skohan · HackerTrans

5 years agodiscuss

I don't think it's a fair characterization. I think just about everyone can infer how shields work after watching this movie. I think the issue is you can watch the film as many times with as much attention as you want, and without extended context there will be a lot which goes over your head.

skohan

5 years agodiscuss

Yeah I think you could have gotten very far with a light touch here. For instance, just a few well-placed character moments between Paul and his father would have heightened the impact of what happens later in the film. And maybe also a few scenes where the characters are actually experiencing joy together to better contrast the hardships later on. The tone of the movie is generally so dour and one-note - maybe that is part of the aesthetic Villeneuve is trying to create, but I think even a little bit of emotional range could have gone a long way.

skohan

5 years agodiscuss

Yeah at least the david lynch opening sets the stage, but I think you could do better than just direct exposition from a floating head. For instance maybe have a voice over while showing a navigator use the spice to travel safely in space.

Or maybe show some important event in interstellar politics and explain how it was made possible by spice.

I think there are different ways you could do it.

skohan

5 years agodiscuss

Yeah I had the same feeling. I watched the new movie, and was left feeling underwhelmed. Striking aesthetics, and a true visual and audio experience. But the first half of the film felt like all exposition with no plot, and the film didn't give me much reason to care about the characters so I didn't. But the movie left me with a feeling of wanting more, so I did some research about the world Frank Herbert created, and I actually watched the film again and enjoyed it a lot more with a better understanding of the relevance of what I was seeing.

To be honest, I think that's a bit of a failure of the film that it doesn't stand truly on its own. It seems that they tried to be very faithful to the text in terms of what they depicted - which I'm sure was appreciated by Dune fans - but I understand the source material was quite dense, so they would have had to leave quite a lot of important details out.

And I think one of the mistakes of the film was to focus so much about Arakkis. The film opens with the struggle and exploitation of the fremen over spice extraction. But I think it's the wrong focus. The thing that makes Arakkis interesting is the fact that the entire empire hinges on the spice production there. The planet itself is just sort of a back-water. I think it would have been better to start with a vignette explaining the importance of spice, to properly set the stakes for the rest of the film.

skohan

5 years agodiscuss

Yeah cool! If you have a twitter or any other way to follow you guys I would love to - I work at a sustainability-focused startup and I know a lot of people who would be interested in this, and not all of them would be in the HN audience.

skohan

5 years agodiscuss

Very cool project!

A couple questions:

1. How does your synthetic limestone compare to natural limestone? Are there any important performance differences in terms of the material properties of the resulting concrete?

2. What are the biggest bottlenecks/obstacles in terms of scaling this to the point it could replace a significant portion of natural limestone used today?

Edit: do you have any blog posts/more information about what you're doing? I would love to share this around, but unless I'm missing it your site is very light on details.

skohan

5 years agodiscuss

Julia has a tradeoff w.r.t. startup performance doesn't it?

Also doens't Julia make pretty heavy use of dynamic dispatch, or am I mistaken about that?

skohan

5 years agodiscuss

So in my mind, the main things you would need to compete with npm would be:

1. near-universal adoption

2. "just works" experience: i.e. I can clone any random git repo, and run `npm start|build|whatever` and it's always going to work, without having to know anything about my environment or fiddling with configurations.

Does poetry do that?

skohan

5 years agodiscuss

> Python can be ahead in the performance race. We just need to get real.

I don't know if this is the case. Python's entire value proposition is that it is "executable pseudocode" with an extremely low barrier to entry - so somebody like a scientist or business analyst can solve problems without a deep understanding of computer science. Those goals are always going to run counter to performance, and python would have to re-invent itself at a foundational level to actually compete on performance with languages which were optimized for it from the ground up. Python's already winning in a lot of super relevant ways from playing to its strengths, and I don't think it makes sense to compromise those strengths to reach middle-of-the-pack performance.

If you ask me, if the python community really wanted to advance their interests, the thing to focus on would be dependency management and project encapsulation. If I could have a ux like npm or cargo for python, I would surely be tempted to use it more outside of jupyter. But it would not be because of performance ;)

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

What's wrong with CMake?

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

> DX11/DX12 works better enough anyways

DX isn't performing better than Vulkan, is it? The performance of Vulkan titles has been almost absurdly good.

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

Fancy enough to be invisible to the user, such that games behave like native apps, and to give performance which is better than Windows in some cases.

UX was the biggest obstacle to gaming on Linux, and proton solves it

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

Proton is still very new, and it's night-and-day better than any previous gaming experience on Linux. I don't think past trends necessarily apply

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

Maybe in the short term, but if it means a bigger part of the steam userbase is running games on Linux, it will become economically justified for more developers to work on first-party titles.

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

Yeah I would imagine Unity Linux gets a lot less attention within Unity than the Windows version.

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

Yeah it's so good that I haven't bothered to boot Windows in months. The odd game doesn't work (Horizon, Zero Dawn for example) but it's so convenient to use Linux for everything I would rather just not play the game than to have to boot into Windows.

Linux is just such a more quiet and less pushy experience, I find it relaxing.

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

But you could play destiny as PvE game if you want

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

Ok I see what you mean, and I think my point was more that programming as a skill does seem to be something which can be saturated. However I do agree that that no one person can master all the domains of what you can do with programming.

But I would also say, while it's probably impossible to really master more than a handful of domains in one lifetime, an awful lot of problems really can be reduced to inputs and outputs, and the more experience you get with solving diverse programming problems, the easier it is to penetrate some of these "advanced" sub-fields, at least at a superficial level, and solve a problem or two using tools from that domain.

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

I guess my experience has been a bit different. Yeah I mean there are some really esoteric programming topics, like actually implementing compression algorithms, which I will probably never invest the time to learn. But in terms of "general programming", I feel like at some point over the past ten years, I developed a pretty clear mental model for how a line of high-level code maps to how the CPU/GPU is manipulating memory. I feel like once you start thinking in terms of hardware, the pace of revelations slows way down, and different programming topics mostly seem like different ways of doing the same thing.

skohan

6 years agodiscuss

I would say even in a shifting landscape of different tools/frameworks, the differences are mostly aesthetic, and the fundamentals mostly carry over.

For instance, at various stages in my career, I've done professional work in a lot of different languages and ecosystems: c/c++, objC, Java, Node.js, Swift, React, Rust - and each one of these has it's unique features, strengths, and weaknesses, but I think in general the more different tools you use, the more you see how much they have in common.

For instance, when I pick up a new framework or language, I'm looking for the same basic things: like how does the build system work, and how do I make an http request, how do I optimize for performance, and then I'm generally plugging the new tool into the same design patterns I've been using for years.

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