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xfeeefeee

247 karma · joined December 14, 2022

i like to make dance music videos https://xfeeefeee.net (potentially NSFW)
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xfeeefeee··on CorridorKey 2.0
I'd love to use this but sadly my local GPU is just crap. I know everyone hates hosted offerings but I'd be a happy customer; I mostly use topaz's hosted stuff too for this reason
xfeeefeee··on Kidnapping kids remains legal in USA, this site has you experience it first-hand
A friend of mine was sent to a similar place in the late 90s, specifically for queer kids, but what I heard was eerily similar except with a lot more Jesus. He escaped and his parents were somehow convinced to send him back! He killed himself soon after, in a very painful and slow way. I could not bring myself to go to the funeral. There are few things in this world that truly anger me, and decades later I still feel it.
xfeeefeee··on The Nature of Dance
Dance is such a nuanced thing. Really I think it is more like a language than anything else.

My favorite example of this is at somewhere like a rave or Phish show etc where you can see people form their own little conversations and groups and move on as the night goes.

And of course you have people just enjoying having a nice talk with themselves and the music.

In more professional settings you see people try to fit dance into little boxes and say what it is or is not... it predates spoken language. It is something very primal, not even uniquely human.

xfeeefeee··on DaVinci Resolve 21.1
After Effects still has some features that keep me stuck with it, but I'm excited for more competition. Adobe seems to be paying attention somewhat.
xfeeefeee··on $100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol
Not a fan really. There are certainly uses for AI, but this is lacking something. Personally I think it works best as a filter or applying a style or effect that is difficult otherwise, or generating fancy ambient or abstract textures etc.

People constantly think the music video I created for Zingara's Unlock Your Keys [1] is AI, but it really is just real footage all around, except for a handful of lines / pulse textures that were created in TouchDesigner.

I am really excited for the possibilities that AI can give us in the future but often I find trying to use it generatively I run into the paradox of choice and end up paralyzed!

1: https://xfeeefeee.net/unlock-your-keys/ tribal dance fusion music video, sfw but does show some skin. Uses lots of slow motion ink in water footage for texture as well.

xfeeefeee··on PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform
I am still a bit upset that I got banned without even a warning. I tried to adhere to policies and figured if anything was wrong, I'd get a warning at least, and then I'd know better what the limits are. Unfortunately there is little recourse and even less feedback.

Even more annoying is that it terminates your YouTube account entirely, so now I can't even login to use it. And I was a premium subscriber, too!

The best thing about YouTube is their agreements with rights holders to allow music and revenue sharing easily, which makes it very simple for creators and remixers etc to not get their stuff removed via DMCA.

xfeeefeee··on Who's the smartest corvid?
I started doing this with my cat. It's easy to try to explain away the underlying thought processes as coincidental association, and some of that is certainly true, but experiencing it first hand with a cat you know well is certainly different. My cat presses a button for his name when he wants attentions, buttons for outside, food, water. A button for YouTube (the startup sound), since he likes watching other cats and critter videos and nature documentaries on there. I was working in the other room during a stormy day and he was watching some nature video when I heard him repeatedly pressing the YouTube button and his name. But he was already watching it? When I went out there, I saw there was a video playing with a cat that looked almost exactly like him on the screen. He seemed extremely interested. Did he think it was him? Or was he just calling attention that it looked like him and wanted to tell me? Either way, never saw that behavior before or after.
xfeeefeee··on Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model
That's a pretty wide brush you are painting with there
xfeeefeee··on Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)
Really cool to see this here. I always loved these in movies. There are a bunch of really interesting artists making use of ink ink liquid, oils, chemical reactions etc that create beautiful abstract pieces. Fitting for HN, Roman De Giuli even creates his own machines. Check out Emitter https://youtu.be/VMd608zCEWc
xfeeefeee··on Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32
Oh hey this is exactly why I made node-windows-readdir-fast - especially with the way node works, this makes reading filenames and length and times around 50x faster

https://github.com/xfeeefeee/node-windows-readdir-fast https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-windows-readdir-fast

Windows only of course, but the concept is sound. Was also fun benchmarking to find out that parsing a binary stream was faster than creating a ton of objects through the node api (or json deserialization)

xfeeefeee··on SoundCloud has banned VPN access
Over five years of paid SoundCloud here, I thought something was wrong with my setup. If this continues I'll have to cancel, basically. What a pain.
xfeeefeee··on Show HN: Build the habit of writing meaningful commit messages
On a personal project I've decided to do the opposite and every commit message is meow or mlem or hisssss or purrrr etc
xfeeefeee··on Meta Segment Anything Model 3
I can't wait until it is easy to rotoscope / greenscreen / mask this stuff out accessibly for videos. I had tried Runway ML but it was... lacking, and the webui for fixing parts of it had similar issues.

I'm curious how this works for hair and transparent/translucent things. Probably not the best, but does not seem to be mentioned anywhere? Presumably it's just a straight line or vector rather than alpha etc?

xfeeefeee··on Designing a Language (2017)
For those unaware, Raku is the evolution of Perl 6, basically. It's honestly a beautiful and seductive language. At the same time it terrifies me.
xfeeefeee··on Show HN: The Shape of YouTube
I'm having a hard time understanding what exactly the graphs are showing. Is it just average pixel color per frame?
xfeeefeee··on Show HN: Trott – search,sort,extract social media videos(ig,yt,tiktok)
Does this analyze the video itself with AI or does it just use the text / description and other metadata? Would love to know more details on how that works
xfeeefeee··on [dead]
this is hilarious. more context is here: https://x.com/mahlenr/status/1964524587254964580

hopefully the layers of satire here are not lost

xfeeefeee··on The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful
> Any species that is advanced enough for interstellar communication will almost certainly be a highly aggressive apex species.

Well we could always be pets. That wouldn't be so bad.

xfeeefeee··on The Joy of Mixing Custom Elements, Web Components, and Markdown
I recently discovered a static site generator called Astro, which supports many syntaxes but the .astro is a nice mix of TypeScript and JSX-like syntax. Content can use MDX which is like Markdown but with {JSX} style markup for variables and etc. The static components are used very similar to React, with familiar import statements and <ComponentName props=etc> patterns. It is extremely easy to pick up. Best of all, it has plugins to support all sorts of other interactivity, so you can create interactive 'islands' of content using React or Preact or SolidJS or Vue etc. That way you have most of your content statically generated, and then the dynamic parts can be done from the client side.

Best of all, if you use simple unchanged files for other dynamic stuff like JSON etc, you can just generate those on build and serve those files in the host directly as the 'response' to a simple REST request, which is sometimes overlooked despite being the most fundamental form of a REST API.

https://astro.build/

I came across this after researching various options for a website that had, mostly for my own entertainment, restrictions on wanting to be mostly statically generated but customizable easily without learning a lot of new syntax / etc, something JSX-like with Markdown support etc, and MDX was an immediate find - and astro was the easiest SSG I found for it after trying with 11ty and several others. Actually felt like a delight playing with it.

xfeeefeee··on Against the censorship of adult content by payment processors
I create music videos which can be provocative, though not necessarily pornographic, and this kind of thing really bothers me since I've run into similar problems even just with hosting and donations. Thankfully, I don't try to make this anything more than a creative outlet, so I don't have to worry about taking payments, and I'm happy enough that any expenses are at least covered by a few donations. But it concerns me that it is not an option for others who might find themselves in similar gray areas.
xfeeefeee··on I just want to code (2023)
I've always thought of myself as a struggling artist and musician first, code being one of many avenues to express myself, and also to pay the bills until I got into more managerial roles, and now I get to use it more creatively or in pursuit of creative endeavors rather than during work time, and it is incredibly liberating.
xfeeefeee··on Reverse engineering the obfuscated TikTok VM
I quoted the synopsis from the readme thinking it would be helpful.
xfeeefeee··on Reverse engineering the obfuscated TikTok VM
All credit should go to Lukas https://github.com/LukasOgunfeitimi

I was sharing this here since I thought it was a great write up, but did not intend to pass it off as my own!

There is certainly always a good amount of push and pull, though my personal concern as a contributor to yt-dlp under another alias is more about archival of the underlying media rather than automating things like comments.

YouTube also uses an interesting scheme for authenticating requests for media as well which required implementing a very basic JavaScript interpreter within Python for yt-dlp too. I expect this kind of thing to continue to become even more common and complicated.

xfeeefeee··on Reverse engineering the obfuscated TikTok VM
> It looks like OP filled out the text area alongside with the URL when submitting the post. HN takes that text and turns it into a comment.

Yeah, this is exactly what happened, but I decided to keep it rather than delete and filled it out more with the synopsis from the repo.

Looking back at it, it really does look like an AI bulleted summary. I probably should have noted that the last part was indeed a quotation.

xfeeefeee··on Reverse engineering the obfuscated TikTok VM
The fascinating process of reverse engineering this VM is detailed here.

TikTok uses a custom virtual machine (VM) as part of its obfuscation and security layers. This project includes tools to:

Deobfuscate webmssdk.js that has the virtual machine.

Decompile TikTok’s virtual machine instructions into readable form.

Script Inject Replace webmssdk.js with the deobfuscated VM injector.

Sign URLs Generate signed URLs which can be used to perform auth-based requests eg. Post comments.

xfeeefeee··on What do people see when they're tripping? Analyzing Erowid's trip reports
There are absolutely varieties of lsd, especially nowadays with the legal analogues like 1v-lsd (Valerie) and 1p-lsd which are sometimes more common than the original. Though I agree that set and setting are extremely important
xfeeefeee··on High-Speed Face-Tracking for Dynamic Facial Projection Mapping
The artistic possibilities of this are really fascinating. Looking forward to what people come up with! Projection mapping interactive art is always mesmerizing
xfeeefeee··on Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to “spam and deceptive policies”
This is what I've had to do. I got my channel banned from YouTube despite never getting a strike, and only one warning. Admittedly some of my videos can be a bit provocative but nothing too bad, and many not even that. When they've been flagged before I had appealed and gotten them reapproved, so I was under the impression that I was following the community guidelines appropriately. A sudden ban was unexpected.

Worse though is that banning your channel actually disables your entire YouTube account so I can't even watch YouTube with that account now! Not to mention playlists being gone, though I was able to get data from Google Takeout. That part was the most frustrating for me. I was even a premium subscriber!

And I've made videos for other people that have been around for years that I can't reupload due to the terms of the ban, which is also disheartening. I had started working under a different name before all this for much more artistic and abstract work, at the demand of the people I was working with, which now makes a lot more sense why they were pushing for that. I'm still uncertain if "me" being banned is all my personas or just the one that was banned; there are no obvious connections between them though.

Anyway, self hosting isn't too bad, though certainly need to ensure your hosting is capped so you don't get a giant bill if there is a sudden influx of viewers.

Thankfully I have enough donations to keep running with only a small amount I have to pay to cover the difference. Hopefully I don't have to end up using ads.

However the notable takeaway from all this is that there is no real competitor to YouTube! Nothing even comes close.

xfeeefeee··on All the data can be yours: reverse engineering APIs
It's really fascinating watching the constant push and pull in projects like yt-dlp and places like YouTube and TikTok. So many interesting techniques to make things more difficult for reverse engineering or making unofficial requests. There is even a tiny JavaScript engine iirc that calculates a special value that YouTube uses to verify requests.
xfeeefeee··on Appearances of MIT in Anime
Regarding the knights of the eastern calculus, what is this phrase they are referring to?

> What probably happened is two independent sets of people were inspired by a cool phrase from hacker lore (given LISP’s long-time popularity at MIT, it’s reasonable to suppose that the phrase may have originated here).

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