have stepped on. And it's even harder to get the business to agree to not push out features but instead give time to just go back, look and what's there, and figure out how to make it possible to add the next Y amount of features

There's something intoxicating about being able to have a bunch of teams pushing out new updates, but these high velocities can make it near impossible to revisit something. Hell, I've gone back to code bases on projects I haven't touched in only a few months to suddenly find everything has become riddled with spaghetti code and weird hacks to bypass systems. It works, but each release starts developing longer and longer bug fixing time

royaltheartist··on Two new AI-based weather-forecasting systems challenging the status quo
It's all just marketing. The companies running these advanced chatbots want to tap into tech mystique to give the impression that LLMs are on the cusp of being the intelligent agents we see in movies and books, because just admitting they're just implementing statistical patterns isn't sexy. They need investors, and investors are throwing money at anything called AI
royaltheartist··on U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high
I think it's difficult to make cities more dense if viewed as just strictly taking the current cities and trying to condense them, but that also seems like the less productive way to do it

First and foremost is that the US government itself needs to change how it gives out funds. Instead of emphasizing car and highway development over all, it should give money for cities which plan out multiple modes of transit and also develop 20-30 year maintenance plans (infrastructure maintenance is not currently factored into development). This would result in cities being financially incentivized to build for things other than car traffic throughput

The next place to start is with the new developments, giving them new regulations for how streets should be placed, reducing regulations involving setbacks, lot size, parking and allocating more land to mixed used or denser building, rather than single-family detached housing

As time goes on and roads need repairs, cities can use those as opportunities to connect cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, fix intersections (remove traffic lights, add roundabouts) and properly segregate public transit routes from private vehicle routes

It's a long process but cities only need to change the rules now and start building better developments. People will move to them over time, and they'll be able to convert older developments as people move out of them over time.

The thing that needs to change first, though, is the attitude and belief that car travel above all else needs to be heavily subsidized at the expense of everything else, only then will federal, state and local governments be able to begin making space for people

royaltheartist··on Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer
This strikes me as Google Glass in the form factor of SCUBA goggles
royaltheartist··on I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Seems like a lot of people who want to be heard but don't like it when people actually listen
royaltheartist··on The mid in fake midcentury modern
This feels less like it tells us anything about the world but more about how small the author's conception of it is. Reminds me of people who complain about how music is "bad these days" but they're only talking about what they hear on the radio and aren't really exploring what the landscape has to offer

A lot of what gets created is for functional purposes, and it has always been that way. As time goes on, the functional stuff gets torn down and replaced and anything that's appealing or well-built gets to stay. This gives the impression that the past was full of ornate, well-constructed wonders. But is and always has been an illusion

There were probably people 200, 300, 1000 years ago who thought "Everything is so ugly these days" or didn't care. It's not about what buildings look like, it's about how we live our lives

royaltheartist··on Experiments spell doom for physical-collapse explanation of quantum weirdness
Oh great, now they've got Doom running at the Quantum level
royaltheartist··on Is engineering management bullshit?
Every job I've worked at, when a co-worker goes on vacation, it's up to the other engineers and laborers to compensate. When the manager goes on vacation there's no extra work leftover
royaltheartist··on Is engineering management bullshit?
Because my managers tell me about fires I have to put out when I get back
royaltheartist··on Is engineering management bullshit?
I guess the managers have found this comment. Once anyone notices when a manager takes vacation, then I'll consider it a vital part of any job
royaltheartist··on Is engineering management bullshit?
The answer is yes all management is bullshit
royaltheartist··on We are closer to Bradbury’s dystopia than Orwell’s or Huxley’s
Yeah, sure, it's definitely some type of dystopia where we're all forced to treat criticism against a $100 million podcaster as some fundamental human rights issue
royaltheartist··on How we broke the supply chain
Ahh ha, this is like when I say a Scotsman was rude to me and someone else informs me that it must not have been a true Scotsman, then
royaltheartist··on The strangely successful history of people mailing themselves in boxes (2015)
He mailed himself successfully in that song. It was the opening of the box where things went wrong
royaltheartist··on Bitcoin: Addressing the Ponzi Scheme Characterization
Luckily if the monetary worth of Bitcoin fails, it still has intrinsic value for all of its many uses, such as:
royaltheartist··on Unvaccinated workers who lose jobs ineligible for unemployment benefits (Canada)
The case rate among unvaccinated can be up to 18 times higher than the vaccinated, even in areas where the vaccination rate is close to 75% https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...

The vaccines reduce contraction, transmission and severity

royaltheartist··on The Third Web
I see it less as some revolutionary moment or great sea change but more that people who already have and control wealth can move things in a direction that benefits them regardless of whether the rest of us will benefit or even care
royaltheartist··on TheNFTbay.org – The Billion Dollar Torrent (All NFT's from Ethereum and Solana)
Noticing a lot of takes on here that are side-stepping the "You don't actually own anything" part to suddenly focus on community buildings, as if a community has formed on the basis of receipt collection
royaltheartist··on Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?
Did you know that Javascript programmers are giving up double quote strings for Lint?
royaltheartist··on Elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the problem: Giridharadas
Let me answer your question:

Yes, the richest person on earth is absolutely to blame for the decisions he makes to hold on to his own power and wealth. Hope that clears things up

royaltheartist··on Elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the problem: Giridharadas
Incomes went up only for the unemployed who got the $600/week unemployment benefit, which just expired. And that's just for the pandemic. Real wages, the actual value of one's wages relative to the expenses in costs in society, have been in a decline since the 80s. Yet, the wealthy have come to control more and more wealth.

This isn't some ax to grind. This is life under a system where the wealthy rule and the rest of us have no choice but to work for them or starve.

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