News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

hertzrat

Re:Literary hostility to J. R. R. Tolkien on Saturday September 17, 2022 @10:00AM (#32877593)
> absolutely no one remembers who the fuck Edmund Wilson was

Can’t we strive to be more civilized on this site?

Re:Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications? on Saturday September 17, 2022 @09:36AM (#32877442)
I’m a game developer. Lots of work in that area but it’s hard work with lots of competition. Lots of time spent optimizing performance so you can run on weaker hardware. Insane user experience focus compared to web as well
Re:The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @09:27AM (#32836870)
Theory: The cloud took over the same way most trendy tech took over: resume driven development. Everyone on all the teams pushed for it because of how much value it adds to their resume and gradually more and more companies bought in, which accelerated the process because company d started feeling worried that they were behind the times since companies a-c already switched

The cloud is great for startups and tiny companies though

Re:W4 Games raises $8.5M to support Godot Engine growth on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @09:02PM (#32832059)
It used to be missing occlusion culling, which is a big deal. I think it either has it now or else it’s in v4 though?

It was sparse on tutorial content from the community too, but that seems changed a lot too since then

I wonder what their heavily nested scene graphs do to performance but haven’t tested it

Re:W4 Games raises $8.5M to support Godot Engine growth on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @09:02PM (#32832053)
Godot seems nice so far. How is the c# support? The docs? Is it hard to do x if you look online for how to do so? Performance? Occlusion culling?

Last time I looked into it, it was too far behind still, but it looks like Godot 4 will be a really cool release

Re:The AI Unbundling on Monday September 12, 2022 @10:24AM (#32810770)
Isn’t it likely that patent law is going to lock ai down? One company will finally crack something general-enough in a way that gets it way ahead, will patent it, and will use that monopoly to gain control of the whole space, and the monopoly will never go away because all further improvements will also get patented by the ai legal team?

The brief openness of ai right now is a glitch in the system that will get ironed out soon. Only megacorps, and countries that ignore patent law, will be able to afford to license the patents to do any significant ai work at all

Re:Unreal Rust on Sunday September 04, 2022 @06:32PM (#32718378)
These discussions always remind me of some talks by Jonathan blow where he argues rust doesn’t solve the hard problems he needed it to. There are podcast episodes with better discussions, but the main one people link to seems to be this

I haven’t used rust, but I sympathize with his problems with pointers and learned a lot from the various ways people try to solve them

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk

This is apocalyptic. Imagine something 100km from where you live, and that whole span between you and there being under water tomorrow. in a movie, that wouldn’t feel real no matter how good the special effects are, it’s too out there
Re:Rights, Laws, and Google on Monday August 29, 2022 @07:00PM (#32644637)
Notice is says “for ads,” and not in general. The terms sneakily allow them to still profile you or use your content in other ways, like training ai systems or reporting you to the government
That’s due to swelling batteries, which is apparently common in the xps line
How Orwellian. It’s like newspeak: make it impossible to express certain thoughts
Re:Pine64’s response to “Why I left Pine64” on Thursday August 18, 2022 @06:44PM (#32515722)
If it’s no, but has a dozen asterisks, to the end user, that’s still a “no, this component does not work properly.” The footnotes can be 5 pages long but the chart is still straightforward

One day I’ll probably end up with a Linux phone, but I mean, not if I’m worried I’ll get surprised when it arrives

My mom wasn’t hacked, but she lost her password and can’t get a human to talk to for the life of her
Re:Adventure game graphics with DALL-E 2 on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @10:52AM (#32497219)
Speaking of upping their game, I have a friend who worked in photography, and photo and video editing. Over the years, the tools got better and better and more user friendly. The money started to disappear due to more and more people being able to just use phone apps to do it all. He adapted by… leaving the field completely for a tech job.

That’s what we will see: a far smaller percent of people who have the pleasure of paying their bills by working in the arts. It’s all already so commoditized, I don’t know a single artist any more who can do it full time except one woman with a gallery I met the other day on a road trip. Is she going to have to go back to her old career of environmental policy soon?

Re:Commercial Surveillance and Data Security Rulemaking on Monday August 15, 2022 @10:13AM (#32469931)
I wish Canada would do a similar call for comments
Re:How fast is 12th Gen Intel Core? on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @04:31PM (#32403865)
I’d rather have a portable device that doesn’t need a separate keyboard
Out of curiosity, why is it only 5M and not 500M? You would think the same vulnerability applied to every server, not just one or one cluster, if they are using automated deployments
Re:How fast is 12th Gen Intel Core? on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @10:39AM (#32398642)
I recently turned down a m1 mba for $1100 in favour of a 2015 mba for $500. The keyboard is so dramatically better in the 2015 model, I couldn’t believe it. The battery is great, seems to last about 10h in a charge while writing and browsing and using discord.

I don’t care how fast it is as long as it continues to have those mediocre low travel keyboards. They’re better than their worst keyboards from the 2018 era but they still aren’t good

Re:Superman 64 on Friday July 29, 2022 @11:19AM (#32278064)
Off topic, but I just learned that the author of Watchmen (Alan moore) wrote some superman stories. The one I’m trying to track down right now is “for the man who has everything.” He described his writing process for it in detail in his great, short book on comic writing
Removing affiliate codes is arguably a privacy feature. People don’t especially like having so many sites know where they just came from. I know some people who rely on those affiliate codes for some of their income though

Did they really replace the codes with their own for a while??

Re:It’s time to make that indie C# game in Godot on Thursday July 14, 2022 @02:42PM (#32099920)
> I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour.

Nobody tries to hide anymore that a lot of game companies just create skinner boxes

Re:Using GPT-3 to explain how code works on Monday July 11, 2022 @02:58AM (#32053102)
Again, what does this have to do with being blind? Whether you can see or not, summaries are nice to have; and whether you can see or not, you still need to read the code in case the summary isn’t accurate, as it typically isn’t
Re:Using GPT-3 to explain how code works on Saturday July 09, 2022 @07:09PM (#32040185)
Not sure what that has to do with being blind except the audio part, and we already have text to speech systems to read the actual code

Programming while biking with ai is like relying on a really buggy early stage auto-drive ai system to take you places down winding, slippery roads while you sleep at the wheel. It might get you there most of the time, but I’d might bend you around a tree too

Trust is low because I read a science journalism article recently that claimed mit (or somebody else) had found, but we’re not sharing, drugs that prolonged life spans by 30%. In reality, the report said that they found a drug that raised levels of a certain chemical predictably in mice and humans, and did not venture further claims. The article is fraudulent and almost every science news post does it.

If the media wants to be trusted, they need to stop lying

Re:Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement on Friday July 08, 2022 @09:16PM (#32030273)
I don’t buy it. Musk compulsively creates huge and innovative companies. To liquidate stock, he could just as easily have just waited until his next big thing and sold off his stock then, once again, in order to pay for a non-Tesla venture; and then either used the money for the company, or bailed on the new company. Involving Twitter doesn’t make sense and is unnecessary
Re:Code from the FBI’s Anom encrypted messaging app on Thursday July 07, 2022 @07:56PM (#32021275)
And we wonder why the common person believes in conspiracy theories by the government against them
Re:Arabs believe economy is weak under democracy on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @12:02PM (#32002914)
Democracy isn’t just a system of government, it’s a cultural thing, a paradigm that the people and those in business and government must buy into. If they don’t, you get corruption and decay and fighting. However, you get even more corruption and decay without democracy, you just get less fighting since voicing your grievances lands you in jail
Re:Arabs believe economy is weak under democracy on Wednesday July 06, 2022 @11:56AM (#32002822)
Canadas multiculturalism approach is working great. It’s the American melting pot that has dissolved into tribal identity politics. It helps that Canada can have more than two parties to vote for - when Americas 2 political parties go off the rails, there isn’t a third you can switch to who is acting more maturely
Re:Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets (2017) on Monday July 04, 2022 @07:31PM (#31982770)
I wasn’t aware Sweeney spoke about software design. Any recommended articles?

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