mrob

10 ms·

181.
by mrob 5mo ago
Software moving the mouse cursor is only acceptable when the window is full-screen. If the user makes an application go full-screen, they are opting out of the normal desktop UI conventions. It's expected that full-screen software comp
182.
by mrob 5mo ago
Character counting errors are a side effect of tokenization, which is a performance optimization. If we scaled the hardware big enough we could train on raw bytes and avoid it.
183.
by mrob 5mo ago
Whenever somebody calls LLMs "non-deterministic", assume they meant "chaotic", in the informal sense of being a system where small changes of input can cause large changes to output, and the only way to find out if it wi
184.
by mrob 5mo ago
I still vaguely remember how difficult man pages were to understand when I first started reading them. I'm pretty sure the biggest obstacle is the fact that most documentation is written for people who already know the standard compute
185.
by mrob 5mo ago
Sounds similar to the real-life case of ritonavir: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritonavir#Polymorphism_and_tem...
186.
by mrob 5mo ago
Repetitive patterns in code is called "idiomatic" and is considered a good thing. Repetitive patterns in writing is just bad writing.
187.
by mrob 6mo ago
>I find them all tactily unpleasant Unlike rubber dome keyboards which trigger at the bottom of the stroke, mechanical keyboards trigger mid-stroke. You don't have to bottom out the keys, which reduces shock loading of your fingers.
188.
by mrob 6mo ago
llama.cpp is deterministic when run with a specified PRNG seed, at least when running on CPU without caching. This is true regardless of temperature. But when people say "non-deterministic", they really mean something closer to &q
189.
by mrob 6mo ago
It's desirable for arcade games, which have fixed hardware including the display. There's no possibility of upgrading for better framerate, and the game can be designed so slowdown is rare or non-existent. Tying the physics to the
190.
by mrob 6mo ago
Great article. I see it was already submitted once and received zero comments, but it deserves more attention than that.
191.
by mrob 6mo ago
>Lightgun games, for example, rely on very precise timing of the control input vs the CRT raster and simply do not work without a CRT. Perhaps the most famous light gun game of all time (Duck Hunt on the NES), does not rely on especially
192.
by mrob 6mo ago
>or even outright wrong (see: transparency-layering effects on things like Sonic the Hedgehog) If you're talking about the waterfalls, I'm not convinced blurring was necessary or intended. RGB support was rare in televisions in
193.
by mrob 6mo ago
>No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death. Riding a bicycle while wea
194.
by mrob 6mo ago
Only if you use resistive electric heating, which is usually the most expensive heating available.
195.
by mrob 6mo ago
Youtube doesn't implement a back function. A real back function would take you back to the same page you came from. If you click a video from the Youtube home page, then click the back button, Youtube will regenerate a different home p
196.
by mrob 6mo ago
Double clicking is not a fix because it doubles latency, and more than doubles latency if you don't want to issue page loads that are immediately aborted. Long clicking is such a bizarre anti-feature that I never considered it might ex
197.
by mrob 6mo ago
"Spider and Web" is famous because it's a subversion of genre norms. It does not play fair by traditional text adventure game standards. I don't recommend it for beginners, because other than the central gimmick, the puz
198.
by mrob 6mo ago
That would happen in a free market, but software is intentionally not a free market thanks to copyright/patent laws. In software, lock-in effects dominate. People will continue using bad software because it's necessary to interope
199.
by mrob 6mo ago
Any feedback process has a hard threshold for instability. The PA system doesn't howl until the microphone is close enough to the loudspeaker. The atomic bomb doesn't explode until the fissile material reaches critical mass. If yo
200.
by mrob 6mo ago
AI progress can potentially be extremely non-linear because of feedback effects. The first to build an AI smart enough to accelerate building even smarter AIs wins (or loses along with everybody else if it's more successful than they e
201.
by mrob 6mo ago
>History has shown that an alien invasion can only happen because of the internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. Not true. Overwhelming technological advantage also works. As Hilaire Belloc put it: Whatever happens, we h
202.
by mrob 6mo ago
>They may be describing a radical new chemistry that I'm not familiar with. It's probably pot still vs. reflux still. Chemists use fractionating columns to get better separation. Home distillers won't necessarily do so, so
203.
by mrob 6mo ago
DVDs are extremely robust against scratches, even more so than CDs. Unlike CDs, which have the data protected by only a thin layer of lacquer under the label, DVDs sandwich the data between two layers of polycarbonate. The error correction
204.
by mrob 6mo ago
Serifs are a skeuomorphic artifact of stone-carved text. They're no more legible than sans-serif fonts (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492894 ). The only reason people like them is because they're used
205.
by mrob 6mo ago
>jaggies are a visual distraction So are serifs, and people don't complain about those. Whether any "visual distraction" actually distracts you is a matter of what you're accustomed to. If you read enough cursive or b
206.
by mrob 6mo ago
If you want minimum latency, you want the input side of an traditional vocoder, not an FFT. This is the part that splits the modulator signal into frequency bands and puts each one through an envelope follower. Instead of using the outputs
207.
by mrob 6mo ago
Audio mastering is already automated to the level of a mediocre human: https://github.com/sergree/matchering (I haven't actually tried this, I just watched the linked Benn Jordan video.) IMO, the ideal would be fo
208.
by mrob 6mo ago
It's the exact same anti-cheating method used to great effect in top level e-sports. You can't trust competitor-supplied hardware, so the only option is for the institution to ban it and supply all hardware itself. Higher educatio
209.
by mrob 6mo ago
>What he proposes is radical It sounds entirely reasonable and moderate to me.
210.
by mrob 6mo ago
It makes it easier to treat the computer as part of your own body, allowing operation without conscious thought, as you would a pencil or similar hand tool.

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