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zero_iq

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The user experience accessing YouTube through a web browser on a TV (the main target audience for SmartTube) is less than ideal.

TV and set-top box browsers tend to be slow and fiddly to use from a TV remote. (And often running on underpowered hardware).

I've seen ChatGPT get stuck in this loop all by itself, generating a long multi-page answer where it constantly catches itself, refutes itself, offers a new answer with the same problem, rinse and repeat... All in the same response!

One possibility is to replace part of the battery. The smaller battery can be designed to lie about its charge, or you can replace with a higher energy-density battery and use the space saved for a detonation system (perhaps even incorporating the battery itself into this) and a small quantity of high explosive, which is pretty stable and safe until detonated. Contrary to popular belief, high explosives are actually relatively safe, and usually even burn safely or are hard to ignite at all in some cases. Package it up into something that looks identical to an unmodified battery. Modify device firmware and battery control circuitry to detonate it on receipt of a specific signal and... boom.

It's also at least as expensive as more advanced machines you can buy already-assembled.

If this was half the price, I might be interested. But if I wanted a coffee maker with open source control, I'd probably just hack an existing cheaper product. And I'm someone who absolutely loves assembling stuff from kits!

Heck, I'd be surprised if someone hasn't already got Doom running on a Sage.

Stable Diffusion 3 2 years ago

The models do a pretty good job at rendering plausible global illumination, radiosity, reflections, caustics, etc. in a whole bunch of scenarios. It's not necessarily physically accurate (usually not in fact), but usually good enough to trick the human brain unless you start paying very close attention to details, angles, etc.

This fascinated me when SD was first released, so I tested a whole bunch of scenarios. While it's quite easy to find situations that don't provide accurate results and produce all manner of glitches (some of which you can use to detect some SD-produced images), the results are nearly always convincing at a quick glance.

No, it doesn't.

The phone doesn't need to broadcast anything to control the drone directly. The phone talks to the remote control unit, which is what broadcasts signals to control the drone. You don't need wifi or mobile internet, or even bluetooth to fly a DJI drone (the phone connects by cable to the remote control unit).

(Actually, that's not 100% true -- if you're in a locked zone that requires permission to fly (such as near airfields or other protected sites), you will need internet access to start your flight and unlock the zone using your DJI account. Otherwise the drone may refuse to fly into restricted zones.)

You don't even need the phone at all -- the remote unit is quite capable of controlling the drone in flight with the phone switched off.

In general no, but the provided example depends on parallel memory accesses at the cache level, so cache effects can indeed come into play with instruction-level parallelism. Did you just miss this detail in the article, or are you suggesting it's wrong?

That's true for very large spaces/distances (except at night) where atmospheric scattering comes into play, but consider looking at a flat surface with stacks of objects on it. Lower elements are typically more occluded from lighting due to shadows from higher and neighbouring objects (ambient occlusion), with objects closer to you getting more illumination.

The brain is known to make use of such cues to gauge depth, and it's used in several optical illusions. (You can even make use of this principle with flash photography techniques to create approximate depth maps for surfaces. It's quite effective.)

I would argue that a model based on close distances of stacked items (e.g. stack bits of card or paper) is generally a better model than one based on large outdoor spaces, as it is a closer analogy in most situations. (Reading on-screen being reading off a relatively-close surface.)

But both can work. Look at screenshots of a game such as Spelunky: dark backgrounds, light foreground objects. The eye is drawn to the lighter surfaces and can ignore the darker background. But if the background was a distant landscape (e.g. Rastan -- don't know why that was my first thought... showing my age!), rather than a relatively close cave wall, your approach of desaturated lighter backgrounds might work just as well, as it would be more realistic. And at night, the opposite would be true.

The last time I coded something along these lines was way back in the day for pulsing the Amiga's power/disk drive LEDs in time to music and sound effects, instead of their usual on/off/half brightness states. Not quite so useful, but I remember having fun coding it :D I was surprised at just how effective it was, without any noticeable flicker.

Amiga Forever 4 years ago

Anecdotally, I've had better luck reading Amiga and ST floppies from the 80s and 90s than floppies from the 2000s. I'm guessing disk quality took a nosedive somewhere around 2000..?

Mac OS 9 4 years ago

You might be thinking of SheepShaver, a Mac emulator for BeOS and Linux. Its name is a play on the name ShapeShifter, an earlier emulator by the same develope, which was an Apple II emulator for the Amiga.

Ironically, Unreal Engine was in large part born from Tim Sweeney's "screwing around with tooling and languages".

UnrealScript has long been dropped in favour of C++, but I'm pretty sure Unreal Engine wouldn't exist today, or would be a very different beast, if it hadn't been for UnrealScript and the Unreal Editor being bundled with the original Unreal and its sequels/follow-ups, and Tim's personal interest and research into how programming languages might improve game development, in much the same way that Jonathan Blow is doing now.

Can I assume your use of the phrase "this person" means you are unfamiliar with Mr Blow, and his track record in game development? You might want to look him up -- he's an interesting character and has developed some interesting and influential games.

It wouldn't get to trial. Cease and desist letter with the threat of legal action would likely do the trick, as charmbracelet likely have insufficient funds to defend themselves, and it simply wouldn't be worth the money to defend a small project name. At the very least it would be easy to force them to remove any use of VHS in relation to video tapes: they have a giant picture of a VHS video tape on their homepage!

If the trademark owner discovers this, they would be legally obliged to defend their trademark if they want to keep it.

JVC/Kenwood has previously successfully defended their mark when used in artworks/apparel (which are not in the same domains).

The ideas in this article are strongly reminiscent of those in Jeff Hawkins' "On Intelligence" (2004).

The idea of the brain operating (at least in part) as a "prediction machine" is certainly not a new one. I'm actually surprised it's taken this long for this sort of experimental confirmation and theory to become more mainstream.

Mr first thought reading the article was security. After a quick ctrl-f, it was a little disconcerting to find that the only mention of security is in a tacked-on bullet list under the heading "risks"...

Overthinking 5 years ago

What you said about France is absolutely not true.

Article V of the French constitution:

The law has the right to forbid only actions harmful to society. Anything which is not forbidden by the law cannot be impeded, and no one can be constrained to do what it does not order.

Given that the US constitution was greatly influenced by the French one, and given France's influence and substantial aid in helping to establish the USA as an independent country it's hard for me to imagine how anyone could believe this, unless they were completely unaware of both French and American history and culture.

A few years ago, in the architecture and design museum in Stockholm, I saw an exhibit of a bus shelter that had been fitted with bright daylight lamps for use in a northern Swedish city. It apparently had a measurable impact on depression and suicide when they were deployed.

It's still under development, with no public release, but I think it's a bit unfair to call it vapourware, since he has produced plenty of material that demonstrates he has a working compiler and has clearly spent a great deal of time developing it, not just talking about it.

Whether it gets too much attention is debatable. He has some good ideas, imo, worth exploring, although I don't agree with all of his opinions. He has a prominent enough profile that it will likely inspire others to incorporate features from Jai if they are seen to be desirable, even if Jai is not ultimately released. (Personally, I think it will eventually.)

Jonathan Blow's new language, Jai, has some control over layout allowing easy switching between array of structs and struct of arrays without having to change the accessing code.