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ethanholt1

420 karma · joined April 29, 2024

rotting away emholt1@proton.me https://github.com/ethanholt1
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ethanholt1··on You can use a chicken for a camera stabilizer and it works
Try not to drop it!
ethanholt1··on Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted
I dislike the immediate jumping to “war, sabotage, destruction!” that happened in this article. Cable breakage happens quite often, and sometimes are caused by such menial things as sea debris, or at times, sharks chewing on them [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissacristinamarquez/2020/07/...

ethanholt1··on not(hot)wheels
I’ve always found MSCHF very strange. They sell strange products for exorbitant amounts (see the series of boxes with keys in them,) and I theorize they may be a money laundering scheme.

They even sold those big red boots for $350.00!!

ethanholt1··on Immersive Linear Algebra (2015)
I hope that this sets a standard for future textbooks/publications. I haven’t been able to grasp several concepts in math unless I was able to properly visualize it, which most modern textbooks do with a terribly compressed and unsaturated JPG.
ethanholt1··on Why you can hear the temperature of water
Humans can sense quite a few strange things. Like the smell of rain up to 100 parts per trillion.
ethanholt1··on Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun
Whenever I was about 9-10, I used to love reading books, and I read about 1-3 full novels a month. Whenever I graduated elementary school and went into middle school, the required reading that was assigned left me to have no more time reading what I found interesting, which eventually led to me just losing my interest in books.
ethanholt1··on Deletion of user account
This has to be illegal, right? There’s no way this is allowed. It can’t be legally or morally correct to hold someone’s data, and when asked to remove that data from your servers via account deletion, ask for 20 dollars. Adobe does this too, and I feel that subscription based models and hypermonetization is going to become more and more common in the next 10 year.
ethanholt1··on The fishy death of Red Lobster
I haven’t been to Red Lobster since 2019, and even during that trip the quality of the food was severely degraded from what I remembered it to be. Their garlicky biscuits were quite nice, though. What baffles me about this story is the fact that they’re continuing to sell the endless shrimp, despite the fact that it lost them 11 million dollars. Old habits die hard, I guess.
ethanholt1··on AI Photo Geolocation
It was correctly able to identify several photos of my vacation to NC, down to the exact location where the photo was taken on the hiking trail. Pretty scary. Additionally, just to be sure, I used an EXIF data wiper to make sure it wasn’t pulling data from there and tried each photo in a seperate Incognito instance. Still got it correct, all 3 times. Mind boggling.
ethanholt1··on The Snapdragon 855's iGPU
I was able to get Counter-Strike 2 running on an iGPU of a fourth gen Radeon chip. Don’t remember the name, but I got barely 10FPS and it was unplayable, but it ran. And it was amazing.
ethanholt1··on Roblox players to start seeing video ads in its virtual realms
Roblox has been on a constant downward trend. They’ve been doing some pretty awful stuff, including exploitation of children developers [0], unregulated market which encourages kids to gamble, lackluster moderation allowing kids to be harassed or worse, [both 1] and allowing manipulative and predatory games on their site [2].

[0] https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ?si=Cwfswyot9_FT29Fy

[1] https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY?si=MbT71UNeO0vEPSrr

[2] https://youtu.be/cGAXGroHZKA?si=mlCDY02aUXaJ9EPQ

ethanholt1··on BASIC turns 60
Happy birthday to the language that got me into software. Admittedly, BASIC as a language was quite limiting, and, well, basic. At least the flavor I was using. I made quite a few rudimentary games on my dad's old TRS-80 Color Computer, and eventually learned C because of it. BASIC may not be the greatest language power-wise, but it damn well may be the greatest just because of how iconic and important it was to the programming sphere as a whole.
ethanholt1··on New startup sells coffee through SSH
I wasn’t the one who made this, fwiw.
ethanholt1··on I've forked neofetch to keep it alive
Reminds me of “I no longer build software, I now build furniture out of wood.” https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
ethanholt1··on Cyclic Is Shutting Down
I briefly used Cyclic for my web hosting solution. It wasn’t great, it felt like their website was barely hanging on and took several seconds to load select pages of my dashboard. I guess they finally caved.
ethanholt1··on Please don't share our links on Mastodon
That seems like a problem of It’s Foss’ website, not Mastodon. If you’re hosting a presumably static website, a news website no less, it should be able to handle a spike of viewer influx if you make a viral article. Seems like they’re pinning the blame on Mastodon rather than fixing their site.
ethanholt1··on Z80 is dead – The chip that changed my world – and yours
Some folks are working on making a drop-in replacement for the Z80, as open source and free silicon. Git repo is here. https://github.com/rejunity/z80-open-silicon
ethanholt1··on The Internet Archive's last-ditch effort to save itself
If this makes the IA website go down, we are going to lose so much important internet history. For example, Garry’s Mod recently had almost all of its Nintendo addons taken down, and they were republished on the IA. So if we lose the IA, we might honestly lose quite a lot of preserved media, between games, videos, audio, and everything else.
ethanholt1··on Phreaking
This guy made a really good video about phreaking and how it worked. https://youtu.be/4tHyZdtXULw?si=yIoK7o7zbJ0gB1Fj
ethanholt1··on Neofetch Has Been Archived
NeoFetch hasn’t had a commit since 2022, and a release hasn’t been made since 2020. I guess the writing was on the wall. There’s several nice alternatives, but I usually just use fastfetch.
ethanholt1··on Reentry – An Orbital Simulator
I probably should’ve specified, the mission aspect feels a lot like KSP. In both games, you complete missions, level up astronauts, and use those better astronauts to complete missions (at least in the campaign mode.)
ethanholt1··on Ask HN: I can no longer like React, do you?
I tried to learn React for one of my websites. I wasn't ever able to get past the guide on the site due to it being so, so, so complex. I stuck with Vue and it worked fine.
ethanholt1··on Reentry – An Orbital Simulator
Interesting concept, but this feels a lot like Kerbal Space Program, and that game has thousands of mods under its belt. Credit where credit is due, though, the graphics look fantastic, and I appreciate the attention to detail with the cockpit.
ethanholt1··on Apple MacBook Air 15-Inch M3 Review
Apple’s silicon is really, really, really powerful. Enough to run Death Stranding on a laptop without a fan. Sucks it runs macOS though. There is an experimental distro of Linux for Apple silicon, but it’s still in development and doesn’t run very much software.
ethanholt1··on AI is making Meta's apps basically unusable
> My Facebook is engulfed with AI-generated images and gullible users who seem to have no idea that they are looking at fakes.

I honestly believe that most, if not all, of the users replying to these AI generated posts may in fact be bots themselves, built to boost engagement. It's a downward spiral. AI generates image > Bots congratulate it > It learns to generate images more like it > Images become even more deformed. It's gotten pretty bad. https://twitter.com/henningsanden/status/1776303455717535840

ethanholt1··on Ask HN: What's Rabbit R1 business model?
It’s an “all you can eat” business model. They’re offering more than any user will realistically use, therefore bringing in more users for the deal they’re offering, therefore more units sold, therefore more profit.
ethanholt1··on A proof that Unix utility sed is Turing complete
A lot of things that you wouldn’t expect to be Turing complete are. Magic the Gathering, the video game Terraria, and HTML, to name a few.