smcameron
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
1,985
Submissions
532
Member since
Dec 1
Author of Word War vi, Space Nerds in Space, and gaseous-giganticus
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 21 days ago
Not of that era, but Moral Orel is a modern (2005-2008) parody of Davey and Goliath (not sure parody is the right word, Moral Orel is kind of its own thing, but apes the style of Davey and Goliath.)
Comment · 1 month ago
Scott Manley has a couple of nice videos about wormholes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7e-1bRpweo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVO8nvb1o2w
The second video is about how the first video was made.
Comment · 2 months ago
Presumably, not to be confused with Rexx[1]. Namespace collisions ... or perhaps "wrecks".
Comment · 2 months ago
Must be nice. I live in Virginia, outside Richmond. For the past 8 years, the power company has failed to provide me with even 3 nines of power availability (that means at least 9 hours of outage every year for the past 8 years. Just had a 17 hour outage as of last night, lost everything in my fridge. Again.)
Comment · 2 months ago
Thanks for pointing me to that! Definitely some cool ideas in there. Almost seems like some of those ideas could be incorporated into git itself.
Comment · 2 months ago
I wonder if you could replace the whole github issues feature with just a directory within each git repo named "Issues/". Within that, have another couple directories, "open/", and "closed/". Within "open", have a directory per issue, e.g. "such-and-such-does-not-work/". Within each issue directory, have "issue.txt", or "issue.md", which takes the place of the page for each issue on github. You could store other things in the issue directory which "issue.md" could reference, e.g. screen shots, logs, whatever. When an issue is closed, it gets git mv'ed to "closed/". You want to see a list of open issues sorted by time? Just "ls -ltr Issues/open". Want to see open issues related to the frakfrobber? "grep -i frakfrobber Issues/open/*". Add a comment to an issue? "vim Issues/open/my-issue/issue.md; git add !$; git commit -m 'Updated my-issue';" It would move the entire issues subsystem back under control of bare "git" and make it portable. Undoubtedly, I am not the first to think of such a thing.
Comment · 2 months ago
I built a model sailboat[1] one time, and if it were for myself and not a gift, I would have named it "Sea Hacker".
[1] It was "Schooner Irene" from here: http://www.bearospaceindustries.com/boats2.html
Comment · 2 months ago
I recently was sent patches for my open source space game[1] that added cascaded shadow mapping[1] and gravitational lensing[3] for black holes, both things that I've wanted for years, but found too difficult to tackle. The patches were made with Claude Opus doing pretty much all the work, guided by a human. The quality of the patches was, in my estimation, pretty damn good. It didn't do weird things, it used the infrastructure already present, it looked like what I wish I could have written. It was clearly not plagiarized in bulk, in as much as it was so well integrated with my existing code, though I imagine all CSM code/shaders and gravitational lensing shaders tend to look pretty similar, or at least do similar things. It was eye-opening to find out that Claude was capable of doing such a thing.
Neither of these changes affect the game play, they are both purely aesthetic in their effects, without introducing anything which might be called "art" in a traditional sense, unless you count crudely modeling the behavior of light in shaders and C code as "art", but at that point the distinction between code and art vanishes. I had previously had a "no-ai" policy in my codebase, just as a kind of over-reaction, and kind of, "if I ban it, then I don't have to think about it" response. But these patches... after studying them, there's just no way I wasn't accepting them.
[1] https://github.com/smcameron/space-nerds-in-space [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
Comment · 3 months ago
No, you don't commit trash to a public branch, EVER, if you can help it. Your commits are as perfect as you can make them, and that does not mean squashed in a trash compactor. That means one logical idea per commit, compiles and works as perfectly as you can make it. Use stgit, and this is easy. You do not break git bisect. No need to squash your trash in a trash compactor. Your standards are lower than mine, not higher.
Comment · 3 months ago
For TTS I wonder how this compares to nanotts[1] with the en-GB voice, which is sort of unreasonably good.
Comment · 3 months ago
At my local hackerspace, people sometimes laser cut solder stencils out of transparencies -- the plastic sheets you use with overhead projecters. The trick is to put a piece of paper under the transparency when laser cutting, otherwise they tend to melt too much and deform, but somehow the piece of paper prevents this, maybe the laser needs something non-transparent to interact with to get the heat in quickly and move on quickly. Anyway they worked pretty well, but obviously not as durable as steel, so after some number of uses they start to wear out. (Can't remember how many really, but probably something like 20? more than just 3 or 4 I think. Probably also depends on the density of holes, a big swiss cheesed area will fail sooner.) If the circuit's not too big you can cut several stencils out of one transparency all in one go.
Comment · 3 months ago
That breaks git bisect.
Comment · 3 months ago
Disagree. You need small, git bisectable commits. Use stgit to do it and it's nearly effortless.
Comment · 3 months ago
> Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful. You end up juggling branches and commits, and running scary rebase -i commands that can leave your tree in a half-broken state if you so much as sneeze.
I mean, just use stgit[1] to maintain a stack of patches instead of parallel branches, it's so much better. You can easily wrangle thousands of patches (aka commits) with stgit.
A lot of people, on first encountering stgit, read a bit about it, think "why do I need this? I can do the same thing with just plain ol' git.". Yeah, you can. But not at scale. Not practically. Not with thousands of commits. And it makes the case when you just have a few tens of commits absolutely trivial. Try it for awhile and you'll find it indispensible.
Comment · 3 months ago
I've heard of use after free, but I've only heard UAF to mean Ukraine Armed Forces.