Fun fact about me: I enjoy crawling through really tight awkward spaces in the remote possibility that it's actually a portal to Narnia.... it never is.
**** My blog ****
https://mordenstar.com/blog
**** My projects ****
https://mordenstar.com/projects
Redhook's Revenge II - Official sequel to the original DOS game from 1993 which patches binary to inject new trivia questions.
https://redhook.specr.net
Clockwork Chamber - A bunch of different ways to visualize clocks because I have nothing but time on my hands.
https://clocks.specr.net
Shah Kur - Invisible Chess - A 2d/3d blindfold chess trainer with full voice control to play on your phone as you walk.
https://shahkur.specr.net
Lend Me Your Ears - A Simon-toy inspired educational game to help teach how to play piano by ear.
https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net
Glyphshift - A browser extension which swaps out words with braille/morse/kana while you browse.
https://mordenstar.com/projects/glyphshift
GenAI Showdown - A comprehensive comparison of state-of-the-art generative image models.
https://genai-showdown.specr.net
Aladdin's Mathemagical Flying Carpet - Teaches the times tables as you fly through the cave of wonders
Thanks toast0 - that's my bad, there was an old dev button that was shifting everything over causing the issue because I always mix up "visibility hidden" with "display none" in CSS. Should be fixed now!
Nice - I've done similar things with some of my music [1].
I have a classical piece I wrote over a decade ago for piano [2] (it’s the instrument I play), but it was always intended to be an orchestral work. Using AI allowed me to sonically experiment with a stringed score which was pretty cool.
It’s basically the equivalent of taking a piece you’ve written and running it through an arranger keyboard or Band-in-a-Box on steroids.
This. Whenever I hear somebody defending the US healthcare system (or criticizing another country's healthcare plan), my immediate questions are:
1. Where are you from?
2. Have you actually LIVED in another country and thus have some personal experience with other systems?
For the record, I lived in Taiwan for years and was enrolled in the NHI (National Health Insurance) and received far better care including surgical procedures than I ever did in the states even with a PPO.
Heh. I remember when I first started learning violin, and one of the real gotchas was that, because of your head’s perspective relative to the violin and the bow, even something as simple as keeping the bow perpendicular to the bridge is deceptively hard at first.
My Russian teacher would inadvertently wince every time I played a note that was off. I finally said sardonically, "Look, I know I sound bad. Believe me, I’m the closest one to the violin. It’s right next to my ear."
Still love playing the violin, but coming from piano it was quite the challenge!
This. I've given serious thought to building a native Mac (swift) app thats a cross between the speed of Sublime with the toggleable WYSIWYG markdown capabilities of Obsidian.
I built the same thing about a year ago - animated jigsaw puzzles that are setup as "cinemagraphs", aka seamless repeating videos. It lets you upload your own GIFs/MP4 files as well but includes about 7 original ones.
It's a homage to one of my favorite games as a kid (the Island of Dr Brain). One of the stages in the game was a jigsaw puzzle of a lagoon with animated flamingos.
Assuming you can run Tampermonkey, you can use my script which I've adapted to hide both the score and the username. It’s a script I personally use because I don’t like seeing my score since it just feels like a silly number, and I’d rather focus on the content than on whether my "number" goes up or down.
If you install this script in the Tampermonkey extension for Firefox/Chrome, it will automatically hide your username and your score on all HN pages.
I think they're being silly, but it's a pretty common trope: comparing the weird, sometimes highly idiosyncratic syntactical constructs of programming languages to a series of magical incantations.
Lev Grossman wrote an entire book that hinged on this idea of melding magic with technology.
Nice. Related, I also love exploring different ways to visualize time, so a few months back I came up with twelve variations arranged in the form of an actual clock that you can click through to see each one.
Each one presents a different type of visualization (from sand, where each falling grain represents a second to a 3D-modeled set of water wheels)
Wow, you weren't kidding. Apparently, he (Dave Plummer) ran an entire company that used deceptive scare tactics to try to coerce consumers into buying his "anti-malware" software.
It really was an incredible tool especially for RAD. One of my first "professional" gigs was in highschool porting an old CAD program written for VB-DOS over to VB 3.0. Sure as hell beat the landscaping work I did over the previous summer.
There are plenty of well-known public tests that have been around since SD 1.5 that I'd have to say if companies are trying to "game" they’re failing pretty badly (wine glass filled to the brim, the inverted piano, the nine-pointed star, etc.)
Krea-2 is fantastic. If you can get around the restrictive license, output speed, and JSON prompting, Ideogram 4 probably comes the closest to SOTA models. See my profile for GenAI Showdown, where it's benched against other local and proprietary models.
It actually scored above Gemini 2.5 (aka the original NB) which is pretty impressive.
Fun fact about me: I enjoy crawling through really tight awkward spaces in the remote possibility that it's actually a portal to Narnia.... it never is.
**** My blog ****
https://mordenstar.com/blog
**** My projects ****
https://mordenstar.com/projects
Redhook's Revenge II - Official sequel to the original DOS game from 1993 which patches binary to inject new trivia questions.
https://redhook.specr.net
Clockwork Chamber - A bunch of different ways to visualize clocks because I have nothing but time on my hands.
https://clocks.specr.net
Shah Kur - Invisible Chess - A 2d/3d blindfold chess trainer with full voice control to play on your phone as you walk.
https://shahkur.specr.net
Lend Me Your Ears - A Simon-toy inspired educational game to help teach how to play piano by ear.
https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net
Glyphshift - A browser extension which swaps out words with braille/morse/kana while you browse.
https://mordenstar.com/projects/glyphshift
GenAI Showdown - A comprehensive comparison of state-of-the-art generative image models.
https://genai-showdown.specr.net
Aladdin's Mathemagical Flying Carpet - Teaches the times tables as you fly through the cave of wonders
https://mordenstar.com/projects/mathemagic