Hacker News: lewispollard

New comment by lewispollard in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

lewispollard — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:04:27 +0000

I think the use of the word "ends" rather than "end" makes it sound like you're making 2 snips on each balloon.

New comment by lewispollard in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

lewispollard — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:38:33 +0000

Definitely post-COVID. I remember going to see bands in between or just after lockdowns ended, and even the bands were taken aback by the change in audience behaviour, commenting on it. Lots of self-entitled behaviour, talking and even yelling out during quiet moments, people walking up to the stage during a seated Nick Cave concert demanding to hand him stuff or shake his hand - I remember him saying "wow, you guys really forgot how to behave over the last couple of years". Now it just seems to be normalised that crowd behaviour is worse, more self-entitled. I'm not sure what's driving it - whether people who previously weren't going to gigs decided, during lockdown, that they wanted to go out and do stuff more, but just had never learned the etiquette, and/or social media making the experience about the individual rather than the performance.

New comment by lewispollard in "Iran-backed hackers claim wiper attack on medtech firm Stryker"

lewispollard — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:03:12 +0000

The drones Iran are using are actually relatively small, you can fit 5 of them into a medium sized truck and they can launch in-situ, which is how they've been using them in ground operations. Doesn't seem that much of a stretch to put a bunch of them into shipping containers.

New comment by lewispollard in "You Just Reveived"

lewispollard — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:53:59 +0000

It's a common abbreviation for significant other, i.e. one's husband/wife or partner, but never seen it abbreviate "someone" before.

New comment by lewispollard in "Layoffs at Block"

lewispollard — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:30:26 +0000

Yeah, mid-late last year was one of the worst markets I've seen in my career, but the last couple of months things have really seemed to pick up speed.

New comment by lewispollard in "Claude Code is being dumbed down?"

lewispollard — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:45:32 +0000

Etymologically speaking, "scapegoat" does mean "escaped goat" so it's not a crazy mistake to make.

New comment by lewispollard in "GOG: Linux "the next major frontier" for gaming as it works on a native client"

lewispollard — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:38:32 +0000

Yeah that's a good salary in Europe. It's only slightly less than I make in the UK as a senior.

New comment by lewispollard in "Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone"

lewispollard — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:26:35 +0000

The point is that you don't need an LLM to pilot the thing, even if you want to integrate an LLM interface to take a request in natural language.

New comment by lewispollard in "KORG phase8 – Acoustic Synthesizer"

lewispollard — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:25:19 +0000

Says right underneath:

> Beyond adjusting parameters, phase8 invites physical interaction. Sculpt sound by touching, plucking, strumming, or tapping the resonators – or experiment by adding found objects for new textures.

Like prepared piano.

New comment by lewispollard in "I designed and printed a custom nose guard to help my dog with DLE"

lewispollard — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:26:03 +0000

Yes, but it's published there under a restrictive license which doesn't allow sharing of derivative works.

New comment by lewispollard in "Steam Controller"

lewispollard — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 10:49:36 +0000

To be fair, it didn't originally support it, a firmware update came out some time after release that enabled BTLE connection.

New comment by lewispollard in "Valve is about to win the console generation"

lewispollard — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:52:43 +0000

It's the only controller I use (bar the Steam Deck's built in controller) despite owning plenty of other conventional controllers. Once you get used to it and make use of Steam Input's per-game customisation and mapping it works really well, especially if you treat it as a mouse-like input rather than conventional gamepad.

The only place it suffers for me is games that aren't coded to support simultaneous gamepad and mouse input, which you can work around by mapping the joystick as a keyboard input. Otherwise it's great.

New comment by lewispollard in "Marble: A Multimodal World Model"

lewispollard — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 08:23:19 +0000

The page shows, near the bottom, how the main output is gaussian splats, but it can also generate triangular meshes (visual mesh + collider).

However, to my eye, the triangular meshes shown look pretty low quality compared to the splat: compare the triangulated books on the shelves, and the wooden chair by the door, as well as weird hole-like defects in the blanket by the fireplace.

It's also not clear if it's generating one mesh for the entire world, it looks like it is - that would make interactability and optimisation more difficult (no frustrum culling etc, though you could feasibly chop the mesh up into smaller pieces I suppose).

New comment by lewispollard in "Sam Altman's Lies About ChatGPT Are Growing Bolder"

lewispollard — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 11:29:17 +0000

Seems to be referencing this Forbes article, specifically talking about The Wonderful Company:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2021/11/21/how-m...

New comment by lewispollard in "Merlin Bird ID"

lewispollard — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:35:08 +0000

WhoBird is much better for this, as it's realtime and processed on-device. It stores a log of each bird identified along with the percentage match, and can optionally store a clip of the audio that triggered the match.

New comment by lewispollard in "Compressed music might be harmful to the ears"

lewispollard — Fri, 16 May 2025 09:53:17 +0000

This seems to be referring to the audio effect known as a compressor, rather than data compression techniques, for what it's worth.

New comment by lewispollard in "RPG in a Box"

lewispollard — Wed, 14 May 2025 09:56:19 +0000

If it's a Godot "game" then it should be pretty easy to mod that kinda stuff in, there are plenty of tools to do so.

New comment by lewispollard in "About Google Chrome's "This extension may soon no longer be supported" (2024)"

lewispollard — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 11:15:15 +0000

I can confirm that I got the "extension disabled" notification for uBlock Origin, clicked to re-enable it in developer mode, and then had to also toggle it to enabled after it had been added to the list - still works fine after that.

New comment by lewispollard in "Partnering with the Shawnee Tribe for Civilization VII"

lewispollard — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:07:06 +0000

It's easy to slap an LLM in there to make contextual conversation with the player, but how do you go from what the LLM says to actual gameplay mechanics? The LLM can come up with basically anything to negotiate a deal with you, but then that deal has to be made explicit from natural language into game mechanics, and that's tricky.

New comment by lewispollard in "Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?"

lewispollard — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 08:56:47 +0000

> I used to get tipped in eggs by this wonderful human at a bar

As someone who lives in a country where tipping culture doesn't extend to bars, I was imagining something quite different at first