virgil_disgr4ce (u/virgil_disgr4ce)

virgil_disgr4ce commented on Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES relaxing.run/blag/posts/t... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

debo_ · 2 days ago

I never had much trouble landing on the carrier, but refueling in the sky? I think I only managed it a few times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vetEg8J-wcw

virgil_disgr4ce · 2 days ago

This was the part that my brother and I could never, ever, not even once, complete. I still rue it to this day.

virgil_disgr4ce commented on Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt

dmayle · 9 days ago

I used to manage a team working on the news feed at Facebook (main page).

We did extensive experimentation, and later user studies to find out that there are roughly three classes of people:

1) Those that use interface items with text 2) Those that use interface items with icons 3) Those that use interface items with both text and icons.

I forget details on the user research, but the mental model I walked away with this that these items increase "legibility" for people, and by leaving either off, you make that element harder to use.

If you want an interface that is truly usable, you should strive to use both wherever possible, and ideally when not, try to save in ways that reduce the mental load less (e.g. grouping interface by theme, and cutting elements from only some of the elements in that theme, to so that some of the extra "legibility" carries over from other elements in the group)

virgil_disgr4ce · 8 days ago

Hooray, actual user research and data!! This is what I tell all my clients: "We can speculate all day long, but we don't have to. The users will tell us the correct answer in about 5 minutes."

It's amazing that even in a space like this, of ostensibly highly analytical folks, people still get caught up arguing over things that can be settled immediately with just a little evidence.

Loading parent story...

Loading comment...

virgil_disgr4ce commented on Slashdot effect en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sla... · Posted by u/firefax

virgil_disgr4ce · 21 days ago

Kind of funny to find this on the front page of HN. Makes me wonder what percentage of today's HN readers didn't live through the Slashdot era. (I'm aware it's still around.)

virgil_disgr4ce commented on Serflings is a remake of The Settlers 1 simpleguide.net/serflings... · Posted by u/doener

virgil_disgr4ce · 23 days ago

Pretty sure the poster knows their kids better than you do

virgil_disgr4ce commented on Serflings is a remake of The Settlers 1 simpleguide.net/serflings... · Posted by u/doener

growt · 23 days ago

If I included the exact same graphics as the original, but I did paint them all by hand myself, would you think that makes a difference? No it doesn’t. And what you are proposing is just the same with extra steps. They could include graphics that don’t look the same but I guess that defeats the reason for the game.

virgil_disgr4ce · 23 days ago

> They could include graphics that don’t look the same but I guess that defeats the reason for the game.

How does that defeat the reason for the game?

Loading parent story...

Loading comment...

virgil_disgr4ce commented on We Induced Smells With Ultrasound writetobrain.com/olfactor... · Posted by u/exr0n

virgil_disgr4ce · 25 days ago

OK, I want to meet these guys. This writeup has several breathtaking (if you will) passages. Like:

> "We found different scents by steering the beam over ~14 mm (20 degrees at 4 cm radius). The distance between freshness and burning was ~3.5 mm."

> "The olfactory system potentially allows writing up to 400, if not 800 due to two nostrils, dimensions into the brain. That is comparable to the dimensionality of latent spaces of LLMs, which implies you could reasonably encode the meaning of a paragraph into a 400-dimensional vector. If you had a device which allows for this kind of writing, you could learn to associate the input patterns with their corresponding meanings. After that, you could directly smell the latent space."

This just makes me grin with total delight. Completely freaking fascinating.

virgil_disgr4ce commented on We Induced Smells With Ultrasound writetobrain.com/olfactor... · Posted by u/exr0n

AmbroseBierce · 25 days ago

The adult videos industry must be already closely looking at this, and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't finance related research soon in the future, it will be VHS vs betamax all over again.

virgil_disgr4ce · 25 days ago

...

......

...OH you probably mean for the purposes of stimulating things OTHER THAN SMELLS

virgil_disgr4ce commented on 'Calvin and Hobbes' at 40 npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/mooreds

complianceowl · a month ago

You know, your comment reminds me of something my wife and I were talking about. We have been starting to let our child have a little more screen time and choose what he wants to watch (within the parameters we set).

Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.

Then we wonder why kids adopt those attitudes. It's simply because mimic what they see. And worse yet, when they see it in movie/show form, they think those attitudes are cool and relatable.

virgil_disgr4ce · a month ago

> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.

Although there are definitely a ton of kids shows that I find 100% garbage and would never let my kids watch under any circumstances, none of the 'name-brand' kids movies I've seen in the past 10 years struck me as unacceptably negative in the way you describe.

On the contrary, I get the impression that at least some of these movies are attempting to depict feelings and situations that some kids are feeling in a way that helps them understand 1) they're not alone and 2) their feelings or situations aren't wrong or abnormal.

Like, I took my kids to see Elio when it came out. BAM, right off the bat, dead parents. Anger. Frustration. Fear. Power struggles with parental figures.

This is all intentional—to the point that it's formulaic. A 2021 study found that slightly over 61% of the 155 animated kids features of the last ~80 years had no mention of the child protagonist's biological parents. There are a lot of reasons for this. The simplest are that it's way easier to come up with challenges and conflict for the protag(s) when their parents aren't around.

A more charitable reason is that there are all too many kids who, well, do have absent or fucked up parents. But it doesn't have to be that specific case either—any kid eventually has feelings of anger, fear and frustration, and seeing depictions of this in stories is important (for everyone, of any age, at any time).

I overall doubt that watching those stories causes kids to act angry and frustrated even when they're not angry and frustrated. I'm well aware of how profoundly mimetic human children are (and why that's important), but it doesn't happen with everything 100% of the time.

But this is also age-dependent in various ways. An 8-year-old can absorb a movie depiction of a fight between child and parent in a way that a 3-year-old can't. Are some toddlers going to act out because they watched that? Maybe? Probably?

Anyway, it's tricky to have these discussions because every child is different, even though there are broad anthropological patterns to humanity. But I've been more impressed than annoyed with lots of animated kids movies that I expected to loathe.