fasterik

7 ms·

121.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Regarding your last point, I think it's almost always wrong to move something discontinuously, but I do think designers should think a lot more about getting out of the way of the user. A 50-100 ms animation is more than enough for mos
122.
by fasterik 4mo ago
We're not recording reality, but we're trying to create convincing and aesthetically pleasing effects for brains that evolved in reality.
123.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Our culture has too much focus on landing a job and not enough focus on becoming the kind of person who can adapt and thrive in any situation. Computer science isn't for everyone, and probably the people going into it for the money sho
124.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Philosophy is excellent training in the analytical skills needed for any knowledge-based job. Critically evaluating information, constructing arguments, thinking of counter-examples, etc.
125.
by fasterik 4mo ago
The premise of the article is that every frame of an animation should look good if captured and analyzed statically, in isolation. There's no reason provided for this other than "it feels right." I'm saying that this ign
126.
by fasterik 4mo ago
I agree that some of the examples the author provided are instances of bad animation. But I don't agree with the premise of the article. Computer graphics is all about exploiting features of the human visual system. We perceive things
127.
by fasterik 4mo ago
I think speaking fluidly while thinking out loud is a completely separate skill. Some people are really good at it, usually the ones who get a lot of practice at public speaking. I also suspect extroverts have an easier time with it than in
128.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Productivity is relative to whatever we value. That could be building things, making art, making scientific discoveries, or delivering food to people in poverty. Maybe you value non-tangible, non-durable things like experiences. That's
129.
by fasterik 4mo ago
The non-technical people are in charge and they're not tethered to reality in the same way that engineers are. Objective reality will win in the end, but that doesn't prevent damage being done in the short term.
130.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Wayland is better if you have multiple monitors with high DPI and different fractional scaling settings. But yes, it is less functional than X11 in other ways.
131.
by fasterik 4mo ago
I abandoned Windows for a variety of reasons and while I find Linux better in many ways, the graphics and compositing situation is a bummer. To add another example, I was trying to do a screen recording the other day and it was dropping fra
132.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Not if you enjoy making things and take pride in your work.
133.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Not only did they decide to write a terminal application in React, but it's 500K lines of code. It's strange because I'm sure Claude is capable of writing a decent TUI in C. It says a lot about the engineering culture at Anth
134.
by fasterik 4mo ago
This is one of the main reasons why I left the corporate software world. I love programming too much to spend my life climbing that ladder. I'm fortunate enough not to have to work right now, but if I ever go back to an organization I&
135.
by fasterik 4mo ago
We update our beliefs as we get new data. There's not much else we can do. There's a common thought pattern among conspiracy theorists. "Some conspiracies turn out to be real" so that justifies their belief in their very
136.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Even things we know for certain aren't "safe to consume" are harmless at small enough doses. If I drink chlorine at 1000 PPM it's going to kill me, but drinking it at 1 PPM (roughly the amount added to drinking water in
137.
by fasterik 4mo ago
The expressiveness of a language and whether it does static/dynamic type checking are orthogonal. Type inference and generics are a thing in most modern languages. I also think you're underestimating the amount of code you need to
138.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Static type checking catches a whole class of programming errors for free. Writing tests costs tokens or human time, so you end up needing more code (and probably more CPU time) to achieve the same level of error-checking in a dynamic langu
139.
by fasterik 4mo ago
If we really want to be precise, we should talk about parts per million (PPM). Scientific research establishes a safe level of consumption in terms of PPM, below which there are no detectable health effects. Generally when you see alarmism
140.
by fasterik 4mo ago
I don't think history bears this out. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs of the computer age, none of them started out as owners of capital. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs: yes, they had some level of privilege and op
141.
by fasterik 4mo ago
On the other hand, SIMD loves SoA, and so does the CPU cache. It all depends on what you're doing with your data. Zig professes to be a C replacement, not a C++ replacement, so leaving out operator overloading is consistent with that d
142.
by fasterik 4mo ago
I'm not sure if your comment disagrees with mine. I think we agree that machine learning is a sub-field of artificial intelligence. Evidenced by the fact that Russell and Norvig, the most authoritative textbook on the subject, includes
143.
by fasterik 4mo ago
>This problem only exists because of the marketing move to call anything even slightly ML related "AI". We need to remember what "Artificial Intelligence" actually means. It refers to the field of research starting
144.
by fasterik 4mo ago
A lot of modern discourse makes sense when you realize that most people, when they express an opinion, are not making a claim about objective reality but rather using it as a badge of membership for their in-group. They see being "anti
145.
by fasterik 4mo ago
I think you're overestimating how much the average person knows about how technology operates today, or 30 years ago, or 1000. In some sense, we have been living with magic and tech priests since the Romans built the aqueducts. I would
146.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Just speculation, but I think we would expect a language to grow if AI is effective with it. C++ has a lot of training data. Most large software projects are written in C++: web browsers, compilers, 3D renderers, game engines, UI toolkits,
147.
by fasterik 4mo ago
Romero was a prolific programmer himself back in the day. He's become more known as a designer because Carmack took over as the main engine programmer at id, but Romero was still writing tooling and editors, in addition to doing the le
148.
by fasterik 4mo ago
I don't really understand this perspective. You don't need to memorize anything to learn a new programming language. You choose a medium-sized project you've already done in another language, start with "Hello world,&quo
149.
by fasterik 4mo ago
It turns out that when you level the playing field, girls do better than boys. I don't think it's about the "girl power" nonsense, it's about the ability to sit down, focus on something, and produce work that meets
150.
by fasterik 4mo ago
It's not that the system favors a particular gender. The system favors personality traits like self-regulation, organization, and conscientiousness. These traits develop earlier on average in girls than in boys.

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