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PetitPrince

1,546 karma · joined December 7, 2012

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PetitPrince··on Zigbee vs. Matter over Thread:Understanding IoT Protocol Performance in Practice
Zigbee: You can buy vendor independant bridge / antenna and vendor independant automation server (Home Assistant being the most popular).

I guess a bridge vendor could pull the rug on the antenna ("your Sonoff zigbee antenna is now only compatible with Sonoff zigbee product")(to be clear: they've never done that), but the format is open enough that there's ton of alternative suppliers and open source bridge (the aforementioned zigbee2mqtt).

In any case, I've got a good amount of both Ikea tradfri and Philips Hur bulb and they have never contacted an Ikea or Philips hardware or software of their life.

PetitPrince··on We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars
So this interpret the sidebar as a temporary UI element (like a popover window), but for me I'd rather interpret the sidebar as a constant element (like the sidebar of Windows Explorer). And indeed I'm using Firefox with Tree Style Tabs or Sidebery to have an explorer-like tree view of my browsing session; it makes more sense for me to have this as a permanent fixture.

With that in mind, I would think this kind of preference should be under the control of the browser, not of an individual website.

PetitPrince··on How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood
"Vancouver never plays itself" as Tony Zhao and Taylor Ramos explain in on of their later Every Frame a Painting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU
PetitPrince··on Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed
Because people like the fish flavor ?

Same reason we use tomato paste instead of a MSG + food coloring or parmesan instead of MSG + some protein I would say.

PetitPrince··on Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap
Are you describing what Mapillary is doing ? It's a crowdsourced street level imagery provider (owned by Facebook since 2020, but still contributing to OSM), but they do auto-detection of feature (you can see that in the online OSM editor: Map Data > Photo Overlays > Mapillary > Map Features).

I vaguely remember a blog post about doing photogrammetry out of their images, but I'm not entirely sure about it.

PetitPrince··on 'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling
Meta: your first paragraph could really use a quotation indicator / mark. I suspect it was intentional: the ragebait was very effective on me before reading the rest of your comment (I was ready for defend my usage of tailscale to access my iot stuff).
PetitPrince··on Garzed – my garden waters itself off soil-moisture sensors
I guess a good amount of the HN crowd would say that this can be replicated from within Home Assistant (probably with some LLM help) with the added benefit of even better hardware freedom (from cheap Aliexpress soil sensor and/or sprinker or drip system to brand-name ones) and total control of data.

Still, the same thing was said about Dropbox; hopefully there's enough people willing to pay for the convenience to sustain this business.

PetitPrince··on My quest to see all of Tetris
NES Tetris have memory système that tries to repetition. As per Tetris wiki:

> The randomizer features a slight protection against direct repetition. The first roll generates a value 0-7 and will accept and deal on any value other than the previous piece dealt or the dummy value of 7. The piece history is initially empty. If the first roll fails, it progresses to a second roll that generates a value 0-6 and deals that piece.

Later games would evolve into a more ambitious history system like in Tetris the Grand Master, or a "bag" (Fisher Yates) system.

From a game design point of view, this avoids repetition in the distribution which generally suuuucks while playing.

PetitPrince··on Blogging can just be stating the obvious
Yes, for instance science communication is a whole field. Otherwise we wouldn't hold Carl Sagan et al. in such high regard.
PetitPrince··on Help I accidentally a wigglegram
My pedant self stands corrected. I wonder if some crazy people made a reverse praxinoscope now.
PetitPrince··on Help I accidentally a wigglegram
My constraint was a tongue-and-cheek "use as little technology as possible" (like what was available in 1999). I think nowaydays it's still more economical to do one pass of photogrammetry on your talent then do a mocap and actor replacement ?
PetitPrince··on Help I accidentally a wigglegram
To add to the other comments if you have the idea to use multiple camera to make the same effect but at a higher quality (and if you somehow sort how the synchronisation problem), then congrats ! You have invented bullet time, as demonstrated 27 years ago* in the Matrix.

*ouch, I feel old

PetitPrince··on How I play video games with spinal muscular atrophy
That's cool !

Kind reminder that you can be disabled and still kick ass in videogames. I have in mind Brolylegs (RIP) [1] who ranked very well in competitive Street Fighter 4, despite having to play with his literal face.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrolyLegs

PetitPrince··on USB Power Delivery: Plugging into the Benefits
Yeah it uses a tiny ceramic heating element to heat the bite area up to uncomfortable temperature. It's supposed to denature the toxin and/or counter inflammation. Either way it does reduce moskito itchiness with me.
PetitPrince··on MapComplete: Maps about various topics which you can contribute to
Streetcomplete can filter the map with a variety of filters for features you can edit or complete(Street lighting, Surfaces, Sidewalks, Bike paths, Street parking, Addresses, Places, Things, Buildings). Plus there's some specific "quests" where you can complete information for specific POI ("Does this bench have a backrest? Yes|No", "Where does this fire hydrant lies? On the grass | On the roadway | On a walkway | On a parking).

Mapcomplete also offers filling info about existing POI, but you can filter on specific theme (Drinking water, sports) or very specific theme (etymology) or even your own. There's also an UI to add new POIs; I don't think it's possible with StreetComplete.

Either way both are great.

PetitPrince··on Web Browsers on Video Game Consoles
As mentioned with other comment, web browsers on console were often a popular and easy way to jailbreak your console and install custom firmwares, etc. The 3DS one was bonkers, and I think you could directly download games from Nintendo servers without verification?
PetitPrince··on Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones
Yes, there other mobile editor that are arguably more featured (EveryDoor, OSM Go, OsmAnd), but StreetComplete has a nice gamification / simplification of UI that makes editing a breeze.

MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/

PetitPrince··on Apple WWDC 2026
As other comment suggested, the way I see it Americans are addicted to hyperbolas. Instead of "Thank you" it's "Thank you so much". So when you genuinely want to thank someone because that person went above and beyond (saved your life, avoided you a substantial hassle, etc.) then it's difficult to convey that.
PetitPrince··on Webcam head tracking, webcam to control in‑game FOV
And even with milsim FPS, as those blog posts from more than 10 years ago shows: https://dslyecxi.com/category/trackir/
PetitPrince··on Cate v1.0 is out: The Infinite canvas workspace for developers
I conceptually agree that managing windows should be the task of... the window manager, but at the same time it's easier and lower friction to both develop inside of an app and get some user to test new features
PetitPrince··on Why most product tours get skipped
> * Videogames (i.e. the tutorial). For very similar reasons to the above ;)

Oftentimes it's less jarring to have an invisible tutorial though (a level made to exploit the new gameplay element / feature). But it depends on what you want the user to learn and the type of videogame; I don't mind a guided tour in more strategic games (RTS, turn by turn RPG, ...).

PetitPrince··on Computer Use is 45x more expensive than structured APIs
Not OP but I think you have the right intuition in making a difference between using the app / contribute to the app. You may want to read https://diataxis.fr/ which elaborate on this idea and add another dimension (action / cognition) to this.
PetitPrince··on Show HN: How LLMs Work – Interactive visual guide based on Karpathy's lecture
Have you reread what was produced by Claude Code before publishing ? This thing in one of the first paragraph jumps out:

> you end up with about 44 terabytes — roughly what fits on a single hard drive

No normal person would think that 44 TB is a usual hard drive size (I don't think it even exists ? 32TB seems the max in my retailer of choice). I don't think it's wrong per se to use LLM to produce cool visualization, but this lack of proof reading doesn't inspire confidence (especially since the 44TB is displayed proheminently with a different color).

PetitPrince··on Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction
> Same with emulation, really; had that not been developed, I doubt Nintendo would care about their back catalogue.

I agree with the previous point (no WoW classic without private server), I'm a bit more doubtful about Nintendo. They did remakes before it was cool (see: Super Mario All Stars), and the Super Nintendo -> Gameboy Advance pipeline was well received.

PetitPrince··on Swiss AI Initiative (2023)
Not quite: it's a collab between both ETHZ (Zürich, German speaking) and EPFL (Lausanne, French speaking). According to the website, the actual hardware is distributed all over the country (including in the Italian part).
PetitPrince··on DaVinci Resolve – Photo
Capture One express Fujifilm was discontinued and folded in into the regular Capture One. The out of box processing of raf is still top notch (at least for my x-t3). There's a subscription-less option.
PetitPrince··on iBook Clamshell
Classic Thinkpad use to do that as well. A reasoning I've read somewhere (here perhaps ?): the laptop is here to serve you, not be an advertisement.
PetitPrince··on Conway's Game of Life, in real life
My Alma matter has a jumbo version of this, in which the game if life is one of several available mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWall
PetitPrince··on Home Assistant waters my plants
As a another comment said, the smarter way to have a smart light is to replace the switch with a smart one or even better put a relay behind the existing dumb switch to smartify the switch. For me it's important to have a manual override; you shouldn't need an app for a thing as basic as turning the lights on.
PetitPrince··on Home Assistant waters my plants
> I think I need more Zigbee repeaters to get a reliable mesh network, but to date I haven’t found any consumer-grade devices certified for use in NZ.

Since many devices are also Zigbee router (it's a mesh network after all), maybe some additional lightbulb for exterior would suffice ?

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