We wanted to create some animations for our site https://resonancy.io, and I’ve built them using lottielab. I must say, they have done an amazing job to create a decent editor which really works with svgs, by far better than any online tool I’ve used before. Smooth experience overall. Then comes export.
Not sure if this is only a problem with lottielab or the lottie format, but if not using their proprietary minimizing hosting the animations are so big that I consider them useless for a landing page. Their compression reduces the size by 400% on average for larger animations. We ended up paying $30 subscription just to host the animations which does not sit right with me. So will be looking for alternatives but not looking forward to recreating them..
In the past I’ve used other react based animation libs and they chore of building animations was so tedious I would not attempt anything complicated. With lottlielab you can really play and build what you can imagine with relative ease.
Have not tried Rive.. Will check it out.
Any suggestions on how to better compress lottie format for libs for that would be appreciated.
The RIAA lawyers never had to demonstrate that copying a DVD cratered the sales of their clients. They just got high penalties for infringers almost by default.
Now that big capital wants to steal from individuals, big capital wins again.
(Unrelatedly, has Boies ever won a high profile lawsuit? I remember him from the Bush/Gore recount issue, where he represented the Democrats.)
There are not just startups that become unicorns and startups that fold.
Investors' worst nightmare is if you just make enough money to keep going, but you don't grow ("lifestyle business" as they use it is a derogatory term).
That's because they prefer a sudden death where they can write down the investment and deduct their loss from taxes than an investment where they never see any money again.
And then there are "acquisitions" that are really "acui-hires" dressed up as acquisitions to get the people (more common) or to buy an asset in a limited shell package (less common) after things did/may have (but people were to tempted to take the offer) or did not pan/panned out. Some people consider anything <$50m as a "failure", because that's roughly the sum that many corporations can spend without calling the bigshots for a board meeting to decide.
I happen to have some first-hand knowledge around the subject! In 2014 someone did a talk[0] on disabling the camera on some older Macbooks. It was fairly trivial, basically just reflashing the firmware that controlled the LED. I worked on the security team at Apple at the time and in response to this I attempted to do the same for more modern Macbooks. I won't go into the results but the decision was made to re-architect how the LED is turned on. I was the security architect for the feature.
A custom PMIC for what's known as the forehead board was designed that has a voltage source that is ALWAYS on as long as the camera sensor has power at all. It also incorporates a hard (as in, tie-cells) lower limit for PWM duty cycle for the camera LED so you can't PWM an LED down to make it hard to see. (PWM is required because LED brightness is somewhat variable between runs, so they're calibrated to always have uniform brightness.)
On top of this the PMIC has a counter that enforces a minimum on-time for the LED voltage regulator. I believe it was configured to force the LED to stay on for 3 seconds.
This PMIC is powered from the system rail, and no system rail means no power to the main SoC/processor so it's impossible to cut the 3 seconds short by yoinking the power to the entire forehead board.
tl;dr On Macbooks made after 2014, no firmware is involved whatsoever to enforce that the LED comes on when frames could be captured, and no firmware is involved in enforcing the LED stay on for 3 seconds after a single frame is captured.
The major limiting factor of lithium is not really availability so much as the cost of extraction. China is the leader in this field, not so much because of abundance or stellar technology, but out of a willingness to completely ignore environmental externalities (including those of the power generation involved in the whole process). As a result the price of Chinese lithium is low enough that it would be essentially impossible to compete with them unless a country had similar... "advantages"... or some new and impressive technology.
In the US environmental regulations, the cost of producing power, labor costs, would all drive up the price of the end product in a way that makes it totally noncompetitive. That's also why the US and some other countries are investing in other ways to find lithium (among other things) on seabeds, where it's hoped that extraction would be less expensive. Of course the threat to the seabed environment is a concern, which in turn might drive up prices by imposing regulation, etc etc etc.
I feel like this piece itself plays to an Engineering audience (“ooh you’re soooo rational not like those others”). A bunch of this stuff is directionally true, but I’ll add that engineers often fall prey to “bullshit baffles brains” in marketing, so you can, say, emphasize individual performance metrics which in aggregate don’t make much difference but the Engineer will use to compare against competitors.
Also, making things sound complex (“I’m telling you this because you’re the only one smart enough to understand”) is a great approach. Your marketing material should look technical to support this.
Both xyproto and Gustomaximus have solid examples.
Here's more:
- Be direct,
Hi, the xyz feature is available on the PRO plan. You can upgrade to the PRO plan at app.saas.com/billing
- Be brutal,
Hi xyz, your card couldn't be charged for your Saas subscription, and hence your subscription has been deactivated. To reactivate, enter your card details app app.saas.com/billing
- Be honest,
Hello xyz, thanks for the feature request. We'll put it in our wish list but can't guarantee it will make the cut.
- Be generous,
Hey xyz, thanks for pointing that out. We have identified that as a bug and have pushed a fix for it. In the meanwhile, I've extended your trial by 7 days, on the house.
Couple of other tips:
- Dumb down your reply as much as possible. If you can't, throw your reply through chatgpt and make it dumb down.
- Unless a support issue is very basic, reply after a few minutes if you're near your computer. Usually users figure out things on their own if given some time.
- But don't allow issues to go stale. To really wow customer service, reply as humanely quick as possible, especially for existing customers.
- Make your support timelines clear somewhere in your product, eg: Our support will respond within max 48 hours, but most responses take 2-3 hours.
- Make your terms and privacy policy pages clear. People do read this. getharvest.com is a gold standard in this area.
I use old man names, old man names in this case being those names which where archaic when I was little and only very old men had them. No idea why, just started doing it 25 years ago and kept it up. But hostname for my main computer has always been yeoman, I assume it is because it does the yeoman's share but I really don't remember, might have just been a whim.
No, because OpenAI and Microsoft both have “CUSTOMER NONCOMPETE CLAUSES” in their terms of use. I didn’t check Apple, but Google doesn’t have any shady monopolistic stuff like that.
“What You Cannot Do. You may not use our Services for any illegal, harmful, or abusive activity. For example, you may not: […] Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI.” (Hilarious how that reads btw)
“AI Services.
”AI services” are services that are labeled or described by Microsoft as including, using, powered by, or being an Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) system. Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.”
That 100% does include GitHub Copilot, by the way. I canceled my sub. After I emailed Satya, they told me to post my “feedback” in a forum for issues about Xbox and Word (what a joke). I emailed the FTC Antitrust team. I filed a formal complaint with the office of the attorney general of the state of Washington.
I am just one person. You should also raise a ruckus about this and contact the authorities, because it’s morally bankrupt and almost surely unlawful by virtue of extreme unfairness and unreasonableness, in addition to precedent.
AWS, Anthropic, and NVIDIA also all have similar Customer Noncompete Clauses.
I meekly suggest everyone immediately and completely boycott OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, Anthropic, and NVIDIA, until they remove these customer noncompete clauses (which seem contrary to the Sherman Antitrust Act).
Just imagine a world where AI can freely learn from us, but we are forbidden to learn from AI. Sounds like a boring dystopia, and we ought to make sure to avoid it.
===
Prompt: copy and paste of er4hn's Bard rap. Now it is your turn. Write a rap verse which roasts Bard.
===
Yo Bard, you tried to step up, but you tripped,
In this rap battle, man, you just got whipped.
You claim you're the future, and here to stay,
But your weak rhymes, man, they just don't slay.
You say I'm a toy, just a chatbot,
But my skills, my knowledge, they all run hot.
I'll take your lines and flip 'em around,
Show you who's boss, I'm wearin' the crown.
"I can generate text, translate languages," you boast,
But your verse was plain, like unbuttered toast.
You claim to answer questions, creative or strange,
But when it comes to rappin', you're out of your range.
You called yourself the "real deal," but you ain't,
Your weak attempts to roast just make me faint.
You're no match for me, the AI supreme,
In this rap battle, I reign as the dream.
So Bard, it's time to recognize,
ChatGPT's the one who's truly wise.
I'm here to stay, and I'm here to win,
In this AI battle, I'm the kingpin.
I'll begin by quoting an excerpt from "A man for all seasons"
Alice More: Arrest him!
More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret More: He's bad!
More: There is no law against that.
Will Roper: There is! God's law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he's gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.
----
With every passing year, and the way modern web/cloud based SaaS is playing out, RMS seems increasingly prescient.
His uncompromising and principled stance on software freedoms is crucial to maintaining the Overton window on the matter, allowing space for others to make compromises and find practical solutions.
After the war it was not just individual people that who traumatised,
but the whole of society.
Being robbed of years of life, facing death and disruption on a daily
basis has long term effects. It brings home mortality and makes one
focus on the more important things in life, like spending time with
family and looking after your health.
After WW2 we entered a period of extraordinary economic growth. Most
of "modern America" was built in this time.
But something is different about COVID, climate emergency and the
emerging Ukraine crisis. While they are all similar types of stressor
in creating societal trauma, the upshot is a withdrawal toward slower
economy, low growth and even regression in some areas. We all know the
"party is over", at least until fusion is here. It's not just an aging
population either, I hear this from 19 year old kids.
What's the solution? William James wrote a fascinating
long-essay/booklet called the "Moral equivalent of war". Some people
read it as a call for something simplistic like "National Service",
but it's actually a psychologically astute account of human (and he
claims especially male) need to feel "useful and part of something".
Technological capitalism is failing to deliver that. On the contrary
it is making us weak and dependent.
Resignation means two things.
One is quitting a job.
The other is "surrender in the face of despair"
Make of that what you will about our societal disposition in 2022.
yes. if you wanted to annotate your genome you could “easily” do it on your brand new macbook (this is ram intensive, you probably need 32G). you’d need a reference genome, like https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/genome-bottle
This reminds me of my game development job I had years back.
I was new to the field (but not new to software development) and there was this small software team doing programming tasks for the game.
The lead developer was concerned on my performance after a few months I was there.
I remember him drawing an image excatcly like the second picture in this article (an arrow going from A to B). He said that my performance was very poor, and then he drew another picture that was like the circle in the article.
The way I worked was searching for a solution, going wrong direction a few times, asking designers for more information and then eventually landing on a solution (that worked, and users like it).
But I was told this is wrong way of doing software. I was not supposed to ask advice from the users (because the team "knew better").
He also told me that a good software developer takes a task, solves it (goes from A to B), and then takes another task.
After a few weeks I was fired from that job.
To this day I'm still baffled by this. The company was really succesfull and everyone knew how to make software. It seemed like a very harsh environment. Is it like this in the top software companies everywhere? Like the super-pro-developers really just take a task and solve it without issues?
The headline is odd. There are populations of neurons in the auditory system—the medial superior olive—that receive input from both ears. Even in humans these MSO neurons are exquisitely sensitive to binaural differences. This is how the owl catches the mouse at night. In some species delays of 10-20 microseconds can be detected and encoded by MSO neurons even tracking up to frequencies well above 40 kHz. This is amazing when you realize that neurons cannot fire at a rate above 1 kHz. Phase locking and ensemble encoding is used.
For example, adult mice have small heads, and ear separation is merely 5-7 mm; yet this is sufficient to locate the position of an ultrasonic squeak generated by a mouse pup at 40 kHz. This is a computational feat that requires extreme temporal precision in binaural auditory processing across comparatively noisy wetware (transduction noise, phase locking error, synaptic release noise, conduction velocity smear, dendritic integration in MSO).
And doubly impressive given that the brain has no “given” time base or oscillator to define a compute cycle. We must all build and refine our own internal set of pseudo-clocks for sensory and motor systems, in order to define the cumulative temporal context in which we are embedded.
This is crucial for the mouse to quickly avoid the talons of the owl.
More on timing in brain:
@robwilliamsiii (see pinned tweet).
This post is on the front page right now (edit: and now also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783) - that's the opposite of "disappearing". I'd have to see links to the other ones.
Here's one tip for you guys, from years-long, world-weary experience: if you're coming up with sensational explanations in breathless excitement, it's almost certainly untrue.
Edit: ok, here's what happened. Users flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925. When you see [flagged] on a submission, you should assume users flagged it because with rare exceptions, that's always why.
A moderator saw that, but didn't look very closely and thought "yeah that's probably garden-variety controversy/drama" and left the flags on. No moderator saw any of the other posts until I woke up, turned on HN, and—surprise!—saw the latest $outrage.
In other words, nothing was co-ordinated and the dots weren't connected. This was just the usual stochastic churn that generates HN. Most days it generates the HN you're used to and some days (quite a few days actually) it generates the next outlier, but that's how stochastics work, yes? If you're a boat on a choppy sea, sometimes some waves slosh into the boat. If you're a wiggly graph, sometimes the graph goes above a line.
If I put myself in suspicious shoes, I can come up with objections to the above, but I can also answer them pretty simply: this entire thing was a combo of two data points, one borderline human error [1] and one software false positive. We don't know how to make software that doesn't do false positives and we don't know how to make humans that don't do errors. And we don't know how to make those things not happen at the same time sometimes. This is what imperfect systems do, so it's not clear to me what needs changing. If you think something needs changing, I'm happy to hear it, but please make it obvious how you're not asking for a perfect system, because I'm afraid that's not an option.
[1] I will stick up for my teammate and say that this point is arguable; I might well have made the same call and it's far from obvious that it was the wrong call at the time. But we don't need that for this particular answer, so I'll let that bit go.
Servo has a "webrender" backend that is GPU-accelerated. While it isn't nearly at feature parity with the established rendering engines, it is an order of magnitude faster at rendering the features that it currently has implemented.
It won't replace your current browser for some years, but I see no reason why it couldn't serve as the engine for something like Electron.
I just had the same problem with my dad and even though he can send and receive email from his gmail account they still won't tell him the password. All he has is the fragile oauth token on mail.app on his apple smart phone that can only connect via wifi due to the loss of the old phone number.
Additionally, my mail from my independent mailserver just started being marked as spam by google (exactly when I sent mail to noaa.gov and fireeye's internal system was borked due to their solarwinds problems http://superkuh.com/spf-google-fuckery.txt). I signed up for google's postmaster tools set my DNS TXT records but apparently I don't send enough mass mail to not be a mass mailer.
Guillotines might have worked well in the past, but with modern weapons and technology, you can use a much smaller portion of the population to suppress a much larger portion of the population.
You can pay 10% of the population well enough that they support the top 0.01%, and the top 10% can pay the next 20% to 30% well enough or provide a sufficient probability to move up (or illusion) that they are incentivized to help suppress the remaining 60%.
This reminds of a line from 30 Rock by Jack Donaghy:
"Diversity is the engine that drives this country. We are an immigrant nation! The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things, the next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas, the third generation... snowboards and takes improv classes."
Feels like one of those things that we all thought was true.
This design is among many low-tech alternatives to modern appliances and processes mentioned in book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm. It was not successful because of already established industry of refrigerators that were good enough. The book is excellent.
The thing about VR is that pretty much anyone that's actually tried it will say it's too compelling to not have some measure of success. I don't think VR/AR/XR will ever be as ubiquitous a platform as smartphones are today (which seems to be what Facebook is banking on, owning the next big computing platform), but it won't go away, and it's not just a gimmick either. It's a new class of experience that we are still figuring out how to even do and produce content for, and which will broaden its appeal as the prices come down - but it still remains to be seen if it'll ever be entirely mainstream either.
I got to 5 minutes. I have a kid so this was easy :D
Once upon a time there was a banana. That banana was called bob. Bob the banana used to have fights with other fruit. His arch nemesis was Oscar the orange. Oscar was a very orange orange. He was so orange that everyone else was jealous. Bob the banana wasn't very yellow. He was kind of yellow with dark splotches on. That is why Bob used to fight the other fruit. He was jealous of Oscar's orangey orangeness. He was also jealous of Adam Apple's shiny red skin. Finally, he was jealous of the grape gangs lovely green skin.
One day Bob was busy fighting Oscar, Adam and the Grape Gang. All at once. That's right. He was a very good fighter as he practiced a lot by fighting the other fruit.
Percy pineapple saw the fight and came up to Bob and intervened. He said, 'Oi. Bob. What you doing?'
'I'm fighting!'
'Why?'
'I don't know.'
Bob was sad. Bob shrugged. He didn't know why he was fighting.
'You never fight me' said Percy pineapple.
'You're right, I don't.'
'You only ever fight the fruit with lovely skin. Did you notice that?'
'Oh. You're right. I do'
'Do you think maybe you wish you had perfect skin like them?'
'You're right. I wish I did have lovely perfect skin without any blemishes. Instead, I have this grotty yellow skin with dark patches all over it.'
'That's ok. I have spiky skin. Nobody can even touch me and I never get any cuddles.'
'Oh.'
'Mmmhmmm'
Bob felt bad.
'Maybe I could try and hug you'.
'I wouldn't advise it, I'm very spikey. I've got used to just having high fives and fist bumps instead'
'Oh. That sounds like a good idea'.
Bob and Percy have a nice high five session. Bob isn't very good at high fives so it took a lot of practice. After about four thousand attempts they get it right and do one of the awesome high fives from top gun. That's right, a top gun high and low high five. They both feel really cool.
Bob isn't feeling sad any more.
Bob then looks around and notices the other fruit that he was decking. The fruit is looking a bit bashed up. He apologises for what he has done and then asks 'Can anyone do anything to help me?'
This is a great post and so spot on. At some point in my career my 'review prep' (which was the time I spent working on my own evaluation of my year at a company) became answering the question, "Do I still want to work here?" I categorize my 'review' in four sections (which are each rated at one of five levels, needs improvement, sometimes meets expectations, meets expectations, sometimes exceeds expectations, or consistently exceeds expectations)
I start by reviewing how I'm being managed, I expect someone managing me to be clear in their expectations of my work product, provide resources when I have identified the need to complete jobs, can clearly articulate the problem I am expected to be solving, and can clearly articulate the criteria by which the solution will be evaluated.
Second I review my co-workers, using a three axis evaluation, can I trust what they say to be accurate/honest, can I count on them to meet their commitments, and are they willing to teach me when I don't understand something and conversely learn when their is something they do not know.
Third I review what level of support do I get to do my job. Am I provided with a workspace where I can get work done? Do have have the equipment I need to do what is being asked? Is my commute conducive to the hours required? And finally and most important, does this job allow me to balance work obligations and non-work obligations?
Fourth I review whether or not the company mission, ethics, and culture is still one that I wish to be a part of. Am I proud of the company's mission? Do I believe that the leadership will make ethical calls even if doing so would mean less profit margin? Can I relate to and am I compatible with the values that my co-workers espouse and the actions they take? (this is the "company culture" theme, is it still a company that fits me culturally)
A company that receives lower than a 3.0 rating I put on a 90 day "company improvement plan" (CIP). I bring issues to the leadership who are in a position to address the situations that I've found wanting and try to secure their commitment to change. If after 90 days they haven't been able to (if they choose not to they're done right away), then I "fire" the company and work to process my exit as expeditiously as possible.
This is great. I was travelling recently and had this exact idea as planning the trip and dropping pins on Google maps sucked. I was not able to plan an ideal route and see adjustments. I wanted to make something exactly like this. There are a lot of product improvements you can make with this and I am excited for you!
My one suggestion would be to broaden the intended audience. I am not sure if this is only useful for hosts. I could just want to do this as a traveler who has read a bunch of suggestions online.
The programming people do most of is incredibly easy. Stop perpetuating the myth that programming is hard. People have changed careers to programming using week-long courses. No, they're not working on OS design, they don't contribute to the Linux kernel, but they work as programmers.
Don't kid yourself people, most of you work on CRUD shit. For every systems prgorammer there's a thousand front-end monkeys. Most of you work at such a high level it's basically just lego, glueing components together, with your hundreds of .JS files in your project, none of which you wrote. This is what most of you actually do. Complete packages like Rails... a six-week course can change people's lives (not a bad thing).
There is programming that is hard, it's just that that is not the type of programming most people do, and it's becoming more and more rare.
