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errantsparkon Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing

Yeah and I can afford way more Legos now, I still prefer the old school kind. Compare 42054 to 8480. They're both great sets for sure, but the shuttle pieces are more versatile in other builds.

errantsparkon Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing

Yeah, it's pretty good. I love Lego, it's still undoubtedly the best toy. But it's also way worse than late 90's Technic, which really felt focused on piece versatility above all else.

errantsparkon Brokering Bricks: The World of Lego Investing

> You can be just as creative and have just as much fun with new sets.

You absolutely cannot. Don't get me wrong, I love Lego to this day but late 90's Technic is unmatched in it's versatility by a looooong shot.

errantsparkon PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

> I think the fact that pornography is viewed negatively, at least in public, is a good thing.

I'd love to see your thoughts on this expanded. I don't have a particularly rigorously formed opinion on this, but my gut disagrees. I'd settle for some links to articles/etc. that reflect your viewpoint.

errantsparkon PayPal stops payouts to models on Pornhub

What's the percentage of porn-related shadiness is because our society and business culture forces that? It seems similar to drug prohibitions etc. I haven't had to deal with a shady drug dealer in years now that weed is legal. Maybe if vice-clauses and the like weren't so ubiquitous we'd see more upright actors in the field.

errantsparkon Social Media Is Warping Democracy: Why It Feels Like Everything Is Going Haywire

> social media brought down the attention span to zero

> people just no longer critically process information, and move on to the next thing

Sadly I don't even think this is true. I think "people" in general have always been like this, and social media hasn't really changed that. You mentioned the barrier to entry dropping to zero. I think most of these issues are almost solely a result of that. The intellectual bias that used to be present in "the discourse" has been erased. The politicians/CEOs no longer have doubts, there's no reason to hedge. They know exactly how easy it is to manipulate the populace.

errantsparkon AMD Q4:16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, Threadripper Up To 32-Core 3970X

My home desktop is a NUC + eGPU and it's been working great for me for the past year or so. I love that I can just turn the power to the eGPU off when I'm not using it and run my whole computing setup for something like ~40W.

errantsparkon Re-Licensing Sentry

I'm really confused at the vitriol in the comments, does this license not become a true OSS license after the change period? IANAL but that seems to be the case to me. It's so confusing what part of this is frustrating? I think keeping a 36 month buffer of features to maintain an a commercially viable edge to fund work on a project is extremely reasonable. It seems like a really good and virtuous model.

Patents and Copyrights are more than an order of magnitude more temporally restrictive. This is great stuff, I hope it proves to be commercially viable and sees broader adoption.

errantsparkon BZFlag

That's a good first step but it doesn't really stop hackers. Specifically the two cheats that the parent mentions don't require the server to trust the client. There's mitigation that can be done to prevent wallhacks, but aimbot can be really difficult to detect without sophisticated tools, and even then fundamentally the cheat can operate as an intermediary between mouse input and the game receiving that mouse input which makes it impossible to directly detect without memory inspection. Essentially you're left with heuristic analysis of mouse movements, or more likely a "Overwatch" (CS:GO) type system where moderators/janitors are tasked with evaluating players to determine if they're cheating or not.

errantsparkon Some Blizzard employees are dreading BlizzCon

disable JS

it's in the Dev Tool options (F1) in Chrome

errantsparkon I Miss the Old Internet

I'm conflicted about this, my gut agrees with you but I don't want to because I'd like to hold on to the idea that it's possible to include and bring value to everyone.

errantsparkon I Miss the Old Internet

It's so hard to strike a balance between inclusion and 'eternal september'. Managing a community is incredibly hard work. I don't really know if I can think of a way to be both inclusive and preserve the value of a community indefinitely. It seems that at some point you really need barriers to entry to keep things sane.

errantsparkon Nim: Scripting Ease in a Compiled Language

I've been considering getting into Nim for a while now as something more lightweight/terse to write thin CLI utilities in. I'm glad to hear that it's performing well for this usecase. It's a very attractive alternative to Rust for it's simplicity and terseness.

I still haven't gotten around to picking it up though, these days I just use QuickJS for anything that needs to be reasonably portable and thin.

Maybe next side project...

errantsparkon FTC Brings First Case Against Developers of “Stalking” Apps

I can't agree with this enough, and I feel like the slope along which you slide as you start treating your offspring as a human and not a ward should be steeper and start earlier in almost all cases.

P.S. '93 til ;)

errantsparkon NordVPN confirms it was hacked

Vultr is a lesser-known VPS, ymmv. I had issues with several websites using Linode. I don't have a list, but iirc it was some gaming related service that took issue with the IP.

errantsparkon NordVPN confirms it was hacked

The problem with this is that jumping out onto the net from a VPS-allocated IP causes all sorts of trouble for "normal" internet use. For example you won't be able to use Netflix doing something like this.

errantsparkon Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

> also want a programmable bedroom light that can slowly dim on at morning

Oh you absolutely do, this has been by far the best (arguably only) benefit I've seen from home automation. Sunrise is now whenever is convenient. The lights slowly come on over 30 minutes and it feels like I'll wake up at some convenient time for my body during that period, rather than having my sleep interrupted by an infuriating alarm.

> A smart light will also fail at the worst possible way, and I don't want to deal with it.

I haven't had any problems with mine (v1 hues), they default to working like normal bulbs so the worst case scenario is you toggle the switch off and on and you get an illuminated lightbulb every time. Also (true of any LED light) they will continue to work even after you've shattered the glass by accident.

> changing the shape of the keys so that they would stop puncturing my pockets when I walk

Have you considered alternate solutions such as less-tight pants? ;P

errantsparkon Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event

Tencent owns a mere 5% of Actiblizzard and they generate less than 10% of their revenue in China. Sure it's an expanding market, but I don't think that the amount of pressure necessary to make it unprofitable is outside the reach of the protesting consumer-base. I don't really believe it will play out like that, but one can hope.

errantsparkon Rockbox – Free music player firmware

Wanted to weigh in here, I've got a 5g iPod (Wolfson DAC) with an SSD, upgraded battery and rockbox. It's fantastic, I use it to listen to podcasts before bed. I have something like 200Gb of music on it and I think the last time I charged it was over a month ago.

I think the interface could use a little polish, but that aside there is still no mobile listening experience that surpasses having all of your music on you all the time and knowing that when you're at 50% battery you've still got close to two days straight of listening at max volume.

errantsparkon China Grew Two Cotton Leaves on the Moon

Replying to the other comment on this, it's too deep for a normal reply but a hubble composite and a 3d render have very little to do with one-another outside the fact that they're both images.

errantsparkon Show HN: Create font in your own handwriting style

Unsurprisingly much like all ML things this (presumably) only works well if you're close to the training set. Even writing out pangrams the generated text only looks a little like my handwriting.

I specifically wrote double-decker As and Gs yet the the generated data has single story ones.

errantsparkon U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory: Marijuana Use and the Developing Brain

In general it seems like a great idea not to use drugs when your brain is developing. I wish this signal was louder in the zeitgeist. Drugs are just as much fun at age 25.

errantsparkon Tumblr

I don't think MAUs === how good a site is. I wasn't even a particularly active tumblr user at any point, I can't really say if it was much better 5 years ago. I do not want to be angry or sad about something. I'm just sharing my subjective experience and publicly mourning the loss of something that was valuable to me. I found a lot of positivity and value in the adult content on tumblr. It was of a flavor much more palatable to me than what I tend to find on the rest of the internet.

errantsparkon Tumblr

It's not, and I won't.

It's about having a safe community for self expression through sexual art. It's about a set of deeply regressive (American) cultural norms that stifle sexual expression and further marginalize non-normative individuals. It's about the death of a vibrant community that made people feel included and valued. It's about sex-positivity. It's about destigmatizing overt sexual expression.

errantsparkon Tumblr

https://www.statista.com/statistics/261925/unique-visitors-t...

Yeah ok, whatever.

I don't doubt that it's still a viable business, I don't care.

I feel a deep pain every time I think about it. Something beautiful was destroyed with no remorse. The world is worse off because of it. It feels like tearing down statues of the buddha. The one place on the internet where one could explore explicit sexuality without feeling gross and exploited. I will never forgive this destruction of a beautiful culture. The whole thing makes my blood boil.

errantsparkon Centennial Light

I cannot recommend 17776 highly enough. It is absolutely one of the best pieces of art that I've experienced in the past decade.

errantsparkon QuickJS JavaScript Engine

I can't wait to mess around with this, it look super cool. I love the minimalist approach, if it's truly spec compliant I'll be using this to compile down a bunch of CLI scripts I've written that currently use node.

I tend to stick with the ECMAScript core whenever I can and avoid using packages from NPM, especially ones with binary components. A lot of the time that slows me down a bit because I'm rewriting parts of libraries, but here everything should just work with a little bit of translation for the OS interaction layer which is very exciting.

errantsparkon Show HN: A tiny JS library for real-time localization of eye pupils

I'm all for being paranoid but what exactly is the threat model here? Someone is going to have a few seconds of video of you?

errantsparkon Tesla Model 3 deliveries beat Wall Street targets, shares up 7%

ahahah you are absolutely correct I was looking at the wrong zoom level on the chart, my mistake

errantsparkon Tesla Model 3 deliveries beat Wall Street targets, shares up 7%

and they lost three VPs in a week's time and the shares slumped correspondingly, this bump is despite that

[edit] my mistake about the slump in share price, I had misread the chart