Quibblekrust
@Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club
- Comment on Why the Atari 2600 was breakthrough technology 1 week ago:
Well, sure, but the C64 had 512 times more RAM(!), plus the VIC-II chip for graphics and the SID for audio. The TIA chip in the Atari was a joke in comparison. The CPU just isn’t that important. It only needs to run some game logic. It’s the graphics and sound that matter for games. The NES and SNES had very similar CPUs[^1], too, but the graphics and sound chips are what made the SNES blow away the NES.
[^1]: Same instruction set, but 16-bit and clocked twice as fast, plus a few more features.
- Comment on I c it! 2 weeks ago:
You made a parallel sentence construction:
- pinholes diffract light.
- lenses refract light.
You directly contrasted them. Refraction is obviously key to how lenses work. So it seemed to me like you were saying that diffraction is key to how pinholes work. 🤷
- Comment on I c it! 2 weeks ago:
Only if you know the sun’s size, which kind of presupposes you know its distance.
- Comment on I c it! 2 weeks ago:
Pinholes diffract light.
The diffraction effects from a pinhole camera are not what make them work. In fact, diffraction makes the photographs worse than they otherwise would be. The pinhole makes an effective aperture for photography because it’s small size produces small circles of confusion on the film plane. Ideally, you would make the hole as small as possible, but beyond a certain (small) size, defraction becomes the dominant source of blurring. So the size of the pinhole should be chosen to yield the best balance between geometric blur and diffraction blur.
The diffraction is merely a limit to the smallness of the aperture, and not what creates the image.
- Comment on What's your greatest "gaming high" you've been chasing ever since? Please take care not to spoil anything, if you are going to be story-specific. 2 weeks ago:
Learning I only beat half of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and then playing the rest. And then playing it again and again, and finding new crazy weapons I’d never seen before. Learning that some weapons (like Sword of Dawn) do something other than just slash. Later reading GameFaqs .txt guides to learn about even more stuff I had no idea about, so end up playing it even more.
And playing Final Fantasy 7 right before all of that. When the demo disc of Final Fantasy 7 came out (inside a Playstation Underground magazine), I lost me shit. I had loved, loved, loved FF4 and 6 (2 and 3 in the US), and 7 was just insane. The graphics, the music, everything. Absolutely revolutionary. That game was a reason to buy a PS1. I remember maxing out the playtime at 99 hours in my first playthrough.
- Comment on What's your greatest "gaming high" you've been chasing ever since? Please take care not to spoil anything, if you are going to be story-specific. 2 weeks ago:
Unreal Tournament LAN parties.
- Comment on Is this the best place to post questions about these retro emulation handhelds? 2 weeks ago:
The retro handheld Discord. A couple retro YouTube reviewers have channels there, including Retro Game Corps.
- Comment on What fungus would do this to a tree? Huge blooms. I know nothing about mushrooms. 3 weeks ago:
Any of them. That tree is half dead.
- Comment on Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, a JRPG, just got released on Steam—and this is a big deal because this game is to PC what Final Fantasy VII was to PlayStation. 5 weeks ago:
What do you mean they won’t let you? There’s no time limit on edits.
- Comment on Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters 1 month ago:
The kiosks don’t even let you put onions on a fucking McChicken.
- Comment on CEO Boasts That He Laid Off 80 Percent of His Staff Because They Didn't Love AI Enough, Threatens to Do It Again 1 month ago:
That’s 160%! How does that make sense!?
- Comment on KATHLEEN 1 month ago:
You are correct, but it’s simpler than that.
Katy is short for Kathleen, and “did” is kinda-sorta-not-really short for accomplshment.
Katy -> Kathleen
Did -> Accomplishment - Comment on how do you slice it?? 1 month ago:
I once saw a snake half the size of a garden hose.
- Comment on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately 2 months ago:
It was just a contrived example for the purpose of the comment, and I admit it wasn’t a good one.
How about turning a directory tree of dozens of .url files (Windows web shortcut files) into an HTML file? Directory names as section headings, and nested bulleted lists of hrefs using the .url file names as the link text, minus the “.url”. Can you do that on the CLI? Sure, but it would be a hell of a hack. It would be a disgusting blob of awk code, probably. You’re much better off writing it in something like Python.
It’s not hard stuff. It’s simple directory recursion, string building, and file writing. It’s just so mind-numbingly boring to write, and it takes time. Instead, Copilot made that for me in 10 seconds. As fast as I could articulate the need in text. No debugging needed. Worked the first time. All I had to ask for in a second pass was more indenting of each nested list, and I could have just added that myself.
I would argue that I can probably do it faster by hand than you can prompt your LLM and debug the slop it hands you back.
It’s funny that you’re not even sure you can do that extremely simple thing in my original comment faster than I could prompt an LLM. And your prejudice is showing by assuming I had to even debug it, or that the code was slop. The code looked great. It was perfect Python.
I wish all of you people would stop knocking what you’ve never even tried. Because it just makes you sound bigoted, using words like “slop” and making assumptions about the quality of the output while never having tried it yourself. Prejudice is never a good thing.
I’ve written a fair amount of advanced command line stuff using grep and sed and whatever else. Anything non-trivial takes just as much debugging as Python code, and it’s harder to read and debug. And when it’s boring, one-off code, why would you even want to do it yourself?
I’ll never understand the LLM hate on lemmy. Feel free to hate on capitalism, or on using fossil fuels to power LLMs, or on having no social safety net when LLMs displace jobs, or any number of other things, but to be prejudiced and assume it’s always slop when you’ve never even tried it just makes no sense to me. It’s a revolutionary tool in its infancy, and it’s already very useful on certain tasks.
- Comment on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately 2 months ago:
That hasn’t been my experience for something this simple. Not at all. I vibe coded a 75 line Python script the other day and it worked perfectly the first try.
- Comment on human geography 2 months ago:
Everyone knows they’re properly called “sparkle butts”.
- Comment on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn’t try AI immediately 2 months ago:
And most devs I know use it everyday, so… 🤷
Especially for repetitive mundane code, like they said. It’s much faster to check code for correctness than it is to write it in the first place.
“I need to restructure this directory tree. If a file has “index” in the name, then it has to go in a parallel directory structure starting at “/home/repos/project/indexes/” with the same child folders as the original.”
There, I just finished a custom Python script to accomplish that. Can I do it myself? Yes. Can I do it in 30 seconds? No. Why would I waste my time writing such a mundane script for a one-off thing?
- Comment on Study Finds That School-Based Online Surveillance Companies Monitor Students 24/7 2 months ago:
I’m sorry, but it doesn’t sound like you read the article.
Some salient quotes:
Companies cited a variety of ways they gain access to student digital activity, including browser plug-ins, API integrations and device software.
Many companies collect and flag sensitive data, including students’ private messages and search histories.
So, they work with shady spyware companies to collect private student data, retain it, and then try to sell it to schools.
I, for one, am fucking shocked!
- Comment on Any good Android games that aren't roguelikes? 2 months ago:
No, it’s rogue-lite. Not -like. Rogue-lite games have randomized runs, permadeath, and (often tons of) meta-progression involving spending stat points, or unlocking new skills or weapons. In many games, the difficulty decreases by unlocking new skills and adding stats. Sometimes the games increase their enemy difficulty as you earn victories, in order to balance the difficulty with all the new choices and skills you have.
Rogue-likes, on the other hand, are turn-based dungeon crawlers that have very little or no meta progression. They may have training wheels like being forced to start with a simple class and unlocking additional ones doing simple things in-game. They do this to avoid overwhelming new players with character choices, and not to make the game easier as yoy play. You get better by learning the game, and not by unlocking more things or adding to stats.
- Comment on Begun the kernel wars have 2 months ago:
let $random_game_publisher = "Ubisoft"; print("But on windows every {$random_game_publisher} is allowed...?"); > But on windows every Ubisoft is allowed...?
I’d like to report an issue with your code.
- Comment on AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified 2 months ago:
Thanks! That was a good read.
- Comment on AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified 2 months ago:
ERROR: File or directory not found.
- Comment on NSFW on Lemmy 2 months ago:
That image is 100% NSFW
- Comment on Is there anything I can do to decrease the gap in my blinds? 2 months ago:
Measure the height, and buy a length of some narrow, white board at Low’s Depot. Stick it onto the glass with a small amount of double-sided tape.
- Comment on Home sales are down. So why are prices at an all-time high? 2 months ago:
X = 52?
- Comment on Wood heater pollution is a silent killer. Here's where the smoke is worst 2 months ago:
Does he not own a calendar?
- Comment on Blocking communities doesn't work at all 2 months ago:
I wish there were giant lists of related communities and an easy way to import them as blocks. Want to block all sports team communities? Here are all 1,000 of them. All the anime communities? Here are all 90,000,000 of them.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 2 months ago:
😁 It’s an elite club.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 2 months ago:
No, not directly. Not any more than your average tech leader who goes to conferences and discusses it.
- Comment on Brave browser blocks Windows feature that takes screenshots of everything you do on your PC 2 months ago:
He invented JavaScript, so definitely don’t use that either. For real. JavaScript sucks.