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sandyarmstrong

1,178 karma · joined August 1, 2012

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/sandyarmstrong; my proof: https://keybase.io/sandyarmstrong/sigs/Bby-EvA2CD3EHzG6mvgv2t8UuS7JEiGPJdLKs3o6p28 ]
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sandyarmstrong··on Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
Wow, the list of missing features exactly matches the list of things I don't want and often behaved like pop-up ads on my desktop. Thanks!
sandyarmstrong··on EmulatorJS
Have you played flappy bird before? You keep pressing the button to get it to flap and stay aloft.
sandyarmstrong··on Jurassic Park - Tablet device on Nedry's desk? (2012)
> it puts tension into the spring

Well it certainly put tension into the scene! Thanks.

sandyarmstrong··on enclose.horse
Is there guaranteed to be a solution that encloses the cherry? Is Day 8 the first day to have a cherry?
sandyarmstrong··on That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam
The Verge's article here is the least compelling. They report it with the same confidence and style as their original article when the Reddit post first made waves.

I recommend reading https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax... instead. It offers better reasoning, and an honest reflection about how close they were to getting taken in by the original Reddit post.

sandyarmstrong··on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost
That is probably not true if you are transferring from a community college after two years. It's entering as a freshman direct from high school that has all the barriers.
sandyarmstrong··on Maybe you’re not trying
A line I always remember (from Babylon 5) is: "When I clean my place, all I've done is clean my place. But when I help you clean your place, I'm _helping you_."

tl;dr you should ask your badass partner for strategic help when the entire galaxy is under threat, even if she seems busy.

sandyarmstrong··on Ultra efficient vector extension for SQLite
sqlite does not have native support for a vector-like column type. Extensions like this and sqlite-vec build on the BLOB column type, and provide additional functions to let you efficiently search and manipulate this vector data.
sandyarmstrong··on Ollama Web Search
I believe it's free.
sandyarmstrong··on Xogot: Godot for iPad
It's been really fun following the development of this, Miguel et al have been really open about the design process. A really cool journey for both the UX and the backend. I recommend reading through past blogs if you're interested in Godot or SwiftUI.

Congrats folks!

sandyarmstrong··on Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365
Gmail was also announced on April Fools'...
sandyarmstrong··on Remote Code Execution in Marvel Rivals Game
I just had to fix this for my kid over the weekend. https://steamcommunity.com/app/2767030/discussions/0/5962604... was very helpful:

You can also skip the UAC prompt without editing the registry, by adding the following to the game's launch options in Steam:

cmd /min /C "set __COMPAT_LAYER=RUNASINVOKER && start "" %command%"

sandyarmstrong··on Google Cache is fully dead
This was really useful when looking for product support, as companies regularly pull down or move around pages on their website. Seeing the version of a page at the time google associated it as a result was something I did all the time.
sandyarmstrong··on Boar's Head plant posed an 'imminent threat' years before listeria outbreak
Watery, yes, that's definitely a component of it!
sandyarmstrong··on Boar's Head plant posed an 'imminent threat' years before listeria outbreak
Yup, that's completely true. But as somebody who typically prefers to buy "cheap" brands, and is usually completely satisfied by them, the fact that I experience such a wide gulf between Boar's Head and other brands makes me think it's not a marketing mind trick.
sandyarmstrong··on Boar's Head plant posed an 'imminent threat' years before listeria outbreak
Compared to other brands available in the supermarket, my family finds that Boar's Head deli meats consistently taste better. There is something "cheap" that I find hard to quantify in the taste of generic grocery branded deli meats.

I'm not educated enough to know what the difference is here, but I don't think the fact that Boar's Head costs more is entirely a marketing device.

sandyarmstrong··on The Lurker's Guide to Babylon5
Yes, exactly! I'd seen an episode of B5 here and there, but it was hard to know what was going on. My family moved states when TNT bought the show and started airing the series in order 5 days a week as Season 5 was starting to come out. I didn't know anyone yet so the highlight of my day was coming home and watching the next episode, then reading the episode guide. It made me feel like part of a community.
sandyarmstrong··on The Lurker's Guide to Babylon5
This was the most important web destination for me in high school, so glad it's still up!
sandyarmstrong··on WriteFreely: An open source platform for building a writing space on the web
Have you never read a blog by an open source nerd? Hell, most nerds I know have written their own blogging software at some point.
sandyarmstrong··on Comparing the Framework Laptop with the MacBook Air M2: A Detailed Review
Or the battery :P
sandyarmstrong··on A crazy experience losing Apple earbuds in a remote town in Chile
In some parts of the world, wired lightning headphones are actually cheap bluetooth headphones that only use the lightning port for power (to avoid Apple licensing fees). For the author this was baffling, as everyone else took it as normal that bluetooth needed to be enabled to use wired headphones.
sandyarmstrong··on Cindy Lee might be the future of music
Yeah, that was really cool. A couple of years before that, Harvey Danger (yes, the Flagpole Sitta band) literally released their album Little by Little on BitTorrent. I loved that move, and it also happened to be a great album.
sandyarmstrong··on Stop Acting Like You're Famous
> Advice for myself around leisure activities.
sandyarmstrong··on Bing Copilot seemingly leaks state between user sessions
Was going to say the same, I'll bet it's listed as an example question in the prompt or something like that. Seems unlikely to be a hallucination since multiple people got the exact same question.

(Also happen to work at Microsoft, also don't work on Bing Copilot)

sandyarmstrong··on Vala Programming Language
Historically, it was designed to resemble C#, yet transpile to GNOME-like GObject-based C code, to provide an alternative way for GNOME developers to get higher level language syntax without having to depend on Mono/C# (which was very controversial at the time).

So the biggest difference from C# or Java is that there is no VM. It is mostly syntactic sugar over C and GObject.

At least, this was the case last I paid attention 15 years ago.

sandyarmstrong··on Jedi Knight (Plus, Notes on an Expanded Universe)
There was a brief reference to it:

> They might also want to check out the game’s expansion pack, which caters more to the FPS hardcore by eliminating the community-theater cut scenes and making everything in general a little bit harder. I didn’t bother, having gotten everything I was looking for out of the base game.

I spent a lot more time playing Jedi Knight (honestly, it was probably the best time I ever had playing a video game), but Mysteries of the Sith was still fun, and I liked having a purple lightsaber. :-)

sandyarmstrong··on The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
Have you tried it? It's horribly slow.
sandyarmstrong··on Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation
See https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php?page=faq

> Picotron supports PICO-8 style shorthand syntax, almost the whole API, and other compatibility features that make it relatively easy to port PICO-8 cartridges. However, it is not designed to run PICO-8 carts out of the box, because the underlying machinery is quite different. For example, Picotron uses floating point numbers, and so can only approximate PICO-8's fixed point math behaviour.

sandyarmstrong··on Show HN: NeedleDrop – Guess the movie from a song
What clues? I listened through an entire song and nothing was presented. Although I also noticed the bug that I could click and drag to see a frame from the movie.

I felt like if I didn't know in the first 5 seconds, I wasn't going to know, and there wasn't anything to do but listen to another 2 minutes of music or close it.

sandyarmstrong··on The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing
LLMs and vector embeddings are always lossy compression, yes?
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