joeraut

Great point on accessibility, a guarantee of screen reader support is a benefit that would be lost with screenshots or text without the correct semantics.

A nice improvement! An unfortunate side-effect of it is that it introduces some jitter during macOS's smooth scrolling in Firefox at time of first render, though.

Archive: https://archive.is/WJLKT

That was an incredibly powerful read. Thank you for your effort.

Some companies are still keeping them on.

From the article:

[...]some of them—including Nvidia, as well as giants like Facebook and Google—continued to pay their service workers.

Seconded. This was a great blog post, I think a more visible plug at the end is more than justified.

Happy rsync.net client here, thanks for the great service; the ability to use rclone for exactly this purpose, without having to worry about ingress/egress charges, is a huge value-add.

Edit: Will free-of-charge ingress/egress always be a feature of the service? With more customers using rclone for shifting data to/from/between other services, I'd hypothesize that bandwidth use could be creeping up.

Edit 2: A feature I'd love to see would be the ability to setup automated cron-like jobs directly from the admin portal, for e.g. automated rclone backups, eliminating the friction of having to setup another service to periodically run a command on rsync.net. (Tricky to do in a serverless fashion for long-running commands like rclone.) Is this something that might be in the pipeline?

Original post from January 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21947551

It's probably a running joke internally---anecdotally, I've came across it a few times on different Google properties over the years.

This looks very slick. Great job!

The hero we don't deserve.

Yes, exactly. The procedurally generated world is predictable* if you know the world seed -- land forms, structures and items/loot spawn the same way each time. You can specify the seed when creating a world, if you like.

There are certain things that are nondeterministic, such as where mobs spawn (that depends on player position, etc.) or how they behave.

* There may be parts of world generation these days that are nondeterministic even with a known seed; I'm not too up to date with recent world generation changes.

You're right — fixed :)

A brief summary: pack.png [0] is a 128x128px image of a scenic mountain within a Minecraft world, and is used in in-game menus. The goal of this project was to discover the world seed used to generate the Minecraft world that pack.png was taken in. This was no small feat, with 2^48 possible seeds the procedural world generator could have used, and required much analysis, trial-and-error and distributed computation by many volunteers to obtain the seed.

The process involved exploiting identifiable world features such as the position of clouds, orientations of certain block textures, and more, to discover the exact coordinates of the blocks in the image (insane in itself); figuring out the exact camera perspective via regression fitting; creating and training a machine learning model to upscale the image in order to better discern details and manually create a reconstruction; deducing how the image was taken (print screen -> cropped to 512x512 -> 4x downscaled with specific resizing algorithm); and more. Through these efforts, they had significantly reduced the number of candidate seeds; distributed computing power provided by 3,500 project volunteers' GPUs was then used to obtain the final 700,000 candidate seeds, and from that a brute-force approach was used to isolate the actual pack.png seed.

The YouTuber SalC1 produced an excellent video on the project [1].

[0] https://packpng.com/static/pack.png

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6py9q46QU

You have to be a non-blind person to pass the Turing test, as Cloudflare does not offer a handicap option.

(Edit: not sure if the above is true.)

I was quite surprised to see this. Much effort has been put into making the web more accessible; it’s a shame if an otherwise accessible site is blocked behind a non-accessible captcha wall.

Cool CSS animations aside, that diagram is fantastic!

Edit: It also handles i18n for EN, FR and ES by displaying different titles and hyperlinks for different system languages. Jaw dropped.

Great service, thanks for running it!

Link to the start of the thread: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776

They disclose this in the (beautifully done) about page.

Seconding this. I don't know if it's a fair comparison but Instagram is removing publically-visible like counts because of their associated consequences, and embeddable banner services for tracking GitHub profile views seems inevitable.

Which "yank" package are you using? I came across one [0], which copies the file selected to the clipboard instead of outputting it to stdout. I managed to get it to print to stdout, though:

  alias -g Y="| yank -- cat "

Yep, I got the same error. The version here [0] works fine.

[0] https://fabiensanglard.net/postcard_pathtracer/

Fascinating blog post of yours, thanks for sharing it!

Same here. Running some ancient OS/software in a VM can be pretty satisfying though, especially since I don't have a whole lot of space for physical hardware.

Many games wouldn't work well in a VM, of course, there's no getting around that.

This is a such an epic situation that I'm sure we'll be talking about for the rest of our lives.

The word "epic" is overused a lot - but not here. It's chilling to think about how historically significant each passing day is going to be.

That anecdote applies to more than locksmiths or tech.

A MacBook repair shop may replace a $0.50 transistor, but charge $200+. What you're paying for is the knowledge and experience in identifying and solving the problem. It's unfortunate that so many consumers don't understand this principle.

This. It just seems really special to be sharing the film with photons that made a journey of many, many light-years to reach it too.

South African data center providers seem to have nailed reliable generator power - "...their systems are designed to operate continuously and effectively, regardless of whether they receive power from the national grid." [0] I don't want to imagine the cost.

On another note, load shedding (i.e. scheduled blackouts) have been implemented pretty uniformly fortunately, with areas following different published schedules - there's even an app for that! [1]

[0] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/cloud-hosting/336800-how-sout...

[1] https://sepush.co.za/

This is a great step-up for companies using AWS here in SA.

On a personal note, my latency for my personal site will drop from ~170ms (eu-west-2) to ~3ms!

I first discovered Game of Life during high school, and it got me fascinated about different cellular automata and writing software implementations of them.

RIP John Conway.