noahlt's comments

noahlt | 2 months ago

Yesterday I was required to turn on IPv6 on my router, while setting up some IoT things using Matter over Thread. Apparently that protocol uses IPv6 and doesn't work if your router is only routing IPv4.

noahlt | 2 months ago

> The thing that makes hashcards unique: it doesn’t use a database. […] Your performance and review history is stored in an SQLite database in the same directory as the cards.

Man I was really looking forward to seeing how they stored review history in plain text.

noahlt | 5 months ago

Where I'm from there's no concept of using public space to store your personal belongings without paying for it.

noahlt | 5 months ago

Yes, this is why language hype has largely died down among all but the truly myopic.

noahlt | 5 months ago

You end up standing in line with a bunch of delivery drivers who all know the drill and are on the clock, and you quickly learn you cannot be polite if you want to get your food.

noahlt | 11 months ago

What ElevenLabs and OpenAI call “speech to speech” are completely different.

ElevenLabs’ takes as input audio of speech and maps it to a new speech audio that sounds like a different speaker said it, but with the exact same intonation.

OpenAI’s is an end-to-end multimodal conversational model that listens to a user speaking and responds in audio.

noahlt | 1 year ago | on: What is the origin of the lake tank image that has become a meme? (2021)

This entire deep dive is great. I feel compelled to call out this heroism:

> 1st Lieutenant de Wispelaere had prepared the bridge for demolition ... De Wispelaere immediately pushed the electrical ignition, but there was no explosion... Wispelaere now left his shelter and worked the manual ignition device. Trying to get back to his bunker, he was hit by a burst from a German machine gun and fell to the ground, mortally wounded. At the same time, the explosive charge went off.

noahlt | 1 year ago

array.length

noahlt | 1 year ago

They want to be able to write logic to operate on the DOM elements rather than on Jinja2/Twig/etc template tags.

noahlt | 1 year ago

The end of this road is React's Server Side Rendering and Next.js.

This approach only really has one major benefit over string-based templating, namely, it lets you re-use code across server and client side DOM logic.

noahlt | 1 year ago | on: Musical Notation for Modular Synthesizers

I love all these attempts because I read the introductions nodding my head in agreement—yes traditional notation is annoying, yes we can use software to make better notations, yes it should be intuitive—and then I get to their actual proposal and it's just as inscrutible as traditional notation, and, often, uglier.

noahlt | 1 year ago

I honestly cannot tell whether this blog is trolling, but the comments here suggest they are not.

Am I the only one who is satisfied running `git blame` in my terminal, using `less` as the pager and searching by pressing `/`?

noahlt | 1 year ago | on: Round Rects Are Everywhere

Every time I see this story, I try counting the round vs square rectangles, and in practice they seem about even in my life. Door frames, picture frames, books, cabinets, and windows are all actually squared off.

(And natural things aren’t rectangles at all!)

noahlt | 1 year ago

[Copy-pasting my review from Amazon]

Did you know that Maxis (creators of SimCity) sold investors on a vision a world where "simulation" was a common use-case for computers, and Maxis was the company at the center of simulation software?

This was the first of many fascinating revelations this book brought me. Reading it, I found myself getting caught up in their grand vision.

The first part of _Building SimCity_ is a deep dive into the game's historical antecedents: from tabletop city simulations and Vannevar Bush's analogue computers, to systems thinking and cellular automata. This part explores many ideas that I have briefly encountered before and wondered "why hasn't anyone taken these wonderful ideas and produced something great with them?" The book answers: "Will Wright did, you just didn't notice." More specifically, _Building SimCity_ argues that SimCity the game is a synthesis and application of many great ideas, which are mostly hidden to the player. This book gives us a look behind the curtain.

The second part of the book spends chapters on the design of SimCity, the history of Maxis, and the experience of playing SimCity. The implementation chapter has no code listings — as a programmer, reading it feels like reading an exceptionally clear design document, explaining the real-time (UI) clock and the simulation clock, the 16-bit representation of map tile state, the main simulation loop, and the map scan algorithm for information propogation across tiles. This chapter is accompanied by exceptionally well-designed diagrams, which I find quite valuable on their own.

To set expectations: this is an academic work. It contains war stories and technical details, but it also goes to great lengths to situate SimCity in its historical context, connecting it to previous ideas, and providing full citations. But though the prose has an academic bent, I find it very engaging and readable.

The only negative thing I can say about this book is that the printed edition has a chemical smell, which I assume is due to the full-color printing and will presumeably fade with time.

[Disclaimer: I haven't finished this book yet, I've read the first few chapters about the history of simulation and also skipped ahead to the chapter about SimCity's implementation details. I'm posting this here because it's what I've written out in emails to friends about the book; I'll update my review when I finish reading it.]

noahlt | 1 year ago

I was disappointed the article didn't answer one question I've had for a while:

Which game first used radial menus that mapped directly onto the analog stick / joycon? That is, the angle of the stick maps directly to the angle of the selected item on the radial menu? This way you can immediately select any item, as well as switch from any current selection to any arbitrary new selection.

I first saw this in Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I haven't played many console games.

Contrast this with the Secret of Mana games where you have to repeatedly press the D-pad arrows to cycle to the desired menu item — in that style, the radial nature of the menu is entirely cosmetic.

noahlt | 1 year ago

[not OP] On Naxos, in the summer the DOMUS Festival has traditional (not ancient, but traditional) Greek music: https://www.facebook.com/p/DOMUS-Festival-100066336529833/

The performances are great, the venue (a courtyard of the Venetian castle) is cool, and the host is warm and welcoming — we had a really good experience.

Also, in Athens, outside the Roman Forum site, the Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments is really great, sometimes has performances, and the restaurants on that street are frequented by bouzouki players as well.

noahlt | 2 years ago

Yeah, having worked on alternative notebooks before, one of the big implicit features of Jupyter notebooks is that long-running cells (downloading data, training models) don't get spuriously re-run.

Having an excellent cache might reduce spurious re-running of cells, but I wonder if it would be sufficient.

noahlt | 2 years ago

It's there, but warthog is right, it should be a toplevel section like "A reactive programming environment" — yes ideally people would read the description and understand the differences themselves, or consult the FAQ, but the fact is that most people will understand Marimo in relation to Jupyter and so you might as well optimize that path.
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