Hacker News: ghostly_s

New comment by ghostly_s in "Better Gaussian Splatting in Julia"

ghostly_s — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:46:14 +0000

As I understand the typical workflow starts with a stack of frames which have a small offset in position /orientation which the model is able to derive due to sufficient similarities to the adjacent frames; if I created three stacks like that which are internally self-similar but were taken from three viewpoints 20 meters apart, so perhaps only a small portion of the scene is common between them, could the model still orient them into a single scene? I suppose you could just capture the "transition" frames as you move your camera from one viewpoint to the next as well and then it would be treated as a single path?

New comment by ghostly_s in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

ghostly_s — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:33:52 +0000

1. A couple orders of magnitude more people own homes than EVs; 2. EVs already are used as energy storage, but the thing about EVs is people want to use that energy to yknow, drive them.

New comment by ghostly_s in "Better Gaussian Splatting in Julia"

ghostly_s — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:30:54 +0000

This raises the question, do any of these projects have workflows for combining images taken from different positions? Or does that just work out of the box? (I have no machines atm with anything better than 10yo eGPUs ;~<)

New comment by ghostly_s in "Better Gaussian Splatting in Julia"

ghostly_s — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:26:20 +0000

TFA mentions this project has backends for :

AMD GPU (AMDGPU.jl) NVIDIA GPU (CUDA.jl) MacBook GPU(Metal.jl)

New comment by ghostly_s in "Bike Bureau: Report Bike Lane Obstructions"

ghostly_s — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:49:40 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by ghostly_s in "Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas"

ghostly_s — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:51:00 +0000

This letter says nothing about Louisiana or Virginia, what exactly are you talking about?

New comment by ghostly_s in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

ghostly_s — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:01:37 +0000

Did OP say "I want something vaguely similar that requires a greater investment of my time and money"? Did you in any way indicate that's what you were proposing?

New comment by ghostly_s in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"

ghostly_s — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:10:57 +0000

This is the first press videos I’ve seen of 1x speed that seems reasonable, imho. Though I see elsewhere they report only 50-75% success rate- not clear if that's first attempt, or total?

New comment by ghostly_s in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

ghostly_s — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:44:13 +0000

Considering their recent decision to give up on building Apple Maps into a serious contender and instead enshittify it with ads, I don't have much faith Apple TV will be far behind.

New comment by ghostly_s in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

ghostly_s — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:41:49 +0000

These are not "streaming boxes" in the sense you are talking about. Their appeal is that they come preloaded with chinese pirate streaming apps. Traditional streaming boxes - Apple TV, Fire stick, Roku - are not affected by this, though if you want privacy-focused Apple TV is the only remaining contender, and with Apple's continued descent into advertising vendor I'd guess that one is not long for this world, either.

New comment by ghostly_s in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

ghostly_s — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:37:29 +0000

That's not what these things are. They come preloaded with apps that stream pirate broadcast streams and on-demand servers operated out of China.

New comment by ghostly_s in "Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick"

ghostly_s — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:35:59 +0000

> they probably remember shows being free from over the air antennas

you are aware broadcast TV never ended?

New comment by ghostly_s in "The Scientific Literature Is Poisonous to LLMs"

ghostly_s — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:36:15 +0000

> Imagining a two-by-two matrix with the axes honest vs. dishonest and right vs. wrong, the scientific literature is splashed haphazardly across all four boxes.

Why should we give an extraordinarily claim like this any credence from the authors of a newly-minted substack who can't be assed to write more than a blurb on the topic, and whose listed credentials amount to a cagey statement that isn't even clear on whether they hold degrees?

New comment by ghostly_s in "Darktable"

ghostly_s — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:29:31 +0000

Don't lead people down a fruitless path. From their own FAQ:

>Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?¶ Yes and no. Darktable is an alternative to Lightroom the same way any other raw editor is, since it edits raw files, but it would be a mistake to think it’s a direct replacement. Other than both being raw editors with photo library management, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common.

What they mean is, Darktable has very capable editing functionality, but its "library management" is such an afterthought that I would challenge whether it even deserves to be called library management. It seems to be oriented around the design philosophy that photographers should be organizing their library with CLI tools.

New comment by ghostly_s in "Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents"

ghostly_s — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:23:30 +0000

Please don't paste walls of text into the comment field without quotation marks. It wastes all of our time.

New comment by ghostly_s in "Worse on Purpose"

ghostly_s — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:46:04 +0000

I see Lodge is the first entry on their "approved" list: "The anchor of the entire counter-list." Everything I've heard from the cast iron nerds is that modern Lodge is crap because they switched to the cheaper sand casting process, which leaves a rough finish that is a PITA to season. Selling out to private equity is not a prerequisite to enshittification.

New comment by ghostly_s in "I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated"

ghostly_s — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:05:56 +0000

These aren't even self-setting, let alone self-adjusting. They are merely self-winding.

New comment by ghostly_s in "Patreon laying off 20% of staff"

ghostly_s — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:27:52 +0000

His name is Jack, and I would describe him as a deeply weird narcissist. You got the "relies heavily on maintaining a positive social image" part right.

New comment by ghostly_s in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

ghostly_s — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:16:05 +0000

You can decide what appetite for risk you are comfortable with, but some people don't have any better option than logging in to accounts on a public computer. The industry is pushing this system as the new universal answer for authentication, it NEEDS to work in every scenario passwords do.

(...and I’m pretty sure plugging my yubikey into a locked down public terminal is not going to solve this, either.)

New comment by ghostly_s in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

ghostly_s — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:08:31 +0000

I use Bitwarden on Linux. There is no option to do anything with a passkey I have stored there except delete it.