rikroots

6 ms·

31.
by rikroots 10mo ago
I used to think that blogging was a way to help me build a platform, get my name out there. Nowadays ... I don't know. Sometimes I have thoughts that interest me - but probably nobody else - so I'll craft a post around them and pu
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by rikroots 10mo ago
It's too accurate for my tastes. Needs more snark.
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by rikroots 10mo ago
I'm wary about using AI models to generate stuff for me - I still bristle from the time a model told me that "JS Sets are faster than Arrays" and I believed it, until I discovered that it forgot to add the important piece of
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by rikroots 10mo ago
I'm working on my writing, of course. In the latest episode of my life, my mother surprised me with fresh news about the origin of my name: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/poem/names
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How (not) to train your reader(rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk)
1 points by rikroots 10mo ago|0 comments
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by rikroots 10mo ago
It's sub-optimal in that browser developers have - for a number of legitimate reasons - chosen not to spend their time building SVG engines into their browsers that are efficient, robust and fast. I think its more a story of benign neg
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by rikroots 10mo ago
SVG rendering on browsers is still sub-optimal, which I think is a shame as SVG has great potential if it was treated as a first-class element on the web. Recent improvements to the code driving (2D) Canvas API canvas elements shows that th
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by rikroots 10mo ago
This explains my entire drive with my work on my canvas library. I wanted to do something different with the way I was presenting my poems on my poetry website, so I went away and built something which would help me do just that. I didn&#x2
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Adventures in Poetry Translation(rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk)
3 points by rikroots 10mo ago|0 comments
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by rikroots 10mo ago
> Can someone explains why does that work? I've discovered that if you lecture the LLM long enough about treating the subject you're interested in as "literary" then it will engage with the subject along the lines of
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by rikroots 10mo ago
> Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engine
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by rikroots 11mo ago
Interesting article - of all parts of the lamb/mutton to eat, tail was not a cut I'd heard of before. If we're talking sheep, then I have to put out a shout for my local breed - the Romney Marsh sheep (the sheep that conquere
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by rikroots 11mo ago
tl;dr: This is a link to a sign up sheet for a yet-to-be delivered product promising something that is vaguely hinted at - "Drive traffic [...] AI-powered [...] help you create and share content [...]" - nothing to see here. And y
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by rikroots 11mo ago
Reminds me of why I left the Civil Service after 18 years. The volume of stupidity seems to increase exponentially, the higher you climb through the ranks.
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by rikroots 1y ago
I responded in that post (though not to you, and probably not what you're after) with a link to my JS canvas library's "reduce palette" filter. It includes both supplying an array of colors to act as the palette, and set
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by rikroots 1y ago
I rewrote my canvas library's "reduce-palette" filter last month to make it a lot more code-efficient (because: the library doesn't use web workers, WebGL, etc). But the main reason to go hunting for efficiencies was my
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The Scrawl-canvas graphical filter system(scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk)
2 points by rikroots 1y ago|1 comments
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by rikroots 1y ago
Posting because I've spent the summer giving my JS canvas library's filter system a major code overhaul to make it more performant. The system itself is inspired by the SVG approach to composing filters. Practical demo here: http
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by rikroots 1y ago
> 16 bit as standard. Do a gradient in an 8 bit Photoshop document and you will see how limited 8 bit info is. (OUR PAINT supports this). For interest, this seems to be an active issue for the HTML <canvas> element in browsers. The
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by rikroots 1y ago
I await the first LLM generated PR to my JS canvas library with eager anticipation. I can't wait to ask them if they've run the PR branch against all of the test demos, so they can prove that the PR doesn't break existing fun
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by rikroots 1y ago
Human embryogenesis would like to disagree with you. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13278255
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by rikroots 1y ago
I had a rather pleasing interaction with this persona[1]. I'm thinking: if the British had invented and trained ChatGPT, this is the sort of conversation everyone could've been having from the first day it launched. Which is fun,
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by rikroots 1y ago
My coping mechanism for interacting with people who approach me is: 1. Act friendly and open when they start talking to me; 2. centre the questions on them, hoping that they reveal information that might clue me in on who they are. It'
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by rikroots 1y ago
Complete tangent ... but whenever I see something like this waiting list sign up thing, my mind goes back to the famo.us debacle - now 10 years ago. That one didn't end happily: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052
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by rikroots 1y ago
I've done a lot of work recently to make my library more "LLM Friendly", but I'm not willing at this time to sign up to a service which I don't know I'd ever use again just to run a test on your behalf. If you
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by rikroots 1y ago
I commented about my experiences of Prosopagnosia in this recent HN thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44484595#44487570
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by rikroots 1y ago
I was going to respond saying how much I dislike the way the narrator reads the poem - like a vicar 45 minutes into an overlong Sunday sermon, as bored as the congregation - then I saw the OP article included a link to Eliot reading his own
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by rikroots 1y ago
I really wish this was true. Sadly the caniemail website - https://www.caniemail.com/ - says that Gmail still doesn't support CSS grid or flex, which leaves nested tables for layout as the only viable solution for HTML
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by rikroots 1y ago
> Granted, you can say "you still can play musical instruments/paint pictures/etc for yourself", but I don't think there was ever a period of time where creative works were just created for sake of itself rather
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by rikroots 1y ago
I've shown a product on HN in both human-authored, and LLM-assisted, versions. Neither got traction. When I showed my human-authored submission to LLMs they summarised it as "not a good post likely to gain traction" because,

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