Hacker News Reader

nuclearsugaron Patrick Stewart has died

His portrayal of Picard helped me to understand what real maturity could look like. He will be greatly missed. Pour one out for Patrick.

nuclearsugaron Discord will soon let anyone find public server messages through Google

Discord is ok once you get used to it. But golly the various settings panels is a scattered confusing mess, beware.

nuclearsugaron What Adobe v ArtCraft teaches us

Would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall at the Adobe offices currently

nuclearsugaron What Adobe v ArtCraft teaches us

It's not an ideal replacement as of yet, but the writing is in the wall and I bet in a few year time it (or some other clone) will be quite mature and stable.

nuclearsugaron Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years

Overall yes. When I attend a meetup then I have a mindset of putting myself out there and should I meet an interesting and kind person, then just ask to get coffee with them sometime and talk shop. Also I remind myself that the current conversation went well from my perspective, so probably from theirs too.

nuclearsugaron Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years

Indeed I've had a similar realization and it's a very helpful reminder. Also every time I go to a meetup, I remind myself: to be interesting, you must be interested.

nuclearsugaron Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years

My experience is that meetups have largely the same dynamic, but the attendees very rarely reach out to get coffee. I can't think of a single instance in recent memory where someone has asked me, and yet I have many experiences where people later thank me for instigating. That used to bother me until I spoke with some people about it and realized it seemingly doesn't happen much these days outside of business pitches.

But personally I cannot afford to worry if they think it's cringe. For a long time I was lonely, even in a healthy marriage, but having friends that I see regularly is something that I have found to be a vital aspect of having good mental health and avoiding stagnation. So I continually take the risk and put myself out there when I meet an interesting and kind person.

nuclearsugaron Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years

These days I must make a real effort to be social on a regular basis. Personally I've found satisfaction in going to meetups to find like minds. I also go with my gut and in the moment ask to swap Instagram usernames with interesting people and promptly schedule with them to get coffee. If they prove to be as interesting and kind as I had sensed, then I invite them to a potluck dinner party which I throw every other month. In this way, I invite people under my umbrella, keep them in my life by regularly seeing them, slowly build a friendship, and hopefully they make friends with the regulars at dinner party. I must continually remind myself that I am the instigator and it's feels quite strange as a heavily introverted person. I don't particularly enjoy being the instigator for most social occasions but the pros outweigh the cons.

nuclearsugaron Sharing AI progress in mathematics

Relevant:

"As AI Closed In on ‘Unique Games’ Proof, Researchers Raced to Beat the Machines"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/as-ai-closed-in-on-unique-gam...

nuclearsugaron A Man Who Saw Humanity from Two Billion Years Away

The book that he wrote next, Star Maker, is a wonderful read and is quite early for the genre of scifi. Incredible scope and I still think about it often.

nuclearsugaron A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion

> “None of our data acquisition programmes buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books.” German booksellers are not convinced. They are sure, based on the vast orders, that the process is happening anyway via third-party service providers.

nuclearsugaron Flux 3

Hope the open-weights reduces the VRAM requirement compared to Flux 2.

nuclearsugaron Show HN: Mail Memories – A desktop app to rescue photos from Gmail

This script will extract all of the attachments from a MBOX file - https://gist.github.com/georgy7/3a80bce2cd8bf2f9985c

nuclearsugaron Why I email complete strangers

I agree with this and have received insights on difficult challenges, but I've found that each year it gets more difficult to find an email address for someone.

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

The VJ Curator app is a fork of VLC where you can press the 0-9 hotkeys to easily curate the video clips. After pressing a number key then the video clip will be automatically moved into a folder with a matching number - https://github.com/wivy1/vj-curator

Collection of JSX scripts for After Effects which automate repetitive production tasks since I often work with hundreds of comps in my projects - https://github.com/nuclearsugar/AfterEffectsScripts/

nuclearsugaron Astronauts on ISS told to shelter as repairs under way to fix air leaks

A bit of a tangent, but the fictional book "Children of Time" takes this to wild extremes. Really fun read

nuclearsugaron Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app

For anyone seeking more info, check out these articles -

https://www.patreon.com/posts/apple-has-its-on-148395613

https://www.patreon.com/posts/128473586

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?

I love my Logitech Lift Vertical Ergonomic Mouse since it completely fixed my wrist pain. Also it can memorize 3 different Bluetooth connections and toggle between them via a small button on the bottom.

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/shop/p/lift-vertical-ergonomi...

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://www.jasonfletcher.info/

VJ Loop Artist experimenting with 3D animation, machine learning, and compositing.

nuclearsugaron Maggots, an efficient source of protein

Why'd y'spill yer beans?

nuclearsugaron Meta Segment Anything Model 3

Here are two plugins for After Effects - https://aescripts.com/mask-prompter/ https://aescripts.com/depth-scanner-lite/

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

Just finished generating alien bugs and then rigging/animating by hand. Loads of fun and very satisfying to visualize the ideas in my mind. https://youtu.be/sMYmnQlF_Ww

And here's my tech notes - https://www.jasonfletcher.info/vjloops/insectoid-protocol.ht...

nuclearsugaron Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default

Those of us doing creative production work really don't have a chance since the majority of apps only support Win/Mac. I understand the tech but cannot escape it.

nuclearsugaron A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

Assume an average user that doesn't understand the core tech, but does understand that it's been trained on internet scale data that was created by humans. How can they be expected to not anthropomorphize it?

nuclearsugaron Gödel's theorem debunks the most important AI myth – Roger Penrose [video]

I've never heard of Godel's beliefs before. Where did you learn of this?

nuclearsugaron Show HN: I've made a Monte-Carlo raytracer for glTF scenes in WebGPU

I think there will certainly be an AI 3D render engine at some point. But currently AI is used in 3D render engines to assist with denoising. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.92/render/layers/denois...

nuclearsugaron Llama.cpp Now Supports Qwen2-VL (Vision Language Model)

I recently fine-tuned the Qwen-Coder-7b-Instuct model to generate Milkdrop presets. Pretty amazing to see what can be done locally. https://huggingface.co/InferenceIllusionist/MilkDropLM-7b-v0...

nuclearsugaron MilkDropLM – an LLM for generating MilkDrop shader code

Several years ago I curated through all 52K presets, selected the very best presets, and then organized them into categories and subcategories. So I've been curious if an LLM could be fine-tuned on this dataset.

When the Qwen-Coder-7b-Instuct model was released, it seemed like open-source models have matured to the point that it's worth trying out. I teamed up a InferenceIllusionist and started fine-tuning the model. The results have been exciting to play with and so we've released the model for anyone to experiment with.

nuclearsugaron Show HN: MilkDropLM – generate presets for the MilkDrop music visualizer

I've been obsessed with MilkDrop for a long time. Several years ago I curated through all 52,000 presets, selected the very best presets, and then organized them into categories and subcategories. So I've been curious if an LLM could be fine-tuned on this dataset and then generate new presets. When the Qwen-Coder-7b-Instuct model was released, it seemed like the open-source models have matured to the point that it's worth trying out. So I teamed up a InferenceIllusionist and started doing some fine-tuning experiments of the model. The results have been exciting to play with and so we've released the model for anyone to experiment with.

What is MilkDrop? It’s a music visualization engine which reacts in real time to the music. MilkDrop has a long 23 year history, has been ported to numerous systems, and a robust community of users that have made tons of original presets. Today, there is a new generation of artists using the NestDrop app within their live concert performances. I'm one of the developers of NestDrop.

Feel free to ask me any questions.

nuclearsugaron Ask HN: What book had a big impact on you as a child or teenager?

Star Maker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon