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mehwoot

Re:Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale on Monday October 26, 2026 @05:16AM (#50241141)
I guess the map is the territory
Love this game, fast paced multiplayer that's super strategic.
He claims it was poking fun. The court found differently.

> Bendels claimed the meme, posted by his newspaper's X account, was satirical.

> But the judge in the case said during the verdict that Bendels published a 'deliberately untrue and contemptuous statement about Interior Minister Ms. Faeser (...) that would not be recognizable to the unbiased reader and is likely to significantly impair her public work'.

It's about 1 olympic sized swimming pool long, although I guess we're only allowed to use that for volume
Re:The Ghosts in the Machine on Friday December 20, 2024 @11:50PM (#42477614)
Supermarkets sell promotional space and in some cases access to have products even appear in store, either through discounts on the wholesale price or straight up charging for it. They absolutely tilt things in favour of their own brands, and in some supermarkets in some categories don't stock any non house brands.

Spotify has discovered there is a big market for music where the quality isn't that important and they can serve it themselves. Same as supermarkets do with many products.

Re:What makes gambling wrong but insurance right? (2017) on Saturday June 08, 2024 @05:23PM (#40620257)
The difference is that gambling increases the overall variance of outcomes to an individual whereas insurance decreases it. I wouldn't say insurance is a form of gambling but that they are two ends of the same spectrum. The difference in intention is a clear distinction to me.
I would expect minute-by-minute coverage with a lot of pictures, maps, estimates of how much time they need to reach Moscow etc.

This existed, it just didn't exist in the traditional media. Look in the right discord servers and there were new videos being posted every 5 minutes as the convoy was moving around.

No, it did not “double-check”—that’s not something it can do! And stating that the cases “can be found on legal research databases” is a flat out lie.

What’s harder is explaining why ChatGPT would lie in this way. What possible reason could LLM companies have for shipping a model that does this?

It did this because it's copying how humans talk, not what humans do. Humans say "I double checked" when asked to verify something, that's all GPT knows or cares about.

It's not focused on a point, it's focused on an area, and while it will be hot it won't be unbelievably hot. See this explanation which is far better than I can explain- https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/
Re:A Philosopher on Drugs on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @10:26PM (#35177420)
Why do you say that
Re:A Philosopher on Drugs on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @09:32PM (#35162486)
why is it so common for people to think psychedelics are opening us up to what is ""real"" or some deeper truth

Because the very changes in brain chemistry you're talking about affect your ability to determine whether something is real or not.

Many psychedelics cause Apophenia, Pareidolia and other disorders. In loose terms, the ability of your brain to determine what information is meaningful or not is affected and you begin to over interpret the meaningfulness of things that happen and your own thoughts. So your idle thought becomes some earth-shattering revelation.

Something similar can happen to people with Schizophrenia. They'll be walking down a street and see a license plate XUE-383 and the function of the brain that tells whether something is meaningful or not misfires, telling them that this is very important. The brain then tries to explain why this is incredibly important, hence hidden messages, spies, all sorts of things.

You can of course be on drugs or schizophrenic and understand this is what is happening but it's hard to override an emotion with logic.

Re:Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @08:42PM (#34990851)
What they're talking about is a very active debate in Australia.

The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived

Is absolutely what a lot of, if not the majority of people, believe.

Re:How Duolingo reignited user growth on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @12:07AM (#34978993)
Anki. You'll learn so much quicker
How does one definite hate speech? Who gets to decide? That's my entire problem with this philosophy. Some one or some group feel holy enough to be the arbiters.

Yes, real life is hard and complicated and there's no easy way to decide it. We collectively do the best we can and keep trying to improve. That's just reality. That's why free speech absolutism is naïve- it appeals to our desire for one, simple, always enforceable rule but it's not the way the world works that one simple rule is always the best outcome.

Re:Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @12:42AM (#34409512)
Thanks for this info.
Re:Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @12:36AM (#34409475)
The basic technique is from a research paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4295561_Fast_Hydrau...

My first attempt at creating a simulation of water and erosion before I saw this paper was pretty bad as well.

Yes, it's a grid based system. When you choose map size (e.g. 1024x1024) that's the resolution of the underlying simulation. My refinement of this approach is there is an extra step that "smooths" everything out. The vertex points for rendering are offset depending on how the water flows, which allows rivers to appear to flow at angles other than 90 degrees. Without this, it would either be very blocky or cover a much smaller area- there are other implementations of that paper floating around and the scale is an order of magnitude less, as a river needs to be many grid points across. In my implementation, you can get a nice looking river from a sequence of single points.

The drawback is this complicates a lot of other things. E.g. you can no longer easily tell what the height is at a point on the map is- there is no easy way to know what vertices to interpolate between since they can be offset in different directions. So when rendering trees, there's a whole GPU calculation to produce a separate data layer just to know what height the ground they're sitting on is at. But it's worth it to get a map that covers a big area with a full water flow simulation.

In general terms, the simulation is done as a series of grids of values (called layers, in reality just textures on the GPU) and operations that take some of them as input to generate another. Some layers persist always (e.g. the water flow) and update themselves iteratively. Other layers are produced on the fly when needed, and can be at different resolutions. E.g. you zoom into an area of the map- the water layer is read to determine the biome layer for just that part of the map. The water layer is read to determine the heights layer I talked about previously. Then the biome layer, water layer and heights layer are combined into a trees layer where one grid vertex is one possible instance of a tree. The values represent whether a tree is there, the position of its base, the type of tree, etc.

That's used as input for the rendering system, there's a mesh that uses that trees layer to render all the trees. It's also used as input for the animals system, so the animals walk around the trees, etc. It's basically a big dependency graph of data layers and the operations needed to generate them. Most of the work so far has been building all that tooling and getting it running asynchronously so the game doesn't lag if it takes multiple frames to generate what is needed.

Re:Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation on Monday January 16, 2023 @03:52PM (#34405327)
Yes. Plus different rocks types, since how different rocks respond to erosion is an important factor in why the world looks the way it does.
Re:Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation on Monday January 16, 2023 @03:50PM (#34405313)
this

I might gamify it a little bit more, but personally I love the fun that comes from exploring a set of mechanics by yourself without anyone telling you what you're trying to achieve.

My aim is to build a set of simulation mechanics that are accurate enough to teach you a little bit about how the processes work in real life but also responsive enough to let you play around with them and create what you'd like.

Re:Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation on Monday January 16, 2023 @03:48PM (#34405289)
Do you have any idea of what you'd want to import it into?

I get this feedback a lot, but I'm unsure what formats would be most useful- there are a lot of different heightmap / GIS formats to choose from.

Re:Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation on Sunday January 15, 2023 @11:50PM (#34396946)
Just sandbox mode for now.

The rivers don't meander in the way that real rivers do- real rivers meander because of differences in flow velocity across the width of the river, but the simulation doesn't run at that sort of resolution. If it did, the area covered would be far smaller.

Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1482770/Terra_Firma/

It's free to play on steam, but you'll need a computer with a dedicated graphics card.I just released a new version after first releasing it 18 months ago. It's been a hard slog to scrounge time as it's not my day job but that's life.There's a ton of obvious improvements in the future (weather systems, temperature, varying rainfall, ice/snow, more biomes, more plate tectonics, lava, etc) but...

( Read More... | 79 comments | on HN )
Re:Waymo's collision avoidance testing on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @03:42PM (#33990233)
> I don't think anyone is doubting that Tesla considers themselves to be a player

> I don't consider Tesla a player in self-driving, but I don't think Tesla does either

Re:Blockchain Games Like Axie Infinity Have Failed Investors on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @05:39PM (#33794398)
Although I think the whole token-backed thing is completely unnecessary, it's not hard to imagine what value people walking, hiking, jogging and being physical has these days.
I work for a company of ~200 total employees with ~30 in engineering and the org chart for an engineer goes Individual Contributor -> Manager -> VP Engineering -> CEO. 4 total layers, 2 of managers.
Shameless plug: I wrote a game that lets you play around with this sort of thing, it's on steam and it's free: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1482770/Terra_Firma/
Re:The psychological drama of the world chess championship on Monday December 27, 2021 @07:55AM (#29702108)
No offense but it would need to be much more refined than what you suggest. Stalemate is pretty rare, but the 50 move / 3 move repetition is 99% of draws in chess- or at least would be the outcome if players were not allowed to agree to a draw. Nearly every single game at the top level would be a white win if all white has to do is effectively draw.

Maybe instead of stalemate you meant a draw where neither side has enough material to checkmate? If you make that a black win, white would always have to push for a win.

Re:Apple Joins Blender Development Fund on Thursday October 14, 2021 @07:41PM (#28871782)
Assuming your life is spent in a virtual world consuming media, that is. For people who want to live in the physical world with maybe a few augmentations here and there, AR could be around forever.
Re:Writing the Roadmap from Engineer to Manager on Sunday September 26, 2021 @08:13PM (#28665788)
Why would you give up actually doing real work?

Building something past a certain scale requires people to work together and building a system of people working together is just as much an interesting challenge as building a computer system of components working together.

Re:The Applecare Hustle on Thursday September 09, 2021 @05:38PM (#28474974)
Fair enough. I don't live in the U.S, where I live the limits are far, far higher- at least $500,000, probably more adding up all the different types of entitlements.

https://www.greenslips.com.au/claims-guide/entitlements.html

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