Readit News logoReadit News
theqwxas commented on A new PNG spec   programmax.net/articles/p... · Posted by u/bluedel
albert_e · 9 months ago
So animated GIFs can be replaced by Animated PNGs with alpha blending with transparent backgrounds and lossless compression! Some nostalgia from 2000s websites can be revived and relived :)

Curious if Animated SVGs are also a thing. I remember seeing some Javascript based SVG animations (it was a animated chatbot avatar) - but not sure if there is any standard framework.

theqwxas · 9 months ago
Some years ago I've used the Lottie (Bodymovin?) library. It worked great and had a nice integration: you compose your animation in Adobe After Effects, export it to an svg plus some json, and the lottie JS script would handle the animation for you. Anything else with (vector, web) animations I've tried is missing the tools or the DX for me to adopt. Curious to hear if there are more things like this.

I'm not sure about the tools and DX around animated PNGs. Is that a thing?

theqwxas commented on GUIs are built at least 2.5 times   patricia.no/2025/05/30/wh... · Posted by u/mpweiher
DonHopkins · 9 months ago
PostScript is great for user interfaces!

I've written lots and lots of user interfaces in PostScript. Just not Display PostScript. NeWS was a lot better for making interactive user interfaces than Display PostScript, and it came out a lot earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool (entirely written in PostScript):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

PizzaTool PostScript Source code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

I also worked on HyperLook, which was like HyperCard for NeWS with colorful PostScript instead of black and white pixels, plus networking:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...

Discussion with Alan Kay about HyperLook and NeWS:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/alan-kay-on-should-web-browse...

Then I used HyperLook to implemented the user interface for SimCity, programming the entire interactive user interface in NeWS PostScript -- Display PostScript couldn't do anything like that:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transcr...

Several years before that, I worked on the NeWS version of Gosling Emacs at UniPress, with multiple tabbed windows and pie menus. (Gosling also wrote NeWS, and much later Java.):

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

The source code for UniPress Emacs 2.20 recently surfaced! (We called the NeWS version of Emacs "NeMACS" of course.):

https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS

Here's the PostScript code of the NeWS Emacs display driver:

https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.term/Trm...

And lots of other fun interactive PostScript user interface code we shipped with NeMACS:

https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/tree/main/ps

Pie menus:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/pie.ps

Tabbed windows:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/tab.ps

I used UniPress Emacs to develop an authoring tool for the NeWS version of HyperTIES, an early hypermedia browser, which we developed at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

I also worked on the Gnu Emacs 18 NeWS driver for The NeWS Toolkit:

https://donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.ps

A visual PostScript programming and debugging environment: The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

PSIBER source code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/litecyber/

NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS more coherently:

1) Used PostScript CODE instead of JavaScript for PROGRAMMING.

2) Used PostScript GRAPHICS instead of DHTML and CSS for RENDERING.

3) Used PostScript DATA instead of XML and JSON for DATA REPRESENTATION.

More on that:

SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...

Here's a comparison of X-Windows and NeWS:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

theqwxas · 9 months ago
Is there any place where one could look up screenshots of this? I'd want to see what is capable with this technology
theqwxas commented on Belarusian democratic forces plan alternative passports against current regime   news.zerkalo.io/economics... · Posted by u/theqwxas
theqwxas · a year ago
Additional official site with option in English: https://www.belarus-passport.com/
Posted by u/theqwxas a year ago
Belarusian democratic forces plan alternative passports against current regimenews.zerkalo.io/economics...
theqwxas commented on Show HN: Handwritten Christmas Card for Hacker News   handwritten-card.vercel.a... · Posted by u/muc-martin
carrotcarrot · a year ago
It's cute, but my first thought was "is this AI generated handwriting?".

I would still rather recieve a physical hand written card in the mail.

Some these aren't broken and don't need to be fixed. Waiting for the mailman is a feature not a bug.

theqwxas · a year ago
If you visit the site without the subdirectory [0], you can see a message upload interface. The handwriting is supplied by the user (may or may not be AI-generated); the drawing movements are generated with some (hopefully non-AI) algorithm.

[0] https://handwritten-card.vercel.app/

theqwxas commented on Show HN: Book and change flights with one email   bonbook.co/showhn... · Posted by u/themagyar
theqwxas · a year ago
I am not sure about the US market, but Skyscanner [1] works great in Europe, I wonder how this is different. Besides from being structured as an email, it offers quite similar functionality of finding optimal flights (in some sense of optimal). It may just be me, but I am definitely misunderstanding the inbox metaphor. Why is it an inbox? Why is there emphasis on _one email_? I don't book flights through email -- I go on an airline's website to book.

For now it seems to be always responding with "Hi there, I couldn't find any flights for your request. Please try again.", I could not test it out. Unless this is a demo version, and is working as expected.

[1] https://www.skyscanner.net/

Posted by u/theqwxas a year ago
Terra – A Companion for Mindful Wanderinggithub.com/modem-works/te...
theqwxas commented on How to avoid losing items? Holding pens   blog.alexwendland.com/202... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
EGreg · 2 years ago
How would holding a pen prevent you from losing things?
theqwxas · 2 years ago
In this article, the meaning of _pen_ as in an enclosure, a cage, a tray, a box, a container [0]. A holding pen in this case means a holding tray, a holding box, i.e., a container for holding things. A pen (cage, tray) for holding things.

[0] https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/pen

theqwxas commented on RLHF is just barely RL   twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/tosh
IanCal · 2 years ago
Even there how you score it is hard.

"Is it the same for this s y of inputs?" May be fine for a subset of things, but then that's a binary thing. If it's slightly wrong do you score by number of outputs that match? A purely binary thing gives little useful help for nudging a model in the right direction. How do you compare two that both work, which is more "idiomatic"?

theqwxas · 2 years ago
I agree that it's a very difficult problem. I'd like to mention AlphaDev [0], an RL algorithm that builds other algorithms, there they combined the measure of correctness and a measure of algorithm speed (latency) to get the reward. But the algorithms they built were super small (e.g., sorting just three numbers), therefore they could measure correctness using all input combinations. It is still unclear how to scale this to larger problems.

[0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphadev-discovers-fas...

theqwxas commented on Show HN: Aldi Price Map   aldipricemap.com/navel_or... · Posted by u/ayocado
theqwxas · 2 years ago
I find these types of maps fascinating. For people wondering what would this map look like if we were not limited to the USA and Aldi: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/gmaps.jsp?indexToShow=...

There are a few larger categories (groceries/rent/etc.) rather than individual items.

t

u/theqwxas

KarmaCake day15October 30, 2022View Original