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> I remember usenet where every forum was exactly the same

alt.confident.assertion.question.doubt.disagree

;)


This was in reply to a post about visual design of different forums.


In this thread, we pretend that the difficult and time-consuming part of a code review is all the reading you have to do.


Or, since we're apparently playing the game of maybes in this thread, maybe the LLM was only trained on the teams grandmothers' spaghetti recipes, so that new hires can learn to make the best bolognese sauce.


This being Musk, it wouldn't surprise me.

I mean, consider The Boring Company sell a "flamethrower" despite being theoretically about… boring.


I think you missed a lot of the word play. Somebody else has explained Bore[1]-ing vs boring.

But they sold a blowtorch aka not a flamethrower. The difference being a flamethrower actually "throws flames" like 10+ feet.

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


I didn't miss anything in the wordplay*, it was obvious. (As are the initials, an extra pun).

I put quotemarks around "flamethrower" because that's what it was originally sold as before obvious and predictable legal issues with real flamethrowers and the fact it was obviously mimicing the prop in Spaceballs.

My point is: neither weed burners nor actual flamethrowers have anything to do with digging tunnels nor any adjacent aspect of civil engineering.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring_(manufacturing)


Tesla sold a surfboard and whiskey and...

Just saying. It's kinda on brand by not being on brand because the whole network of companies... well I'm trying off topic.


Because Tesla is making.. coils?


Boring as the noun, not adjective. Also, Tesla was named that before Musk was involved, so it’s not his humor involved in naming both. Nikola Tesla is known for a lot more than just Tesla coils.


That headline feels like a really clever metaphor for something but I can't figure out what.


it reminds me of how in San Jose, CA, there are several roads that were constructed below the local water table. so effectively there’s always water bubbling/“dripping from below” and causing puddles and erosion.


That which is good and right is built on deep foundations which are often forgotten or neglected in favor of surface level activity.


Related: it's like the "Everything is fine" meme cartoon picture, except the people seeing the scene unfold are forbidden from talking about fire.


Green bubble is messages you sent via SMS (and so may have been charged by your carrier depending on your cellular plan)

Blue bubble is messages you sent via iMessage.

All incoming messages are grey, regardless of whether they were sent to you via SMS or iMessage.


> and so may have been charged by your carrier depending on your cellular plan

I don't know of any UK plan that charges.


Must be a couple of decades since I was last charged for SMS


Try sending an image on green.


PAYG plans do.


Don't they almost all work on a "goodybag" model now where you top-up £x for the next month of tens of GB of data, hundreds or unlimited minutes, and unlimited texts? Using "real" balance is uncommon in my experience


Only if one buys such a "goodybag".

My father doesn't and so pays PAYG rates when he uses his. Which probably makes sense for him, given his infrequent use pattern.


I suspect a lot of people 'invented' the effect at approximately the same time. Honestly, the Dreamcast was the first piece of hardware really capable of doing the effect to a high level of quality in real-time.

I developed the cel shading effect for the Dreamcast game 'Looney Tunes: Space Race' (developed by Infogrames Melbourne House) literally during the first week we had access to a Dreamcast development kit. Infogrames Sheffield (devs of Wacky Racers) were shown an early version of our implementation, and added the similar effect to their game. It looked great, but went into their game pretty late in production, so the game hadn't really been optimised for it the way that ours was.

And the folks behind Jet Grind Radio came up with the effect on their own as well, and beat both of us to market. They were using exactly the same algorithm, but were using it in a very different way; they were fully embracing and leaning into the uneven, wide and jagged outlines, where Sheffield and we were fighting against them and trying to match a more uniform and traditional art style.

And then only about a year later, somebody seemed to have figured out how to make the edge-detection cel shading approach work in real-time on Xbox, for the game "Dragons Lair 3D". I had done a test implementation of that approach on the Dreamcast, but it wasn't nearly performant enough for us to run it on multiple characters at once while playing a game too! Not sure whether it was due to the Xbox being more powerful or them just having a smarter algorithm than mine, but you can't argue with their results! If you're making a game that you want to look like an actual hand-drawn cartoon, that is still absolutely the best quality way to do it, IMHO.

Someday I'll find an excuse to try my hand at implementing one of those again. Performance shouldn't be a problem at all any more, I imagine!


For a game I haven't thought about in nearly 25 years, I want you to know I instantly remembered how Looney Tunes: Space Race looked.


Thanks for sharing that. It was a great read.


As a practical matter, studies about links between major diseases will always always be talking about correlation.

To reach 'causation' would require intentionally giving your experimental subjects Covid-19 (and in a way that didn't result in them knowing they'd had it!), and that's unlikely to pass muster with the ethics review board.


Hm, I thought other methods could be used to establish causation, such as longitudinal cohorts, RCTs, and (another randomization I'm forgetting), that wouldn't require infecting humans, but maybe I'm confusing these


I can't stop thinking about this throwaway parenthetical at the start of the blog post:

> [...] for many writers, writing a book is about the last thing they should do (unless they feel a book bursting out of them, much like a facehugger).

Now, as we all know, the aliens that burst out of people in the Aliens franchise are called 'chestbursters'. "Facehuggers", by comparison, are hatched from alien eggs.

So in this metaphor, since we're told that novels are facehuggers, the writers must be the eggs. And by process of elimination, we can deduce that the innocent starship crewmembers being attacked by facehuggers (novels) are innocent readers.

The metaphor actually contradicts the author's main thesis, since every egg (writer) does in fact contain a facehugger (novel). But contrariwise, all the human characters (the rest of us) would be much better off if those novels just stayed inside the writers and didn't insist on being written or read.

Metaphors are like scissors; they're twice as much fun when you run with them!


Considering how tooth-achingly boring the original post is, this is the best kind of feedback for it.


I found it super readable. I think it helps a lot if you’re familiar with the other authors Gwern is referencing.


First Gwern post I see.


What I think happened is that he said "facehugger" when he meant "chestbuster," likely because 1) the word "chestbuster" almost repeats the word "bursting," and 2) everyone knows that a chestbuster is the only notable symptom (aside from hunger and sudden indigestion) of having been attacked by a facehugger.

You've introduced eggmorphing (the transformation of people and other animals into eggs), which is not canon because the scene was cut.

https://collider.com/alien-eggmorph-deleted-scene-explained/


"Facehugger" is a lot more familiar a term, and yeah, I didn't even realize there was a difference because a facehugger leads to bursting-chests, at least in what I remember of the 3 Alien movies I watched. (I also keep thinking of 'facehuggers' thanks to the AI startup Hugging Face. Every time I see their logo+name, I think again to myself, 'what a bizarre brand, it looks like _Alien_, like the poor emoji guy is about have his chest burst from the face-hugging alien'.)

But since the term is apparently not technically correct (which as we all know, is the best - indeed, only - kind of correctness), I have changed it.


Are you saying everyone would be better off not reading my Starship Troopers fan fiction where they get it on with the Arachnids?


Where is this fanfiction located? So you know.. I can avoid it at all costs of course.


I'm sure there's a market for your creation ;-)


Everyone should read my science fiction novel, where a team of intrepid heroes travels in time to assassinate Marx and Engels, but returns to a future where things are worse because they should've focused on Hegel.


But if you open up in preparation for launching that facehugger, you may trigger Ripley's response with a flamethrower, then no eggs are happy.


And they are most fun when their author actually understands the subject. Don't make a trek reference unless you know your Kirks from your Spocks.


This is a strange comparison. It is a humorous throwaway line about SF, where the actual 'subject' is not SF at all. (It's nonfiction writing.) That aside, your Kirk/Spock comparison is also wrong: the difference between Kirk and Spock is not a minor terminological quibble over a monster's name (which was not even the most important monster of that movie). The relationship of Kirk/Spock is the heart of _Star Trek_, the dramatic core, as they oppose and support each other. Even I, a non-Star Trek fan, know that!


too short; didn't read


No he just made a mistake.

As usual, readers reading too much into something.


I bet you're fun at parties.


As a game developer, I'm absolutely not going to risk my players' engagement with the game by putting character personalities, dialog, and (therefore) plot into the hands of an AI that's going to play out differently for each player. No way, no how. That's where all my game's value is - that's what pays my rent - and I will not be handing it off to a glorified RNG.


Not the person you're replying to, but I agree that for me (as another heavy shift-G user), vim-racer having `:relativenumber` turned on is where my own troubles are coming from.

I'd really love to be able to specify whether I want absolute or relative numbering (or both or neither); the :set commands don't seem to be implemented?


I'll make the line numbers absolute by default soon.

It's just a shallowish vim, so there's mostly only key bindings. I'd like to support more in the future though.


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