Hacker News: smitelli

New comment by smitelli in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

smitelli — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:15:51 +0000

CyberS3XY was what I always figured he was going for.

New comment by smitelli in "The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)"

smitelli — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:32:20 +0000

Never played Thief, but I logged a lot of hours in Unreal, 1998. I was (and still am) amazed at how full-featured the software renderer was. I always wished I could peek at the code behind it.

If memory serves, the only thing my 3dfx Voodoo3 could do that software-only mode could not was surface reflections. Maybe something with colored lighting too, it's been a long time. Point is, it was a decent enough substitute for dedicated graphics hardware.

New comment by smitelli in "Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 – 2025)"

smitelli — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:08:21 +0000

There are definitely outside organizations whose sole responsibility is to monitor TV/radio broadcasts and nowadays even podcast sponsor breaks to ensure that ad copy is inserted as agreed. (Source: I was contracted to do some of that work for a time.)

New comment by smitelli in "Making macOS Bearable"

smitelli — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:47:18 +0000

You mean something other than ⌘+` ?

New comment by smitelli in "Duke Nukem: Zero Hour N64 ROM Reverse-Engineering Project Hits 100%"

smitelli — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 14:27:48 +0000

I'm the person who reimplemented Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure (DOS, 1992) and my original reasoning was a desire to know how it was able to do some of the graphical tricks it did on such underpowered hardware (it could run on an IBM AT). The game wasn't anything special by any metric, but it was an important piece of my childhood and I felt an attachment to it. I also learned a hell of a lot about the PC platform, the C ecosystem from the 80s, and my own tastes as an engineer.

https://github.com/smitelli/cosmore

https://cosmodoc.org/

New comment by smitelli in "You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here"

smitelli — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 13:25:20 +0000

https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/em-dash-tool/

New comment by smitelli in "YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission"

smitelli — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:16:52 +0000

I'd be interested in seeing an example of a well-composed 9:16 portrait photo. All the ones I have found look awkward.

New comment by smitelli in "Show HN: FFmpeg in plain English – LLM-assisted FFmpeg in the browser"

smitelli — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 15:33:18 +0000

https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/em-dash-tool/

New comment by smitelli in "Fine dining restaurants researching guests to make their dinner unforgettable"

smitelli — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 16:53:32 +0000

I gotta say, I don't have the right personality traits to enjoy this kind of personal attention a lot of the time.

I've had experiences where the counter staff at my daily breakfast place started to recognize me and know what "usual" my order was going to be without my having to say it... and it really weirded me out more than anything else.

Sometimes I just want to be a faceless nobody, forgotten day after day by the businesses I visit and the public spaces I navigate.

Understanding the World as Entropic – Part 1

smitelli — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 12:56:51 +0000

Article URL: https://entropic.mataroa.blog/blog/entropic-world-pt1/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44454539

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by smitelli in "Swearing as a Response to Pain: Assessing Effects of Novel Swear Words"

smitelli — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 21:02:45 +0000

Percy Livermore: We must rid our speech of slang. Now, besides "OK", I want you all to promise me that there are two words that you will never use. One of these is "swell" and the other one is "lousy".

Lucy Ricardo: OK, what are they?

Percy Livermore: [with emphasis] One of them is "swell" and the other one is "lousy".

Fred Mertz: Well, give us the lousy one first.

New comment by smitelli in "Cuss: Map of profane words to a rating of sureness"

smitelli — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 14:46:51 +0000

Never realized the "chunky" in my chunky peanut butter was so profane. /s

New comment by smitelli in "YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It's Coming for the Sitcom"

smitelli — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 15:41:04 +0000

Good for occasional use. Feed it a big playlist and you might find yourself IP-banned for a week.

New comment by smitelli in "Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot"

smitelli — Thu, 22 May 2025 17:40:34 +0000

Some call this phenomenon the Goomba fallacy.

New comment by smitelli in "Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden"

smitelli — Mon, 19 May 2025 23:05:06 +0000

I really respect Jim Davis, believe it or not. Draw the cat, collect the money, keep mouth shut.

New comment by smitelli in "Experts have it easy (2024)"

smitelli — Sun, 18 May 2025 14:58:32 +0000

I have been nerd-sniped into conjuring up a less-traveled-path technique:

Portable Python on the Windows computer. `python -m http.server`. On the Linux computer, something like `wget -mkp` followed by `find … -delete` to get rid of the index files.

(Lots of disks are soldered in nowadays, or the procedure might require multiple M2 slots that the destination mobo might not have. Is your company IT department happy to know their hardware is being disassembled?)

I have not benchmarked to see if this would sustain the 120 Mbps the original scenario would require.

New comment by smitelli in "Show HN: iPhone 2005 weird "Blob Keyboard" simulator"

smitelli — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 20:34:04 +0000

The thing I found interesting in trying to type out a single test sentence is how many of the letters were reachable with just a tap. It wasn’t until I really studied the layout closely that I noticed that it wasn’t in true alphabetical order. Oddly intuitive, although I would probably despise using it long-term.

New comment by smitelli in "In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio"

smitelli — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 15:07:32 +0000

To my ear it sounds like AFSK, kind of like the Bell 202 scheme. Here's the first passable search result I found with a clean recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PXxSHGrF-8

New comment by smitelli in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

smitelli — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 11:41:50 +0000

What happens on the day when those people just directly pay some AI model to do it?

New comment by smitelli in "Data Becker"

smitelli — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:29:17 +0000

Data Becker Music Center, the first real MIDI composition software I ever used. Came with a pretty decent dead-tree printed manual. Hadn't thought about that one in a long time.