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rjinman

It’s amazing how everyone thinks this sculpture’s message doesn’t apply to them. “My side’s flags are different, it’s the other side’s flags that are bad”. So many people here making this argument. It’s beyond parody, yet really so predictable. Amazing lack of self awareness. I thought this place was more rational than Reddit, but apparently not!
Being downvoted for an objective fact. Haha, brilliant.

Idiots.

No, you don’t understand, it’s only British national flags that are bad!
Is it? Most people I know who have flags proudly displayed are left wing and their flags are usually one of: the Palestinian flag, the ukrainian flag, the LGBT rainbow flag, or the trans flag.
Re:Write "Freehold" Software on Sunday July 27, 2025 @03:49PM (#44704099)
I wasn't asking it to define it. I came up with the list of principles first, then spent ages trying to think of a suitable name for them. It was quite gratifying when ChatGPT, without any context, when asked to guess what the term "freehold" might mean with respect to software, came up with almost the exact same set of principles. That told me that the "freehold" term is a pretty good fit. It would be an incredible coincidence otherwise.
Re:Third Interstellar Object Discovered on Thursday July 03, 2025 @04:43AM (#44452951)
The more interstellar objects we find that resemble comets, the weirder Oumuamua is.
When I posted about this project here and on reddit a few months ago I got a lot of people asking for advice and learning resources. I promised I'd one day provide a detailed write-up explaining everything, so here it is :)
Re:Modern C++ – RAII on Friday May 30, 2025 @07:29AM (#44135106)
unique_ptr is much better because then each object has a sole owner, which makes object lifetimes much easier to reason about and you can't end up with cyclic references causing memory leaks.
Re:Nice Things with SVG on Sunday April 13, 2025 @01:33PM (#43674403)
I wrote a game of Tetris in JavaScript with SVG many years ago. It had nice graphics and was smoothly animated. I hadn’t heard of anyone else using SVG like that at the time.

I also made a game called Pro Office Calculator (available on Steam), which includes a Doom-style 3D engine for which I used Inkscape as my map editor. Here’s an example of a map: https://github.com/robjinman/pro_office_calc/blob/develop/da...

Re:GPT-4.5 on Saturday March 01, 2025 @01:45AM (#43216623)
That’s not what I was saying at all. I was using Go as an example of what the experience of being helplessly outclassed by a superior intelligence is like: you are losing and you don’t know why and there’s nothing you can do.
Re:GPT-4.5 on Friday February 28, 2025 @11:03AM (#43207138)
> What's the difference between your "agentic AIs" and, say, "script kiddies" or "expert anarchist/black-hat hackers"?

Intelligence. I'm talking about super-intelligence. If you want to know what it feels like to be intellectually outclassed by a machine, download the latest Go engine and have fun losing again and again while not understanding why. Now imagine an ASI that isn't confined to the Go board, but operating out in the world. It's doing things you don't like at speeds you can scarcely comprehend and there's not a thing you can do about it.

Re:GPT-4.5 on Friday February 28, 2025 @09:55AM (#43206264)
I agree unfortunately. I might be a bit of an extremist on this issue. I genuinely think that building agentic ASI is suicidally stupid and we just shouldn’t do it. All the utopian visions we hear from the optimists describe unstable outcomes. A world populated by super-intelligent agents will be incredibly dangerous even if it appears initially to have gone well. We’ll have built a paradise in which we can never relax.
Re:GPT-4.5 on Friday February 28, 2025 @08:59AM (#43205637)
As someone who is terrified of agentic ASI, I desperately hope this is true. We need more time to figure out alignment.
Re:DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures on Thursday February 27, 2025 @09:08AM (#43194505)
What the frell! This is cool.
Re:Why Clojure? on Monday February 24, 2025 @11:31AM (#43161459)
Couldn't agree more with the necessity for fast feedback loops. I've experienced the opposite, and it's not fun.

I worked with Clojure/ClojureScript (mostly ClojureScript) for a couple of years many years ago. It was the first time I'd worked professionally with a functional language, so I made a game of minesweeper in my free time to help get to grips with it: https://github.com/robjinman/cljsmines

Back then, I fully bought into the idea that functional language like Clojure were the future, especially on the web. The way application state is managed is perhaps the key virtue of functional programming - if you get it right, you can design your program to consist mostly of completely pure functions. I remember how enlightening that was once I understood it.

Re:A C++ Developer Learns Assembly on Saturday October 05, 2024 @03:02PM (#41752109)
Thanks, I've made a new branch called display_fixes. Let me know if it works
Re:A C++ Developer Learns Assembly on Saturday October 05, 2024 @05:21AM (#41748655)
Hi, thanks for the update. I’ll make this change when I get a chance. Thanks
Re:A C++ Developer Learns Assembly on Thursday October 03, 2024 @07:49AM (#41729760)
Interesting, I’ve only tried it on two machines - my (fairly old) laptop with integrated graphics and my desktop with an RTX4060. I’ve also tried it on the desktop on Windows in a Linux VM running Ubuntu 24.04. It runs way smoother on the laptop.

Thanks for trying it :)

BTW, is there a problem with the JavaScript on my website?

Show HN: Boulder Dash style game made in x86_64 assembly

https://github.com/robjinman/gemsnrocks_asm

It doesn’t use any libraries, not even the C standard lib! It just uses the Linux system call interface.Drawing to the screen is done by writing directly to /dev/fb0.I created this just to learn assembly - something of a lost art these days. I’m mainly a C++ developer. This has been a lot of fun and very enlightening.Here is a video: https://youtu.be/IoJQ80pWyGI

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Re:Psion: The Last Computer on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @09:52AM (#40788642)
I learnt to program on a Psion as a ten year old.

Show HN: Pro Office Calculator – How deep does the rabbit hole go?

https://github.com/robjinman/pro_office_calc

I developed this game back in 2017/18 while bored out of my mind working as a junior web developer. It was partly to entertain my friends and colleagues, but I decided at some point to put it on Steam for free. You can find it if you search "Pro office calculator". It also has an official website at proofficecalculator.com.The game is written in C++ and remains my largest project to date at...

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Re:Double-Entry Bookkeeping as a Directed Graph on Wednesday April 10, 2024 @11:47AM (#39992035)
Double-entry bookkeeping is very easy to understand once you ditch the ridiculous "credit" and "debit" terminology.

Essentially, the goal is to keep the accounting equation true at all times. The equation is: Equity = Assets - Liabilities. Eventually, earnings (Income - Expenses) will become part of equity, so splitting that out, you have: Equity + Income - Expenses = Assets - Liabilities. Rearranging to get rid of the minus signs you get: Equity + Income + Liabilities = Assets + Expenses. This equation must be true or something has gone wrong - like money appearing or disappearing out of nowhere. To keep it true at all times, it should be clear that any time you add money to an account on the left side of the equation (say, to an Income account), you must either add the same amount to an account on the other side or subtract the same amount from the same side.

For example, you sell a lemonade for $5. You add $5 to Sales (Income) and add $5 to Current Account (Assets).

The "credit" and "debit" terminology is ridiculous because their definitions swap around depending on which account you're talking about, which is an utterly absurd (mis)use of language and the main reason people find this confusing.

The short answer to the first question is… not great.

There are no Vulkan constructs corresponding to those things. Vulkan lets you run compute shaders written in GLSL, HLSL, or any language for which there exists a compiler that outputs SPIR-V. Vulkan doesn’t have its own shader language. Deciding how to break the problem down into separate shader programs each with different workgroup sizes is a challenge.

And the end result performs very poorly compared with tensorflow. However, I haven’t yet put much effort into optimisation, so I expect there’s some easy performance gains to be made.

I don’t know anything about WebGL or WebGPU.

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