Hacker News: rollulus

New comment by rollulus in "Everything is free now, so why not a floating orb in my IDE"

rollulus — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:39:05 +0000

The orb is free yet comes at a cost. When I wrote the equivalent of the orb 25 years ago I had to go through the book “Real-Time Rendering” by Tomas Akenine-Möller and Eric Haines, the first edition with the chameleon. I remember the smell of the book. I learned that 3D projection was not mostly trigonometry (as I believed) but instead “just” multiplications and an occasional division, mind blown! I learned while skimming through the various chapters in the book how little I knew and how much there was to explore, creating a sense of excitement and craving to understand and implement algorithms from shadow volumes to spherical harmonics, and acquire first all the mathematical prerequisites. And I had the rewarding feeling of accomplishment when my orb was rendering.

Now all of that is gone, if you choose so, and what’s left is brainrot and the equivalent of doom scrolling.

New comment by rollulus in "The Highest Point in the Netherlands"

rollulus — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:04:24 +0000

Nice, I stand corrected. A “special municipality”, TIL!

New comment by rollulus in "The Highest Point in the Netherlands"

rollulus — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:47:06 +0000

Well since you ask: GP is inaccurate because Mt. Scenery is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but not the Netherlands.

Edit: I was wrong, see skylurk’s comment.

New comment by rollulus in "The Highest Point in the Netherlands"

rollulus — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:45:47 +0000

I don’t find that strange. Our drug policy is not backed by any sort of philosophy. E.g. possessing cannabis is illegal in NL. The policy is the outcome of micro-panics (a few accidents with tourists on shrooms), indecisiveness and fear.

New comment by rollulus in "Dutch central bank moves 86 tonnes of gold from US citing 'geopolitical unrest'"

rollulus — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 05:47:41 +0000

Not OP but the amount from Canada was next to nothing, which could make the title sound misleading. Just guessing.

New comment by rollulus in "TurboKV: Insanely fast Rust key-value store"

rollulus — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:14:20 +0000

Now that “blazing fast in Rust” has become a meme, is “insanely” the next thing?

New comment by rollulus in "Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras"

rollulus — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:45:28 +0000

Any idea what happens to the grid when a significant chunk of solar power suddenly disconnects?

New comment by rollulus in "Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner [video]"

rollulus — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:29:36 +0000

From experience: the iPhone’s panorama photo mode works to take pictures like this from a train.

New comment by rollulus in "Learning a few things about running SQLite"

rollulus — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:44:55 +0000

I realized that in the age of LLMs I appreciate Julia’s writing even more. Authentic exploration as an antidote to overconfident know-it-all generated junk articles.

New comment by rollulus in "98% Isn't Much"

rollulus — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:01:05 +0000

What’s much and what isn’t depends on the context. One hair on your head isn’t much but one hair in your soup is.

New comment by rollulus in "Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament"

rollulus — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:58:21 +0000

“We decide on something, leave it lying around, and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”

And

“If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'.”

- Jean-Claude Juncker

New comment by rollulus in "Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You"

rollulus — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:10:45 +0000

What I missed in the article: the curves of the three “cone kinds” overlap. What if you could stimulate kinds of cones individually to see entirely new colors? Some people shoot layers at them into eyes. But you can also try this website: https://dynomight.net/colors/ (previously on HN but search fails me).

New comment by rollulus in "GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands"

rollulus — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:05:17 +0000

Interesting that this got posted now: the project is receiving increasingly more skepticism lately in the Dutch tech scene [0], and I think that’s fully justified.

[0]: https://www.quotenet.nl/zakelijk/a71588202/techondernemers-m...

New comment by rollulus in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

rollulus — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:21:43 +0000

I’m in the very same situation currently. A coworker vibe coded a PR for me to review. I asked: normally I would ask “why did you do xyz”, but what are you going to do now, proxy that question to your LLM? And is the LLM going to construct a “why” based on the nonsensical code it produced? Is this how we want to work?

The review is currently stalled in absence of answers.

New comment by rollulus in "Spanish court declines to fine NordVPN over LaLiga piracy blocking order"

rollulus — Sun, 24 May 2026 06:48:01 +0000

Mullvad is Swedish, right?

New comment by rollulus in "In 1979 engineer Hugh Padgham discovered "gated reverb" – by accident"

rollulus — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:04:31 +0000

This article is incomplete without examples.

New comment by rollulus in "Rendering the Sky, Sunsets, and Planets"

rollulus — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:22:55 +0000

Incredible what mobile phones and browsers can do nowadays. I remember implementing this paper from 1993 (the absolutely OG for this topic and very readable): “Display of The Earth Taking into Account Atmospheric Scattering” by Nishita et al: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2933032_Display_of_...

New comment by rollulus in "Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust"

rollulus — Tue, 05 May 2026 06:18:50 +0000

Rewriting it using an LLM is one. But did all the contributors became as proficient in Rust as they were in Zig over night as well?

New comment by rollulus in "How an oil refinery works"

rollulus — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:43:53 +0000

That’s because of the primary energy fallacy: https://medium.com/@jan.rosenow/have-we-been-duped-by-the-pr...

TL;DR: the efficiency of converting fossil energy resources into something useful is poor.

New comment by rollulus in "How a subsea cable is repaired (2021)"

rollulus — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:55:47 +0000

Do they maintain the original connection between the fibers or is that not worth the effort and is a swap not a problem?