dmitrybrant

A hearty +1 to using WinForms (as long as your desktop app targets Windows only, of course). The fact that WinForms has outlasted so many other UI toolkits is a testament to its simplicity and ease of use. I still use it in numerous personal projects, and I don't foresee Microsoft dropping support for it anytime in the near future.

My biggest gripe with these AI film enhancements is that they are adding information that was never there. You're no longer watching the original film. You no longer have a sense of how contemporary film equipment worked, what its limitations were, how the director dealt with those limitations, etc.

Very cool prototype, and a very interesting idea to sort nearby Wikipedia articles by number of pageviews.

Just a note that the Wikipedia app for iOS does in fact have a map with nearby articles, and we will soon bring the feature (back) to the Android version.

Yep, I'm also seeing a 2px scrollbar that does not expand.

In other words, touch grass?

I approach it not from a perspective of "taste" per se, but from a perspective of purity and truth. All of these techniques (AI upscaling, colorizing, interpolation, etc) are adding information that was never there, which means you're no longer watching the genuine media.

By all means take the original film and rescan it in the highest possible resolution, to capture all the information that was in the film, but to add information that wasn't there to begin with is going too far.

It's like all the modern TVs that have the horrendous "motion smoothing" feature, which is enabled by default, and makes movies look like soap operas. When the TV performs frame interpolation, it's adding information that was never there, and wasn't intended by the director.

Please, for the love of god, stop with the custom scroll bars, and on the wrong side of the viewport, no less!

I literally just met Werner Herzog on a flight to Chicago the other day. He was flying coach, like a boss.

I stay active on a Slack community of devs and creators in my country, as well as go to meet-ups and events in interesting communities

How does one find these supposed Slack groups and meetups? I live in a major metropolitan area, but the meetups I've been able to find have been underwhelming.

Love the concept, and might even consider getting one. But please, please let me have my scrollbar when browsing your website.

I don't upvote a lot, but this is well earned.

Assuming everything in the video is real, the only remaining question is: what is the actual temperature of that sample?

If all of this checks out, then it's a new era.

Can I ask why we're using a special definition of "levitation" that doesn't really mean levitation? I'm finding it very annoying to click headlines that say "Levitation of LK-99!", and... ohh it's still standing on one end.

I'm sure this is a promising discovery and everything, but saying "levitation" at this stage is very forward-looking, and for me - a bit cynicism-inducing.

In what sense were any of them nut jobs? All of these were traditionally pedigreed scientists, doing groundbreaking research at their institutions, under their own names. I'm asking for a historical parallel of a researcher who published an earth-shattering result anonymously, from their home lab, in a field unrelated to their day job, on a random night off chilling and watching movies?

Can you give an example? I'm struggling to think of historical comparisons. I suppose I can think of a couple of "unlikely" achievers:

- Ramanujan: if he lived today, I could imagine him tweeting some awesome infinite series, which could be verified easily by other mathematicians.

- ...maybe Tesla? But he had a solid track record of invention before becoming a nut job.

But who else?

That may be true, but I'm not seeing 999 other people with geeky interests reporting their failed attempts. We are, however, starting to see actual labs reporting negative results.

Don't get me wrong, I want to believe (tm) as much as anyone, but this particular part of the story has a lot working against it:

* This person is anonymous (account created in Apr 2023), so we don't know anything about their affiliation or credentials.

* They do seem to have good knowledge of materials science (although I have no way to judge), but the rest of their twitter history, which is all we have to go on, doesn't inspire confidence.

* This person decided to replicate this experiment on a whim, as a distraction (because they couldn't stream a movie that night, according their tweets), while serious labs around the world have been trying frantically for several days, without any results.

* This person refuses to submit a video ("bad tone") or any additional footage of their achievement, despite it being the most unique and world-changing compound on the planet.

The "demonstration" is a photo of a single crumb of material inside a transparent pipette. It's claimed that the crumb is "levitating" inside the pipette, but what's stopping a random internet anon from gluing a crumb onto a pipette and taking a picture of it?

I don't know about you, but if I had just succeeded in replicating a literally history-making experiment, I would perhaps take a video of it, and demonstrate how the crumb actually behaves without the support of the pipette.

It seems to be based loosely on this preprint from 2018: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.09376

...which was never peer-reviewed or reproduced. The authors of the patent are also not physicists, chemists, or materials-scientists, with no prior publications related to superconductors. This just came out of thin air.

If anything, this highlights everything that's wrong with the US patent system. (you don't need to have a working prototype to get it patented, and the patent examiner doesn't need to understand anything about the mechanism you're proposing.)

For sure, but it's a bit weirder than that: 1) They applied for the patent in 2021, long before the current hype coming from Korea. 2) The patent was officially granted by the Patent Office on pretty much the same day as the Korean preprints were uploaded. The patent is very clearly bunk, but the timing of the patent approval is an astronomical coincidence.

Samsung is hoping the launch of its foldables will help level out these losses

Very serious question: Who is asking for foldable phones? Who is saying, "You know what's missing from my phone? More moving parts! A huge hinge for crumbs to get stuck in! I just can't enjoy this app unless it's in a square form factor and a crease in the center!"

Like so many other programmers of a certain age, I cut my teeth on Borland IDEs in the late 90s, building software for Windows 9x, which was a time when Borland was absolutely crushing it with tools that were light years ahead of Microsoft's own offerings at the time.

It makes me so sad that Borland tools are squarely in the dustbin of history, and are now maintained almost exclusively for legacy customers. I would love to read some kind of retrospective (a book, a series of blogs, etc) on the downfall of Borland and what exact business circumstances led to its irrelevance.

I haven't formed a definite opinion on this, and I think I largely agree, but what about a counterargument like this one:

Virtually no one does long division manually anymore, or really any basic arithmetic greater than two digits, because we invented pocket calculators and smartphones that do this for us. And are we any worse mathematicians or engineers because of this? If anything, this has freed us to perform more higher-order reasoning.

And so with these kinds of "AI" assistants, is it possible that the types of reasoning that we offload onto them will free us to reason in even higher orders?

BetterHelp has been around for a while now, and I'd be curious if it's actually helping with long-term mental health outcomes, on an individual and population level.

I mean, their advertising campaigns are massive. They advertise on literally every podcast, and now NPR. They advertise even more than Squarespace, and even more than [insert latest mattress company].

Interestingly, just this week we saw a perfect example of how an actual UFO sighting would play out, namely the Chinese spy balloon.

We saw real, actual photos of it in the sky, instead of grainy radar images and verbal testimony. We had a real acknowledgement of it from our government, and a real response to it, i.e. shoot it down. This is all very rational and satisfactory, and is exactly what would happen if there really was something unidentified in the sky.

This is all to say: purveyors of UFO/UAP theories really need to step up their game. Give us something better than "we can't give you actual photos because of stigma!!"

without an action-reaction process. Just an energy source, and no propellant.

Unfortunately, in our universe, momentum is conserved.

Totally agree! I remember raising my eyebrow at ambiguities in math notation as early as high school, before I could articulate them as such. One specific example is the convention of cos^-1(x) referring to the inverse cosine of x, instead of the multiplicative inverse of cos(x). Similarly, the convention of cos^2(x) referring to the square of cos(x) instead of a nested cos(cos(x)). It's madness, and totally avoidable.

I haven't heard this term, either. I've always heard 5.25" floppies referred to as "diskettes", because they were a smaller diminutive version of 8" disks.

Hang on... to go from "System32" to "System33" is one bit flip, but to go from "System33" to "System34" is three bit flips at once. Doesn't that seem astronomically more likely to be a malicious program than bad RAM?

Yes, definitely. I feel a profound sense of despair when we purchase a mobile device with the most cutting-edge CPU and insane amount of memory, and proceed to saddle it with a bloated VM that's designed to guardrail and protect the device from even more bloated, leaky, crashy, unresponsive apps.

And when we purchase a new desktop workstation, equipped with even more staggering horsepower, we're totally OK with installing software that makes itself comfortable by consuming large fractions of this horsepower without any apparent need, all because the amazing hardware is able to mask the awfulness of the software.