jcalx

Reminds me of turquoise cockpits [0], another workspace where visual fatigue considerations are important.

[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...

I would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for accurate this is at all.)

[0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1

[1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...

> Cortex, by default, can set a flag to trigger unsandboxed command execution

Easy fix: extend the proposal in RFC 3514 [0] to cover prompt injection, and then disallow command execution when the evil bit is 1.

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514

I didn't want to nitpick terminology, but yes, the tile-placement algorithm here is just a way of solving constraint satisfaction problems with DFS using a "minimum remaining values" heuristic [0]. The original use case for generating textures [1] is different in that the constraints are implicit in the input bitmap, but this project is a more straightforward tile placement with explicit constraints.

I think this algorithm is more efficient for generating maps with only local (adjacency) constraints, but setting this up as an integer linear program and plugging it into a constraint solver is more generalizable (say, if you wanted to enforce a constraint that rivers had to flow across the whole map and could not loop).

But I agree "wave function collapse" is not really the best name, for two reasons:

- the original repository mentions "it doesn't do the actual quantum mechanics, but it was inspired by QM", but it implies something QM-related.

- as an ORIE major in college that loved optimization, I think constraint satisfaction problems are really cool and actually somewhat approachable! So calling the heuristic something else like "wave function collapse" might limit people from finding previous work and known improvements (e.g. forward checking).

[0] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4700/2011fa/lectures/05...

[1] https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

Reminds me of Jasper Flick's Unity tutorial on hex terrain [0] which is similarly wonderfully detailed. Interesting contrast: this project uses premade tiles and constraint solving to match tile boundaries, while that one dynamically generates tile boundaries (geometries, blending, etc.) on the fly. Both enjoyable reads!

[0] https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/hex-map/

You can see an archived list of industrial security clearance decisions here [0] which is interesting, and occasionally entertaining, reading. "Drug involvement security concerns" usually involve either actively using drugs or, worse, lying to cover up drug use, both of which are viewed as security concerns and grounds for rejection.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170218040331/http://www.dod.mi...

Also see A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry's series of fortifications [0] regarding castles and their strategic importance, especially on how they were essential to local control of the area as opposed to "just" FOBs for military campaigns. (Incidentally the term "tyranny of the wagon equation" linked in the article also eventually leads to a different ACOUP series.)

[0] https://acoup.blog/2021/12/10/collections-fortification-part...

> Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

> History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

> My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

> There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

> And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

> So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

For reference: the base model 2025 Toyota Camry does 0-60 in 7.0s and the quarter mile in 15.4s [0].

[0] https://www.zeroto60times.com/vehicle-make/toyota-0-60-mph-t...

Not exactly the same aesthetic, but the Factorio blog has examples of early concept art in a minimal line-art style (like [0]) and I actually like it!

[0] https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/blog-sync/fff-420-line-art.p...

Can't wait for someone to buy boolean.exposed and teach me about some esoteric representation of booleans in memory that I'd never considered (either that or it's a very simple page).

Feels like something similar to the NFPA 704 safety square [0] — maybe they could copy that to mimic a relatively accepted "danger measurement" format.

Also of interest: hypercanes [1], my hurricane-adjacent Interesting Wikipedia Deep Dive, which (according to Wikipedia):

- require ocean temperatures of 120 °F (50 °C)

- have sustained winds of 500 mph (800 km/h)

- have barometric pressures in their centers sufficiently low enough to cause altitude sickness

- may persist for several weeks due to above low pressure

- may be as large as North America or as small as 15 mi (25 km) — Wikipedia has an unhelpful caption about the size of the "average hypercane" (!)

- extend into the upper stratosphere, unlike today's hurricanes (lower stratosphere)

- due to above height, may sufficiently degrade the ozone layer with water vapor to the point of causing (an additional) hazard to planetary life

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFPA_704

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

This article and its associated HN comment section continue in the long tradition of Big O Notation explainers [0] and getting into a comment kerfuffle over the finer, technical points of such notation versus its practical usage [1]. The wheel turns...

[0] https://nedbatchelder.com/text/bigo.html

[1] https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201711/toxic_experts.html

You'll probably like this short series on fy_iceworld if you haven't seen it already: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-legacy-of-fy_iceworld-c...

But yes, I was never really a 1.6 player but I felt the same way about Garry's Mod maps. Joining a random server and seeing the maps and assets download and never really knowing what you were going to spawn into... it was wonderfully weird in a way that reminds me of the individuality of the Old Internet™. It might be nostalgia talking but there's some crispness and snappiness to the Source engine that games these days don't quite have.

Reminds me of the classic Tyranny of Structurelessness [0] and how power accumulates out of necessity, convenience, informal networks, and so on.

[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Alternatively stated:

> The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

> Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.

> The signal is an attack.

―Blindsight, by Peter Watts

From the linked Hackaday article:

> If you don’t want to kill flies, wasps, bees, or other useful pollinators while eradicating the tiny little bloodsuckers that are the drone’s target, you need to be able to not only locate bugs, but discriminate mosquitoes from the others.

> For this, he uses the micro-doppler signatures that the different wing beats of the various insects put out. Wasps have a very wide-band doppler echo – their relatively long and thin wings are moving slower at the roots than at the tips. Flies, on the other hand, have stubbier wings, and emit a tighter echo signal. The mosquito signal is even tighter.

Fascinating engineering! Doesn't seem like it would be possible but it apparently is. There's also more visuals at about 17 minutes in the video embedded in that article, the signatures seem fairly distinct.

Spot The Drowning Child [0] if we're thinking of the same one — lifeguarding is a hard job!

[0] http://spotthedrowningchild.com/

Related PSA that drowning doesn't look like drowning [0] — people don't yell, splash, and wave like you might expect and is "almost always a deceptively quiet event".

[0] https://slate.com/technology/2013/06/rescuing-drowning-child...

As supplemental reading see "bulk positive randomness" as discussed here [0]. It is tempting, but fallacious, to imagine "luck" as a zero-sum, EV=0 (or worse) process across every domain of life, where all upside or alpha has long been arbitraged away. Yes, there are some domains where you want to minimize variance, like the distribution of transit times to the airport when you have a flight to catch, or the odds of being robbed in a bad neighborhood. But there are also many situations where meeting new people, trying new things, etc. have many upsides and few drawbacks, and for most people these are (1) common and (2) recognizable.

Apple's easing function (like others) is parameterized by physical characteristics (e.g. spring force, damping) that are easier to model from first principles, but there are other parameters (overshoot distance, anticipation size, animation time) that are more useful for animation. A closed-form parametrization with the latter might be tricky to derive, but some kind of iterative solver (plug in desired animation parameters, get values for the physical parameters) shouldn't be too difficult?

Context, for the above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It worked out the first time!

I have thought of this as knowing _about_ things, as opposed to knowing things, and not having the self-awareness to be able to differentiate between the two.

I've seen this most notably in a former coworker who enjoyed watching YouTube videos (especially when the rest of the team was hard at work, but that was another point of contention entirely). He thought himself very knowledgeable on various topics because he could readily regurgitate talking points, but if you asked him about second-order effects, or implicit simplifying assumptions, or how X from the video would be different if Y and Z were different, it was obvious how surface-level his "understanding" was.

Not specifically about kings but — I recommend The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer, for a very thorough look at daily life in this era.

More specifically about kings, ACoUP has a great writeup [0] on royal legitimacy and the various purposes of the king's court in the context of my favorite medieval shenanigans simulator, Crusader Kings III.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/02/18/miscellanea-thoughts-on-ckiii-...

I generally agree with these points but I sometimes find "do X, not Y" suggestions too prescriptive to be helpful. Compelling phrasing should be context-aware and mindful of how users actually use the product, what their pain points are, and what they find useful.

Largely I take issue with the use of metrics. "Create events 10x faster" reminds me of the "put hard numbers in your resume" advice that people blindly follow — it's not a useful description to use here! When I go into XYZ Calendar and create a new event by copy-pasting fields, I don't think "hey I wish this was 10x faster" but rather "I wish I didn't have to do this". Announcing the feature as "Duplicate events instantly" cuts right to the heart of the improvement without splitting hairs of "I can do unnecessary work N times faster".

For "fixed a thread deadlock that froze the UI for up to two second when creating a new file" vs. "we sped up new file creation, so you can now create a new file in under 20ms, a 100x speedup from v1.2" — if the new file stutter is a common complaint, we can celebrate this by acknowledging the flaw and its fix. "Creating a new file is now instant after we fixed a thread deadlock bug" conveys that (1) a common user annoyance is now gone, (2) we recognized that it was an annoying bug, and (3) we put in the work to fix it. And no "100x" in there — we didn't speed up an annoyance, we got rid of it entirely.

Of course performance metrics aren't always bad — "Gleam JavaScript gets 30% faster" announcement is great! But compiled language speedups is something that users care about, and not something we want to abstract away (e.g. by merely saying "faster" or "better"). Here, putting a concrete number in the title and letting it speak for itself is absolutely the right choice.

Context is everything for making writing compelling. On that note — Style: Towards Clarity and Grace [0] is the best book I have read on writing clearly and effectively.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style:_Lessons_in_Clarity_an...

From the title I was expecting some hardware faults that were transmissible (as opposed to merely widespread), like the classic "hardware virus" story from The Daily WTF: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-hardware-virus

My main gripe with fingerprint sensors on the back is that it's easy to inadvertently smudge the camera lens when unlocking the phone. Some phones have/had fingerprint unlock on the side power button which is similarly convenient, although I actually don't mind the underscreen sensors that are most common these days. I do appreciate being able to sneak a peek at my phone by discreetly unlocking it at very oblique angles that aren't possible with Face ID.

Reminds me of a semi-plausible mechanism for carnivorous flora from this [0] Worldbuilding Stack Exchange answer by ckersch:

> Bonegrass is a white fungus which grows in wheat fields. Most of the time, the bonegrass fields are normal wheat fields, indistinguishable from other wheat fields except for their exceptionally high yields and relatively low numbers of animal inhabitants. Of course, this entices lots of animals, large and small, to move into the area. Populations boom, fueled by the seemingly unnatural abundance of the wheat.

> And then the bonegrass blooms. Overnight, huge mycelial mats below the wheat fields become active, with white fungal growths growing up the stalks of the wheat plants, using their stalks for support. Then, simultaneously across hundreds of square miles, the bonegrass releases its paralytic spores. Within 12 hours, the wheat fields become pale, white places of death. The fungus then begins to grow over the paralyzed creatures, flooding their body with neurotoxins that keep them immobilized until they die from dehydration over the next few days.

> The dead animals quickly break down, broken apart by the fungus. As suddenly as the bonegrass grew, it will then die back, shrinking back beneath the earth, where it will slumber as the land above it slowly repopulates, drawn by the seeming gaia above the soil, and unaware of the horrors slumbering beneath...

Scary stuff. Symbiotic plant-fungi or plant-bacteria relationships seem like plausible mechanisms for "carnivorous" plants, even if it's not "plants directly eating people" a la Little Shop of Horrors. There are more good answers with a similar premise under the same SE question.

[0] https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/38354/how-...

The children yearn for ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ Frutiger Aero

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero)

I enjoy his writing style, and particularly his willingness to indulge in paragraphs of dryly humorous details, usually of the technical and operational varieties. For all their flaws, he and a few others (e.g. Alistair MacLean) have a particular flavor of "very competent protagonist relying on their wits and Very Particular Set of Skills" that other authors can't execute quite as well.