chch (u/chch) - Readit News

chch commented on The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development pikuma.com/blog/jungle-mu... · Posted by u/atan2

dylan604 · a year ago

> that era was so raw and fresh, the future was being invented right there! Very happy days

I've been told by several Gen-Z that they've never been to a "rave", and I feel sorry for them. In my town, we had quite the underground scene, but then times changed and it is so much smaller now. Now, "kids" just call it all EDM instead of the specific genre that we know and love.

chch · a year ago

I was surprised to see Gen Z called out here specifically, though I guess it depends on where you live/grow up as well. I'd hazard to guess most of the millennials I know also haven't been to a rave!

I don't think there were any available in my hometown (or they were too underground for me to have ever heard about!), and there wasn't much exposure to electronic music at all, so it's not an experience I'd ever considered trying to find out how to have.

Just one person's anecdote, of course, but I wonder what the balance of generation vs. location is!

chch commented on A camera that shoots 40k FPS decided the 100-meter sprint final petapixel.com/2024/08/06/... · Posted by u/wallflower

iainmerrick · a year ago

I was curious what the advertising board would have looked like to the athletes -- it must be a bit distracting to see a display scrolling at ~10m/s!

You can see it here at 9m50s:

https://youtu.be/7Xnr805bm4E?feature=shared&t=590

It's just a single animated strip, one pixel wide. I assume the camera array is on the opposite side.

chch · a year ago

Thanks for pointing that out! This video doesn't seem to be available in the US, so you can also see it in the slow motion footage here, right on the finish line:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcxyXnPIF4o#t=2m45s

(You can see it in normal speed too, but I can feel the formation of shapes better in the slow-mo, instead of it just feeling like blinking)

chch commented on Don't be terrified of Pale Fire unherd.com/2024/05/dont-b... · Posted by u/lermontov

chch · 2 years ago

I always saw Pale Fire as somewhat of self-parody, which made me enjoy it more.

Seven years before Pale Fire came out, Nabokov was working on his translation of Eugene Onegin. Often, people argue that a translated novel should have no end/footnotes, because a "good translation" should read "naturally" to a reader. Nabokov disagreed, and wrote an article that included the phrase:

> "I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity." [1]

Quite a fun image, and one he took somewhat seriously, as his endnote commentary for Onegin is more than twice as long as the translation itself! [2]

So, for me personally, I can't imagine a world where he didn't reflect on his own zeal here, and realize "I think there's a novel idea in here somewhere!"

[1] "Problems in Translation: Onegin in English." Partisan Review 22, no. 4 (1955): 512.

[2] https://secondstorybooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/136717...

chch commented on YouTube Oddities github.com/mattwright324/... · Posted by u/xk3

nonethewiser · 2 years ago

That is fascinating. Wonder why that video in particular (or any single video that in theory) would need its text style changed.

chch · 2 years ago

Less a need, more an easter egg.

The short itself is based on the stereotypical American family sitcom;s opening credits, which would tend to show a character doing something 'representative' of their character, while showing the actor's name on screen that played that character. Without too much spoilers for the video itself, the names popping up is a pretty key aspect of the video itself. It gained a pretty good following in 2014 when it came out, and I guess someone on the YouTube UI team thought it would be a fun addition to add the text style from the video onto the video page itself. I remember being happily surprised the first time I saw it (similarly to the first time I saw someone added the Wadsworth Constant[1] as an actual feature, though that's unfortunately since been removed).

[1] A user on Reddit once posited in 2011 that the first 30% of every YouTube video was a waste, so they would just click to around the 30% mark to skip to the important part. A reply deemed this the "Wadsworth Constant", after the user, and it tumbled from there. Eventually, YouTube had an official feature where if you added ""&wadsworth=1" to a URL, it would start the video 30% in, for any video! I'd used it several times when sending instructional videos to friends who didn't need to see the intros.

chch commented on The Unique History of Japanese Plastic Food Samples tokyoweekender.com/art_an... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

chrisco255 · 2 years ago

It would be nice if there were more than two photos of the plastic food to go with this article.

chch · 2 years ago

I happened to accidentally stumble into a plastic food store while in Osaka a few months ago. I just looked up the name, and they have a web storefront! [1]

Admittedly all in Japanese, but the top part of the side bar shows you examples of pure fake foods, then the section under the "Sale" box gets you to fake-food style accessories, like USB drives, phone cases, and hair clips. Lots of pictures there to show the variety and quality!

(Edit: Sorry if this reads like a shill, I have no affiliation, and didn't even buy anything while I was there! Just took very touristy pictures.)

[1] http://morino-sample.jp/?mode=cate&csid=0&cbid=1803129&csid=...

chch commented on Reindeer sleep and eat simultaneously smithsonianmag.com/scienc... · Posted by u/gmays

Eji1700 · 2 years ago

There's the "uber sleep" method or whatever it's called. Made the rounds in my circle of friends in like...2007ish?

Basically you force yourself to only take 4 15 minute naps a day. A utterly hellish thing to do, but eventually your brain figures out that you've decided to terrorize it and will instantly dip into REM the moment you fall asleep, and you'll wake up feeling rested and only need to sleep an hour a day.

I personally tried this for a bit and it kinda sorta works, but it's awful to get started, and the first time you sleep more than 15 minutes you're going to break the trend and revert, and who knows what long term effects it has on people.

Sleep in general is one of those really interesting areas of biology that we still don't get.

chch · 2 years ago

I was actually just talking about this yesterday!

That schedule I'd read about was the Überman schedule, where you sleep 20-30 minutes six times a day. Definitely a much more extreme form than most polyphasic sleep schedules. :)

I read a series of blog posts about it, probably around the same time as you did, and found them again [1] last night. I didn't actually read through it again, but if anyone's interested in reading more about someone's firsthand experience with it, could be a good classic read.

[1] https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

chch commented on How does Chrome decide what to highlight when you double-click Japanese text? stackoverflow.com/questio... · Posted by u/polm23

JonathonW · 6 years ago

ICU (International Components for Unicode) provides an API for this: http://userguide.icu-project.org/boundaryanalysis

Assuming Blink is using the same technique for text selection as V8 is for the public Intl.v8BreakIterator method, that's how Chrome's handling this-- Intl.v8BreakIterator is a pretty thin wrapper around the ICU BreakIterator implementation: https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/refs/heads/master/...

chch · 6 years ago

Doing a bit more deep diving into the ICU code, it looks like the source code for the Break engine (used by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) is here: https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/778d0a6d1d46faa724ea...

and then according to the LICENSE file[1], the dictionary :

   #  The word list in cjdict.txt are generated by combining three word lists
   # listed below with further processing for compound word breaking. The
   # frequency is generated with an iterative training against Google web
   # corpora.
   #
   #  * Libtabe (Chinese)
   #    - https://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=1519
   #    - Its license terms and conditions are shown below.
   #
   #  * IPADIC (Japanese)
   #    - http://chasen.aist-nara.ac.jp/chasen/distribution.html
   #    - Its license terms and conditions are shown below.
   #

It's interesting to see some of the other techniques used in that engine, such as a special function to figure out the weights of potential katakana word splits.

[1] https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/6417a3b720d8ae3643f7...

chch commented on The Plain Text Project plaintextproject.online/... · Posted by u/mmillin

arminiusreturns · 6 years ago

How is it you are aware of this? Affiliation with MS or a project that ran into it?

Wouldn't the key part:

"and in response to completion of a task, modifying the task list during the interactive code development session to indicate that the task has been completed."

mean it doesn't apply?

Worst case, just put a US exclusionary clause in the release so US copyright law doesn't apply. At least Europe is ahead of the US in this and doesn't allow such trivial patents and considers them invalid by definition.

chch · 6 years ago

Someone discovered it years ago online, and it's done a couple rounds in the media[1] as an example of an "overreaching software patent", similar to the "pop-under" patent, which patents a pop-up ad that opens after a window is closed[3].

So no personal experience, but I definitely think it's pretty frivolous; I don't imagine its ever been tested in court. :)

[1] https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1040068/microsoft-... from 2004 [2] https://www.geek.com/news/microsoft-granted-patent-covering-... from 2010 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_ad#Patent_controversy

chch commented on The Plain Text Project plaintextproject.online/... · Posted by u/mmillin

mntmoss · 6 years ago

Recently I decided that I was going to solve the problem of: I easily write inline TODO comments while I work on code, but then have difficulty keeping track of them and getting my head back into the state of things later. While there is IDE support for such things, it's usually not exactly the right interface I want.

So I made a tiny CLI app that scans the source for TODO and FIXME lines and presents a menu of files, containing the number of items to work on in each. Then I type in which file I want to work on and it instantly reports all relevant lines, plus successive comment lines. All I have to do is punch in the line number and start working.

I felt a kind of stress relief almost instantly after doing this. It's better than Trello for me.

If I need to add additional kinds of data sources, many syntaxes, etc. it might become a bit more complex, but still managable as long as there's an API to get some plaintext lines out. It's basically following up on the hypothesis of a lot of information tools today: it isn't the data generation that's the issue, but the filtering.

chch · 6 years ago

Just be careful about Microsoft's Patent US6748582B1; it doesn't expire for another few months. ;)

From the patent (edited down a bit):

> According to various example implementations of the invention, a task list facilitates code development by assisting developers in keeping track of and managing a variety of tasks, such as errors to be corrected, opportunities for optimization, and other user-defined tasks. As the developer edits source code, warnings and coding errors are detected and inserted as tasks in a task list. The developer can also embed keywords known as comment tokens in the code. These comment tokens are detected and used to define tasks.

> [...]

> Tasks can also be identified using tokens or keywords. These tokens or keywords typically preface comment lines in the code and may include predefined labels such as, for example, “UNDONE,” “TODO,” or “HACK,” as well as labels that are defined by the individual developer. If the source code has no syntax errors, the parser [...] determines whether any of the keywords are present in the source code[.] If so, [it] extracts the comment from the source code and uses the tag to determine the priority of the task. The task is then inserted in the task list[.] For example, if the source code contains the comment, “/TODO: Need to add copyright text/”, the parser [...] adds the task “TODO: Need to add copyright text” to the task list with a priority rating assigned to the “TODO” tag. [1]

[1] http://patents.google.com/patent/US6748582B1/en

chch commented on Chrome 69: “www.” subdomain missing from URL bugs.chromium.org/p/chrom... · Posted by u/gouggoug

austincummings · 7 years ago

Looks like this is intentional. To change it back go to chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme-and-subdomains and disable the setting.

chch · 7 years ago

Additionally, if this flag ever goes away, the "kFormatUrlOmitTrivialSubdomains" is the internal flag for this, it seems[1], though its description says it's "Not in kFormatUrlOmitDefaults"[2].

Back when they removed the "http:" off of URLs, I used to use a hex editor to turn the kFormatUrlOmitHTTP bit flag off every time I got a new build, so I'd get the URL formatting I wanted, but eventually lost the mental wherewithal to continue the hack every week.

[1] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/3d41e77125f3de8d72...

[2] https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/78aae16be65e409075...