Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.

  • 22 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • I … find that hard to believe, but also someone on the R site said in a “everything is bass heavy” troubleshooting section that the vinyl master has less bass and the record players add extra bass back in to the signal.

    I’m really leaning towards Vinyl is just a different reproduction that some people like more than digital. Seems like a similar thing with how some people use tube amps with their digital audio library to cause that “old school radio” warm tone when you crank it up.






  • Right?

    I’m really hoping for better trees at a distance. The current system looks pretty dated, especially when you scope in on a tree and it changes shape.

    The lighting and water changes alone should really help improve the maps though!

    I’m very curious how the shooting range will look on the 15th (it’ll presumably be the only way to play on an old map for the first 30 days).





  • I know A LOT of people that still use cash and use it frequently for legitimate purchases.

    There are also several places around here that are cash only shops, and several more that will charge you extra for using a credit card.

    Cash is an official, government sanctioned, form of currency. Part of the appeal of cryptocurrencies is they’re a currency that’s outside of government management.

    The problem with bitcoin in particular is volatility vs any other reference currency is insane. You might have enough to buy an expensive house one day, then a few months later you only have enough for a cheap car, then a few months later you can buy an even nicer house (or maybe not!). That’s just not practical for most people … I don’t think it ever will be practical for most people.

    If we get a “stable coin” that requires low power draw … maybe? But is that really better than just using a credit card? Are online purchases really more secure? People get their wallet stolen in real life, getting your digital wallet stolen is something that can totally happen too. There’s no FDIC on your bitcoin, a bitcoin wallet isn’t a bank.

    Crypto fans love to talk up crypto coins but … I just do not see them as a practical solution to much of anything. We would be far better off improving security of credit cards so you can manage your purchases in a system that’s more like PayPal’s where there’s a way to see “these are the things that are authorized to take money from you automatically” and “these are the things where we generated a one time token and this is how much you paid.”

    The things I’ve seen about bitcoin at scale have also suggested it could never even come close to the transaction speed of VISA.

    I just … I am so far from sold. I found Bitcoin when it was ~1 USD per bitcoin. I wish I’d bought just $50 of bitcoin back then and sat on it, but I don’t think bitcoin ever has soared because of its merits. It’s kind of like this AI hype right now, block chains have very limited practical usability.


  • OH, I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you were saying search itself is a duopoly between Google and Brave Search.

    You’re saying searching Reddit is a duopoly between Google and Brave Search.

    That’s my bad… but yeah, the article is just wrong anyways, Kagi also has access still (presumably through their deal with Google to use Google’s search results as part of their result set). I wonder if Brave has a similar deal … or their crawlers just haven’t been blocked yet … or they paid off Reddit.

    EDIT: Also, I will say because Brave search has such a small market share that’s probably not going to help Google’s case much.


  • I will say, I disagree with this perspective as a developer.

    Adding more people doesn’t inherently make the product better. You can have too many cooks in the kitchen and too many people stepping on each other’s toes.

    It’s like the saying 9 women can’t make a baby in a month.

    I think the other apps are moving at a reasonable pace. Though I do wish they’d put some more people on Linux desktop apps… Maybe even a Linux distribution “Proton OS” could be very interesting.






  • LLMs are expensive power hungry beasts of limited use.

    Crypto is similarly a power hungry beast. It’s also primarily a niche pseudo currency that’s arguably more regularly used for crime than legitimate purchases.

    “Feed what you wish to grow” applies here … and TBH I’m okay with what they’ve done with the LLM. The crypto wallet … I just wish we’d let crypto die. Bitcoin in particular is too unstable for the average person to use as some kind of normal currency. People also see it as an investment, but it’s a super questionable investment that is backed only by the arbitrary value we give it.



  • You should definitely benchmark it using a simulation of what your data might look like. It should not be that hard. Just make script, that creates bunch of files similar to your data.

    Right, it’s just kind of a thing to think about. If your program is something that might conceivably be used of sshfs (as an example) … this is probably not a great option for your program’s configuration.

    The data structure and parser is not formed the same way as the json, where you have to parse the whole thing. So you don’t have to. You just open the files you need read their content. It is a bit more difficult at first since you can’t just translate a whole struct directly, but it pays for itself when you want to migrate the data to a new format. So if your structure never changes, probably those formats are easier.

    Well a very common thing is to create a “config” object that lives in the long running process (and in some cases can be reloaded without restarting the program).

    That model also saves you from unnecessary repeated IO operations (without one off caching and reloading mechanisms) and allows you to centralize any validation (which also means you can give configuration errors on start up).

    I do wish various formats were more “streaming” friendly, but configuration isn’t really one of them.

    In a lot of languages moving between formats is also fairly trivial because the XYZ markup parser parses things into an object map and the ZYK markup writer can write an object map into ZYK format.

    Maybe I’m not understanding what you mean by migrating the data to a new format though.



  • I’m a bit skeptical about the performance penalty. I know there’s a benchmark but I didn’t see any details of what was actually benchmarked and where. Windows (AFAIK) still has notoriously slow directory traversal operations. God forbid you’re using SSHFS or even NFS. I’ve seen things with hundreds of YAML nodes before.

    Benchmarking this is also tricky because the OS file cache will almost certainly make the second time faster than the first (and probably by a lot).

    Also just the usability… I think opening a file to change one value is extreme. You also still have the problem of documentation… Which sure you can solve by putting that in another file, but… You can also do that with just plain old JSON.

    I think in the majority of languages, writing a library to process these files would also be more complicated than writing a JSON parser or using an existing library.

    Also how do you handle trailing whitespace inserted by a text editor? Do you drop it? Keep it? It probably doesn’t matter as long as the configuration is just for a particular program. The program just needs to document it… But then you’ve got ambiguities between programs that you just don’t have to worry about with TOML or JSON.