Hacker News: granularity

New comment by granularity in "Replicube: 3D shader puzzle game, online demo"

granularity — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 23:05:29 +0000

Nice!

On the leaderboard I'd like to see code size vs cycles in a 2D plot with the Pareto front highlighted.

New comment by granularity in "The XOR Texture (2004)"

granularity — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 15:13:05 +0000

Oooo, link to a photo, please!

New comment by granularity in "How do you find a good manager?"

granularity — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:56:03 +0000

Exactly:

> Participants were recruited from the Essex University Economics Lab sample pool. ... The median participant was a graduate student with two years of work experience.

Hard to see how econ grad students play-acting boss says much about the kinds of long-term relationships / group dynamics that appear in the wild.

New comment by granularity in "Panic at the Job Market"

granularity — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 18:30:03 +0000

Are the scare quotes around wisdom because you're embarrassed to admit that such a thing exists? ;)

Since it seems you've thought about it a bit, I'm interested to hear your definition of what is / isn't wisdom in an engineering context.

New comment by granularity in "How to compare two packed bitfields without having to unpack each field (2019)"

granularity — Wed, 22 May 2024 22:07:43 +0000

Thanks for the links! Seems like we don't need to mask prior to the first compare, since the low order bits only matter if the high order bits are equal (in which case, we can also safely compare lower bits). Or am I missing something?

  bool IsEveryComponentGreaterThanOrEqual(uint16_t x, uint16_t y) {
    int rv = x >= y;
    auto xg = x & 0x07E0; auto yg = y & 0x07E0; rv &= xg >= yg;
    auto xb = x & 0x001F; auto yb = y & 0x001F; rv &= xb >= yb;
    return rv != 0;
  }

New comment by granularity in "Borges and AI"

granularity — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 18:09:07 +0000

> Tesler's Theorem (ca. 1970). My formulation of what others have since called the “AI Effect”. As commonly quoted: “Artificial Intelligence is whatever hasn't been done yet”. What I actually said was: “Intelligence is whatever machines haven't done yet”. Many people define humanity partly by our allegedly unique intelligence. Whatever a machine—or an animal—can do must (those people say) be something other than intelligence.

https://www.nomodes.com/larry-tesler-consulting/adages-and-c...

New comment by granularity in "Chandrayaan-3 Soft-landing [video]"

granularity — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 14:28:33 +0000

Here's the actual story about that quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Armstrong#First_Moon_walk

New comment by granularity in "The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)"

granularity — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 19:54:53 +0000

I read “attaches all these numbers to each other” to mean concatenation, not addition. Presumably you’d want to encode a “next book” token too. This kind of compression is known as arithmetic coding. It does work.

New comment by granularity in "Stable Attribution"

granularity — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 23:08:05 +0000

I like the concept, but if you upload a photo you took, the page will tell you:

  "These human-made source images were used by AI ... to generate this image."

Where "this image" is your photo.

New comment by granularity in "Intel’s Netburst: Failure Is a Foundation for Success"

granularity — Sun, 19 Jun 2022 16:06:24 +0000

> we’ll use period-correct graphs, created on Office XP

So beautiful.

New comment by granularity in "Sketch Machine"

granularity — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 20:18:06 +0000

Agreed, and I second the Looom recommendation.

New comment by granularity in "Why is China smashing its tech industry?"

granularity — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 16:45:53 +0000

> And of course you need firmware as well.

Love this. It's like Obama's "the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go". Clearly Mr Smith has done his homework on the subject of military technology and has learned a Technical Fact: "firmware exists". He probably even knows that it goes between hardware and software!

New comment by granularity in "Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia"

granularity — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 22:39:34 +0000

New comment by granularity in "‘Deep Nostalgia’ can turn old photos of your relatives into moving videos"

granularity — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 21:30:11 +0000

If you like bad movies, this one manages to be bad on a number of interesting dimensions at the same time. Highly recommended!

New comment by granularity in "Symbolics, Inc.: A failure of heterogeneous engineering (2001) [pdf]"

granularity — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 17:10:27 +0000

I wasn't aware of the Symbolics / SDI connection:

> The market created by funding from SDI was quite forgiving. The government was interested in creating complex Lisp programs and Symbolics machines were the leading alternative at that time. Officials who allocated funds for SDI did not demand cost-effective results from their research funds and hence the expert-systems companies boomed during this period.

Sorry to be glib but, maybe we should be grateful we got an AI winter, not a nuclear winter.

New comment by granularity in "Ask HN: As a person, what can I do to improve a city?"

granularity — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 22:29:55 +0000

The takeaways (for me) were that: 1) a small number of high-status parents with different priorities than the broader community will often (without malice) influence a school's administration such that the community's more fundamental priorities get lost, 2) political action to enable racial integration of public schools has been a symbolic goal in NYC for generations, but there's been a repeated lack of follow-through due to ... lack of courage and commitment.