tholman

One of the most beautiful improvised Jazz pieces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K%C3%B6ln_Concert) was largely produced due to having to play within the limitations of the piano, which was mistakenly set up and was too late to replace.

It's fun reading about the differences they've made regarding the AI computer players, giving them a more modern/better tactics vs the also interesting way it was implemented before (computer players being always able to see the full map and have extra creature growth)

I know it's anecdotal and irrelevant to the real science, but whenever neuroscience comes up, I think about the Exhalation short story Ted Chian, about a civilization with brains that rely on air pressure, and a deep explanation of these alien brains and at the same time made me appreciate that we also still know so little about our own, they may as well be the same.

Fun story, a good... (checks calendar, oh lord) 8+ years ago, I made a mis-kerned version of helvetica (smelvetica i called it [1]) as a joke, and eventually had the lawyers push on me

> we ask that you stop promoting ‘Smelvetica’ and making the font software available to everybody. Next time, just let us know if you have more ideas on how to modernize our classics, we are always open for creative input.

- [1](https://tholman.com/post/smelvetica/)

Tried to visit the first domain, baydailymedia, but doesn't seem to exist... I know its unsurprising and not against the rules or even spirit of showing off your new toy, but some humor in the aria tag "Video of user creating a protein maxing Skill" and then within the video, a fat "Video for illustrative purposes" "Results may vary" "check response for accuracy"

Second video seem's more real. And yeah, again not against the rules, but dropping onto website, no ads, prompting data out of it is very in the ethos of our current "lets just do an ai" era to be relevent era.

For those out of the know, Nova Launcher is an Android home screen replacement... so hits home when the root of your phone existence gets shook piece by piece.

Crashes like a Windows ME screensaver. Jokes aside, it's very fun to see open firehose access like this. I seem to recall that Dorsey had said that twitter limiting their api access was a mistake, hope we can keep this going.

Fun hypothetical, or can someone solve? How long, would this regex prime check [1] (via hn 2009) take to run on this on todays average machine?

Hitchhiker's Guide's Deep Thought "42" was 7.5 million years, just for a guide-post.

- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=707236

I love a good useless program, I may have written more useless ones than useful. Here's a few of my faves from the last 10 years!

- A password strength page that insults you based on strength https://trypap.com/

- Minesweeper with 1 square https://onesquareminesweeper.com/

- Adding elevator music to "go to top" buttons https://tholman.com/elevator.js/

- CSS Animation library of obnoxious over the top animations https://tholman.com/obnoxious/

- A fake mosquito with the web audio api https://tholman.com/mosquito-js/

Here's the HN conversation from 2020 [1], a little closer to when this came out.

- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507942

We've come a long way from console.frog [2016]

- https://tholman.com/console-dot-frog/

I've got maybe 4 extensions that are manifest V2 that just purely don't seem worth upgrading/fixing up (my largest with 5-10k installs) due to the time/5+ year old code that has been working fine on the old apis... Has chrome done some outreach to the popular extensions, or maybe just gone past a point where they're happy to kill off the old and move onto the new? Or is this purely about ublock etc?

As someone that works in media/advertising, the first thing I check when I see something like this is their ads.txt [1] -- It looks like they're managed by ezoic whom you forward your entire dns and they inject ads in the middle (AI is mentioned, naturally). Definitely ruining this whole site's experience.

[1] https://samagame.com/ads.txt

Ahh, this is super nice!

One thing I'd love to know or see is common mistakes I make or the type of mistake/trap I fall into in the pivotal moments of games (some kind of fork/pin combo for me I suspect) ... and/or repeated mistakes I've made in the same position.

I'd noticed some strange changes at our veterinary office, where they'd usually give my dog a full round of shots once a year, suddenly they decided to break it up into multiple different rounds, meaning I'd pay 3 times instead of the one. After a little research I'd found that they'd been bought by a private equity firm, and on further inspection had found a lot (NYC) of practices had changed hands the last few years.

There's been some antitrust cases, but the FTC clearly can't block many. The changes are clearly costing everyone more money for no reason, but can anyone really block this?

- [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/06/...

- [1] Bloomberg Article https://archive.is/eTpi5 - [2] NYT Article https://archive.is/fUtnl

https://tholman.com/ - Largely JS experiments dating back 10+ years. Sometimes I scroll right back to the start and can appreciate the long journey I've taken from scrappy student to now.

Have been on the feedly train ever since google axed reader, was able to transfer all feeds via import ++ will help you get some kinda feed (can break with big site redesigns but has been pretty solid) from sites without RSS. Haven't needed to shop around at all since 2013.

Four days in a row at GitHub with different outages, someone's definitely having a difficult on-call.

- https://www.githubstatus.com/history

Am thinking that a few of the domains on the list expired and were snapped up by malware/scammer sites causing the spreadsheet to seem super sus to a machine scanning/checking urls.

Am I missing something, or is "kwon-artist" a racism-style play on words much like say, "kung-flu"? Cmon...

_edit_ ~ Sounds like I'm wrong here by the general sentiment, was taught not to use name's as puns :(

As a wow amazed individual I had made this guess the wow to the movie game a couple of years back [1] ... this would have made that work a whole lot easier than the painstakingly slow sourcing I had done :D

[1] http://wowenwilsonquiz.com/

Lots of people saying "You can improve costs here!" without factoring in the developer time/learning/upkeep dollars it would take to do that. Sometimes the best solution is the one you know that will be easiest for you.

Amazingly the source code for the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 expansions was lost for years, so they've not often been included in the HD ports. Someone has (apparently) dug it up on an old hard drive [1] though a few screenshots isn't a true proof.

Knowing that a huge organization has lost such a treasured codebase has insured that I backup almost every piece of code I ever write... after 10 years of development I dip back in every now and then and look at what younger me was working on, always brings a smile to my face.

1. https://twitter.com/diskblitz/status/920801845349466113

If you've been following these two products for the last few years it's definitely clear to see that Lichess is slowly eating chess.com's lunch ... They're not fast at development, but slowly and surely improving and innovating on the space via being open source.

For example, Lichess puzzles aren't quite of the same quality yet and their puzzle games are new (BUT) they've built and are improving the tech to create new puzzles from games played on their system which is ever increasing, with the benefit of being REAL positions reached in games.

It feels like when Lichess make a move (eg into puzzle games) its sudden and of high quality. ++ Their growth is amazing especially considering they aren't paying chess influencers to use their platform.

All for extra tools to help in emergency situations, that said I would also like it if I could see street names without zooming to a microscopic level which could be helpful in these situations especially.

Oddly am hitting a paywall, is there a summary for this?

Somehow, trying to find specific graphql/apollo solutions I run into 3 blocked medium articles before I can find something open. A little niche of course, but not something that should be served up by google... I suspect (and hope) their very nice SEO of the last years will finally go the way of the experts exchange of old, and re-promote small bloggers who are excited to share what they have learned.

It's fiction, but I really enjoyed the chapters of World War Z [1] from the perspective of the nuclear submarine, and their "oh it seems like the world is ending, we have to wait this out" perspective. Really something that just get's you thinking, and I'm not sure if I feel safer, or more worried that people have been thinking about exactly that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z

If I'm understanding L958+ [1] There's a hyper specific css class browser quirk because the login button for gizmodo/kotaku/etc's CMS's svg icon click event wasn't firing... and here I am fixing my day-to-day browser bugs like a chump

[1] https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...