nameless912

ontemdiscuss

You can buy very powerful handheld green laser pointers on Amazon for around 20 bucks. You absolutely shouldn't shine one into a camera sensor, ever. It says so on the box!

nameless912

há 26 diasdiscuss

I'm working on a thing I'm calling TOASST, or the Tiny Open Android Smartphone-based Smart Telescope. The basic idea is to use a smartphone (often the best camera in your house) to do electronically assisted astronomy/astrophotography a la Seestar. I've been working on the solidworks design for a mount to hold a phone for about 3 weeks and started the Arduino firmware this week. Eventually I'll write a small android app to control the mount and coordinate astrophotography sessions, hosted via wifi hotspot so you can see the results coming in on another device.

This project started when my partner told me I couldn't buy a Seestar, so I decided "fuck it, I'll build my own!" It's still early days but I think there's something cool here. I'm designing the whole thing to be easy and cheap to print and build. I hope someday this will be the kind of project that a sufficiently motivated teenager will be able to build with minimal experience and an old smartphone; maybe it's healing my inner child, lol.

nameless912

mês passadodiscuss

I was just talking about this with my partner the other day. We have an amazing retro games shop/arcade not far from our house, so I think for probably my kiddo's 5th birthday I'm going to take him to buy a Gameboy Advance SP and a couple of games He's already shown interest in video games and I think this is a great way to introduce him without overwhelming him. I'm sure the whole package will be <150 bucks and provide him with literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, and the games are almost literally a dime a dozen. It'll be a really simple reward system for school, life milestones, etc: let's go down the street and buy you a new game! Just like in the good old days.

We aren't a fully screen free family. Our kiddo watches probably 1/2 hour to 45 minutes of TV a day and we aren't so naive as to think plane trips and long car rides will be screen free, so we bring an old iPad loaded up with shows and movies he likes. We review the list beforehand and make sure it has what he wants (subject to our approval). But the night and day difference between a moderated amount of screen time and his peers who are full on iPad kids is just astounding. I just hope we can keep up the low screen time for as long as possible.

nameless912

há 2 mesesdiscuss

> XGo is a programming language that reads like plain English

This is possibly the most dangerous sentence on this entire page. The hubris and ignorance of history wrapped up in this one sentence is breathtaking.

We've been trying to do "plain English" programming for 50-odd years. COBOL was supposed to be a programming language for business critters. BASIC was going to eat the world. We were going to UML our way out of writing software. Over and over and over again, it's been proven that there is irreducible complexity in programming that can't just be converted to "plain English" in a way that's meaningful to actual laypeople. AI has, in some ways, reduced the barrier to getting software from zero to one, but it's not a replacement for knowing how to code beyond the very basics.

The more I read of this page, the less I understand what's happening here. None of the examples show anything resembling "reducing the difficulty" of programming; it's still abstract symbols mapping to operations on a silicon chip people fundamentally can't reason about without training and practice. There's no universe in which

  a <- 5, 6, 7

is so significantly easier to read than

  a = append(a, 5, 6, 7)

that it's going to fix that programming as a discipline is not natively easy for people to do. It's like the author never _talked_ to a newbie before making these decisions. A new programmer doesn't know what a "string" is. They don't understand why there are so many curly braces and equals signs and colons. The word "variable" isn't common vernacular unless you have at least a decent high school math education, and even then, the programming usage is very different than the math usage.

I don't know why this makes me so angry. Maybe it's because the pedagogy of software engineering is important and interesting to me, and projects like this are the latest generation of a long line of people believing they have finally figured out the secret formula to make coding "easy". It's just...never going to be easy. That's the nature of complex systems.

nameless912

há 4 mesesdiscuss

Margaritaville Frozen Drink makers, specifically. A sound investment if I've ever seen one!

nameless912

há 4 mesesdiscuss

And they used their supposed ability to refund tariffs as justification for continuing to charge them during a court case last year, per another comment in this thread. We live in unserious times.

nameless912

há 4 mesesdiscuss

I was prototyping to this end the other day - what would it be like for a coding agent to have access to a language that can be:

- structurally edited, ensuring syntactic validity at all times

- annotated with metadata, so that agents can annotate the code as they go and refer back to accreted knoweledge (something Clojure can do structurally using nodepaths or annotations directly in code)

- put into any environment you might like, e.g. using ClojureScript

I haven't proven to myself this is more useful/results in better code than just writing code "the normal way" with an agent, but it sure seems interesting.

nameless912

há 5 mesesdiscuss

I'm working on my fourth attempt at a first novel :D

In all seriousness, I am about 10k words into a new draft I started a couple weeks ago. It's a far-future post-catastrophe sci fi type story, with some inspiration taken from Dune and a whole bunch of post-collapse fiction. Writing is tough between a full time job, a toddler, and a social life, but I've managed to squeeze in at least a few sessions a week. Hopefully this will be the one that actually lands!

nameless912

há 6 mesesdiscuss

https://gabethebando.cc

nameless912

há 7 mesesdiscuss

I don't have anything to show for it yet, but I'm rebuilding my dotfiles from scratch with a (hopefully) reusable framework that I want to open source some day. I don't know if it'll be useful to anyone else as I have very strong opinions about how this kind of stuff works, but hey, maybe someone else will find it useful. I'm inspired to do this because I realized the other day that computers....aren't fun for me anymore? So I'm taking the opportunity to make my computer mine again rather than continuing to rely on VSCode and all the automated config my company drops on our machines.

In other news, my first astrophotography rig is _finally_ mostly fully put together, and I'm going to try to go out and do some captures tomorrow night!

nameless912

há 7 mesesdiscuss

I had a hilarious experience the other day with an (HP) laptop that I thought might be fun to share here.

I've been getting into astrophotography recently, so I went out to my local Astronomy club's dark site in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Ohio, star tracker, DSLR, lens and nearly brand new HP Gaming Laptop I bought specifically for this purpose in tow.

It was cold as shit outside - 25 with a wind chill of just under 15 degrees. But I came prepared, and the club has a small heated clubhouse on the grounds of the site, so I set up all my equipment, did my polar alignment, and left my laptop plugged into a power outlet and remoted into it on my iPad so I could monitor the data capture from inside where it was warm.

About 20 minutes later, I lost remote access to my laptop suddenly. No problem, I thought. I headed outside to go debug what was going on, to find that the laptop had shut down randomly. That's weird. I tried to turn the laptop on, and it spun on the windows logo for over 5 minutes. I got worried that somehow out of all this gear I brought out to the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold, somehow the laptop was what had died. I try force-resetting a few times, to the point where I get the windows recovery environment, and it boots _so slowly_ that I think something is seriously wrong. Then the CMOS battery reset screen comes up (what the fuck?) and I finally get it to boot after about 8 attempts. However, it's so slow it's completely unusable - the CPU is pegged at the lowest possible frequency and just opening up the controller software for my star tracker takes nearly 5 minutes. decide to pack it in for the night, assuming my laptop is dying.

I bring all my equipment inside to tear it down, and leave the laptop in the warmth for 15 or so minutes while I tear everything else down. Then I hear the familiar Windows 11 startup chime behind me. I turn around and the laptop happily boots up, running at full speed, as if nothing was wrong.

Friends, the laptop got _too cold_. I have never experienced this before in my life, and I have put laptops through similarly extreme conditions in the past for other projects, let alone all the Raspberry Pi's I've left to bake in the sun and freeze in the cold. I am so done with modern technology, I want to return to 2011 when Thinkpads were good, Macbooks were great, and phones couldn't break my brain's dopamine circuits. I'm so tired.

nameless912

há 8 mesesdiscuss

Currently working on building my first 3D printed star tracking rig for astrophotography (via the incredible OpenAstroTracker project) and beginning to think through a 3D printed Dobsonian telescope. Also working on some ceramic glazing techniques to try and make cool gas giant-looking tiles. I'm on a real space kick right now!

nameless912

há 9 mesesdiscuss

Ah yes, because more AI will solve this problem.

No, what we need is for people to feel safe in public again, for them to not feel like they're constantly one questionable picture away from their lives being ruined. Kill social media, kill gigantic public face tracking dragnets, kill privacy-invading capitalism.

nameless912

há 9 mesesdiscuss

This whole thing reeks of a plant. I never heard a word about this, and I work in the entertainment industry, until this week. I'm going to assume this is manufactured attention trying to legitimize something that doesn't actually exist until proven otherwise.

nameless912

há 9 mesesdiscuss

> Are they all just focused on sex, debauchery, lots of drinking today?

...As opposed to the actual medieval period, which was famously chaste, calm, and sober?

nameless912

há 3 anosdiscuss

In this aspect, Gygax is wrong :)

nameless912

há 5 anosdiscuss

Population: One is pretty great if you like online multiplayer. Superhot is an obvious classic, lots of replayability and one of the first things I put people new to VR into. I've heard great things about the Walking Dead game but haven't played it yet.

nameless912

há 5 anosdiscuss

I personally started out with Supernatural, which is "Designed" for fitness and has classes with real instructors, but have since moved over to beat saber. They're similar, but whereas Supernatural still "feels" like a workout thanks to the coaches and stretching routines, beat saber just feels like a game but I still break a sweat.

nameless912

há 8 anosdiscuss

Are you the a_poem_for_your_sprog of Hackernews?

nameless912

há 10 anosdiscuss

The internet is saying 4 hours+, and I'm inclined to believe them. After all, they were right about everything else (seriously, go check out /r/nx: it's 90% shit posts, but the rest is speccing this thing out to an almost insanely detailed degree, even months ago).

comments