News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

loganhood

Re:OpenCiv1 – open-source rewrite of Civ1 on Saturday March 28, 2026 @07:54PM (#47559126)
There are also some folks working on a similar project for Civilization 2. https://github.com/axx0/Civ2-clone
> It is almost 2026 and really only a matter of time before AI papers over all those little cracks it currently has, and truly delivers on the promise of vibe-coding. So the question now becomes, do you really want to learn that new language and become a newbie again at this late a stage?

AI-assisted coding - not full-blown vibecoding, but having an AI agent generate code under close direction, supervision, and review - allows me to work competently in a bigger set of languages/frameworks than ever before. In particular, in the last year I've written quite a bit of Typescript and Python without ever having learned those languages properly. They're both close enough to Ruby - a language I do know well - that I can read the code and understand what it does; or ask the AI questions when I see a language idiom I don't know.

Maybe, given enough time, I'll accidentally learn some new languages this way!

This isn't the end of production of all Blu-ray media, right? just consumer-writable Blu-rays?
Re:PrivTracker – Private BitTorrent tracker for everyone on Saturday January 11, 2025 @03:30PM (#42668696)
Does a private tracker provide any meaningful security if I'm already encrypting the contents of the torrent?
Re:RCE Vulnerability in QBittorrent on Saturday November 02, 2024 @09:41AM (#42026332)
I've done this with friends/family a couple times and wrote up a tutorial that I use as reference every couple months.

Has an optional step to password-protect the contents if you have any qualms with security-by-obscurity of using an unlisted torrent on a public tracker.

https://loganhood.com/2023/12/14/everyday-7zip-bittorrent

> in practice I found there's just too many debugPrint() lines cluttering the code

On this particular aspect - I find that log lines can do double-duty as code comments. When I see some comment that explains the what-and-why of a section of code - "// We also need to check the Foo state for consistency before committing Bar" - I might actually change it to a log line like - "Verifying state of Foo ${foo.id} before committing Bar ${bar.id}".

Re:Scala 3.0 on Friday May 14, 2021 @06:42PM (#27160445)
I'm an SDE at AWS. Many teams including mine are using Kotlin for backend dev.
Re:Why does an A note sound different across instruments? on Monday March 01, 2021 @05:45PM (#26309518)
The sustained overtones are only half the battle. Getting the attack correct (the sound profile of the first ~10 milliseconds) is really important for differentiating instruments. Plucking a guitar string and hammering a piano string have very different attack characteristics. A flute has a distinctively "breathy" attack.

Many synthesizers use a sampled recording of the actual instrument for the attack, then synthesize the sustained portion of the instrument.