Lucent
Joined 18 years ago
Karma
557
Submissions
133
Member since
Nov 25
openpgp4fpr:3057B3A23A272B93408E34C4ADFE984091983F93
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 1 month ago
On September 22, hundreds found their Threads account suspended, taking down every linked account and bricking any Meta hardware they owned with no consistent reasons provided or recourse available.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThreadsApp/comments/1wnkje9/my_inst...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThreadsApp/comments/1wng8u5/threads...
Comment · 1 month ago
Here is the creator of Kobo caught up in the same ban wave, who escaped only by knowing a Meta employee.
https://www.threads.com/@mtamblyn/post/DdqEWIGAF1g
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
The best adventure games are 2D because random walks there always return (Pólya). Not true in 3D, so puzzle games there end up either too easy or too difficult.
Comment · 1 month ago
I just got swept up in this mass Threads suspension yesterday, despite not using it. I am locked out of Facebook and Messenger, and my Portal, Oculus, and Glasses are now bricked. I pay them $12 for Instagram a month, mostly to deter username thieves, and that was oddly not suspended, despite being linked, so the "safety" claims ring hollow. Be very careful about giving your money to Meta. They are quick to unperson with no recourse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThreadsApp/comments/1wnkje9/my_inst...
Comment · 1 month ago
Good addition! I just added it.
Comment · 1 month ago
You're in luck. I just moved a lot more motion to the compositor. Cladogram got a big upgrade too in speed. Most annoying bug is that Chromium will not allow any SVG on the compositor if your devicePixelRatio isn't 1, which is practcally nobody on a modern laptop.
Comment · 1 month ago
This is vernacular picked up from Wikimedia commons for Homo rhodesiensis and its WikiData. It could be vandalism. I'll post to the Talk: and if it reverts, I'll reingest that source.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Homo_rhodesiensi...
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q131464
Edit: Regardless, I pulled it from production immediately out of an abundance of caution.
Comment · 1 month ago
I reproduced this bug and will have a fix out in an hour.
Comment · 1 month ago
This is the highest compliment, and I see why no other projects have tried to join all the different trees of life together or attach and reconcile traits. This was the majority of the project.
However, the unique "roll-up" visualization of traits brought in an interesting method of self-correction. For example, if any other phyla than the obvious 4 showed up with a single egg-laying species, I went back to the drawing board to find out where that incorrect join introduced the error.
Comment · 1 month ago
OneZoom is a great museum piece. Very engaging visualization that invites large touchscreen interaction. Impressive code behind it too for pruning offscreen vectors so the zoom stays smooth. On desktop however, perhaps due to my age, it gives me a bit of gorilla arm.
Thanks to open data, I offer the same node hierarchy of OTT, among 10 other backbones, but present it with 3 different (perhaps less dazzling) viewing mechanics switchable at the top: Icicle, which packs hierarchy into a fixed vertical height while allowing depth to stay horizontally reachable. Chronogram is the opposite, showing structure even 10 levels deep in a compact horizontal region, but at the expense of large vertical expansion. And Tree, the default, which is a compromise that can also show multiple winding paths simultaneously by folding them against the gutter.
I also focus less on the tree itself and more on trait overlay and rolling up thousands or even millions of species into compact segments so you can get a feel for how many chordates lay eggs or how many spiders are carnivorous at a glance. https://ptree.org/#OTT
Comment · 1 month ago
The gutter fold is entirely custom and took a month to get right. Try a link like this to see how the lines fold around each other in the gutter so hierarchy is preserved. https://ptree.org/#GBIF/Nutrition/42&view=tree&tab=wiki&open...
The project only exists thanks to thousands of scientists carefully cataloguing all this data and releasing it CC-BY. I am only the interface.
Comment · 1 month ago
The problem with rolling up 2.2 million species into 7 kingdoms is it surfaces data quality issues loudly. Ranking photos by popularity means one node mismatch in millions due to a homonym will send that up from 10 levels deep. As I find these, I'm trying to squash them.
That raccoon you see is actually suffering from Morbillivirus Canine Distemper Virus and that photo is correctly attached to that virus, and that bird is indeed eating a lungfish. I actually do penalize outlier favorite counts for photos because they're often meme-ish. I may blacklist this so the 2nd most favorited lungfish can surface. There are a lot of detailed rules that score which photo you get based on aspect ratio, whether the subject is in captivity, alive, etc.