HackerLangs
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

ksymph

856 karmajoined 2년 전

Submissions

GIFBreeder

alexrez.com
6 points·by ksymph·지난달·0 comments

The Mythology of Rice and Beans

economistwritingeveryday.com
5 points·by ksymph·2개월 전·1 comments

Wolfenstein 3D for Gameboy Color on custom cartridge (2016)

happydaze.se
149 points·by ksymph·2개월 전·37 comments

Lilush – LuaJIT static runtime and shell

lilush.link
47 points·by ksymph·5개월 전·15 comments

KiraStudio 1.0.0 – a lightweight, cross-platform music studio

kirastudio.org
13 points·by ksymph·5개월 전·3 comments

DeepSeek-R1 paper updated from 22 pages to 86 with additional details

old.reddit.com
10 points·by ksymph·6개월 전·1 comments

Spirits and the Incompleteness of Physics

theseedsofscience.pub
1 points·by ksymph·7개월 전·0 comments

Playtiles – stick-on electronic-free gamepad for phones

get.playtil.es
4 points·by ksymph·8개월 전·0 comments

Our Paint – A featureless but programmable painting program

wellobserve.com
96 points·by ksymph·9개월 전·24 comments

Should we drain the Everglades?

rabbitcavern.substack.com
116 points·by ksymph·10개월 전·118 comments

comments

ksymph
·6일 전·discuss
~2.5g of psilocybe cubensis is considered a standard dose; according to this [0] study, ~10mg/g is a pretty typical psilocybin concentration in mushrooms, so 25mg of pure psilocybin sounds about right.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11856550/
ksymph
·7일 전·discuss
Nit: movies with sound were around as early as the 1800s; 1927 is just considered the turning point when they became commercially viable and widely available (with the release of The Jazz Singer).
ksymph
·10일 전·discuss
That's just not true. Off the top of my head: SMBX, Pokemon Uranium, Ocarina of Time 2D, AM2R. A few years back they mass DMCA'd hundreds of fan games on the site GameJolt, none of which were monetized.

(why some fan projects like Showdown are still up is anyone's guess)
ksymph
·13일 전·discuss
The article is pretty light on details. Essentially, the tree is first pruned to create a wide and sturdy base; once that's stable, subsequent shoots from the branches are pruned to grow vertically. The technique relies on this particular variety of cedar which tends to grow vertically but can also be made to spread out a bit. It has some advantages in space-saving and efficiency but it's also very labor-intensive.
ksymph
·19일 전·discuss
The Nintendo 3DS has two cameras on the back, so you can turn its 3D photos into wigglegrams. I made a web app that does this automatically, it has a few demos where you can mess with offset or timing: https://wiggle3ds.moonlemon.nexus/

It's neat how the offset affects focal point. To my eye they look best when the main object is kept fairly stationary, and the further away you are the faster the wiggle speed should be.
ksymph
·27일 전·discuss
Wow, this completely crashes Firefox for me. Don't think I've ever seen that before.

Super cool though! Works fine on Chromium. I liked Pass the Ball, and it was really fun contorting to avoid the red balls in Ball Dash -- if you're looking to add some games, maybe some along the lines of Twister or the Hole In the Wall game show? A whack-a-mole style game could also be interesting. Also, it'd be nice to be able to navigate the menus with mouse.
ksymph
·27일 전·discuss
This is a longshot, but -- I have a lychee tree that's fruiting right now, with more fruits than I know what to do with, and I'm about to go on a road trip from Florida to the midwest in a week or so. I could drop off a bucket along the way. Shoot me an email at concat("ksymph0", "@", "proton.me") if you're in the area.
ksymph
·27일 전·discuss
https://archive.ph/9I5e1
ksymph
·30일 전·discuss
One's perspective on this discussion really hinges on the question you raise: if an animal has a 'better' life in captivity by various metrics -- lifespan, access to food, safety from predators, etc. -- is it morally right to keep them captive? What exactly are the metrics by which we judge quality of life and what values do we assign? Does a dog (or cat, or gorilla, or selectively bred human, ) have a concept of freedom or independence that carries weight? And what if that drive is extinguished through genetic modification?

There aren't clean answers to these questions, of course. We've essentially just described the same process of wolf-to-dog evolution from the two ends of the spectrum, and neither perspective is entirely wrong or right. I would like to point out a couple things, though:

> Over evolutionary time, wolves adapted to better fit the niche. Not because humans wanted that, but because it was evolutionarily advantageous for a companion species to be more compatible with its host.

Take a step back and consider that statement. What made it evolutionarily advantageous is that humans wanted it. If humans didn't want a more compatible companion species, it wouldn't be evolutionarily advantageous. You can't separate the advantage from human desires.

Selective breeding doesn't have to be entirely intentional. Early humans weren't practicing pedigree breeding on wild wolves, of course, but nonetheless it was artificial selection that drove evolutionary change. And for the past few thousand years, we very much have been actively and intentionally breeding them. Also -- this is beside the point, really, and total speculation, but -- given how early humans understood selective breeding in plants, it seems likely that they had some awareness of the knock-on effects of favoring friendlier wolves.

Regardless, the moral unease I feel is primarily about the current state of having another species tailored to serve our emotional needs, not how we got here. Even looking at dog to wolf evolution as an entirely natural process, does that justify everything we've done and are still doing to modify them to suit our desires? Dogs as a species may benefit from our ownership, but does that make all the individual suffering we cause okay? We think of dogs living a life of privilege and comfort, and many do, but just as many have abusive owners or are living on the streets, often with worse quality of life than wild wolves today.
ksymph
·지난달·discuss
I dunno, it kinda freaks me out. For thousands of years we've been selectively breeding another species to love us unconditionally, and be so subservient to the point of dependence.

Imagine if we found out some alien species has their own 'breed' of human they've been genetically engineering for millennia; one that wants nothing more than the company of their alien owners and hates when they leave, that has been bred to be perpetually child-like and devoid of critical thinking in order to better please them, is sometimes pampered and sometimes abused but absolutely subject to the alien species' will. They keep us locked in a house or yard most of the day because their world is dangerous for us, and see all of this as totally justified because they're our intellectual superiors. They make posts on AlienNews about how beautiful the alien-human relationship is because they bred us to be the perfect companion; only magnifying the social compulsions that already existed in humans, to be fair, but still fundamentally changing us.

For the record I do understand that selectively bred humans != dogs, but it still just makes me kinda uncomfortable when I think about it all too much.
ksymph
·지난달·discuss
That's a good idea, but remember that, up until CLU's outright betrayal, Kevin had no reason to be concerned, and after it, he had no way back into meat space to run those commands.

Also -- unrelated, but a nitpick of the article -- Kevin was using the laser to come and go from the grid for a while before he got stuck there. The laser would have been pretty well-tested by the time he made/edited the last will and testament, so the article's explanation that it was his first use of the tech doesn't make sense. (He could have just spontaneously decided to update it though, which isn't too far fetched)
ksymph
·2개월 전·discuss
On that last point, GNOME/Gtk/Adwaita apps generally function really well on small screen sizes. The design language naturally suits it, and in my experience most apps will even make some layout adjustments where they're needed when resized to ~phone screen dimensions.

Anecdotally, out of the ~50 or so I have installed right now on my laptop, which covers the basic calculator/calendar/contacts/etc., and also things like file compression, torrenting, a Mastodon client, RSS reader, and so on, all of them are ready to use on a phone.

Alas, if only there was a (reasonably priced + fully functional) phone that could use them.
ksymph
·2개월 전·discuss
Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTkEM7b0IQw
ksymph
·2개월 전·discuss
I think the use of "progress" in the quote is somewhat ironic -- "movement towards a perceived refined [...] state", as the definition puts it; an unreasonable person's perception of progress likely doesn't match up with a reasonable person's.

As I see it, the quote neither advocates nor critiques unreasonableness, but rather observes that unreasonable people are most often the ones responsible for change. Whether you take that as a lesson on the merits of unreasonableness, the dangers of it, or something in between, is up to interpretation, and depends on how much one values reasonableness vs progress (for the record, I've heard the quote more often in a negative sense by people who put reasonableness above "progress"). It also depends on one's definition of "reasonableness" of course, and whether something can be unreasonable yet still a positive.

So I guess my point is that the quote can mean just about whatever you want it to mean. It's an interesting litmus test. I do agree that people using it as carte blanche for unreasonableness in the name of some sort of nebulous "progress" is, well, unreasonable, though with context I'm certain GP was using it as more of a critique.
ksymph
·2개월 전·discuss
> There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves.

You say that like it's a counterexample, but is that not literally what the quote is saying? I mean what's the difference between that and:

> the unreasonable [man] persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
ksymph
·2개월 전·discuss
Social Shapes Test https://www.cmu.edu/corecompetencies/collaboration/resources...

Web version here, if you want to see what it's like https://psytests.org/arc/ssten.html
ksymph
·2개월 전·discuss
> Regulation that’s defined entirely in terms of the technology it regulates, as opposed to in terms of the effects it has on society or imposing boundaries and limits on the technology itself, is a core component of the technopolistic political and legislative environment.

Incredible article, a lot to unpack here, but I found this particular offhand tidbit interesting. It does seem like any attempt at tech industry regulation over the past decade or two (that isn't somewhat in the interests of big tech anyway, i.e. age verification and so on) has been either overly vague, or overly specific, leading to easy workarounds.

It seems like a microcosm of a wider trend in regulation; the disconnect between intentions and results. On the rare occasions that consumer-friendly legislation does go through, there is no working mechanism for evaluating its effectiveness and refining the rules as quickly as big corporations can adapt to them. I like how the article frames this, of how the regulations are targeting the wrong thing, how they're defined by the problem rather than the desired end state.

For more thoughts along these lines I'd highly recommend checking out Jennifer Pahlka's blog Eating Policy: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/
ksymph
·2개월 전·discuss
I run into https://www.hcaptcha.com/ and https://friendlycaptcha.com/ from time to time as a user without complaint. Can't speak to the latter but I've used the former a bit and it does the job.
ksymph
·2개월 전·discuss
Nintendo's core audience has always been children, their parents, and casual players, but with some console cycles they expand into other niches, as has (resoundingly) been the case with the Switch; the Switch appealed to virtually anyone interested in playing games on the go, including people who otherwise don't usually buy the newest Nintendo console/games for their polish and/or family-friendliness. For a long time it was by far the most convenient way to play Skyrim or Witcher 3 or what-have-you on buses, planes, at school etc.

The Steam Deck doesn't cut into Nintendo's core audience, but it does draw away people who would have bought the Switch 1/2 for those reasons -- the audience that made the Switch 1 such an overwhelming success. Anecdotally, I've had multiple non-techies bring up the Steam Deck unprompted, usually with an impression of 'the Switch but better' and/or 'more adult-oriented'.

Historically, when the market they created starts to become saturated, Nintendo starts looking to pivot. So the Steam Deck might not kill the Switch 2, but I'd be very surprised if it doesn't kill the Switch 3.
ksymph
·2개월 전·discuss
Tangled is pretty cool. I'm not particularly into atproto, and I think the connection kind of distracts from the reality of what it is and can do.

You can host your git repo on their servers, or your own. You can host issues/pull requests/runners/etc on their servers, or your own. Regardless of where a repo is hosted, you can interact with it from a single account, and with that same account interact with others' repos connected to tangled. Plus it has native jujutsu support, though you can use plain ol' git if you want to, too.

Do I think a forge with those features necessarily needs to use atproto to exist, or that atproto is the ideal version of itself? No, not really. But the site is there, and it has some pretty neat features I want; I don't need to love the stack to use it, any more than I do Github's.