nothis

Dropbox is still unmatched as a service not trying to push you into a trillion dollar monopoly (One Drive, iCloud, Google Drive). It's admittedly been a while but I tested a whole bunch of automatic cloud backup software at one point because I got pissed about some annoying niche cases and Dropbox just worked throughout everything I threw at it, automatic versioning and recovery included. It doesn't mangle file names, handles huge files, folders with tens of thousands of small files, recovering old versions of accidentally overwritten files, works on Mac and Windows without losing a beat, sending people files always works.

I guess for collaboration you want to use stuff like Google Docs and advanced versioning software for coding (I'm not talking about coding stuff here, btw, which might throw off some people on hacker news). But Dropbox delivers for "I need a backup and I don't want to think about it except when I mess up and need its help".

I'm not pretending to understand half the words uttered in this discussion but I'm constantly reminded of how much it helps me to articulate things (explain them to others, write them down, etc) to understand them. Maybe that thinking indeed happens almost entirely on a linguistic level and I'm not doing half as much other thinking (visualization, abstract logic, etc.) in the process as I thought. That feels weird.

There was a whole "now we finally have the technology!" push for VR in the late 80s/90s. Google the Forte VFX1, for example. Jaron Lanier made one of the first ever TED Talks in 1990 and it was about how VR will revolutionize everything ( https://youtu.be/lfvOACM-vbE ). It all... "rhymes".

I have this thought that maybe the problem with VR isn't the display technology but the input. Walking forward in a straight line is more or less an unsolvable problem. Motion sickness, the need of a frickin' threadmill, it's just messy. Touch feedback is an unsolvable problem unless you introduce robot gloves that can break your fingers. And then we have the question of use cases. VR solves a very specific spatial problem with an interconnection between perspective and hand movement. Very few problems exist in that space. It sometimes seems like VR creates more problems than it solves, in fact.

I low key believe in AR (although Apple finally played its cards and the result was underwhelming). Something about infinite and freely positioned 3D monitors. But VR? Great for cockpit sims and maybe some very specific professional uses. But useless for 99% of tasks of an average person.

Its solar cells are working again after a shift in lighting conditions allowed it to catch sunlight, the agency said.

It could not generate power when it landed on 20 January as the solar cells pointed away from the Sun.

Sounds like they were just lucky with the angle of sunlight.

Hyper-naive take: Couldn't nearly all of these attacks be blocked by a white-list approach, essentially hiding every file or directory from the internet except a very controlled list of paths and escaping all text sent so it can't contain code?

I somehow always imagine these types of hacks to be more clever, like, I dunno, sending harmless-looking stuff that causes the program receiving it to crash and send some instructions into unprotected parts of RAM or whatever. This all looks like "echo ; /bin/cat /etc/passwd" and somehow the server just spitting it out. Is that really the state of web security?

I know Nintendo will never allow it to exist in the open but is this a way to archive the actual levels or just a list of names/codes? I'm genuinely sad thinking about the (very real) possibility of them vanishing forever.

Users love PayPal.

Genuinely surprised to hear all the love for PayPal, recently. I don't use it much these days (did, years ago but found the experience fairly neutral) but remember a period of everyone seemingly hating PayPal because... I actually don't know? Maybe something about niche cases where it was harder to get them sorted out via PayPal vs other services (which I can imagine to be annoying)?

Is this one of these innocent little articles popping up that people refer to as "the SVB moment" in the future?

Or was this bank just uniquely fucked?

None of this should matter as long as the algorithm determining randomness is deterministic.

The bottleneck is player input which is the most overestimated bandwidth stat in gaming. It's mouse movements and a couple of keys strokes per second. Top Starcraft players are in the 300 actions per minute range, that's still just 5 per second.

Ok, that's worse.

Naive question: Once they get out more than they spend, can they just loop the generated energy back in and keep increasing this exponentially?

As I understand it, if you're a huge company, you want ToS that ban an obvious, easily enforceable line before anything illegal is said because enforcing just the very edge of legality causes some fuzziness that will likely end in court. Basically what Elon isn't doing with Twitter.

Why they just don't release a law that forbids people from making bugs?

The more I think about it, isn't that literally what the law is about, lol?

Just had the video play without sound and my girlfriend said she thought it was real before she noticed the overlay text being weird. We just went to Amsterdam, too

I agree that we'll be shaving off these last 3% of visual artifacts for a while (honestly, on a good setup, games have been looking like this for 5+ years, the main thing this video has is photogrammetry and lighting). But this does look realistic.

Photogrammetry (together with a physical based rendering pipeline to get the lighting just right) probably deserves all the credit in this. I remember first reading about it in 2014, in an article about an indie game for that matter. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Here's an article: https://www.pcgamer.com/find-out-why-the-vanishing-of-ethan-...

Since then, every game that embraced it for photo realism looks basically perfect in terms of world geometry. Doesn't even have to be crazy high-res or high poly, as long as you don't stick your virtual nose directly in front of stuff, you can easily fill every pixel on screen with one that's ~95% there from where it should be in a real-world photograph.

Art direction trumps tech in games for a while, now. This is just well lit, well researched and compression artifacts smooth out the details. Character's eyes are still kinda dead, animations fidgety, screen space reflection artifacts if the "reflected" area isn't in frame, etc, etc. Definitely no different from the average "realistic looking game" 5 years ago and probably, yes, even "high end graphics" 10 years ago. Things are slowing down.

The way I see it is that by raising the bar like this, you're making more realistic speeds for average users a) more stable/common and b) less expensive.

For people in the EU/UK, how has this currency slide impacted your day to day?

Not at all?

I mean, I guess you could argue which caused which but the real problem here in central Europe are gas and energy prices. Those legitimately doubled and affect personal budgets.

Trying to understand bluetooth's awfulness is a dead-end. I tried. I thought, "yea, you're nerdy enough to read the tech specs, it will be boring but after an hour you'll understand and your bluetooth keyboard will pair every time instead of 85% of times". Nope.

Re-check your sources. A lot of pro-nuclear material out there is pure advertising from nuclear lobbies. Nuclear is a hugely expensive and high-maintenance way of generating energy. There's risks that don't show up in neat, averaged numbers, think Russia shelling a nuclear plant in 2022, that was on none of the yay-nuclear bingo cards.

The military applications of this tech would be to stir up decent or manufacture outrage in a country for political gains.

I didn't need that thought in my life, thank you. Seriously, though, this genuinely makes it possible to gently tweak an algorithm (which is absolutely invisible to anyone outside the company or the Chinese government) to nudge public opinion. Like, you could probably nudge elections by a percentage point or two, manufacture specific outrage about policies unfriendly to China, generate a bit of chaos with conspiracy theories when convenient, etc, etc. Black Mirror stuff. I

'm telling myself it's unlikely to actually happen but when I ask myself why I can't come up with a reassuring answer. The technology is there. The control is there. The willingness is certainly there. I guess it would be a bigger endeavor and there might be leaks of it happening. But, ultimately, a few dozen people could do a lot of damage.

Honestly, this sounds like tumblr was crazy dependent on both apple and a porn-like business. That's a weird combo and not one that makes me feel particularly sorry for them. There's a reason facebook, youtube, pinterest and, ultimately, apple don't allow porn. It's a messy business.

What I'm noticing the past 5 to 10 years is the right outsmarting the left in activism and public imagery. Not with arguments, with wording. It's hard to watch.

One way I'm trying to make sense of is the following: The left is used to being the underdog, the ones fighting for reform against powerful, conservative institutions. They are used to not really stand a chance, it's the spirit that counts. In that position, it makes sense to yell loud, provoking slogans. The people in power will laugh it off, the people you're trying to reach will hear you. But we're in a situation where there are pockets of real power occupied by left-leaning leadership. University campuses. Some parts of the media. Large cities. Certain internet communities. The people in power (who are still largely conservative) are no longer laughing, they're scared. They will use your words against you if they aren't worded well. But it seems left-wing organizers refuse to change their tactics, refuse to acknowledge they entered the mainstream arena.

I still don't get what "abolish the police" is supposed to accomplish. Everyone who bothers understands what it is really about but you don't even have to twist the words, you just have to take them literally and it's a call to pure anarchism. The "blue lives matter" bullshit could have been stopped by changing the slogan to "black lives matter, too". A comedian should not be cancelled for actual, clear-in-context jokes, at least not when genuinely apologizing. A confused college student quoting some Jordan Peterson logic (which he'll likely feel embarrassed for in 5 years without any outside help at all) should not be yelled at in public or you get that shit on Tik Tok as "lefties suppressing free speech". Don't call your work reform movement... "anti-work". Sigh.

Laugh at right-wing stupidity. Take left-wing politics (i.e. European conservative politics) seriously and consider how to implement it in the real world. Do what the right has been doing for centuries, learn from it. They're in the defense now. And the most powerful move on the offense is appearing calm and composed.

Sounds like the limit is computation speed, not conceptual. That should solve itself over the years.

That's kinda the plot of Don't Look Up.

My browser threw a hissy fit, if you just want to download the PDF with the sample problems, this is the link:

https://hosteagle.club/booklets/samples.en.pdf?__cpo=aHR0cHM...

What confuses me: These are good photos! Many are sharp, well lit. And they were made from a pocket camera of people who didn't specifically stand still for the photo.

Why on earth did they have people stand like grim statues for those staged photographs? I thought it was because exposure times were extreme with those early cameras but this kinda proves it wasn't? 1890s, those must be among the first photographs, ever.

Some of those are actually hilarious. Like peak 80s shoulder pad fashion, only even more extreme:

https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/s...

How can a commercial company own a top level domain like ".app"? I get that they own .youtube or .google but isn't that way too generic? Like a company owning the copyright for the word "Company"?

Whenever I read about countries banning sites, people post "just use a VPN, lol". But I wonder: If China really wants to, couldn't they just block VPNs? At the worst, just whitelist a bunch of sites and services and literally block everything else?