Hacker News: natural20s

New comment by natural20s in "[dead]"

natural20s — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 20:33:00 +0000

Bummer!

New comment by natural20s in "Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal recent technology you have seen?"

natural20s — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 17:52:11 +0000

AI image generation from text prompts. Midjourney, DallE, etc. These platforms are quickly disrupting the visual art and commercial art world. This isn't just "Putin as a Vampire Riding a Nuclear Bomb" wacky art. If you spend time looking at how these platforms are being used - they are quickly becoming production tools that are helping accelerate ideation and creation. Here are some examples:

* Developing logo concepts - the rendered text is usually wrong but the layout and design can be used to "hand build" a final concept

* Developing UI and web page designs

* Architectural designs and renderings

* Packaging design

Personally I'm using it to develop very niche imagery for a roleplaying game (Welcome to Grimsbury). Everything from postcards, postage stamps, posters, signage and illustrative imagery is coming out of Midjourney. The amount of control I have over the final product, the detail and unexpected "awesomeness" is mind blowing. I just generated a set of vintage postage stamps in the gravure style of scientists opening otherworldly portals. I could print them out and use them to mail a letter.

Artists and illustrators are very concerned about this technology - and rightly so. I was budgeting almost $2,000 to pay for art for my game - now - I spend $10-$20 a month to get hundreds of images that I 100% own the commercial rights to use. This will get me to the Kickstarter phase where I will then use kickstart $$$ to pay an illustrator to help with the final product - but Midjourney gets me launched.

New comment by natural20s in "What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames"

natural20s — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 18:24:38 +0000

Looks like a great opportunity for a community driven patch to provide period accurate pig renderings... wait that didn't come out right =)

New comment by natural20s in "Forgotten Employee (2002)"

natural20s — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 16:10:27 +0000

This happened to someone I knew back in 2014 or so. We were hired together at C** Consulting and I was immediately shipped off to Dallas to help with an eCommerce program at a famous Watch & Accessory brand. My buddy from orientation in NJ kept in touch and was jealous I was on a project so quickly. He went back to his home and went into the C** office dutifully for the first month and just did training, enablement and finally surfed the web and got bored.

It seems his manager LEFT C** right as he joined. The ORG had not changed to reflect this status and my friend now reported to a ghost. He joked with me about it but was also baffled that such a large company could let this happen. His humor turned dark and he started to stay at home - do nothing - and collect his check.

Last I heard he applied to Ac** Consulting - got a role and started up with them... collecting two checks for a while until C** figured out what was up and reassigned him - he put in his 2 weeks notice at that time. :shrug emoji: True story.

New comment by natural20s in "Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard"

natural20s — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 14:19:25 +0000

I hope they bring back Battlezone - Activision rebooted it in 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1998_video_game)) A great single player and co-op "real time strategy" game that ran on a simple protocol called ANET (http://www.kegel.com/anet/) (http://www.strickleton.com/anet/) Most servers are dark now but there's still a great community keeping this game alive. It had very robust tools for building and sharing your own maps for deathmatch and strategy campaigns. One of the first games I ever fell in love with.

New comment by natural20s in "Letter from Acting Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection to Facebook"

natural20s — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 15:04:54 +0000

Weak tea.

New comment by natural20s in "Dungeon Magazine"

natural20s — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 21:48:17 +0000

mathfinder

New comment by natural20s in "How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around"

natural20s — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 14:49:38 +0000

Thanks for posting this. I thought it was just me or my laptop or my hardward config. Or the thousands of photos. YES the lag after hitting the windows icon... or searching or trying to open a folder with more than 100 items... it is very real and annoying.

New comment by natural20s in "CRDTs are the future"

natural20s — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 20:25:52 +0000

Ahhhh Google Wave. I was an early adopter and shed a tear when it went away. The closest I've felt to that product is Slack but find Slack too noisy. With Wave I felt like I was IN my work not in a "sidebar" application that was pulling my attention from my work. I suppose there were so many ways to use Wave and so many ways to use Slack that your experience could be completely different than mine. But RIP Google Wave.

New comment by natural20s in "Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?"

natural20s — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 01:59:12 +0000

Finishing a tabletop game simulating Robowars and Battlebot competitions. Looking for playtesters ;-)

New comment by natural20s in "Why Enterprise Software Sucks"

natural20s — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 15:31:25 +0000

As an aside - the author of the post is Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan. I took his free Cryptocurrency course on Coursera and it was superb. He really broke down all of the concepts in an easy to understand way that has stuck with me for years.

New comment by natural20s in "Icecast: Open Source multimedia streaming"

natural20s — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:38:00 +0000

Instead of reinventing the wheel - here is a tutorial I found helpful: https://www.howtoforge.com/linux_webradio_with_icecast2_ices...

New comment by natural20s in "Icecast: Open Source multimedia streaming"

natural20s — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 16:58:39 +0000

I run shoutcast on :8000 and icecast on :9090 (iirc). Running both b/c I was just experimenting - both are not needed.

Uploaded all of my tracks and stored them on DO.

Ran a script to create a text playlist file.

Configured icecast to be "fed" by ices (https://icecast.org/ices/docs/ices-2.0.2/basic.html)

Pointed ices to that file and have it feeding icecast.

Created a startup bash script to fire up all both servers on restarts so "it just works".

Maybe I should create a tutorial?

New comment by natural20s in "Icecast: Open Source multimedia streaming"

natural20s — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 15:50:59 +0000

"For a while it was looking like I could actually afford the basic ASCAP/BMI/etc. license with hobby money but that changed when laws were changed to require you to pay royalties per-song-per-listener (unlike terrestrial radio)."

^^^ This is what really killed hobby streaming. The fear of getting popular and reported had a serious chilling effect on this scene. Coupled with the rise of streaming services that changed the music paradigm from ownership to on-demand access.

Yes the platforms had a bit of a learning curve... hand editing icecast config.xml beyond basic settings could be daunting.

But I still run icecast and shoutcast servers on digitalocean for $10/month with an autodj randomly cycling through my mp3 collection... comes in handy when entertaining and need my own music etc.

It is still possible to find great niche streaming stations using directories: [0] https://www.streamfinder.com [1] http://www.radio-browser.info

As a side-note - Nullsoft (shoutcast developer) was purchased by AOL and languished. Recently a French company radionomy purchased shoutcast from AOL and has relaunched it. They have a pretty mature radio broadcasting platform built on it. (I don't work there just admire their product)

New comment by natural20s in "Ask HN: Effective methods to fight depression?"

natural20s — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 16:43:17 +0000

Volunteer for a cause you care about. Serve a meal in a soup kitchen. Prepare dinner for a homeless shelter. Do overnights in a shelter. Work with animals at an animal shelter. Pick up beach trash. You will feel better.