Hacker News Reader

wunderbabaon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

It's a mishmash of philosophical musings, personal projects, and music compositions.

Building a Pictionary multiplayer AI game with stable diffusion https://specularrealms.com/2022/10/04/stable-diffusion-picti...

Sean Aston uses BASIC to Hack https://specularrealms.com/2021/04/21/strangest-things/

How free will is constrained from a physiological standpoint

https://specularrealms.com/genetic-freedom/

wunderbabaon Some Chatbots Ganged Up and Plagiarized Me

For context, this is related to a article posted on a sub stack called the rationalist which made efforts to disguise the fact that it was GPT generated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34287747

The author, Petra, defended themselves saying that English wasn't their native language but that the "seed" content was their own. This article would appear to indicate that they also plagiarized the original source material.

wunderbabaon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://specularrealms.com

The site doesn't have a particularly stylistic design, and my writing tends to focus on theistics and cognitive philosophy.

The physiological constraints of free will https://specularrealms.com/genetic-freedom

Secular vs God's morality morality https://specularrealms.com/godsmorality

But I also write goofy articles like how Sean astin used basic programming language to hack a password. https://specularrealms.com/2021/04/21/strangest-things

wunderbabaon Visually symmetric words

Actually "butt tub" is a palindrome that you cannot unsee. Even at a young age I had a very sophisticated sense of humor....

wunderbabaon Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

I abandoned my faith once I was unable to rationally reconcile secular and divine morality, which was a theory I played around with in college and later wrote a paper about.

https://specularrealms.com/godsmorality

wunderbabaon The Golden Age of BASIC (2014)

I grew up on DOS 6.22 and quick basic 4.5, so I have a huge amount of nostalgia for how low friction it was to start programming back in the day.

There's a scene in Stranger Things where Sean Astin's character tries to brute force a code using a basic variant, and it was surprising to me to see code on a popular TV show that was remarkably faithful to the original.

https://specularrealms.com/2021/04/21/strangest-things

wunderbabaon Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

A few years ago I started taking up running regularly but I didn't have a buddy that I could run with so I decided to adopt a dog. Unfortunately the shelters were relatively far away from my home making it inconvenient to go in and check continuously on the weekends. I later realized that nearly all of them connected to a central city database which contained all of the dogs in the nearby shelters and furthermore that that database was behind a publicly available rest endpoint.

I whipped up a program that periodically every 10 minutes would query the database filtering for dogs matching the qualifications I was looking for using a combination of regex to search for any dogs that were:

- Between 50 and 100 lbs

- Did not have a history of behavioral problems

- Matched a list of active breeds

When it found a potential match it would send an SMS via Twilio to my phone with a picture of the dog, a link to the shelter, and a picture.

Several years later my huskee / Pyrenees hybrid is the best running partner I could ever have asked for. That's my proudest hack and I think she would agree with me.

wunderbabaon DALL·E Now Available Without Waitlist

What? None of the people in these images are even remotely recognizable as Homer Simpson.

wunderbabaon DALL·E Now Available Without Waitlist

It depends on what you're generating, complex prompts in DALLE ("a witch tossing rapunzels hair into a paper shredder at the bottom of the tower") blow midjourney and stable diffusion out of water.

But if all you're doing is the equivalent of visual mad Libs: "Abraham Lincoln wearing a zoot suit on the moon.", then SD and MJ suffice.

wunderbabaon Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI

We should get in touch. I built a language partner in Chinese about a week ago using GPT, continuous real-time speech recognition via webkit speech recognition, and Polly TTS so you don't even have to press any buttons, you can just have a fluid conversation the entire time.

wunderbabaon Remembering the best shareware-era DOS games that time forgot (2019)

Does anyone remember Redhooks Revenge? It was a maritime-themed trivia board game with risk battle mechanics for DOS. You can see the original here:

https://archive.org/details/RedhooksRevenge

I actually received permission from ImagiSOFT to build the sequel, titled Redhook's Revenge: Call of Booty which adds in 1000s of general trivia questions, which is freely available on itch.io:

https://specularrealms.itch.io/redhooks-revenge-ii-call-of-b...

wunderbabaon All about QBasic and QuickBasic

I posted an article to my blog about a scene from Stranger Things where Astin's character brute forces a password by writing a BASIC program. It was such a great homage to the 80s.

https://specularrealms.com/2021/04/21/strangest-things/

wunderbabaon “Put that in your pipe and smoke it”

This will never not remind me of Spaceghost Coast to Coast when he interviews Sportscaster Bob Costas. "Put that in your pipe and smoke it! With your burned lips!"

wunderbabaon We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon

I wish it would as well but honestly I think a lot of vendors treat their software as gym memberships - and hope that customers forget about that seemingly innocuous five dollar fee every month on their credit card.

wunderbabaon We’ll stop selling our Code Editor app for iOS soon

Evernote is one of the few that might at least have a legitimate case for having a recurring monthly fee since ostensibly you're paying for cloud storage and synchronization across all of your devices.

wunderbabaon How to Load Fonts in a Way That Fights FOUT and Makes Lighthouse Happy

I was just dealing with this insanity a few weeks ago. I eventually settled on using a pre-load of my font in the head element and then immediately afterwards a built-in script element that loaded it into the font family.

And even after this it seemed really inconsistent whether it would wait to display the correct font or load the fallback font then visually hot swap in the correct one depending on the browser and the device used.

wunderbabaon “To be safe allocate 5 bytes more than you need”

This should be called the "Baker's Dozen" law for engineering.