wincy

This is where Nintendo is at. It’s hilarious how much fun me and my kids are having playing games like Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Pokemon Pokopia, and the surprise smash hit has been Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. My kids make all the neighbors and have them get married and laugh about it and it’s just such a goofy concept. The graphics are good enough that you no longer notice there’s graphics, just the art.

Switch 2 is a fantastic console with an astonishingly fun first party library, and Nintendo just over there doing their own thing like they’ve always done.

Every rat (4 now) I've owned except one has died of cancer. Or at least, they died with cancer, I'm not a veterinarian. The one that didn't got the flu or something at 6 months and died of some respiratory issue.

Pokemon Pokopia has been a surprise hit in our house, I have two kids, but I got into it and spent a ton of time making a perfect little Pokemon village. My kids really enjoy Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. It's really silly but they make all their friends and have them get married and read the news and it's just peak Nintendo goofiness.

My kids have also gotten a little older so the mainline Pokemon games have become a thing again, and we've been playing those together. Everything just seems to run better on the Switch 2.

You and I are kindred souls here buddy, I haven’t had heartburn in months and it used to be an almost daily occurrence. When it does occur it’s fixed by one Tums. I’ve lost 120 pounds taking Zepbound. My life used to be Waking up and downing half a bottle of Pepto because my stomach was an acid volcano. Doctors telling me that it’s just the way my life is now, and to take PPIs. Eating a pizza in one sitting. Feeling the urge at 11pm to go get fast food after eating dinner because I was so hungry. Now if I get Taco Bell it’s like $8 and it still tastes good, but I tucked into cauliflower and Caesar dressing as a snack today instead.

Totally transformative.

I’m on the max dosage of Zepbound and ate an entire six course meal at a Michelin star restaurant last year. It was an incredible experience. I just don’t eat an entire frozen pizza by myself, or box of zebra cakes where I’d then wake up with horrifying heartburn at three in the morning anymore. My life is so much better and my relationship with food is still totally fine. Sure I’ll have a treat sometime, but I’m not finding myself hungry at 11pm driving to the store to buy a box of them because I feel like I’m starving. I was well on the path to becoming diabetic and it felt like something I could barely control. When I’d try to diet I’d wake up shaking from night time blood sugar drops. All that hell is gone now.

Same as it ever was. If you listen to interviews with Zuckerberg he’ll talk about the constant communiques from The White House during the Biden administration. Trump didn’t start this unfortunately he’s just more brazen about it.

You gotta check out the new ChatGPT 6.3 Betelgeuse bro

Wow, until this moment I didn’t realize that Lloyd Bentsen was talking about John F. Kennedy when he said “senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” to Dan Quayle! I was born in the mid 80s so it was just a quote I’d heard as a child and never thought of it much but thank you.

Well, to actually 3D print looks like it’s $3300, but still that’s really incredible! Seems substantially less messy than the resin printers I played around with a few years ago.

I’m a senior lead at a big (not tech) company and have had multiple people change jobs in the past few months for much better offers. I’ve had two places try to hire me in the past six months. Things were down for a bit with the rise of AI (I’d imagine a “wait and see” approach) but I’m personally seeing a lot of people trying to recruit now.

I remember what a big deal the Western Digital Raptor drives were since they were 10,000RPM on SATA instead of SCSI. All my teenage friends and I wanted a SCSI drive or a Raptor in the early 2000s (I had very nerdy friends). It was a huge boost for an early 2000s gaming PC until SSDs came along and absolutely obliterated them.

I just parental lock my wife’s phone and she parental locks mine. This has worked for us for nearly a decade now. Solutions that actually work often sound weird (because otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem in the first place), but yeah “ask my wife” and vice versa keeps us from installing Facebook and other apps that are rabbit holes while making it easy to remedy if I actually need it. To be clear, this is totally voluntary and we both choose our own blocks then say “hey add a password” or “hey I need to adjust, punch in the password”. I see it as similar to having a bank teller vs the ATM. Easy peasy and that little bit of friction has made our quality of life better.

You’re absolutely correct! Let me find a better topic to post to the front page of Hacker News, no slop.

Thinking…

This is my only complaint about the Bose QuietComfort Ultras. Nearly $400 headphones and they have an LED that glows while charging so I can’t charge them in my room at night unless I throw a shirt or something over them.

This is a motte and bailey though. A regular person on the street has never seen a distinction between these two words, and common sense prevailed after years of Silicon Valley policing of speech to try to make an unpopular position seem tenable and widely agreed upon to get the average person to step in line.

Dang, that’s crazy. Last I checked they were $10,000. It seemed almost attainable to me as a mere mortal just last year. I’m glad I at least got enough vram and ram to play around a little bit with local models before all the prices went bananas.

So instead we ended up with the only Calvin and Hobbes items in the physical world being those vinyl bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on things, because those were cheap and easy for random unscrupulous printers to make. Some artistic vision. As someone born in the late 80s, I recall seeing those far more than the actual comics.

I use them because they look nice and with an OLED I wanted a dynamic wallpaper so I wouldn’t get screen burn in. There is adult stuff but everything I use is just video games and matrix scrolling patterns, that kind of stuff, so I can tell my monitor is on without getting burn in. I’ve got a high end desktop so can take the minor performance hit running it all the time.

Unfortunately seems like I’m going to be uninstalling it.

If I could just save up $6000 I could sell off my RTX 5090 for $4,000 and buy an RTX 6000 Blackwell Pro Workstation. I can fit models into the 32GB of vram but my context window ends up being tiny for any halfway capable model.

So what does one of these full time data center jobs look like, day to day? If I’m a software engineer I feel like I’d have to move and get a pay decrease to actually work at one of these? I mean until AI finally puts me out of a job. I guess I wouldn’t really be qualified to work one of these jobs?

I started reading the Camp of the Saints precisely because people said I shouldn’t. It was a bad book, I couldn’t read more than a few chapters. But I think adults should be able to read whatever they want.

Yeah but they could have gotten a Makita XWT15Z 18V LXT Lithium Ion Brushless Cordless Impact Hammer instead?

(This is like my niece buying a $5000 Alienware to play Roblox because she thinks she “needs a gaming PC”)

I live in the suburbs of Kansas City where the World Cup is happening, and the only way it’s affected me is it’s really annoying to take my disabled kid to the children’s hospital downtown because there’s so much traffic.

I know exactly one person out of my friends that is going to one World Cup game, and he’s well known as the guy who likes soccer.

My wife has enjoyed the TikToks of Europeans coming to Kansas City and reacting to stuff that’s totally normal to us, like the Bass Pro Shop and Tornado Shelter signs.

I’m using $200 a month Codex working on a game for my kids for fun and curiosity since I’m a dev, I’ve played games, but I’ve never done dev for games. and have all night tasks but mostly they’re “spend time tending to and adding stuff to my 3D asset pipeline”. My RTX 5090 runs Trellis2 -> ultrashapes -> Trellis2 -> wiring up rigging and setting up animations.

But like 99% of that task is just Codex waiting for the output. So it’ll run for 12 hours but mostly it’s just setting lots of sleeps. I haven’t gotten close to running out of tokens. The $100 a month codex I hit usage limitations almost immediately, about 3 days in of working like crazy with 10 agents going at once, mostly coding an asset pipeline, I ran into my weekly limit and upgraded. So with the $200 a month plan at 4x more credits I haven’t hit any walls at all and can absolutely cook.

Yeah I’ve been working on a game just for my kids, it convinced me to upgrade to Codex Pro and I absolutely wouldn’t release it to anyone until I felt 100% it actually was fun to play. It’s easy to get stuck not doing the stuff that can’t be automated. The crazy thing is that making the game pretty good looking (like Nintendo Switch level graphics) is basically trivial now and can be largely automated, maybe with a little Blender cleanup for your most important assets. That doesn’t make a game fun though.

I ran into this wall too. Someone here on HN said their general test is “make a browser only simple rts game with no AI and no multiplayer” What makes a game fun is very different than the engine of a game. My kid asked me to make a game where you brew potions. Okay, done. Adding ingredients, having physics to drop the items rather than “okay they just appear in the pot” (or worse it just says “okay they’re in there!”) Especially for kids there’s a physicality you have to capture to make it both fun and understandable to a seven year old.

Getting cutesie stylized 3D models is something that’s trivial with an RTX 5090, a ChatGPT pro subscription (unlimited image generation), you run Trellis2 plus a few other open source things in a pipeline that your agents can queue and it’s astonishing how much cool stuff comes out the other side. But the graphics don’t make the game fun at all, they’re just set dressing for the fun.

There’s been a lot of learning going from 0. “Okay, 3D model of a character. Oh, this model is useless since it isn’t in a T Pose I can’t rig it. What’s a rig? Okay, there’s a rigging ML model. Download that. Okay, how do I animate it? Oh, cool there’s a model for that. Oh wait my model has holes in it, that looks weird. Okay there’s an ultra shapes library that helps improve geometry. Whoops, that strips all the textures and shaders. Okay, trellis2 has a mode that takes an existing model and retextures it. Okay wow these look good, the characters are walking around! This goblin is break dancing! Okay uhh, what do you actually do in this game?”

Like it feels like that trap you can get stuck in when one part of something is trivially easy, so I have like 500 random 3D assets that are honestly pretty good looking for a game where the core gameplay loop is not developed at all because I have no idea what would make it feel fun. Because I can prompt and say “oh wouldn’t a Christmas village be cool?” And I wake up the next morning with 50 3D models of Christmas village stuff and characters and I say “wow, neat!” (It takes maybe 8 minutes end to end for the pipeline to generate one 3D model, so I just run it overnight). But then I have to manually place them in the world (if you let the AI do it in unreal engine 5 it places them via coordinates which become impossible to move inside the unreal editor).

The fun part is “wow, this is something I’m making with my kids, and it’s unique to us”. That’s what keeps me at it. I’ve never seen my kid so engrossed and excited to help me with something, she’s the one coming up with ideas and saying “what if we did this and that?” and then seeing those things become real is really neat. The bottleneck is there’s a dozen agents that can work on different parts of the game but it’s a chaotic mess.

Still, I’d imagine this is how people learn is by making something that’s a piece of junk then making something that’s better. I don’t plan on releasing my pieces of junk unless I feel like they’re actually fun.

The gamers would really be complaining about why they can’t run Fable.torrent on their gaming PCs

Most shutters are non functional vestigial architecture. People like the look, even though it has no non aesthetic purpose at this point. At least in the USA the vast majority of “shutters” are this way.

If you go to say, the Florida keys, you’ll obviously see real shutters, since they get hurricanes. Probably doesn’t need to be reiterated, but those shutters are fold out during the nice season (which is the “look” you see on a modern colonial style home) but if a storm is coming you you fold them in and latch them shut to protect your glass windows. I’d imagine part of it is also modern windows are more shatter resistant than older windows, so a much larger storm is required to blow out your windows without the shutters.

Canopy beds are similar (although canopy beds aren’t in style anymore). They served as a way to allow a king privacy in a large hall where courtiers and the court all slept in the same room (a bedroom being prohibitively expensive in medieval times) and to keep heat in before modern heating. Most canopy beds are just kind of nice looking but don’t serve to hold heat in to your sleeping area. We have walls and central heating so they’re largely anachronistic.

I remember working for a company that did a lot of business in logistics. We were strictly prohibited from using any Amazon Web Services because several of our very high profile customers didn’t want anything on AWS. The higher ups were thoroughly convinced Amazon would copy it (and I mean, they came out with a product that competed with us, so they weren’t wrong!)

My wife makes real Eggs Benedict for me once a year on my birthday. I went to a resort hotel and spit out their Eggs Benedict it tasted so bad compared to what I get at home. They comped my meal. I guess this explains why I’m constantly confused why Eggs Benedict doesn’t taste right. I’ve found one, maybe two restaurants with passable Eggs Benedict in my city.