Esras (u/Esras) - Readit News

Esras commented on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off businessinsider.com/ibm-c... · Posted by u/nabla9

SamvitJ · 3 months ago

"They have great R&D but just can’t make products"

Is this just something you repeat without thinking? It seems to be a popular sentiment here on Hacker News, but really makes no sense if you think about it.

Products: Search, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps, Youtube, Workspace (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Meet), Photos, Play Store, Chromebook, Pixel ... not to mention Cloud, Waymo, and Gemini ...

So many widely adopted products. How many other companies can say the same?

What am I missing?

Esras · 3 months ago

I think the sentiment is usually paired with discussion about those products as long-lasting, revenue-generating things. Many of those ended up feeding back into Search and Ads. As an exercise, out of the list you described, how many of those are meaningfully-revenue-generating, without ads?

A phrasing I've heard is "Google regularly kills billion-dollar businesses because that doesn't move the needle compared to an extra 1% of revenue on ads."

And, to be super pedantic about it, Android and YouTube were not products that Google built but acquired.

Esras commented on Show HN: Koreo – A platform engineering toolkit for Kubernetes koreo.dev/... · Posted by u/tylertreat

Esras · a year ago

I think I can see some of where this could be utilized, but I think I'm still missing a step and I'm hopeful someone can fill me in.

There's a comparison against Argo Workflows, but with the description here and in other comments, Koreo seems to be aiming more for what I would use Argo CD for - managing the entire state of the cluster, the controllers, configuration, etc. Because of it tying into repos, you can then define the entire state of your cluster in code, and Argo CD has tools for doing some of the interpolation of variables into your YAML.

The project looks cool, and I don't think that the world suffers from having multiple ways of doing something, I just want to understand it better.

Esras commented on Scaffold Level Editor blog.littlepolygon.com/po... · Posted by u/mwkaufma

Esras · a year ago

Thanks for sharing! I was thinking how this is a good example of the kinds of things that you can do with a game engine that already exists, as opposed to having to write everything yourself.

Also a nice mention of octrees' use outside of voxels.

Esras commented on Source code art in the Rivulet language github.com/rottytooth/Riv... · Posted by u/cranbor

rottytooth · a year ago

Yes, that's a typo: the first two strands have hooks pointing up, the third to the left.

I forgot to mention that you can run the interpreter with -p to convert the program to pseudo-code. This makes it much easier to tweak the examples and experiment. I'll add that to the readme, along with more pseudo-code for the example programs.

And thanks so much!! Very excited to publish (Sept 2025).

Esras · a year ago

Thanks, as I said, easy to fool yourself into thinking you're wrong when esolangs are involved.

The CLI tool is fantastic. I never thought that I'd see an esolang where "ergonomics of using it" was something the author would work on. I'll play around with that some more later, thanks again!

Esras commented on Source code art in the Rivulet language github.com/rottytooth/Riv... · Posted by u/cranbor

rottytooth · a year ago

Hi, I created this language as part of a series of experiments with bringing aspects of natural language into code. My previous language, Valence (https://danieltemkin.com/Esolangs/Valence), dealt with semantic ambiguity — this one with calligraphy. It avoids an overly logical syntax in favor of compactness and expressiveness.

I’m completing a book of these esolangs for MIT Press this fall including this; not much info yet online yet but here’s the link: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553087/forty-four-esolangs/

Esras · a year ago

This is beautiful, genuinely (the SVGs are lovely bits of artwork) and it's a fun puzzle to read, and I've shared with friends that like esolangs, including your book (good luck on publishing!).

In the "Data Strands" -> "Value Strands" section, you describe it as "Value strands (and other data strands), begin with a hook that points up (as in the third strand below) or to the left (as in the first two)" for the following example:

  1 ╵╰──╮╭──╯╶╮
  2    ─┘└─   └─╮
  3               
  5              ╷

but the way I was parsing it was that the hook is '╰' or '╯', in which case both of those are hooks pointing up? It looks like a fairly innocuous typo, but I'm never sure with an esolang so wanted to ask.

Esras commented on Why Is Britain Poor? edwest.co.uk/p/why-is-bri... · Posted by u/paulpauper

mike_hearn · a year ago

Brexit isn't mentioned because it's not relevant - the perception that it was important economically is a hangover from the times when the establishment was telling everyone it would be. In fact there was no economic impact. Britain continued in about the same place it was before rankings-wise, there was no Brexit recession and even trade with the EU continued on its prior trend line! An outcome so embarrassing to the Remainer classes that they just ignore the real outcomes and talk as if the economist's models were accurate.

> What's the underlying mechanism that got them to that state?

The Foundations essay discusses that. It's a combination of a big overhang of very socialist regulation from the 1940s, especially related to construction, combined with the lack of a big enough libertarian faction in the right wing party that would fix it. America has a strong Republican movement that pushes for pro-capitalist, pro-freedom outcomes (or did pre Trump), and inter-state competition makes it easier to compare outcomes. The UK had such a government for a while in the 1980s but British society didn't produce enough Thatchers to keep it up and the reforms were never completed. Blair accepted the 80s changes were necessary but didn't continue, and after Blair stepped down Labour shifted to the left (reverting to its historical mean). Cameron took advantage by steering the Conservative Party towards being continuity New Labour i.e. a center left party. They found that maintaining and doubling down on super strict building regs satisfied both the left wing greens and the right wing pensioners/house flippers, making it into a winning electoral strategy. They didn't have enough people making the long term arguments about the economic damage of that strategy, and indeed the Conservatives set things up to suppress their own right wing in the belief that this would yield bigger victories. Everything continued to drift ever more listlessly to the left until their activists, funders and ultimately voters basically gave up on them. Labour won more or less by default (not because they became more popular) and is now acting much like they did in the 1970s, so it looks like history travels in a loop and things will get worse for Britain before they get better, unfortunately.

> NIMBYism is brought up as "logical" given the incentives at one point, but I'd argue it's fundamentally a social issue

It's mostly not a social issue but financial. The USA has unusually sophisticated investing culture, it's common for people to understand and engage in stock trading there. In the UK it's normal for people's only investment to be their houses, and the social expectation that house prices always rise is abnormally strong. Therefore, anything that could lower house prices became political death -> NIMBYism.

Esras · a year ago

For anyone else coming along reading this thread, in searching for Brexit's impact, I see mention that while a sharp recession and many of the doom-and-gloom style predictions didn't happen, it _absolutely_ has had a negative impact on the economy, and that it's expected that the effects are long-term and will continue.

I do think it's potentially fair to say that some of those effects aren't relevant for this particular article or discussion, due to the recency. The movement around it didn't arise out of nothing, after all.

Esras commented on Why Is Britain Poor? edwest.co.uk/p/why-is-bri... · Posted by u/paulpauper

Esras · a year ago

Positives upfront:

I appreciate that the article is trying to describe a complex topic, and many of the issues described are shared by us here in the US. It does cite different statistics of other nations as comparisons, and calls out that access to jobs, ease of movement, and housing are all things that help make countries wealthy.

Now for the downsides.

I feel like this article maintains a tone throughout that I might describe as "dismissive nationalism." The comparison against France is preceded by a paragraph that, due to the framing, is presented as ludicrous, proceeds to describe all of the things France does better, and then somehow still makes the claim that Britain has "many advantages." Perhaps that's intended in a vacuum, but with how hard it's pushing for private investment (to the extent that it touts all that earlier infrastructure in Britain as "built by a total of 1,116 private companies" and that it describes the State's role as functionally just exercising eminent domain), it's hard to overlook.

And while the underlying paper is discussing foundational, long-term effects, that there isn't a single mention of Brexit in the article feels stark in contrast to the conclusory statement by the paper's authors of "it is vital that Britain should once more have the strength and self-belief of 1939 with which to play its part in the leadership of the free world."

---

I'm not an expert in economics (as my critique above might have clued you in), but I do think it's important to be careful in which experts you choose to listen to. I also don't know the biases that this particular publication or the underlying paper subscribe to.

I may try read the Foundations paper (https://ukfoundations.co/ - it's not that long), but if this article is summarizing well and is all, then it feels "too shallow." What's the underlying mechanism that got them to that state? If the proposed solution is "allowing more private investment," then what about all of the social shifts that happened in the meantime? NIMBYism is brought up as "logical" given the incentives at one point, but I'd argue it's fundamentally a social issue, related to a perceived quality of life and a lack of perception of a larger group as being part of "your community."

I digress.

Thanks for sharing the link, and I hope others with more of an economic / politics background might have more fruitful critique.

Esras commented on Unicode 16 now includes retro video game sprites [pdf] unicode.org/charts/PDF/Un... · Posted by u/qingcharles

lifthrasiir · a year ago

Flags are in Unicode, they are just encoded like "the flag of United States" instead of "seven horizontal stripes and a specific arrangement of 50 white stars in a top-left blue background". (And the flag of US changes, although it hadn't been for many decades.)

Esras · a year ago

I was specifically referring to this: https://blog.unicode.org/2022/03/the-past-and-future-of-flag...

Esras commented on Unicode 16 now includes retro video game sprites [pdf] unicode.org/charts/PDF/Un... · Posted by u/qingcharles

Esras · a year ago

Echoing a similar sentiment, so supporting legacy retro video game sprites are very important to ensure are in and never change, but including flags is not okay? I re-read the justification for it recently and it still doesn't hold water, because it felt like it boiled down to "It's hard."

I was thinking about how Minecraft has a system of components and layers that let you compose various flags on their banners. Obviously that's far, far simpler than country (and autonomous region, and county, and province, and and and) flags that can include text, symbols, and practically entire images. But I did wonder if there was some way that could be represented. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly well-versed enough in code points and their ilk to propose anything useful.

But, I am torn. Archival projects are important, too, and language evolves. These decisions will live for potentially hundreds or thousands (Linear A) of years, and interoperability in computing is important.

Esras commented on Microui+fenster=Small GUI bernsteinbear.com/blog/fe... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

Esras · 2 years ago

Cool project! Graphics programming is _hard_ and anything to make it easier is welcome.

Maybe a dumb question, but why not Dear ImGui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui). "It's way too big and complex" is a completely reasonable answer, but I found it fantastic for debug menus, and there are a few applications that have used it as their _main_ GUI (Ship of Harkinian as an example).

(Edit for fixing the name of the project)