teucris

Multiple people have suggested modding games. This is what led me to computer engineering as a career- specifically Quake III mods. Having games that are easily extended and hacked makes for an incredible exploratory environment, especially if it’s a game that the child loves.

What’s out there?

I know this is meant for EMT, but these look a lot like chainlink fence end-rail clamps which go for about $2.50 a piece. The post material (galvanized 1-3/4” pipe) goes for about $2.50 per foot, so those could be a reasonable alternative for when you can’t get easy access to EMT or maker pipe shipped to you.

Maybe the misalignment is one of misunderstanding - we don’t make it explicit that sharing something like this isn’t to celebrate it.

I don’t catch any major celebrations of abusive tactics on HN, but then again I tend to be late to the comments and those posts are buried by the time I arrive.

Agree and I’ll take it a step further: shouldn’t we encourage deep understanding of malicious or unethical systems so we can know how they work and possibly thwart them?

That Bret keeps Dynamicland and Realtalk so closed to others while touting it as “more open than open source” is really frustrating.

I get it. Opening it up means losing control. I really appreciate the desire to specifically not share it on traditionally engineer-centric spaces like GitHub as that will skew the vision towards engineering and possibly shut out non-programmers. I even get that Dynamicland isn’t really code that can be shared anyway.

But you have to give people something more than a general description and a vague invitation to visit your space. Otherwise it isn’t really open at all.

Some ideas:

- A document for how to experiment with domain exploration using tangibles and people in a way that leverages insights gleaned from Dynamicland

- A codebase for a “toy” computational system (named completely differently from Realtalk/Dynamicland so it’s clear that it is not actually part of Dynamicland) that shows how it’s possible to link physical properties to computational agents

So far I’m loving this. Would love a language tour doc!

Just my experience but as a musician who used Bandmix for a while, I found that most profiles I was interested had audio. It felt like it was expected and profiles without links to audio weren’t complete.

I’m loving the feedback everyone is posting here. While there are some cynics, you all have posted a treasure trove of useful insights for this creator. And for people like me who are constantly trying to improve user experience for the products they make, reading these comments has been incredibly insightful.

I wonder if by using a large nozzle, you could print out the entire sensor by laying out lengths of TPU with flexible joints at each air gap. It would depend on how well light traveled through the printed part though.

You got a lot of great responses to your observations around 4chan, partly debating whether it should be to blame for the growth of the alt-right. I think it boils down to one simple thing: 4chan was unfettered. Anyone could go there and do anything - learn to code, coordinate a LOIC attack, draft an Anonymous army, or brew an ultra-conservative movement. Those things will happen in places where there aren’t guards in place. The fewer of those places there are, the slower things on the fringe will develop. If an open forum is shut down, these things find new places to grow. But they won’t stop.

Apart from the math being off there, who do you know who has the time and resources to try and start 100 startups? Most people barely have the time and resources for 1.

Learn how to manage bets. Some people have the resources to fail many times and keep going. Others do not. Knowing that a huge portion of starting a business is luck, you can better weigh your options and hopefully select different opportunities depending on your situation.

And, in the unfortunately common case, recognize when you cannot take any bets and instead focus on getting yourself to a place where you can, rather than betting everything and losing everything.

I was curious as to what articles he was referring to. Here is the one from number 3:

https://www.panshin.com/critics/Renshaw/notassmart/notassmar...

But I don’t see the bottleneck. What are they optimizing that’s worth all this effort? As others have noted, RNGs are not a notable bottleneck in AI.

Great article and given the context of the code this is a brilliant solution, but note that this assumes that the data is well-formed. Much of the value in an effective, battled-worn parser is efficient error checking and recovery.

Minor nit regarding this thing that will destroy quality:

“We'll fix it if customers complain."

You can’t fix everything, and perfect is the enemy of good. While punting testing to users is a no-no, recognizing that edge case issues can be deprioritized is crucial to getting things out the door. This means shipping stuff with known defects that you can respond to if necessary.

There haven’t been any as successful, but there have been competitors. OpenCL, DirectX come to mind.

In hindsight, yes, but just because a specific technology is leading an industry doesn’t mean it’s going to be the best option. It has to play out long enough for the market to indicate a preference. In this case, for better or worse, it looks like CUDA’s the preference.

It depends greatly on the genre, but I do have some experience in querying. How does one DM these days on HN?

I really like that assessment. Frankly I hadn’t thought that far so thanks for the extrapolation!

- make more kid-accessible low-code app development environments

- train hackable LLMs on a corpus targeted for younger audiences

- offer built in “escape codes” to the lower levels of gaming systems like the playdate

- offer social networking sites meant to be customized/hacked on (eg myspace)

/edit These are ideas for how to bring tinker-ability to where kids are. But I don’t think I can say with confidence what is going to make a great explorative environment for the next generation. Bringing as much useful tech into the right places in kids’ lives, wherever they are and whatever background they have, is going to be the right start though.

I think there’s a bit of survivorship bias in the tech industry. Many of us got into tech because we were able to explore computers with few limitations. But I’m not convinced it was mostly due to the tech of the 90s being more open.

We are the ones who did that kind of stuff, so we’re a filtered audience posting on HN about tinkerable software. We likely tinkered for a lot of reasons that didn’t have much to do what tech was like - we had unfettered access to tech in some form, for instance, or we were encouraged to do so by our parents or society or our peers.

Making our tech more accessible is a fine goal, but that’s likely not the biggest blocker for the next generation of technologists. Rather, I'm starting to think that, given recent advancements in UI, social media, etc. our belief of what makes a great engineer is totally off base for what we’ll actually need in the next decade.

I used to be an infinite canvas fanatic, even building products that leveraged the concept, but ultimately I’ve abandoned it. There are too many issues with having an infinite canvas that make it untenable. This isn’t to say they should never be used, but rather that I believe there are good reasons why they aren’t used more.

1. Ambiguous structure - users cannot easily glean the structure of content from the layout alone. For instance, on an arbitrary canvas, you don’t know if two things are close to each other to indicate a relation, or just for aesthetic reasons. This can be mitigated by ensuring relations are exposed in other ways, but unless everyone is super strict about including an underlying structure, this will always be an issue. Also, without a representation of the underlying structure, an infinite canvas is fundamentally inaccessible.

2. Navigation - finding all possible content on a canvas is hard. This can be mitigated with something like a mini-map, but frankly sticking to one dimension of “infiniteness”, eg scrolling, has shown to be the most effective for the average person to handle.

3. Implicit, but heterogeneous, affordances - when you have an infinite canvas, there are many more actions needed eg. pan, scroll, select, possibly lasso, possibly zoom…all of which need a mouse movement or keybinding or touch gesture, depending on the device and context. These all need to be discovered, or taught, and are often initially hidden from the view. This makes the learning curve far steeper, especially when users are accessing content from many different types of devices.

4. Responsiveness - it’s hard enough to make a paragraph of text easily viewed on multiple screen sizes, let alone a complex layout of objects with relations possibly conveyed spatially. Infinite canvases are difficult to reformat to get a good, legible layout on a screen other than the one the creator used. There are workarounds, but they often lose information unintentionally by repositioning items in ways the author didn't anticipate.

Unless I’m misreading the wiki, the deadline of the collapse didn’t change to 20 years further out. The data seem to continue to match the original prediction.

Nothing right at all? From the wiki entry:

> In 2015, a calibration of the updated World3-03 model using historical data from 1995 to 2012 to better understand the dynamics of today's economic and resource system was undertaken. The results showed that human society has invested more to abate persistent pollution, increase food productivity and have a more productive service sector however the broad trends within Limits to Growth still held true.

And then later in the wiki entry:

> In 2023, the parameters of the World3 model were recalibrated using empirical data up to 2022. This improved parameter set results in a World3 simulation that shows the same overshoot and collapse mode in the coming decade as the original business-as-usual scenario of the Limits to Growth standard run.

Ossification of systems is mostly due to zero order thinking - a paucity of examination into the purpose of established systems. If someone with the agency to change a system gets to 2nd order thinking in their decision making, that is a blessing to everyone.

There exist ID systems that prevent you from protecting your privacy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a core feature.

Humans! We rely on nation states for root identity - social security numbers and birth certificates in the US - which are then used to get further identification credentials, eg drivers licenses, mailing addresses, passports, etc. These are easily defrauded, lots of mistakes are made, and are dependent on the nation’s government for support and reliability. Imagine those systems required no government bureaucracy, couldn’t be revoked, proved you were a human, etc. Wouldn’t that be a benefit?

I’m not a fan of cryptocurrencies and I think with regard to world coin there’s plenty to critique when it comes to the security of what they’re doing as well as the potential for corruption.

But identity is a Hard Problem that could use some attention. Imagining for a moment that it worldcoin works, the way they want, offering a secure, private way to prove you are you, to anyone. Wouldn’t that be a huge benefit? What am I missing?