h0l0cube (u/h0l0cube)

h0l0cube commented on The movie that's different every time you watch it movieweb.com/eno-document... · Posted by u/mmoustafa

Animats · 5 months ago

"new and unique cinematic experience"

Neither new nor unique. It's been done, many times. The classic is Kinoautomat, 1967.[1]

Much video game design revolves around how to keep to the plot while giving the user some freedom. If the user is locked to a path, the game is called a "track ride". If the user can do whatever they want, it's an open-world game. Resolving that dichotomy is hard, but has been done successfully many times. GTA V is a good example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinoautomat

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

See also Dragon's Lair:

> Most games in the Dragon's Lair series are interactive films where the player controls Dirk the Daring, in a quest to save Princess Daphne. The game presents predetermined animated scenes, and the player must select a direction on the joystick or press the action button in order to clear each quick time event, with different full motion video segments showing the outcome.[10] A perfect run of the 1983 arcade game with no deaths lasts no more than 12 minutes. In total, the game has 22 minutes or 50,000 frames of animated footage, including individual death scenes and game over screens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Lair

> If the user is locked to a path, the game is called a "track ride". If the user can do whatever they want, it's an open-world game. Resolving that dichotomy is hard

Actual generative AI (as opposed to that in the OP) holds promise in solving this conflict by being the story teller in place of the game designer. I'm curious to know what's happening in this space.

h0l0cube commented on Black Mirror's pessimism porn won't lead us to a better future theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/magoghm

ryandrake · 5 months ago

> To be clear it doesn't have to be happy, it can still be grim and dark, but when every character is a terrible character, it undermines the story

The world is full of terrible people, though. It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name. And by terrible I don't mean "literally Hitler," but the boring terribleness and malaise that so many around us have kind of just slipped into: Selfishness, impoliteness, paranoia, anger, belligerence, spitefulness, indifference to cruelty, unnecessary competitiveness in everything. Just an overall lack of socialization, grace and empathy.

Maybe it's boring to you because the characters' traits can be found all over the place in real life.

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

> It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name.

Nope. It's a reference to the surface of a screen. (Though undeniably there's important double meaning there)

> The "black mirror" of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/01/charlie-b...

h0l0cube commented on Bonobos' calls may be the closest thing to animal language we've seen arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/rbanffy

jvanderbot · 5 months ago

So the question is one of modularity. Having one sound for each such phrase doesn't scale.

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

TFA refers to 'non-trivial compositionality' as what's novel about how humans communicate (and how it's perhaps not as novel as we thought):

> However, the team also found examples of non-trivial compositionality, the first such discovery outside of humans.

> The first non-trivial combination was high hoot-low hoot that was translated as a distress call. But it was also used to stop other individuals’ display behaviors—dramatic, exaggerated actions or gestures bonobos perform to assert dominance or attract attention. The second was either peep or yelp in the “join” meaning paired with high hoot to form a structure used for coordinating with others before traveling. Finally, the “I would like to” peep followed by “let’s stay together” whistle was used for initiating more romantically inclined interactions bonobos are famous for indulging in.

h0l0cube commented on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy... · Posted by u/belter

Server6 · 5 months ago

Tanking the currency is literally step 2 in their plan.

https://www.nordea.com/en/news/mar-a-lago-accord-explained-a...

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

It's obviously the only real end game to this policy. Asia needs to divest itself off US bonds, which China has been slowly doing the background of late. No matter how it plays out, it's looking like higher interest rates, inflation, and foreclosures for everyday citizens and SMEs are going to be on the cards for the US, and it's going to take something akin to religious faith for people to tolerate the hardship on the way to this promised renewed prosperity.

h0l0cube commented on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy... · Posted by u/belter

dralley · 5 months ago

Just think how many companies moved production from China to Vietnam to avoid China tariffs, and now tariffs on Vietnam are larger than on China.

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

It's just going to be a game of whack-a-mole as production and dumping shift to the less taxed countries. In the end, manufacturing won't shift to the US while labor costs are too high for factory workers. And the only way to remedy that is tanking the currency.

h0l0cube commented on How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack krebsonsecurity.com/2025/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

cutemonster · 5 months ago

The population is unarmed. Small arms don't count, they're good for the shooting range and mass shootings, but not against a modern military.

But yes let's hope there will be elections again

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

Numbers matter. Only a small amount of insurgents are needed to occupy the military, but if even 2% of the civilian population took up arms, the situation would become untenable. All the armed forces together constitute not much more than one million troops. And there would be also conscientious resistance within the armed forces to executive orders to shoot civilians.

h0l0cube commented on Can Style Be Timeless? mrporter.com/en-gb/journa... · Posted by u/mooreds

nine_k · 5 months ago

Showing a sign of belonging to the in-group always has value. Based on that, marketing of new fashions becomes much simpler.

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

In-group value is a kind of MLM scheme :)

h0l0cube commented on How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack krebsonsecurity.com/2025/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

johnnyanmac · 5 months ago

I don't see the paradox. You can consider some people idiots and find it condemnable for idiots to be kidnapped in vans or have their visas revoked.

If anything it's a slipperly slope logic. These people are idiots -> these people deserve bad things happening. Unfortuntaely, the admin is proving all those fallacies before us.

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

'Considering some people idiots' is intolerance. Tolerating that kind of intolerance in the name of free speech in the marketplace of ideas or whatever can allow that intolerance to gain traction such that intolerance becomes a dominant mode of thinking, via tolerating people. Is that not the paradox?

h0l0cube commented on How each pillar of the First Amendment is under attack krebsonsecurity.com/2025/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

cutemonster · 5 months ago

Makes sense to me. I've been thinking: The US was doomed from the start? Because of the laws that makes it a two party country? It was just a matter of time, and for mass manipulation tools to appear?

Are there any more doomed two party countries waiting to go authoritarian / fascist?

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

Maybe. I'm not sure if FPTP necessarily leads to authoritarianism, but there's a whole bunch of countries that sill use the system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Cou...

I think, though, that the US won't go full top-down authoritarian, because a large enough portion of the population is armed. Should some kind of coup ever be attempted, it could well spark a civil war – which is still doom, but not a subjugating kind of doom.

h0l0cube commented on Win98-quickinstall: A framework and installer to quickly install Windows 98 github.com/oerg866/win98-... · Posted by u/userbinator

iforgotpassword · 5 months ago

> with a custom data packing method that is optimized for streaming directly from CD to the hard disk without any seeking

This is nice. I've always wondered why they don't do this with the core parts of the os and then only extract additional components and drivers. But maybe back then the core was only a few MB and it wouldn't have helped so much...

I remember the setup taking ages. With 9x I don't think any install ever lasted longer than a year, so I did this a lot. :)

h0l0cube · 5 months ago

This was definitely a thing in the optical disc era of games where seek times were horrendous. In record mode, this is done by just overloading the file read functions, recording a list of file, seek position, and read size instructions, and then using that to build a .dat file. In play mode, the function is overloaded to ignore file opens and seeks, and to just read from the contiguous file. This requires the load to be perfectly deterministic, and preferably without redundancy.