drhagen · HackerTrans

They spent a huge amount of complexity supporting mailing lists that claim mutated messages came FROM the original sender instead of FROM [email protected]. Is that use-case worth the additional effort?

drhagen

2개월 전discuss

"never mind" does the same thing, as does "shut up, clanker"

drhagen

2개월 전discuss

It is interesting that gold was able to retain its value after the industrial revolution. It could have gone the way of aluminum, once twice as valuable as gold, but now used in disposable drink containers. At the time of the alchemists, there was no way to know that some metals were actually distillable from common rocks and others genuinely rare and impossible to manufacture with even quite advanced technology.

EDIT: Aluminum itself may not be the best counterexample to gold as it was not discovered until the industrial revolution was well underway.

drhagen

2개월 전discuss

I am an absolute nobody on the internet, so it didn't get me at all. But the names it did guess were some good bloggers, some which I had yet to follow.

So do this even if it has no chance of getting it right for you.

drhagen

7개월 전discuss

Great! Now make `set` have a stable order and we're done here.

drhagen

7개월 전discuss

If this gets wide enough use, they could add an optimization for code like this:

    n = 1000
    a = {}
    for i in range(n):
        a[i] = str(i)
    a = frozendict(a)  # O(n) operation can be turned to O(1)

It is relatively easy for the JIT to detect the `frozendict` constructor, the `dict` input, and the single reference immediately overwritten. Not sure if this would ever be worth it.

drhagen

7개월 전discuss

A funny thing I realized: immortality is incompatible with spending a nonzero fraction of my life with children.

I treasure the time I spend with my kids. I can see that this season will be over soon. This won't be my whole life, but it will be a significant fraction of my life. If I were immortal, this would be a tiny blip in the inconceivably far past for 100% of my life.

You may think I could start again every 100 or 1000 or million years, but if a nonzero fraction of people did that, that would be exponential growth. Even ignoring resource constraints, you cannot sustain exponential growth of any kind in a 3D universe.

A universe with kids necessitates a universe with death.

drhagen

8개월 전discuss

It does yield control. As far as I know, that's "how you're supposed to it". But the example is not great because there is no other task available to switch to, so the event loop goes right back to where it left off. While the text says otherwise, I'm pretty sure the same thing would happen in JS, C#, and Java.

drhagen

3년 전discuss

I'm too lazy to downscale it myself, so here's a 180x180 picture of the moon from WP [1]. This looks about the same as the Samsung result [2]. They are not getting the original detail, but they are getting the detail they should expect if Samsung simply deconvolved the blurred image.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Lu...

[2] https://imgur.com/bXJOZgI

drhagen

3년 전discuss

> I downsized it to 170x170 pixels and applied a gaussian blur, so that all the detail is GONE. This means it's not recoverable, the information is just not there, it's digitally blurred

Strictly speaking, applying a Gaussian blur does not destroy the information. You can undo a Gaussian blur with a simple deconvolution, which is something I would expect even a non-AI image enhancement algorithm to do (given that, you know, lenses are involved here).

I'd like to see what detail can be "recovered" with just the downsizing, which DOES destroy information.

drhagen

4년 전discuss

I guess you could restart the whole thing to let new players join or people replay it. I am envisioning something like Mass Effect or Skyrim, which made money, but with thousands of other people with you. Perhaps I am underestimating the cost of the servers.

drhagen

4년 전discuss

A cooperative story-based MMO. Everyone is a participant in a months-long story that evolves in real time on the server. This is not just a world-wide event in a regular MMO; the world is progressively and irreparably altered throughout the story. I envision that the server simply shuts down at the end of the story.

There are two hard parts to this: (1) how do you make the game balanced even as the number of players fluctuates by orders of magnitude, (2) how do you make the game fun even as the amount of time each player spends differs by orders of magnitude. You will probably want key plot twists to be announced in advance so that as few people miss them as possible ("we predict the enemy hoard will arrive at our base on Friday around 8:15 PM").

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