Hacker News: notglossy

New comment by notglossy in "Every Frame Perfect"

notglossy — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:01:07 +0000

Animation should convey meaning, not achieve pixel-perfect morphs between states.

When iOS first launched, some of the brilliance was in how UI elements transformed into one another—a title in the title bar becoming a "back" button on the left, for instance. There were no intricate morphs, just a simple cross-dissolve between two elements shown briefly at the same time. It read as meaningful without being literal.

The Crop/Adjust example doesn't hold up here, because the two modes don't share a focus. The crop animation is deliberately different: it emphasizes the cropping controls at the edges of the image that you might otherwise miss, prepping you visually for the task and tying the controls into the image workspace. Adjust mode has no direct controls on the image itself, so the transition out should differ. The mismatch is the point, not a flaw.

For most UI, you don't need pixel-perfect morphs between small elements. The real job of animation and behavior is to convey meaning and context. Make your transitions pixel-perfect and most people would never notice the difference.

New comment by notglossy in "ICE denies having a protester database. A letter to Congress sheds more light"

notglossy — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:23:26 +0000

This is the issue. At some point very basic and normal things, like believing in a woman’s right to vote or in people’s broad access to healthcare, can be considered radical or terroristic by the powers that be. Then the lists become so pervasive that just living your life and performing every day activities puts you at risk, even if you are trying to conform.

New comment by notglossy in "Photoshop's challenges with focus, pt. 2"

notglossy — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:05:42 +0000

With all due respect, the customer doesn’t care. You served a raw turkey on Thanksgiving and act like there is nothing that could be done to remedy this. Under no circumstances was leaving it in the oven longer an option for some reason. You knew it was raw, so why did you serve it?

I keep seeing the same issue over and over again with other companies as well. “Sorry you are disappointed but our internal processes, or we had to do this because of deadlines, yadda yadda, blah blah.”

Does anyone stop and think why they are developing or shipping a product? Its not for you to have an overly complicated development, build, or review process. It’s not for you to hit your quota of installed upgrades or versions shipped per quarter. It’s for people to use your product. Your product has utility, and the customer is your client, not the other way around.

New comment by notglossy in "From zero to a RAG system: successes and failures"

notglossy — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:33:32 +0000

I think generally, SFT is like giving the LLM increased intuition in specific areas. If you combine this with RAG, it should improve the performance or accuracy. Sort of like being a lawyer and knowing something is against the law by intuition, but needing the library to cite a specific case or statute as to why.

New comment by notglossy in "From zero to a RAG system: successes and failures"

notglossy — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:20:59 +0000

You will still get hallucinations. With RAG you use the vectors to aid in finding things that are relevant, and then you typically also have the raw text data stored as well. This allows you to theoretically have LLM outputs grounded in the truth of the documents. Depending on implementation, you can also make the LLM cite the sources (filename, chunk, etc).

New comment by notglossy in "Z80 Sans – a disassembler in a font (2024)"

notglossy — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:51:20 +0000

Man... I'm lucky if the fonts I'm using even have tabular figures as alternates. This is on a whole other level.

New comment by notglossy in "BMW's Newest "Innovation" Is a Logo-Shaped Middle Finger to Right to Repair"

notglossy — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:29:48 +0000

This patent came from the design department. Some dude looked at the logo and said, “Huh, we could make a screw from this.” The legal team then took it and made a design patent.

If you guys want, I can message him and ask about the grand conspiracy behind it but you might be disappointed.

New comment by notglossy in "Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by manufacturing them in the U.S."

notglossy — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 23:16:04 +0000

Just wanted to point out that California, for being barren of manufacturing and hostile to it, is actually the largest manufacturer in the USA in terms of people employed and economic output.

https://nam.org/mfgdata/

New comment by notglossy in "HTML5 Differences from HTML4 (2014)"

notglossy — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 16:14:22 +0000

Whenever I hear VRML, I am reminded of this Aptiva commercial from the 90's with the "3D San Francisco" site. Was always bummed as a kid that I never actually could find it online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROOSUiLEesA

New comment by notglossy in "Disabling Modernism"

notglossy — Sat, 18 May 2024 23:35:59 +0000

It’s interesting to see how optimistic and forward thinking architecture for education could be during this time period.

It seems by the 1990s, many attributes that were seen as desirable (open air, windows, single level) were at some point abandoned in general, leading to windowless boxes and long wheelchair ramps between classrooms (at least this was my experience in Los Angeles).