Hacker News: positus

New comment by positus in "A modern 35mm film scanner for home"

positus — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 01:34:23 +0000

Some modern 35mm emulsions can record ~500 megapixels worth of detail, but good luck getting all that detail in a digital scan.

https://www.adox.de/Photo/films/cms20ii-en/

New comment by positus in "Roc Camera"

positus — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 04:27:24 +0000

It seems like one could just shoot film and make darkroom prints and accomplish the same thing?

New comment by positus in "US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces"

positus — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 17:01:58 +0000

SCOTUS has life-long appointments because it is designed to move and operate slowly and be the least political of the branches. Parties that try to legislate from the bench when they cannot successfully get something through Congress are the issue.

New comment by positus in "Age Verification Laws Send VPN Use Soaring–and Threaten the Open Internet"

positus — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:47:48 +0000

If you want to make a new internet and take all the trash that is on the current one with you to the new one, please do! It will make the current one much more tolerable for the rest of us.

New comment by positus in "Earth Has Tilted 31.5 Inches. That Shouldn't Happen"

positus — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 16:46:56 +0000

Humanity is not an infection. And how many of those millions of planets can you name?

New comment by positus in "Christianity was always for the poor (2024)"

positus — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 19:27:28 +0000

Jesus taught Paul everything he knew about Christianity, by the way.

New comment by positus in "String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'"

positus — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 23:34:15 +0000

Most people don't hate trans people, they just think they believe things that do not correspond to biological reality; ie. they have an illness that is negatively affecting their mind and they need compassion and help. Those same people want to minimize social exposure to provably contagious, harmful, and absurd ideas like gender fluidity.

New comment by positus in "You need 4 colors"

positus — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 20:07:32 +0000

Assuming the hue and saturation components stay the same, changes in lightness would result in various shades of the same “color”. I think. Maybe. The problem is that in real life changes in lightness result in changes in saturation as well, so things get wonky.

New comment by positus in "My brand new digitizing workflow using a 25 year old film scanner"

positus — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 01:06:48 +0000

Yeah bought some Ultramax 400 last week. Two rolls….$25. Yikes. Might switch to bulk rolling soonish. Portra 400 is about 16-18/roll at the moment. It’s crazy.

New comment by positus in "Apple's AirPods Pro hearing health features"

positus — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:54:53 +0000

Same. There's a difference in texture, primarily in the trebles, but there's also a general muddiness and lack of separation. Everything feels like it's been smoothed over, but not in a good way, or too "crunchy". Transients don't have the right amount of bite and the stereo image doesn't feel as three-dimensional. It's harder to hear the "room". Currently using Sony IER-M9 with a Linum DualBax Zebra, which is a great cable, btw.

New comment by positus in "Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT"

positus — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 19:18:40 +0000

Code output from is Claude pretty good. It seems to hallucinate less than o1 for me. It's been a struggle to get o1 to stop referencing non-existent methods and functions.

New comment by positus in "Johnny LLM Can't Read Code"

positus — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 01:47:55 +0000

Here’s o1’s answer:

The function `fizzbuzz(n)` returns a value based on whether `n` is divisible by 3, 5, both, or neither. Let's break down the function step by step for an input of `n = 3`:

1. Array Initialization:

  ["Fizz", "Buzz", "FizzBuzz"]

   This array has indices 0, 1, and 2 corresponding to "Fizz", "Buzz", and "FizzBuzz" respectively.

2. Condition Checks:

   - `n % 3 === 0` checks if `n` is divisible by 3.

     - For `n = 3`, this is `true` (which equates to `1` when used in arithmetic).

   - `n % 5 === 0` checks if `n` is divisible by 5.

     - For `n = 3`, this is `false` (which equates to `0`).

3. Index Calculation:

  (n % 3 === 0) + (n % 5 === 0)

   - For `n = 3`, this becomes `1 + 0 = 1`.

4. Array Access:

  ["Fizz", "Buzz", "FizzBuzz"][1]

   - This accesses the element at index `1`, which is `"Buzz"`.

Conclusion:

For an input of `3`, the function returns `"Buzz"`.

Answer:

"Buzz"

New comment by positus in "FTC: Vast Surveillance of Users by Social Media and Video Streaming Companies"

positus — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:08:37 +0000

It's like a glass of pure water. If there is anything else in the glass, it can no longer be called a glass of pure water. Likewise, the presence of evil of any quantity or quality in a person disqualifies them from being good. Apple trees do not yield blueberries, and good men do not do evil things. So if we discern in our thoughts, words, and actions the presence of evil, we can know with absolute certainty that we, too, are evil.

Or is it supposed that hating each other, lying to one another, stealing from one another, murdering one another, failing to fulfill contract, covenant, and commitment to one another are things that should be considered good?

New comment by positus in "FTC: Vast Surveillance of Users by Social Media and Video Streaming Companies"

positus — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 04:02:30 +0000

I understand your perspective, but I maintain that "good" (morally pure) isn't a category any of us belong to. We're all lying, hateful people to one extent or another, and lying hateful people aren't "good", even if we haven't lied or hated as much as other lying, hateful people. "Less evil" isn't synonymous with "good".

The argument that profit motivation is the origin of shady business practices ignores the existence of those businesses which pursue profit in an ethical manner. The company I work for, for instance, is highly motivated to produce a profit, but the way we go about obtaining that profit is by providing our customers with products that have real value, at fair (and competitive) prices, and by providing consistently excellent customer support. Our customers are *very* satisfied with our products and services, and they show their satisfaction with extreme brand loyalty. The profit we make year over year allows us to increase the quality of life for our employees, and keeps our employees highly motivated towards serving our customers. We pursue the good of our customers alongside our own, and we avoid shady business practices like the plague.

New comment by positus in "FTC: Vast Surveillance of Users by Social Media and Video Streaming Companies"

positus — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 20:08:26 +0000

The problem isn't society or profit motivation. It's people. Humanity itself is corrupt. There aren't "good people" and "bad people". There's only "bad people." We're all bad people, just some of us are more comfortable with our corruption being visible to others to a higher degree.

New comment by positus in "Rio: Web apps in pure Python"

positus — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 15:38:38 +0000

Using the term "justify" is very common outside of web. It's been used for decades in print ("left justify / right justify / center justify"). This is indeed a web project though, so I hear what you're saying.

New comment by positus in "Open Props – Supercharged CSS Variables"

positus — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 03:38:08 +0000

I think it is that the elements alternate in height between the left and the right columns, creating a weird kind of feeling of instability as you move down the page. The vertical rhythm of the layout creates a feeling of unsettledness and disease.

New comment by positus in "For those who hear voices, the ‘broken brain’ explanation is harmful"

positus — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 12:20:27 +0000

This seems similar to the type of intrusive thoughts associated with OCD. It's like someone pretending to be God inside your mind, making commentary on all the things you want or try to do, sometimes very cruel. I kind of think of it as the part of your mind that is involved in planning for the future is given a voice, or that your internal anxieties or fears or hopes become kind of like a separate entity alongside the normal conscious mind.

New comment by positus in "IBM Audible Random Timer"

positus — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 09:31:06 +0000

I fairly regularly hyperfocus on something that isn't the thing I should really be hyperfocusing on and end up spending hours fleshing out a less-than-supremely valuable idea without meaning to. Hyperfocus in the wrong direction can be a real problem!

New comment by positus in "AeroSpace is an i3-like tiling window manager for macOS"

positus — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 10:41:19 +0000

I buy computers that run macOS for a couple reasons:

- it’s generally smooth and stable from a UI standpoint

- it has mostly sane defaults

- it has great font rendering

- the video and audio subsystems are rock solid

- it has access to every development tool I need daily via homebrew

It seems like there are generally two perspectives:

- “I shouldn’t have to change the way I want to do things”

- “I don’t mind changing to another way of doing things”

The first group I think has a harder time with macOS.

A while back I decided to experiment with only using the default first-party apps for macOS for everything, and it greatly changed the amount of OS customization I did from that point on. I still live in iTerm for most of the day, but I don’t really feel hindered by the OS in any way anymore.

From my experience Windows actively attempts to subvert my clear, authoritative commands, second guesses every admin instruction, interrupts me with focus changes and dialog boxes instead of giving the active window absolute priority (this happens sometimes with macOS, too), and comes with bloat right out of the box. When this developer thinks about a hostile OS, Windows 11 is rhe first thing that comes to mind.