Hacker News: N1ckFG

New comment by N1ckFG in "It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history"

N1ckFG — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:07:47 +0000

It's also New Wave science fiction, and once you get past the conlang and the genre conventions, it's still incredibly violent! Kubrick iirc even once said in an interview that he removed some book scenes from his (initially X-rated) film adaptation, because he thought the invented language helped make them less disturbing to read, but audiences watching them dramatized would just give up and walk out. Anyway I sure do see some of the trends described in the article with my younger students and relatives, but such a strange unforced error makes me suspicious of the strength of the research.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM"

N1ckFG — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:55:11 +0000

In my experience, yes to hardware-accelerated video from CLI--running in EGL mode, with no window manager, that RPi model works very well. (A C++ app that uses video as a texture can be surprisingly performant, too.) But no to playing video in a full desktop environment and browser, not smoothly--it's just too much overhead.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Martin Scorsese Is Embracing A.I."

N1ckFG — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:53:34 +0000

An imo fascinating wrinkle that the article doesn't get into, Black Forest's main use case for their Flux models is "analytical" (modifying the user's pre-existing material, storyboards in this case) rather than "generative" (modifying stored material from the model's training corpus). In my experience with these tools so far, the analytical approach is more filmmaker-friendly, with image models fitting comfortably into well-established rendering and compositing roles. Meanwhile my current guess is that creative applications of the generative approach are going to end up looking a lot more like gamedev than filmmaking.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Hosting a site on a Raspberry Pi"

N1ckFG — Sat, 09 May 2026 19:48:24 +0000

imo it's not setting up the site once that's the problem, it's keeping it maintained indefinitely without making mistakes, because hostile automated systems will keep on rattling the doorknob like Jurassic Park velociraptors. (And I agree, for sophisticated users keeping it off your home network goes a long way towards preventing worst-case outcomes.)

New comment by N1ckFG in "Analysis of Hedy Lamarr's Contribution to Spread-Spectrum Communication"

N1ckFG — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 05:20:07 +0000

Afaik the basis of the Bluetooth thing is that out of all the different kinds of spread-spectrum radio we use now, Bluetooth happens to be the closest to her original design. So it's a drastic simplification, but not wrong.

New comment by N1ckFG in "3D Line Drawings"

N1ckFG — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 20:28:20 +0000

Informative-Drawings already has monocular depth estimation built in--that's why its line results are so beautifully consistent. But without this extra step combining results from multiple camera positions, you get 2.5D geometry, not 3D.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Babies made using three people's DNA are born free of mitochondrial disease"

N1ckFG — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 17:57:06 +0000

Afaik it's a misconception that MRT necessarily involves the destruction of an embryo. The spindle transfer method transplants the mother's egg's DNA into the donor's egg before fertilization, so only one embryo is ever created. The UK trials exclusively used the older pronuclear transfer method, where two embryos are created and the donor's is destroyed, because the journey to full regulatory approval took about a decade and embryos are currently safer to freeze and thaw than eggs. In a hypothetical scenario where MRT became as widely available as IVF, this would not need to be the case for new patients.

New comment by N1ckFG in "The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive"

N1ckFG — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 04:05:04 +0000

Afaik they do respond to DMCA requests for the individual uploads, and they do more active curation for the collections where only specific user accounts have upload access.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Natron: Open-source alternative to Adobe After Effects"

N1ckFG — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 04:23:27 +0000

Yeah it's a common misconception; I think it's it's because After Effects has far outlived the source of its original UI metaphor, the Oxberry (rostrum) animation camera, which at this point few people still have firsthand experience with. Nuke and most newer node-based compositing software offers a more scalable approach for a broader range of tasks, but it can't adequately address that very specific AE niche of under-the-camera-style animation.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Ben Fry resigns from the Processing Foundation"

N1ckFG — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 05:27:18 +0000

And imo up till now the original Java flavor of Processing has been maintained very well! They've kept up with Java versions, done an Apple ARM port, added modern conveniences like debuggable shaders and a library to run ONNX ML models, and improved GPU performance with each major release. I'm concerned about this changing if the current maintainers are leaving...

New comment by N1ckFG in "The Future of Consumer SBCs: Has the Pi Bubble Burst? [video]"

N1ckFG — Sun, 28 May 2023 22:23:26 +0000

Based on price/performance alone an 8GB RPi 4 doesn't make sense even in its own category--it can't compete with an Nvidia Jetson. But if you're doing a lot of Pi work then the more expensive models earn their keep as dev machines. (Multiple compiler threads can actually use that RAM, and there are situations where transpiling on a desktop can't help.)

New comment by N1ckFG in "Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop (2019)"

N1ckFG — Thu, 18 May 2023 18:05:45 +0000

It's a matter of resources and time imo. Blender is currently about thirty people and started in 1994; Krita and Gimp are each currently four people and both started in 1998. (Also, 3D graphics turned out to have a Blender-shaped hole--it's arguably the first generalist's creation app--while the 2D painting space has gotten pretty crowded since the 1970s.)

New comment by N1ckFG in "“Twitter is going great” is being sunset"

N1ckFG — Mon, 01 May 2023 16:19:10 +0000

I bet most of the community here defaults to Following (non-curated timeline). Mine's gotten a lot quieter, without as many interesting threads cutting across fields, but talking to friends hasn't changed. However I've seen the occasional literal, ideological N*zi pop up in New Twitter's For You (curated timeline), which I suspect is down to using metrics susceptible to rage-farming.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Ask HN: Is Mastodon the best alternative to Twitter?"

N1ckFG — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 19:50:30 +0000

imo the "echo chamber" scenario would be if you only followed people from your local server, and also set your posts to only show there. If you set your posts to public and gather a couple hundred mutuals...I find the Mastodon 2023 experience turns out to be pleasantly similar to early '10s Twitter.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Ask HN: Share Your YouTube Channel"

N1ckFG — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 19:40:56 +0000

Experimental animation: https://youtube.com/n1ckfg

New comment by N1ckFG in "Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens"

N1ckFG — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 19:13:22 +0000

Yeah y'all are right, I can't find anything to support the notion the HoloLens 2 uses an Android fork for its OS. (Possibly the person who told me this had it confused with Magic Leap...?)

New comment by N1ckFG in "An IP attorney’s reading of the Stable Diffusion class action lawsuit"

N1ckFG — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 19:01:02 +0000

Afaik theoretically you could reproduce any image in the training set using the full weights (not a fraction of them) and the correct prompt. In practice since this is an extremely lossy process, some or most of them aren't reproducible. For this specific case, I suspect it'll come down to whether somebody in the class can pass a test like this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03860

New comment by N1ckFG in "Microsoft has laid off entire teams behind Virtual, Mixed Reality, and HoloLens"

N1ckFG — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 02:51:55 +0000

HoloLens 2 switched to ~~Android~~ ARM and UWP apps running on heavily modified Android, but imo the insistence on hand tracking as the primary interface still walled it off from the other Android XR developer communities.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Blender 3.4"

N1ckFG — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 14:37:41 +0000

There's an Eevee update in the works that includes some Lumen ideas, real emissive materials for instance (iirc). Even for now, you can dive into the options and enable some stuff like refraction that defaults to off for the folks with less GPU.

New comment by N1ckFG in "Twitter was a valuable platform for scientific discourse in the past"

N1ckFG — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 15:09:45 +0000

Mastodon's at the "email in 1994" stage--the general public is starting to become aware that it exists, and folks who were running small servers for their own purposes suddenly find themselves in a position to earn social capital by handing out accounts. Obviously in a few years at most, this will get tedious for the admins providing all that undercompensated labor. I think the winning scenario will be old-school webhosts including a personal Mastodon instance with their default package, like email. If that happens, Big Tech adoption will follow and we're quickly talking about a real standard with a lifespan of decades, if not more