Another great question, and another good opportunity to supply you with true facts and deep knowledge of reality. Here we go.
(This is turning into a real educational opportunity, unexpectedly.)
I have never--not once in my entire life--been so mistreated in person as I have been online, here or elsewhere. It simply does not happen, for some reason. At all. Ever.
This is not to say I haven't ever met any of you online abusers in real life; no, statistically speaking, I'm sure you're out there in the crowd somewhere, presumably within earshot when I speak truth. It's just that (for whatever reason) you simply never, ever think to approach me in the same manner as you do here.
(Maybe you can think of one or two good reasons why this is so. I'm sure whatever explanation you reach will be completely self-centered and self-serving, just like your other justifications and rationalizations about everything, which always reach the same conclusion: that I'm wrong, and terrible, and that you're a Good Person, and it's OK for you to just shit all over me.)
Since there is no such thing as downvotes or flags in real life--and since you don't have any actual rebuttal to offer to what I say, in 95% of cases--therefore your only choice (other than listening and, you know, learning) must be to sit quietly and fume in the corner, were you to suffer the indignity of hearing my horrible and unacceptable opinions spoken in the vicinity. So I guess that's what you do.
If you run into me in real life, feel free to speak up and make yourself known next time. Be sure to froth at the mouth as you call me a lunatic and a maniac and so on. Really, the more hatred you launch in my direction, the more success you will surely have. Everyone who hears will be thoroughly impressed at how right you are and how terrible I am.
> It simply does not happen, for some reason. At all. Ever.
Do you speak the same in-person as you do online? Most people probably could not parse any of what you posted, even with context. The most they'll pull from it is the Nazi correlations, and they probably won't extrapolate nice things from there.
I have thick skin, I dislike copyright and keep the company of all sorts of malcontents. If you lashed out against me for refusing to use your copyrighted code in real life, then yeah I would hold you very deeply in contempt. Or assume that you're an undercover agent of some sort trying to peer-pressure me into crime.
I am a descendant of the man called Sequoyah, if it's not obvious. Writing clearly and expressively is not difficult for me. I do it as easily as breathing. If you can't parse my perfectly clear and understandable language, the problem is with you and not me.
I didn't "lash out" at anyone. I simply asked why waste time on this when you can just use the original source code. It's a valid question, isn't it?
It's also a perfectly cromulent place to express my completely valid opinions about the abomination and complete waste of time and energy that is copyright law, isn't it?
So what is the actual problem here, other than your butthurt feelings, that are in fact a personal problem of your own creation and have nothing to do with me? ... Ah, it seems I answered my own question.
Again and again we come back to the root of the problem: Why are you so determined to find some kind of flaw in me and my opinions? Pull the log out of your own eye first.
Why do you hate me so much that you enjoy censoring and shutting me down at every step, preventing me from expressing my valid thoughts? Isn't that abusive behavior of the sort that one expects from a tyrant, not from a supposedly free society?
Is this the paradise you had in mind to create when you genocided my ancestors and drove the survivors from our land? Well, you did not succeed in deporting or killing me. Nor will you silence me.
If you were truly correct in your own opinions, you could easily outargue me. A look at my post history will show at least one or two examples where I admitted the other guy was right when they clearly were. I guess that's considered an amazing superpower these days, since it never, ever happens anymore. No, you'd rather fight LITERALLY TO THE DEATH in some cases rather than allow for an alternate viewpoint.
And you wonder why people all over the world say your nation is corrupt and full of arrogant criminals. Gee, I wonder how they ever came to that conclusion.
You often call yourself "polite society", but you're not really very polite, are you?
I have no defense for HN; the website is designed poorly, moderated inconsistently, and the YC-affiliated retinue is sketchier than a pencil drawing.
That being said, people who take things personally for no reason is exactly the reason the "flag" button exists. We all know that the Half Life source code is out there on the internet, most of us agree that copyright is stupid, and a good handful of us are probably deliberately violating copyright law. That isn't your excuse to deride people who make things that don't conform to your (literally illegal!) outlook on society.
This is a really cool project that is in no way invalidated by the existence of leaked source code. Your copyright tangent is a non-sequitur and deserves to be flagged.
I maintain my position that this project is a complete waste of time which exists only due to the abomination that is copyright law. (Without that reason, the author would have easily recognized this project as a waste of time, would he not?)
I continue to assert that it's OK to have such an opinion and to express it freely. I reject your incorrect, selfish, and quite frankly evil belief that I deserve to be censored. Nobody deserves to have their honest opinions be censored, ever, especially in what is allegedly a public discussion forum.
(Except maybe you--since you self-identify as a tyrant. I'm OK with you never being allowed to speak again, if you want to shut me up when I have done nothing wrong.)
There are about ten trillion important projects that need to be done in this world, many of critical, life and death importance. Reimplementing a 20-year old game (due to copyright concerns, of all reasons) is a foolish waste of time no matter how you slice it.
If the guy was collecting Pokemon cards or spent all his time watching sports, or blowing his money on hot rodding, or a thousand other foolish things, I'd post exactly the same advice: Stop wasting your time on useless activities and get serious.
Of course, such a sentiment isn't going to be popular in a forum full of so many young (or not so young) "men" and "women" who spend their entire "lives" inside video games, when they aren't doomscrolling on "their" phone. Lots of escapism and avoidance of reality going on around here. Let's just hate and attack the messenger, that's always a great move.
It's pretty sad we have to keep going back and forth about this. All you had to do is just let me express my opinion and move on. But you just couldn't do that; it was impossible. Now we have a giant "discussion" thread in which you are unsuccessfully attempting to argue with a brick wall, after your censorship attempt failed.
Remember what I said above about the GIANT WASTE OF TIME AND ENERGY that copyright law creates? I wonder how many watts and calories have been burned and lost forever as a result of this thread, in addition to all that has been wasted on this reimplementation of an old game.
Here's some more life wisdom: Just because somebody says something "negative" doesn't mean they're being an asshole. It is permissable to disagree and to express that disagreement. Stop being so thin skinned, perpetually offended at every word that comes out of my mouth. You will not succeed in censoring me. Period.
In one use case, it is kind of a verbal exclamation point, but it has more meanings and uses than just that. Likely originates from Hokkien, but it has evolved into it is own thing. If you are curious, more details here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish
I can't speak to gaming but i was warned about printer issues as well. However after a hasty switch from win10 to xubuntu to save my phd work i was able to get the office printer working on ubuntu that i could never print to on windows. Sure, i installed a driver but the dialogue literally directed me to do so. My jaw hit the floor when the test page came out flawless.
Yah, I feel like Linux was way worse with printers in the past.. now the story is more like: you'll have a different set of printer issues across the major OSes but no OS is clearly better or worse.
I agree with most of what you said but i'd like to raise 2 points
1) the immediate action _is more important immediately_ than the systemic change. We should focus on maximizing our "fixing" and letting a toxic element continue to poison you while you waste time wondering how you got there is counterproductive. It is important to focus on the systemic change, but once you have removed the person that will destroy the organization/kill us all.
I suppose that depends on context. I think it's important to be pragmatic regarding urgency. Of course the most urgent thing is to stop the bleeding; removing the bullet can probably wait until things have calmed down a bit.
If Joe dropped the production database and you're uncertain about his intentions then perhaps it would be a good idea to do the bare minimum by reducing his access privileges for the time being. No more than that though.
Whereas if you're reasonably certain that there was no intentional foul play involved then focusing on the individual from the outset isn't likely to improve the eventual outcome (rather it seems to me quite likely to be detrimental).
Yeah, it's definitely a small percent of people. But i do wonder how many there really has to be to have an outsized effect. One of those lifted kid killers blowing black smoke for the entire duration of the bicycle pack is definitely more than 3 of my tiny honda civics, i wonder how many it really is, and how much those modifications increase the "resting emissions rate"even when not blowing shit. Should be illegal, likely is.
I'd wager it's largely disruptive and dangerous in a highly localized way due to the small percentage of folks doing it. Doesn't make it an acceptable practice though. One person "rolling coal" can temporarily blind 3 or 4 cars back and several across depending on wind conditions, etc.
In terms of NOX it can be a factor of 100. If 1% drive without cats they produce half the NOX emissions. In reality it is probably less since there are other old cars as well that have higher emissions
The showcase of frames at the end really broke something through for me. It's easy to simply sit in a theater or on your couch and watch the movie as a movie. But while the theater screen is large, you don't get to pause it. So nearly all of the incredible detail gets blurred in a way that makes it easy to be immersed in the movement and story, but also forget the art of visuals. Seeing those specific frames laid out, each one of those would be an incredible art piece on their own! They would all be extremely difficult to create for an individual and take so so much time. I always wondered what those 1000+ people in the credits were actually doing, now i know! I never realized the incredibly depth and thought and time and art that goes into every frame of an animated movie.
There's an old, semi-retired YouTube video essay channel called "Every Frame a Painting". I disagreed with several of its essays, enjoyed many of them, but the biggest takeaway/agreement I got from that channel was that core spirit in the title itself. It is something I still find very useful reminder when thinking about films and/or criticizing them. The medium of a movie (or a TV show) is 12 or 24 (or more rarely 60) frames per second. We don't always reflect on how everyone of them in (even a "bad" movie) is essentially a painting. Art was involved to get that shot, that frame of the shot. Often art by lots of people, very few of them are the people you see on that screen, yet their fingerprints and hard work still shows through. "Every frame a painting" is a good sentiment to remember, I think. Especially for animation, but for any movie.
Thank you for sharing this - it reminds of the film adaption of "The Peasants" novel which uses a painted animation technique made up of thousands and thousands of paintings. Quite literally, nearly "Every Frame [is] a Painting".
I really appreciate the still images at the end of the Mandalorian episodes. I'm not sure if they were used for set design or created afterward, but they are really stunning and gives you more time to appreciate the world building, costumes, and creativity that goes into production.
Also a huge fan of that channel. I think he came back recently to do some more episodes. There's a new channel I found that offers similar reflections upon cinema - willbryanfilms - definitely worth checking out!
For some reason, if I don't think about it, instinctually I would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming example) and Zootopia as "simple" graphics. My mind recalls big swathes of primary colours in relatively flat yet cheerful lighting, rounded/smoothed shapes, relatively little complex texturing or surface detail.
It's when I pause overwatch that I start realizing 1. how much detail there is, and 2. How quickly and flawlessly it's rendered on relatively slow computers. And then I start truly appreciating the relentless optimizing work to make it "seem simple and fast" :).
Same thing with Zootopia - I've enjoyed the movies (doesn't hurt that I have two young kids), but they would not come to mind if I were asked to name breakthrough or particularly well animated movies. Yet the detail and work is clearly there once you pause and examine :)
> I would always describe Overwatch (to take a gaming example) and Zootopia as "simple" graphics.
I think an art director would describe them as "readable". When there's a lot of detail and quick motion, it's important that the audience can very quickly recognize what they're looking at and what's happen. Otherwise, it just turns into a big jumble of chaos that the viewer can't follow, like in Michael Bay's Transformer movies.
A big part of the art of movie making is telegraphic a sense of rich realism and complexity while still having everything clearly visually parsable. Doing that when cuts and action are fast is quite difficult.
Doing it well affects every level of the production: the colors assigned to characters so they are separated from the background, wardrobe choices to also keep characters distinct, lighting, set design, texture, animation, focus, the way the camera moves. It all works together to produce one coherent readable scene.
A nice example of this is shown in Figure 2 of the paper "Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2" [1] from Valve. It shows how they tried to make the silhouettes of each character class distinct and readable. (And the paper also discusses the choices that went into the color palette.)
In case of games, that's pretty much optional. Many games (e.g. Battlefield) take the opposite approach where spotting the enemy in the chaos is intentionally hard and a skill to master. I'm sure there are also intentionally less readable movies or at least scenes, although no immediate example comes to mind.
We are "just fine" with blurry details, on some level... but a lot of processing a movie holistically comes from that level of detail being present. Even if few people walking out of the theater could put their finger on why the world felt vibrant, it'll come down to the fact those details were there.
So much of movie making is like that. No normal person comes out of a theater saying "wow, the color grading on that movie really helped the drive the main themes along, I particularly appreciated the way it was used to amplify the alienation the main character felt at being betrayed by his life-long friend, and the lighting in that scene really sent that point home". That's all film nerd stuff. But it's the lighting, the color grading, the camera shots, all this subtle stuff that the casual consumer will never cite as their reason for liking or disliking the movie that results in the feelings that were experienced.
They aren't necessary. People still connect with the original Snow White, and while it may have been an absolute technical breakthrough masterstroke for the time, by modern standards it is simple. But used well the details we can muster for a modern production can still go into the general tone of the film; compare the two next to each other while looking for this effect and you may be able to "feel" what I'm talking about.
Fair enough, I agree with the sentiment, especially about the lighting, colour grading, shots and similar details that form the overall "feel" of the movie.
With my comment I was referring to some things that end up being indistinguishable even if insane number of hours were put into it being photorealistic. For example, take a shot where background is heavily blurred. Maybe those assets took a lot to render, compute, used fancy hair simulations and had a lot of details, but they were very far in the distance and camera choice made them indistinguishable from a static background. This is what I am wondering - where is the balance of not doing things that are bound to not be noticed by anyone.
I think there's a bit of rose tinted glasses going on with our memories of SD TV, too. A decade or so ago I plugged an old PS2 into my 50" plasma TV (which I bought just after plasma TVs got suddenly cheap :D ) and then spent a good 10-15 minutes trying to find a setting to increase the resolution before realising that, no, that's just how things looked back then, except now it's magnified so it's really blurry.
I recently put together a system that trained a model to identify "background worthy frames" of TV shows. Animated shows scored often quite highly with a many frames being valid, I suppose an essayist would be able to explain why.
I agree. I was brought on as an intern to do automation for a business team. The company had built this gargantuan complex "programming tool" to help the boomers who'd been there for 30 years adjust to the new world (a noble endeavor for mortgage holders without college degrees, i believe). I was brought in to basically fuck around and find little things to optimize. In 2 months I wrote a python script to do about 50% of the teams work near instantly.
They had layoffs every year and i remember when the "boss's boss" came to town and sat at our table of desks. She asked me and i excitedly told her about my progress. She prompted how i felt about it and i nearly said "its very easy as long as you can program". But mid sentence i saw the intense fear in the eyes of the team and changed subject. It really hit home to me that these people actually were doing a useless job, but they all had children who need insurance, and mortgages that need paying. And they will all be cast out into a job market that will never hire them because they came on at the very end of not needing a college degree. The company was then bought by a ruthless and racist "big man investor" who destroyed it and sold it for parts. But my manager did somewhat derogatorily refer to the only programmer near them as "the asian".
I don't have a dog in this disagreement, but putting the bar at "dig up the personal details of 10 different individual people and the changing dynamics of their lives over decades _starting from 1880_" is a pretty insane ask I'd imagine. How many resources for reliable and accurate longitudinal case studies from the 19th century are there really? I suppose we could read a couple dozen books written around then but that's just making a satisfactory reply so prohibitively time intensive as to be impossible.
Indeed, and when 10 were pulled up by zozbot234, they say that doesn't count. This sort of discussion is not really useful in my eyes, shifting goalposts around and not saying what one means.
Very interesting how nearly half the list is (assumedly) every single chemical listed under California Prop 65. Do they really need to specify exactly which chemical it is? I've seen thousands of prop 65 warnings in my life but I've literally never seen it tell me what chemical its warning me about. I just commented to a friends a couple weeks ago i wished they'd tell me what so i could look it up myself!
Is this satire? Does merely seeing a picture of a cantaloup on a shelf harm your psyche? Sure, if it's a model holding them up to her chest saying "come get my melons" i can understand that might qualify. But i don't see how "joe's has cantaloup again" would make you feel literally anything unless you already wanted cantaloupe, in which case the notification was beneficial in _allieving_ a negative emotion and not creating one.
I admit that the line gets very fuzzy at a certain point but i think we can agree that the extremes are different things.
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