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tlahtinen

55 karma · joined September 24, 2025

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tlahtinen··on Tells of a Slop UI
Earlier this year I used Claude to design a screen for an Unreal game I work on. At first I thought wow, what a great layout, this is a game changer and gives me a huge advantage.

Less than a year later I am embarrassed how Claude it looks - blinking dot in the corner, double // separating header text, the font choices... now I see the same patterns everywhere, and I'm sure the audience is picking up on it too.

I still use Claude in my work, but a lot more sparingly; I ask for color scheme and font suggestions (no Rajdhani or Share Tech Mono!), but they're mostly for inspiration and I'm not blindly copying them. It feels like I'm being smarter about it, but maybe in a year I'll realize I still haven't climbed out of the trap :)

tlahtinen··on UFO Series Home Page: "UFO" TV Series from 1970
Definitely, the vibe of an international secret organization with cool vehicles is very much in line with the series. Although funnily enough I found contradicting interviews with Julian Gollop (the lead designer) as for what the level of influence was.

"I remember going out and buying a video tape of the old Gerry Anderson UFO TV series, and the thing that inspired me from that was the idea of having a worldwide organisation that was set up to stop this alien menace." - Now Gamer, 2011 (https://web.archive.org/web/20111026175106/http://www.next-g...)

"Despite such inspiration, Julian actually hadn’t seen Gerry Anderson’s 1970s UFO TV series before writing the game, despite the identical title and scenario. “After we finished I bought one of the videos, but to be honest I found it a bit boring.”" - Amiga CD32 magazine, 1994 (https://archive.org/details/amiga-cd-32-gamer-issue-5/page/n...)

tlahtinen··on Show HN: Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer
Super cool project! These kinds of viewers seem to pop up every few days, but this one is the best one so far. For feedback, I found it a bit odd that when selecting Sombrero Galaxy for example it zooms to the black hole M104 at the center of it, and actually viewing the entire galaxy then requires several mouse wheel spins :) Otherwise, great stuff.
tlahtinen··on StemDeck, a free, open-source and local AI stem separator
Good use of AI!

Audacity can also do this through the OpenVINO plugins and I've been happy with its results (https://github.com/intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity).

tlahtinen··on I built a browser-native SysEx librarian for 80s/90s synthesizers
> The sloppy marketing site is really off-putting.

Yep, got to agree. The language is just... eugh. It doesn't feel genuine. I could make that comment for a million other sites, but for some reason this one annoys me extra much.

> I'd honestly be curious what those “83+ vintage & modern synths” are but you don't even provide a list…

It's on the site if you hover over the '80 hardware synths' at the top. I'd copypaste it but the layout makes it unnecessarily difficult.

Also, the site lists the price as both $63 and $49 (I'm in Canada).

Anyway, as a fellow synth fan, to the author: don't be discouraged. But consider writing the website in your own voice.

tlahtinen··on Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
This is a very promising announcement for Unreal game development specifically. For any other purpose I wouldn't care as much.

Perforce definitely needs a challenger. It is not the incumbent because it is particularily simple to use or administer. Git is actually way simpler when it comes to branching operations for example.

The reasons why p4 is often preferred in gamedev have already been mentioned in other comments: large project support, permissions, file locking and so on. Another key reason p4 is the king for Unreal dev is just how well it's supported inside the engine. Not perfect, but it's the best supported VCS because it's what Epic uses. Even the Git plugin is painfully unfinished, because Epic does not internally use it. So with Lore I expect them to give it first class support. I'd recommend Git a lot more if the support in Unreal was better.

(background; I've been in gamedev for almost two decades now, 2-200 person companies, every kind of engine and version control system. I prefer git where I can use it: for Unreal that means small projects and/or tech savvy team members. Pick the tool that is right for the job and the team.)

tlahtinen··on The pivot
It's not out of the question.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.14060 https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/tropical-rai...

And the planet may well have been warmer in the past, but the ecosystems had millions of years to adapt to it.

tlahtinen··on Quicksort explained IKEA-style
I'm a programmer (after a fashion) but I don't know how quicksort works.

This is how I understand it after reading these instructiöns, without looking up any further explanation:

1. Choose a random element as the 'center' point of the sort

2. That element defines the maximum 'height' (value)

3. Anything that is larger than that value, is moved to the right side of the 'center'

4. Anything that is smaller than that value, is moved to the left side of the center. After this, the array is partially sorted.

5. The sorting process is repeated on both 'sides' independently, picking a new random center element and so on

What isn't clear, is how often the process needs to be repeated, or when the algorithm 'knows' that the sorting has been finished - surely it can't be just three iterations?

By now I've already looked up how the algorithm actually works, but the above is what I got out of the illustration :)