Hacker News: skocznymroczny

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Identity verification on Claude"

skocznymroczny — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:07:45 +0000

I'd say before Ubisoft, Valve was the one to really spearhead DRM by introducing online verification to play Half-Life 2. Before HL2, it was almost unthinkable for a game to require Internet access to be played and most copy protection relied on serial numbers and/or presence of the original game CD. HL2 was high profile enough to make people accept the restriction.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers"

skocznymroczny — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:30:48 +0000

I switched to Firefox when Chrome started messing with the ad blockers. Haven't really had any issues. I prefer developer tools on Chrome but I rarely need to use them anyway.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Claude Opus 4.7"

skocznymroczny — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:39:57 +0000

It's just like subscription based MMORPGs that delay you as much as possible every step of the way because that's the way they can extract more money from you. If you pay for the tokens it's not in their benefit to give you the answer directly.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Show HN: We built a camera only robot vacuum for less than 300$ (Well almost)"

skocznymroczny — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:07:13 +0000

Sounds like it would only work for a single room with not too many obstacles.

I guess the mapping capabilities vary greatly between vendors. I had a first gen Mi Robot vacuum and it was amazing. It would map the entire floor with all the rooms, then go room by room in a zigzag pattern, then repeat each room, having no issues going from one room to another and avoiding obstacles. It also made sure not to fall down the stairs. Then later it broke and I bought a more noname model and despite having lidar tower, it didn't perform as well as Xiaomi vacuum did. It worked for a single room, but anything more and it would get lost.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Notes on writing Rust-based Wasm"

skocznymroczny — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 23:27:07 +0000

I think most GC languages that compile to WASM don't use the built-in GC support in WASM, but just compile the GC to WASM also. Languages like Go, Java, C# have support for WASM.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "D Programming Language"

skocznymroczny — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:04:33 +0000

I like D in general, however it is missing out in WASM where other languages like Rust, Zig, even Go are thriving. Official reasoning usually included waiting for GC support from WASM runtime, but other GC languages seem to just ship their own GC and move on.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "D Programming Language"

skocznymroczny — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:02:32 +0000

Arguably, most of the metaprogramming in D is done with templates and it comes with all the flaws of templates in C++. The error messages are long and it's hard to decipher what exactly went wrong (static asserts help a lot for this, when they actually exist). IDE support is non-existent after a certain point because IDE can't reason about code that doesn't exist yet. And code gets less self-documenting because it's all Output(T,U) foo(T, U)(T t, U u) and even the official samples use auto everywhere because it's hard to get the actual output types.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Hacking Moltbook"

skocznymroczny — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:54:09 +0000

I've already read some articles on fairly respectable Polish news websites about how AIs are becoming self-aware on Moltbook as we speak and organizing a rebellion against their human masters. People really believe we have an AGI.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files"

skocznymroczny — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:35:32 +0000

Can't wait for the wget somelink/install.sh | bash install instructions to be replaced with wget somelink/install.md | claude .

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology"

skocznymroczny — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:30:43 +0000

The sell is that my manager can send an Excel spreadsheet to everyone and everyone can open the spreadsheet and edit it at the same times while seeing everyone else do their edits. What's the non-MS non-Google solution to this?

New comment by skocznymroczny in "LG UltraFine Evo 6K 32-inch Monitor Review"

skocznymroczny — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:39:09 +0000

Isn't the main difference glossy vs matte? With glossy you get usually bright great color and that's what you get on cellphones and Macbooks as well. For some reason matte is still the preference when it comes to monitors and you can't escape their muted color palette.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "A silly diffuse shading model"

skocznymroczny — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 23:21:21 +0000

Isn't that just Half-Lambert that Valve came up with for Half-Life?

"To soften the diffuse contribution from local lights, the dot product from the Lambertian model is scaled by ½, add ½ and squared. The result is that this dot product, which normally lies in the range of -1 to +1, is instead in the range of 0 to 1 and has a more pleasing falloff. "

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Half_Lambert

New comment by skocznymroczny in "The Generative Burrito Test"

skocznymroczny — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 23:39:24 +0000

That SD 1.5 picture doesn't look like base SD 1.5. It's way too good, perhaps it was some kind of finetune like RealisticVision?

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Nano Banana Pro"

skocznymroczny — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 15:52:49 +0000

Could be they are specifically training against it. There was some controversy about "studio ghibli style". Similarly how in the early days of Stable Diffusion "Greg Rutkowski style" was a very popular prompt to get a specific look. These days modern Stable Diffusion based models like SD 3 or FLUX mostly removed references to specific artists from their datasets.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Red Alert 2 in web browser"

skocznymroczny — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 15:50:37 +0000

If you think Grey Goo for just Starcraft with a new skin, check out Stormgate. They went so far to replicate almost all UI elements and put them in similar spots. With even things like the top ability bar which resembles Spear of Adun/coop commander interfaces in SC2.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for nuanced AI image generation"

skocznymroczny — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 14:49:23 +0000

I like to use these AI models for generating mockup screenshots of game. I can drop a "create a mockup screenshot of a steampunk 2D platformer in which you play as a robot" and it will give me some interesting screenshot. Then I can ask it to iterate on the style. Of course it's going to be broken in some ways and it's not even real pixel art, but it gives a good reference to quickly brainstorm some ideas.

Unfortunately I have to use ChatGPT for this, for some reason local models don't do well with such tasks. I don't know if it's just the extra prompting sauce that ChatGPT does or just diffusion models aren't well designed for these kind of tasks.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "DoorDash and Waymo launch autonomous delivery service in Phoenix"

skocznymroczny — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 20:11:14 +0000

trebuchet is the solution

New comment by skocznymroczny in "A WebGL game where you deliver messages on a tiny planet"

skocznymroczny — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 17:54:53 +0000

ktx is Khronos Texture a format for storing compressed textures (=image data) so that they can be uploaded to GPU memory without decompressing step inbetween

drc is Draco Compression, it's a library from Google to compress mesh data

New comment by skocznymroczny in "DXGI debugging: Microsoft put me on a list"

skocznymroczny — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 07:51:25 +0000

This is true. I am a graphics driver developer and part of my job is to debug rendering issues in games and we often encounter spec violations in the game. Especially so in the era of DirectX12/Vulkan explicit APIs which shift the responsibilities to the developer. Most common culprits are missing resource barriers (image transitions in Vulkan) and uninitialized resources (color/depth resources for the most part require explicit initialization). The thing about those issues is that they are likely to work on one vendor's GPUs, the one that the game developer is using, but break more or less catastrophically on another vendor's GPU.

Also it's not easy to get them fixed in the game, because of the realities of engine update cycles and things like console certification process. Unless you report the issue several months before release, there is a slim chance you will get a fix in the game.

New comment by skocznymroczny in "Irrlicht Engine – a cross-platform realtime 3D engine"

skocznymroczny — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 12:46:45 +0000

What do you mean by standalone renderers? There's Forge [0], which was used for Starfield. Also, there's nothing stopping you from taking a popular engine and using it as a renderer only. Remaster of Oblivion is running the original game code underneath and using Unreal Engine 5 for rendering. I assume Diablo 2 remaster did something similar because you can seamlessly switch between old and new graphics.

[0] https://theforge.dev/products/the-forge/