Hacker News: hcarvalhoalves

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "More assorted notes on Liquid Glass"

hcarvalhoalves — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 19:46:14 +0000

> Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision.

I believe that's exactly what Apple wants. This new design direction appears to be a strategy to unify all UI for VR as well.

If all controls are designed to be translucent, they (Apple) have freedom to put the control anywhere on the user's field of view on VR and allow "focus on the underlying content" (which in the case of VR, is the real world).

Time will tell if this approach makes sense for 2D screens.

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "More on Apple's Trust-Eroding 'F1 the Movie' Wallet Ad"

hcarvalhoalves — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 13:04:25 +0000

Company takeover by bean counters and clowns. It happens with every company, sooner or later.

Apple remains on the edge with hardware though. I guess the show is still ran by the engineers at this department.

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "AI fakes duel over impeachment of Vice-President in Phillipines"

hcarvalhoalves — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 21:24:45 +0000

The Philippines has a story of foreign influence on their local politics. It wouldn't be crazy to expect this is just the latest chapter of the 3 letter using it as laboratory.

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Is gravity just entropy rising? Long-shot idea gets another look"

hcarvalhoalves — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 16:46:09 +0000

In other words, gravity would be explainable by statistical mechanics (like heat)?

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Apple's Liquid Glass is prep work for AR interfaces, not just a design refresh"

hcarvalhoalves — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 15:05:02 +0000

This looks like a product evolution, but in reverse.

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun's poles"

hcarvalhoalves — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 14:55:24 +0000

I suppose it takes a lot of deltaV to get a stable orbit over the sun poles?

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech"

hcarvalhoalves — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 18:21:30 +0000

Last I heard, workers were getting replaced by AI, so this will sort itself out.

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "I made a chair"

hcarvalhoalves — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 17:51:35 +0000

The traditional methods of "carving" I know about are using an adze [1] and controlled burning [2].

[1] https://engineeringlearn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Adze...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dwAu6RIQURo

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "I made a chair"

hcarvalhoalves — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 02:27:54 +0000

This is the first chair one can make, it's a common pre-industrial chair design. Search for "tribal chair" or "2-piece chair" for examples.

It gets even better with wood carving (rather than building out of straight planks):

https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/seating/chairs/african-sol...

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Why Algebraic Effects?"

hcarvalhoalves — Sat, 24 May 2025 15:56:17 +0000

What once was old is new again.

https://lisp-docs.github.io/cl-language-reference/chap-9/j-b...

https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-24-algebraic-effects-y...

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Minimum Viable Blog"

hcarvalhoalves — Sat, 03 May 2025 14:28:48 +0000

Here’s one using Emacs’ Org mode built-in HTML publishing capabilities:

https://github.com/hcarvalhoalves/org-mode-site-template

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "DECtalk Archive"

hcarvalhoalves — Fri, 02 May 2025 00:24:33 +0000

Is this what Stephen Hawking used at the time?

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Understanding Information Architecture"

hcarvalhoalves — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:24:39 +0000

A much needed area of study. Companies and institutions are drowning on "data", but don't know how to organize information. It gets progressively worse with the ability to generate large bodies of text with the help of LLMs, but no structured information.

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "A new sign that AI is competing with college grads?"

hcarvalhoalves — Thu, 01 May 2025 16:16:43 +0000

> Even if you are the biggest critic of AI, it's hard to deny that the frontier models are quite good at the sort of stuff that you learn in school. Write a binary tree in C? Check. Implement radix sort in Python? check. An A* implementation? check.

I don't feel this is a strong argument, since these are the sort of things that one could easily lookup on stackoverflow, github, and so on for a while now. What "AI" did was being a more convenient code search tool + text manipulation abilities.

But you still need to know the fundamentals, otherwise won't even know what to ask. I recently used GPT to get a quick code sample for a linear programming solution, and it saved me time looking up the API for scipy... but I knew what to ask for in the first place. I doubt GPT would suggest that as a solution if I described the problem in too high level.

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Exploring model welfare"

hcarvalhoalves — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 22:45:48 +0000

The problem is any discussion around this topic is tainted – these companies have to justify their valuations. Begins with the shift in nomenclature: "LLM" is now "AI".

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over"

hcarvalhoalves — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 17:55:51 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over"

hcarvalhoalves — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 17:04:54 +0000

I login to Instagram and I see:

- Ad promoting "investment" platform with deep fakes of personalities

- Ad from radicalized politician promoting hate speech

- Semi-naked girl promoting their "other" social media (OnlyFans)

- Ad disguised as content of some dude promoting a random restaurant

I agree with Zuckerberg, it's not social media anymore. I don't see content from any friend, only scams.

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Tabular Programming: A New Paradigm for Expressive Computing"

hcarvalhoalves — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:57:42 +0000

When I first read the title, I had something in mind, but this is actually about structuring the code itself as a fixed-size table.

Here's a different take on thinking about tables:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5UK-VHbJlQ

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "Hypertext TV"

hcarvalhoalves — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:12:00 +0000

Yeah, I miss buttons and VFD displays.

New comment by hcarvalhoalves in "JSX over the Wire"

hcarvalhoalves — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 02:08:55 +0000

> REST (or, rather, how REST is broadly used) encourages you to think in terms of Resources rather than Models or ViewModels. At first, your Resources start out as mirroring Models. But a single Model rarely has enough data for a screen, so you develop ad-hoc conventions for nesting Models in a Resource. However, including all the relevant Models (e.g. all Likes of a Post) is often impossible or impractical, so you start adding ViewModel-ish fields like friendLikes to your Resources.

So, let's assume the alternative universe, where we did not mess up and got REST wrong.

There's no constraint saying a resource (in the hypermedia sense) has to have the same shape as your business data, or anything else really. A resource should have whatever representation is most useful to the client. If your language is "components" because you're making an interactive app – sure, go ahead and represent this as a resource. And we did that for a while, with xmlhttprequest + HTML fragments, and PHP includes on the server side.

What we were missing all along was a way to decouple the browser from a single resource (the whole document), so we could have nested resources, and keep client state intact on refresh?