Hacker News: leguminous

New comment by leguminous in "PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible"

leguminous — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:33:01 +0000

I disagree. There are some new (sub-) genres and great games since that period.

* Roguelites have proliferated: Hades is the most obvious example, but there are a variety of sub-genres at this point.

* Vampire Survivors (itself a roguelite) spawned survivors-likes. Megabonk is currently pretty popular.

* Slay the Spire kicked off a wave of strategy roguelites.

* There are "cozy" games like Unpacking.

* I don't recall survival games like Subnautica or Don't Starve being much of a thing in the PS2 era.

* There are automation games like Factorio and Satisfactory.

* Casual mobile games are _huge_.

* There are more experimental games, sometimes in established genres, like Inscription, Undertale, or Baba Is You.

Not to mention that new games in existing genres can be great. Hollow Knight is a good example. Metroidvanias were established by the SNES and PS1 era, but Hollow Knight really upped the stakes.

I'm sure I'm forgetting things and people will have some criticism, but I really don't believe games have stagnated in general.

New comment by leguminous in "Dithering – Part 2: The Ordered Dithering"

leguminous — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 02:09:15 +0000

What is the advantage over blue noise? I've had very good results with a 64x64 blue noise texture and it's pretty fast on a modern GPU. Are quasirandom sequences faster or better quality?

(There's no TAA in my use case, so there's no advantage for interleaved gradient noise there.)

EDIT: Actually, I remember trying R2 sequences for dither. I didn't think it looked much better than interleaved gradient noise, but my bigger problem was figuring out how to add a temporal component. I tried generalizing it to 3 dimensions, but the result wasn't great. I also tried shifting it around, but I thought animated interleaved gradient noise still looked better. This was my shadertoy: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/33cXzM

New comment by leguminous in "Television is 100 years old today"

leguminous — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 01:39:05 +0000

At some point, most NTSC TVs had delay lines, too. A comb filter was commonly used for separating the chroma from the luma, taking advantage of the chroma phase being flipped each line. Sophisticated comb filters would have multiple delay lines and logic to adaptively decide which to use. Some even delayed a whole field or frame, so you could say that in this case one or more frames were stored in the TV.

https://www.extron.com/article/ntscdb3

New comment by leguminous in "Adoption of EVs tied to real-world reductions in air pollution: study"

leguminous — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:02:36 +0000

I think they are more accessible now than when that article was written. My wife and I bought a mid-trim Hyundai Kona Electric for under $35,000. Besides, lots of people buy used cars, and there are crazy deals on used EVs. I've seen Bolts go for under $15,000. 2 year old ID.4s are selling for under $20,000 in my area. You may not find a $5,000 beater, but EVs are penetrating further into the middle of the market now.

There are also lower ongoing costs for maintenance and fuel.

There is still the secondary wealth filter of having a place to park and charge, of course.

New comment by leguminous in "When square pixels aren't square"

leguminous — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 02:05:53 +0000

> For example, 720 is tied to 13.5 Mhz because sampling the active picture area of an analog video scanline at 13.5 MHz generates 1440 samples (double per-Nyquist).

I don't think you need to be doubling here. Sampling at 13.5 MHz generates about 720 samples.

    13.5e6 Hz * 53.33...e-6 seconds = 720 samples

The sampling theorem just means that with that 13.5 MHz sampling rate (and 720 samples) signals up to 6.75 MHz can be represented without aliasing.

There's some history on the standard here: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf

New comment by leguminous in "When square pixels aren't square"

leguminous — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:15:45 +0000

CRTs didn't have pixels at all. They had shadow masks (or aperture grilles) and phosphors, which could be a triad of rectangles, lines spanning basically the entire screen height, or dots. They did not line up with the signal, so it doesn't make sense to call them pixels.

New comment by leguminous in "Perfect Aircrete, Kitchen Ingredients [video]"

leguminous — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 19:52:38 +0000

Aerated concrete is an established building material in some parts of the world. In Europe, a big manufacturer is Ytong, and they even make precast panels in addition to blocks.

It's made differently from this, though. It is aerated through a chemical reaction rather than mechanically.

New comment by leguminous in "Asus Announces October Availability of ProArt Display 8K PA32KCX"

leguminous — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 13:33:46 +0000

If you look at the Steam hardware survey, most users (as in, > 50%) are still using 1080p or below.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

New comment by leguminous in "Study finds gaps in evidence for air-cleaning technologies to prevent infections"

leguminous — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 02:26:16 +0000

The EPA estimates that radon[1] is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. I have a RadonEye monitor in the basement. They aren't that expensive and it's nice to have the piece of mind.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon

New comment by leguminous in "Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG"

leguminous — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 13:18:02 +0000

CCCP was just a collection of existing codecs, they didn't develop their own. Most of the codecs in CCCP were patented. Using it without licenses was technically patent infringement in most places. It's just that nobody ever cared to enforce it on individual end users.

New comment by leguminous in "Beyond Meat fights for survival"

leguminous — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 02:29:39 +0000

I've been vegetarian for a long time and I still think Beyond burgers are great. I have a pack of them from Costco in the freezer. I like black bean burgers, too, but Beyond burgers taste like my (distant) memory of a "normal" burger.

In any case, I assume Beyond was relying on getting more market penetration past just vegetarians and vegans. There just aren't enough of us to get to the revenue they seem to be targeting. Personally, I'll be disappointed if they end up disappearing.

New comment by leguminous in "PWM flicker: Invisible light that's harming our health?"

leguminous — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:58:04 +0000

> Nobody is out there policing flicker rates.

Actually, Energy Star and California's Title 24 have flicker standards. They may not go as far as some people like, but you can look for these certifications to know that a bulb at least meets a certain minimum standard.

New comment by leguminous in "Why JPEGs still rule the web (2024)"

leguminous — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 12:10:50 +0000

As far as I know, that's only support for the container format. You can't actually decode HEIC without also installing libde265, which you are supposed to have a license for. I'm not even sure how you'd go about getting an individual license.

New comment by leguminous in "Debunking HDR [video]"

leguminous — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 09:16:26 +0000

On my 8-bit-per-channel monitor, I can easily see banding, though it is mostly obvious in the darker areas in a darkened room. Where this commonly manifests itself is "bloom" from a light object on a dark background.

I can no longer see banding if I add dither, though, and the extra noise is imperceptible when done well, especially at 4k and with a temporal component.

New comment by leguminous in "Debunking HDR [video]"

leguminous — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 08:58:46 +0000

What book was it?

New comment by leguminous in "Superauthenticity: Computer Game Aspect Ratios"

leguminous — Fri, 30 May 2025 19:21:35 +0000

Some amount of vertical blending often occurred because scanlines tapered off in brightness, bleeding into the next scanline. For example, if the electron beam spot has a two dimensional gaussian profile, then the vertical profile of a scanline at a constant value will also be gaussian. If the height of the scanline (full width at half maximum of the gaussian) is around 1x the distance between scanline centers (a reasonable value at full brightness), then there will be significant overlap between neighboring scanlines. The point between the scanline centers will be a blend of them both.

How much blending there is depends on the brightness at that particular area (brighter parts of the image will have wider scanlines and more blending) and the characteristics and configuration of the particular TV.

If I wanted sharp pixels, I would use something like the pixel-art-scaling shaders in Retroarch. I like bandlimit-pixel and pixel-aa, but most of them look pretty similar. They basically try to antialias the pixel edges. I prefer to fill the screen as much as I can using the correct aspect ratio and not worry about integer scaling.

For more realistic blending, CRT shaders are pretty good now.

New comment by leguminous in "A Pixel Is Not a Little Square (1995) [pdf]"

leguminous — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 17:24:11 +0000

The half pixel offset makes sense, though. If you have two textures, you want the edges to align, not the centers of the pixels.

See, for example: https://bartwronski.com/2021/02/15/bilinear-down-upsampling-...

Implementations of resizing based on aligning pixel centers resulted in slight shifts, which caused a lot of trouble.

New comment by leguminous in "Sponges, drill bits and wires: Surgeons mistakenly left objects inside thousands"

leguminous — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 10:52:44 +0000

When my wife had some minor surgery (not fully anesthetized), there was a nurse present who counted all of the sponges, etc. that were used, then made sure there were that many on the tray at the end. They didn't match up, and it turned out that the surgeon had dropped one off of the table.

The article mentions that counting is standard procedure, so hopefully this is how it works everywhere. It definitely seems like having someone who isn't the surgeon doing the counting would be the way to go. The surgeon is already very focused and it's easier to say "I'm sure I didn't leave anything" when someone else isn't telling you otherwise.

New comment by leguminous in "Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte"

leguminous — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:06:10 +0000

Part of the reason the US government needs to use consultants is because they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales. Often times the top levels of the pay scale aren't even available because there is some rule about how people can't be paid more than someone else. So instead they pay for consultants and all of their overhead.

(Of course there are more reasons as well, but this is a popular one that some of my friends in government agencies complain about.)

New comment by leguminous in "Lead is still bad for your brain"

leguminous — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:32:05 +0000

Some US states require lead screening (blood tests) for babies and toddlers. In that case they are covered by insurance. My son has been tested once so far.