mrob

27 ms·

451.
by mrob 1y ago
I trust software more if it's ugly. Desktop software interfaces were pretty much solved by the late 90s. The majority of changes since then have been aimed at either dumbing down the software to better appeal to people who are easily m
452.
by mrob 1y ago
I don't drink cola myself, but it seems logical to me. The point of the expensive advert is showing everybody how rich Coca Cola is. That increases the trust people have in their products being safe and reliable because they know Coca
453.
by mrob 1y ago
I think paying for Youtube will increase the chances of my Google account getting banned. I've never heard of Google banning somebody for rejecting adverts. But if I pay them money, there's a chance there will be a problem with th
454.
by mrob 1y ago
I don't think this is true. The typical uneven LED spectrum causes poor color rendering accuracy, but human color perception is highly inconsistent anyway. Think of the blue/white dress people were arguing about ( https:/&#x
455.
by mrob 1y ago
I've seen this repeated many times but never seem any evidence for it. At typical PWM frequencies the perceived brightness is just the average brightness of the wave. I believe this myth arose from people driving low-brightness indicat
456.
by mrob 1y ago
Linear regulators are in fact used for room lighting, and efficiency can be reasonably good. Typical design is AC input -> bridge rectifier -> passive low-pass filter -> long string of LEDs with a single linear regulator in series.
457.
by mrob 1y ago
There doesn't need to be a health risk for it to be annoying. I personally dislike PWM and I'll continue to personally dislike it even if it's proven safe. Fortunately it's easy to find non-flickering LED lights.
458.
by mrob 1y ago
You can just lower the current. Not everyone does because it generally requires more expensive components, e.g. inductors. There is a threshold voltage ("forward voltage") needed for LEDs to turn on but there's no threshold f
459.
by mrob 1y ago
JPEG artifacts are less disturbing because they're so obviously artificial. WEBP and similar artifacts look more natural, which makes them harder to ignore.
460.
by mrob 1y ago
Subpixel rendering isn't necessary in most languages. Bitmap fonts or hinted vector fonts without antialiasing give excellent readability. Only if the language uses characters with very intricate details such as Chinese or Japanese is
461.
by mrob 1y ago
Despite Apple hardware being fast, it subjectively feels slow because of the mandatory UI animations. The "reduced motion" setting does not help because it only replaces them with equally slow fades. I believe there are unofficial
462.
by mrob 1y ago
Desktop GUIs were already solved in the 90s. Just stick with what works. Modern GUIs make the mistake of trying to force one GUI onto all platforms, giving us antifeatures like hamburger menus and vanishing scrollbars. As a desktop user, I&
463.
by mrob 1y ago
Any new operating system will be frustrating for non-technical users. An older-looking UI serves the valuable purpose of filtering people who aren't the intended audience.
464.
by mrob 1y ago
I can think of one example of true pixel art that intentionally deviates from a strict pixel grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_(1991_video... Look at the vegetation in the background. However, this
465.
by mrob 1y ago
These are not pixel art because they don't use a regular pixel grid. Additionally, the style is inconsistent, and there are many obvious artifacts. They're also large, which means they don't have to rely so heavily on special
466.
by mrob 1y ago
Some of these have both highly variable block size and fine details, e.g.: https://gametorch.app/commons/131 There's no way to fix this without redrawing it from scratch.
467.
by mrob 1y ago
I don't see a problem with that. If you are using the find in page feature then you are very likely going to type something. Your hands are already on the keyboard. The fact that you said "press Ctrl+F" instead of clicking th
468.
by mrob 1y ago
Wrapping a rope under tension for several turns around a cylinder can make very strong assemblies. Relevant concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capstan_equation Note that the exponent is proportional to the number o
469.
by mrob 1y ago
Close mic it with a SM57 like your favorite recordings probably did. You don't need any fancy room treatment when close micing. Or just run the direct input through an amp sim and cab impulse response. Unless you're going for a 19
470.
by mrob 1y ago
Jim Lill has a video testing amp tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBEOcPtlYk It's almost entirely EQ and distortion, applied in various orders (the exact signal chain matters, because EQ after distortion sounds d
471.
by mrob 1y ago
Jim Lill has several excellent videos on Youtube testing guitar tone myths: https://www.youtube.com/@JimLill/videos The "air guitar" demonstration in his first video memorably shows that the wood doesn't
472.
by mrob 1y ago
This can be generalized to stories about any kind of real-life racing. For example, there's a whole genre of videos about the history of speedrunning video games (competing to complete the game in the fastest time), popularized by the
473.
by mrob 1y ago
>Mulholland Drive From the article: "One of my favourite films, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), conforms pretty closely to formulaic structure, even if it is complicated by dream sequences: the inciting incident of the car cr
474.
by mrob 1y ago
One way to get more structural variety is by watching foreign movies. For example, I think Tokyo Story (1953) is better modeled as a four-act kishōtenketsu[0] structure than a three-act hero's journey. It's widely considered one o
475.
by mrob 1y ago
Modern ones can have more than 7 speeds. The Rohloff Speedhub has 14 speeds, and the Shimano Alfine is available with either 8 or 11 speeds.
476.
by mrob 1y ago
Galaxian was released in 1979 and features a smooth scrolling background and non-flickering sprites, all at 60 FPS. It's especially notable because it was the first game to use dedicated tiles + sprites graphics hardware, which would b
477.
by mrob 1y ago
Most floating point implementations have deterministic rounding. The popular LLM inference engine llama.cpp is deterministic when using the same sampler seed, hardware, and cache configuration.
478.
by mrob 1y ago
LLMs are deterministic [0]. An LLM is a pure function that takes a list of tokens and returns a set of token probabilities. To make it "chat" you use the generated probabilities to pick a token, append that token to the list, and
479.
by mrob 1y ago
One dyslexia font was tested and found to have the same legibility as normal fonts: "Dyslexie font neither benefits nor impedes the reading process of children with and without dyslexia." https://link.springer.com/
480.
by mrob 1y ago
Distances in the UK are measured in miles and yards (or fractions of a mile). Google Maps gets this wrong and uses miles and feet. I don't think many people in the UK have a good intuition for how far 500ft is.

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