djray (u/djray) - Readit News

djray commented on Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse felixturner.github.io/hex... · Posted by u/imadr

djray · 3 days ago

The demo runs at 5 FPS on my laptop (11th gen Core i5 and Iris Xe graphics, Chrome Latest as the browser, with the GPU being the bottleneck). I was hoping for something rather more efficient given the write-up saying it ran at 60 fps on mobile.

The maps are pretty, but the per-tile build constraints of the WFC build approach means that pretty unnatural generations end up happening because non-local influence is difficult to take into account. I think this may be OK for games where you discover tiles one at a time, but for a full map generator it's not great, and better solutions exist. Red Blob Games did a writeup of a noise-based method which looks superior imo. You can use moisture-tracking approaches for rivers, lay roads, bridges and other artificial elements in a separate pass, and it will likely end up faster and more robust. I think WFC is an interesting programming problem, though, so it was likely fun to implement.

Nonetheless, this was an excellent write-up and impressive demo.

djray commented on Tell HN: I underestimated how lonely building solo can be · Posted by u/paulwilsonn

deadbabe · 7 months ago

You think it’s lonely?

When a free soloist climbs a mountain by themselves, they are entirely alone. Do you think they have time to think about loneliness while climbing? No.

That’s the mentality you need when building solo. If you’re thinking about how lonely you are, it just means you’re losing focus. Get your head in the game.

When you get to the top, you have all the time in the world to think about how lonely you are up there. And if you don’t get to the top, well, don’t worry about it…

djray · 7 months ago

This is quite insensitive and a poor analogy. Telling someone who's struggling to "Get your head in the game" is unhelpful in the extreme. It's like telling someone who's drowning to "Just swim better".

Free climbing is a high-risk pursuit. A free climber goes on occasional expeditions where they solo a route, but before then, they train with others, have spotters and partners during route practice, and whole communities to provide help, support and emergency contact should things go wrong. Alex Honnold doesn't just rock up to a mountain (if you'll forgive the pun) and solo it every day for months on end.

It's very difficult to just put everything aside and focus on a singular task for the amount of time it takes to complete a significant software project. Once the initial enthusiasm wanes, keeping going can be a real challenge when you're on your own. The OP's concerns are absolutely valid and deserve respect.

djray commented on Apple lacks strategic vision unherd.com/2025/08/time-i... · Posted by u/retskrad

troyvit · 7 months ago

> AI? Probably huge, but in which direction? Who knows?

This is a really cool take that actually aligns with Apple's walled garden. They've built the garden wall (their hardware), they've prepped the soil (marketing, sometimes not great), and now it's time for them and their partners to start releasing local apps that take full advantage of the M2/M3's power to execute LLMs locally.

Apple has made bets like this before, both on the CPU and peripheral side. Historically, for better or for worse, they've done the whole "build the hardware (AltiVec, Thunderbolt, even USB-A) and the software will come" thing. With their latest ARM CPUs they're doing that with AI & LLMs, and it's a huge chance to change the direction of this tech from SaaS centric to user-owned. I too am not an Apple fan but I think they are going to come out of this looking pretty good.

Edit: I didn't mean to imply that Apple "built" USB-A, just saying that when they released the iMac it relied heavily on USB-A and people were pretty surprised at the investment they made in that tech.

djray · 7 months ago

I think the key here is the ability to focus on the privacy-first nature of local LLMs. A cloud-based service will always be more powerful (and markedly so), but Apple is very cautious about pursuing cloud-based solutions when user data is involved - privacy is a selling point of their products, after all. This is a double-edged sword, as you get to sell your services as privacy-friendly, but your offerings can be significantly less capable than your competitors' (see the iOS messages summary debacle, for example). The advantage of waiting is that smaller AI models are becoming much more powerful all the time.

Of course, Microsoft is also at this with its Copilot programme for laptops, where an onboard Neural Processing Unit has to be a particular speed to qualify. This lets you do local AI things like content-aware image snipping, text summaries and...er, Recall.

As to whether Apple will come out of this looking good or not, I think they're currently regretting rolling out a shitty initial AI offering, and will get better with the next release. It'll be like Apple Maps. Or the butterfly keyboard. Or any number of other broken version 1 Apple things.

An interesting question is to whether Apple Intelligence can be cancelled or pared back now the landscape is so AI dominated, i.e. will the lack of AI offerings be seen as a competitive disadvantage, or are people so sick of AI by now that it isn't a factor.

djray commented on Visa and Mastercard are getting overwhelmed by gamer fury over censorship polygon.com/news/616835/v... · Posted by u/mrzool

arcfour · 7 months ago

Freedom of speech is freedom from being arrested for your speech. It is not the freedom to force others to give your speech a platform. Just like how it's not freedom to force other people to listen to your speech. If it is, then I exercise my freedom of speech to place bumper stickers on YOUR car that say things that you find distateful. "But that's my property!" Yes, and Steam's servers and software are Valve's property. Mastercard and Visa's platforms are theirs.

If you ran a bookstore, and I could force you to carry a bunch of books that glorified Nazism, you would probably find this objectionable. Why? Because if you walked into a bookstore and there's a bunch of books there full of Nazi propaganda, you would probably wonder if the owner of the store was a Nazi. You don't want to be associated with or seen as promoting it.

This is why it's akin to speech.

djray · 7 months ago

The reality is more akin to me agreeing to have my car covered in your bumper stickers (and anyone else's, as long as they abide by my particular set of bumper sticker rules), and then having to remove some without notice at a later date because the chap at the gas station got offended and wouldn't serve me any more.

And there being only one gas station.

And the guy having not objected to the exact same bumper stickers for the last 15 years.

Visa have said this is because of 'enhanced risk' caused by this content, but they've been fine with it up to now. It's only because of the Australian group's censorious actions that they've decided to act. That's the frustrating thing, at least to me.

Whether they have the legal right to do it or not, it's still a dick move.

(If you'll forgive the pun.)

djray commented on Lossless Float Image Compression aras-p.info/blog/2025/07/... · Posted by u/ingve

djray · 8 months ago

What you gain in performance, you somewhat sacrifice in flexibility, at least in comparison with OpenEXR.

OpenEXR was designed for modularity, allowing efficient access to individual layers or channels. This is crucial in VFX workflows where only specific passes (like normals or diffuse) might be needed at any one time. This access is possible because EXR stores channels separately and supports tiled or scanline-based access.

The custom compression method Aras proposes - using meshoptimizer on 16K pixel chunks, followed by zstd as a second compressor step - achieves significantly faster decompression and better compression speeds than EXR ZIP, HTJ2K, or JPEG-XL lossless. However, it trades off random access and requires decompressing the entire image at once, which increases memory usage. Individual frames for a VFX production can be multiple gigabytes (i.e. dozens of 32-bit layers at 4K resolution).

The author's proposal is still compelling, and I wonder if a variant could find its way into some sort of archival format.

djray commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove

shaky-carrousel · 8 months ago

Did you write your own letters? Did you write your own arguments? Did you write your own code? I do, and don't depend on systems other built to do so. And losing the ability of keep doing so is a pretty big trade-off, in my opinion.

djray · 8 months ago

There seems to be a mistaken thought that having an AI (or indeed someone else) help you achieve a task means you aren't learning anything. This is reductionist. I suggest instead that it's about degrees of autonomy. The person you're responding to made a choice to get the AI to help integrate a library. They chose NOT to have the AI edit the files itself; they rather spent time reading through the changes and understanding the integration points, and tweaking the code to make it their own. This is much different to vibe coding.

I do a similar loop with my use of AI - I will upload code to Gemini 2.5 Pro, talk through options and assumptions, and maybe get it to write some or all of the next step, or to try out different approaches to a refactor. Integrating any code back into the original source is never copy-and-paste, and that's where the learning is. For example, I added Dexie (a library/wrapper for accessing IndexedDB) to a browser extension project the other day, and the AI helped me get started with a minimal amount of initial knowledge, yet I learned a lot about Dexie and have been able to expand upon the code myself since. If I were on my own, I would probably have barrelled ahead and just used IndexedDB directly, resulting in a lot more boilerplate code and time spent doing busywork. It's this sort of friction reduction that I find most liberating about AI. Trying out a new library isn't a multi-hour slog; instead, you can sample it and possibly reject it as unsuitable almost immediately without having to waste a lot of time on R&D. In my case, I didn't learn 'raw' IndexedDB, but instead I got the job done with a library offering a more suitable level of abstraction, and saved hours in the process.

This isn't lazy or giving up the opportunity to learn, it's simply optimising your time.

The "not invented here" syndrome is something I kindly suggest you examine, as you may find you are actually limiting your own innovation by rejecting everything that you can't do yourself.

djray commented on Writing toy software is a joy blog.jsbarretto.com/post/... · Posted by u/bundie

n4r9 · 9 months ago

Technology is a catalyser. It has a knack of turning things from "already a problem" to "now a catastrophe".

djray · 8 months ago

"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." -Paul Ehrlich

djray commented on Show HN: I am making an app to rival "Everything" drimiteros.github.io/Da-D... · Posted by u/Drimiteros

djray · 9 months ago

I think your project is at far too early a state to share. You are currently literally using 'fs::recursive_directory_iterator()' to search one file at a time on the selected drives. You aren't even using multi-threading for solid state volumes or caching the file system details during iteration, meaning every search is going to take several seconds on even modestly-sized SSDs. I can't believe this is faster than a comparable Windows 11 search, as you claim on your GitHub - I suspect the Windows search was for a non-indexed location and/or from a cold start, meaning the file system entries weren't cached already by the OS. (By the way, if you're going to make claims like this, you should publish reproducible benchmarks, so people can test your methodology.)

You also say that you want a solution more integrated with Windows, yet your UI is in SFML and your screenshots look nothing like a native Windows application.

Your project website doesn't render correctly on non-wide screens.

You are using a font which won't render many Unicode filenames correctly, e.g. Japanese or Chinese characters.

You have given no thought to accessibility or localisation.

You argue that Everything doesn't work with non-NTFS drives. That's incorrect - you can add them manually. See https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#how_do_i_index_a_fat_volume . You can also add Network Drives, NAS volumes etc.

Everything will run as non-administrator, but it will be unable to index NTFS properties. This is an OS-level restriction. You will face the same when you attempt to read these properties. The same goes for accessing protected folders - you just skip them.

You mention that you also want to feature file encryption and file transfer features in the same application. You are taking on too much here; each of the three features (file search, file transfer and file/folder encryption) is challenging and could take months to years to develop on its own. There are already accomplished apps satisfying these needs. Why would anyone use your solution over 7-zip?

You have no tests. If you want to feature encryption or file transfer, you will need an extensive test suite. Users will not be happy if your tool deletes or mangles their files.

Looking at your "Da-file-encrypter" repo, you don't seem to have any knowledge about how to actually encrypt files - you are doing an XOR against the bytes of the key, which is derived from the same bytes each time. Please NEVER ROLL YOUR OWN encryption strategy. Even the experts get it wrong. Instead, use a proper cryptography library. If you take anything away from this, please let it be that - never implement your own encryption.

Voidtools' Everything has an API and people have used that to integrate with launchers like PowerToys Run. It may be better to use the API and to add the features you think it is missing. It is very unlikely you will be able to beat its performance.

Judging by your licence and the Donate button on your website, you seem to have recently switched licences and want to make money out of this. In my personal opinion, that's not a good look for a project in this state.

djray commented on Flea-Scope: $18 Source Available USB Oscilloscope, Logic Analyzer and More [pdf] rtestardi.github.io/usbte... · Posted by u/burgerone

cushychicken · a year ago

The new Rigol DHO800 series are fabulous bargains for the money, and extremely well designed in a lot of ways:

- 12 bit ADC frontends

- Actually usable touchscreen inputs

- Super simple to drive remotely over a network connection (though getting the IP address with just the touchscreen is a little tricky)

- USB-C power input - you can run it from a battery pack if you like!

- All the essential decoders built in for free (I2C, SPI, UART)

- VESA Mountable - I got a monitor arm to gain back some desk space (awesome feature)

- Very, very easy to hack one of the budget models and upgrade it to a 250MHz model :D

djray · a year ago

These start from 450 euros.

djray commented on I Tried to Fix Government Tech for Years. I'm Fed Up reason.com/2025/02/13/i-t... · Posted by u/frankish

marcus0x62 · a year ago

> The problem is that this is the first time any of us are hearing of these inefficiencies.

If this is the first time you’ve heard of inefficiencies of this kind, you’re in a filter bubble.

djray · a year ago

To be clear, I meant the specific issues the OP was talking about in the article, not the overall inefficiencies. I was speaking to the fact that the author had not seemed to have raised the matters with anyone who was actually in a position to do something about it. I apologise for the lack of clarity.