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samplatt

1,530 karma · joined January 5, 2017

imposter syndrome -> coffee in styrofoam -> compost at home
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samplatt··on What can we gain by losing infinity?
And then the next kid says "infinity plus two", which is a perfectly acceptable progression, and the cycle starts again.
samplatt··on The Beauty of Bonsai Styles
I had a fig at my work desk for a couple of years. Work moved buildings. The new aircon killed it. No matter how much I watered it, it kept drying out.

It was still trying to live off its two remaining leaves, when I picked it up by its trunk and noticed it was completely hollow and almost made of paper. It was utterly desiccated.

samplatt··on Air is full of DNA
Not OP, but The Thought Emporium is a personal favourite. Their name belies the hands-on nature of their videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_q-fD_lyU

samplatt··on Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive
Ah, missed that bit entirely, was going mostly on the story of being front and centre and being smiled at - it's an apocryphal story for TGD.

Now I"m thinking, the mention of digital formats doesn't make much sense either ^_^;

samplatt··on Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive
Based on the story there's a good chance it'll be one of these recordings: https://relisten.net/grateful-dead
samplatt··on Fuck the cloud (2009)
A UK trance artist called Deathboy left directory-traversal open on his website about 23 year ago. Since then I've had a lot of mp3's that he's never released or put on albums, which is sad because a lot of them are pretty great.

Similarly (also from ~2003), the (Australian) ABC's website held a lot of recorded breakfast radio show clips from when Adam & Wil hosted it, getting the awesome comedy band Tripod [0] to write songs in an hour. Many of these were released on their CD's, but nowhere near all of them.

Eventually that ABC server was shutdown due to lack of government funds. There's a very good chance I'm the only one on the planet with these excellent songs & interviews from those shows.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripod_(band)

samplatt··on Fuck the cloud (2009)
All of mine. Music, photos, copies of important documents, archived sets of email (and gmail) across different eras. My facebook archive export, IRC & IM logs stretching back to ~2000. A lot of it even on SSD, let alone HDD's, let alone "archival media". The spinning rust is mostly used for double- and triple-redundant copies of my music and photos, as well as the usual movie collection.

I'm not sure HN is the best place for such... technological anachronistic skepticism? A lot of us ARE going to be storing all that for shits and giggles.

samplatt··on ZomboCom stolen by a hacker, sold, now replaced with AI-generated makeover
I didn't think I'd be the first person in this (or the reddit) thread to call this new site ZombieCom, but not gonna lie I'm pretty happy about it.
samplatt··on Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)
You're essentially holding a large tablet upright, but all the weight is taken up up the base. Rather than finger-painting, try holding it on both sides like a tablet or gamepad and operating with thumbs.

Scrolling/controlling checkboxes and switches feels GREAT. Depends entirely what you're using it for.

samplatt··on Study: Workers who fall for 'corporate bullshit' may be worse at their jobs
Dilbert was popular for a long time for a reason.
samplatt··on A retro terminal music player inspired by Winamp
The times haven't changed. It's still spyware, it's just been normalised.
samplatt··on Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable
>If there were ever any backdoor in some phone, it would have been found. Not only have MANY been found, but the whole security industry is aware of them and works with/against those backdoors.

This is kind of like a mechanic not knowing what a car's exhaust does...

samplatt··on Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge
Certainly not the prior century-and-a-half's worth of books and films.
samplatt··on FreeBSD doesn't have Wi-Fi driver for my old MacBook, so AI built one for me
>Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern

That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real.

When ungodly amounts of money is governed entirely by vibes, it's hardly surprising they lose ungodly amounts of money to vibe-coding.

The downside is the effects of all that money shifting is very real :(

samplatt··on Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout
Seven for my ~140kg arse. Not sure how healthily this scales.
samplatt··on The shadowy world of abandoned oil tankers
Western Australian here confirming all resource extraction does this. Woodside and Adani are the most egregious that come to mind but they all do it.
samplatt··on RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001)
In case anyone else has ever wondered:

IDDQD stands for Id Delta Quit Delta, a fraternity created by DOOM programmer Dave Taylor who released that if you drop out or quit a course you get a statistically-better final grade than you would by failing the course. Of course, you still end up not achieving a degree, hence when used in-game it shows "Degreelessness Mode" activated.

samplatt··on RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001)
It's only offensive if you're being carried around.
samplatt··on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
Programming semantics is a large part of the equation, but it's a secondary part. Unity is just too damn EASY for spinning up a prototype and gluing other modules onto it. C# is a part of that but simple implementation is so much easier and powerful than other engines.

This goes out the window for polished end products but that's a different argument... but by then the ship has often already sailed and you're already using Unity.

samplatt··on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
VS is actually one of the cheaper tools in our stack; Unity (the game engine) is probably the most expensive one at the moment, and it's going to get much more so with their recent changes to licensing structure for embedded hardware.
samplatt··on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
>business clients, who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves, and would want to have support and liability (i.e: Someone to hold liable for problems in said software.)

This is a nice idea but the reality is that there's MANY corporate customers who are happy to get away with casual piracy. Sometimes it's a holdover from when the company was small enough that every business expense is realistically coming out of their own pocket, sometimes they're trying to obfuscate how much their department actually costs to the company at large.

You think individual consumers lie to themselves to justify software piracy? Corporate self-deception is a WHOLE new kettle of fish.

samplatt··on Doing the thing is doing the thing
I learned that lesson as a solo dev on a project that lasted a year, then learned it again as a team of 4 on a 2-year project. I've not had to learn the lesson again but I've certainly trod the same path... 20 people (including some VERY expensive contractors), 3.5 years, AU$80m to deliver what amounts to a timesheeting system that needs a team of 10 people manually massaging the data every month to make it work.

How do you not be "toxic" after that? How do you retain a chipper attitude when you know for a rock-solid certainty that even if the project is successful it's likely by accident?

samplatt··on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
Not just jokes and scenarios - it's full of many actors that for years (and decades) played very serious "leading man" type roles. Seeing all these all-american heroes just being utter idiots helped make it so impactful.
samplatt··on Letting Claude play text adventures
Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence, a term coined in 1985, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI
samplatt··on The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves
Cory Doctorow waxed lyrical for many years about the ability to 3d-print clothes and other Maslow-hierarchy needs. Even the most experimental of designs haven't approached that yet... and I think we'd now be scared of increased PFAS levels even if we could.
samplatt··on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux
Oh, for sure. That and ADAT are great examples of tech that worked and worked well - and maybe even instrumental in HDMI's later adoption of optical tech in their cables.
samplatt··on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux
I replied to someone who claimed HDMI's only purpose was DRM, which is wrong.

I haven't pivoted since the start of the thread. There simply was not a digital solution that could negotiate then stream video and AND 2+ channels of audio, all in one cable, that was supported by more than a small fraction of consumer and industry devices at once. Firewire (which you seem fixated on), for all it's many technical superiorities, had almost zero market with Windows users, or consumers in general. Set-top boxes used it in the US, but was uncommon outside of the US. Camcorders used it, but in 2002 when HDMI came out most people were still using film camcorders IIRC; digital only really became commonplace well after HDMI gained footholds.

I'm not saying the cable itself controlled clocks and handshakes, I'm conflating terms over the last couple of comments. I'm referring to HDMI, the cable, the protocol, and the connectors. And yes - HDCP had a huge part in how HDMI was pushed, which is both bad (introducing proprietary bullshit's never great) and good (larger adoption of standards that work well in the field).

Was HDMI perfect? FAR from it. But all these "there was this tech that did THIS facet better" is missing the point that I've stated a few times. It was a good solution to a number of small problems.

samplatt··on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux
Correct! Now put that USB cable _inside_ a DVI cable, magically solve all the buffering problems that plagued the industry for several decades, slap on some DRM over the top, and you'll have HDMI 1.0 :-D
samplatt··on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux
I... think you might be proving my point for me? The ability to have a single cable that can do video AND a bunch of audio channels at once is amazing for the average joe.

Don't get me wrong, I use optical in my setup at home & I'd love to have more studio & scientific gear just for the hell of it, but I'm the minority.

I'm not trying to defend the HDMI forum or the greedy arsehole giants behind them. The DRM inbuilt to HDMI and the prohibitive licensing of the filters (like atmos) is a dick move and means everything is way more expensive than it needs to be. Was just pointing out that parent's comment was reductive.

samplatt··on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux
DVI-D doesn't carry audio; HDMI can do a bunch of uncompressed channels simultaneously.
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