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Wooooow, I LOVED this site when it first came out and I still reference it when I talk about the early web and how it enabled me to learn things I never would have otherwise. I can still picture the animation of the wankel rotary engine from this site whenever I think about it.

This and howstuffworks.com made me so hopeful for the future of the web when I was young


This is so lovely! If the original author is here in the comments, some feature requests that would absolutely make my day, presumably from easiest to hardest :)

I love this so much, thank you for sharing!

* Slow down the motion to about .5 of what it is currently, with easing/acceleration on the speed to emulate the camera dolly and jib effects used in the film

* Add a random motion setting that allows me to run it full screen just sliding through the aisles, banking around turns, flying up and then back down the aisles.

* optionally lock the framerate to 24fps to give it a film feel

* optional shaders on the main viewport to emulate lens distortion, film grain, etc

* raytracing with reflectivity on the glass, refraction, diffusion, etc.


I think this is a good example of something you can vibe-code today. (though maybe not as good)

I went to gemini, picked "cavnas". used this prompt

> There's a famous CG scene in the movie Hackers where they "Hack the Gibson". It shows a bunch of translucnt cubes with glowing edges. The textures on the cubes are live computer text. The camera slowly flyies between the cubes tilting gracfully and it searches for the main one.

> Reproduce this scene in Javascript. Be sure to include each of those features

> 1. live computer text which you can simulate by drawing to a canvas offscreen and uploading to a texture, adding more output as it goes. You can even use "function.toString()" of the code you write as input

> 2. a post processing step so we get a glow

> You can probably use three.js for this

Here's the result.

https://codepen.io/greggman/pen/XJKPBZW

No, it's not as good as the site linked above and it's unlikely it would be. On other hand, it got this far on the first try. Maybe a few more iterations and it could get the stuff you want.


For anyone taking this comment seriously, please research and understand the potential long term impacts of GBL before going near it. It's neurotoxic and can cause brainfog and lowered cognitive ability. It's also lethal in the wrong dose, with a tiny margin for error.

It's by no means a safe alcohol replacement


Yeah so basically the same thing as alcohol


Your response feels like a gut-level averse reaction, not an actual weighing of the harms against alcohol, which is about the most harmful drug ever for every system in your body, and also has a relatively small margin between lethality and and recreational doses.


> which is about the most harmful drug ever for every system in your body

I am not saying that alcohol is good for you or anything, but that is not even wrong. It’s trivial to find drugs that kill you or nuke your liver if you get a few milligrams.

> also has a relatively small margin between lethality and and recreational doses.

Unless by "recreational dose" you mean a whole bottle of 40% ABV spirits, not really. And even then. IIRC the lethal dose is around 7g/kg, which is more than a pint of pure ethanol for someone weighting 70kg, or twice the amount of alcohol in the bottle. This is not a particularly small margin of error, particularly considering that the hypotheses were conservative.

It is possible to kill oneself with alcohol. It is nowhere near the dose commonly taken for recreative purposes.


Awesome to see real UX experimentation, and this elicited a strong response from me at first "oh I haaaaate that".

On further reflection, this is very interesting and I understand where the drag and drop interaction breaks down on long lists. Some additional UI affordances to communicate what's happening may make it intuitive and clear.

Things I'd want to experiment with if I was implementing this:

* A "wheel" effect where the items in the list grow slightly as they near the chosen item which stays locked in the interface at the center, popping into place at at each 'click'. Somewhat like the Price Is Right wheel flipper

* Making the interaction entirely scroll based once I click. Setting the item in place can be done by any other click or keypress, and cancelled with the escape hotkey. My interaction is pick, scroll, click (without having to aim back at the thing I just placed by scrolling)


I believe this was a statement on cost per token to us as consumers of the service


Training cost-effectiveness doesn't matter for open models since someone else ate the cost. In this case, Chinese taxpayers.


Deepseek is a private corporation funded by a hedge fund (High-Flyer). I doubt much public money was spent by the Chinese state on this. Like with LLMs in the US, the people paying for it so far are mainly investors who are betting on a return in the long to medium term.


Do you actually believe what you just wrote or are you trolling? One version at least has a foot planted in reality. The other one well...


It all reads like hallucinated slop from top to bottom

"I've been tracking software quality metrics for three years" and then doesn't show any of the receipts, and simply lists anecdotal issues. I don't trust a single fact from this article.

My own anecdote: barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005. There's been an industry trend towards caring about the craft and writing decent code.

Most projects, even the messy ones I inherit from other teams today have Git, CI/CD, at least some tests, and a sane hosting infrastructure. They're also mosty built on decent platforms like Rails/Django/Next etc that impose some conventional structure. 20 years ago most of them were "SSH into the box and try not to break anything"


"barely capable developers churning out webapps built on PHP and a poor understanding of Wordpress and jQuery were the norm in 2005"

It was the norm in 1998 also, based on the "dotcom" era code I saw.


PHP was created in the first place because writing slop in Perl was too hard.


I have no way of knowing, but I will say I'm already fatigued with comments claiming something is AI slop. It's only going to get worse.

You're so quick to be dismissive from a claim that they "tracked" something, when that could mean a lot of things. They clearly list some major issues directly after it, but yes fail to provide direct evidence that it's getting worse. I think the idea is that we will agree based on our own observations, which imo is reasonable enough.


go to tax.gov

You'll identify on id.me

People have just gotten used to this sort of thing unfortunately


That’s a different issue, though related.

For password safe users, auth being handled entirely on a different origin is completely fine, so long as the credentials are bound to (only used on, including initial registration) that origin. The hazard is only when login occurs via multiple domains—which in this case would mean if you had <input> elements on both tax.gov and id.me taking the same username and password, which I don’t believe you do. Your password safe won’t care if you started at https://tax.gov, the origin you created the credentials on was https://id.me, and so that’s the origin it will autofill for.


Folks have been predicting that the next big shift in computing will be onto glasses that we wear and away from our phones.

The tech just hasn’t been there yet and most of the devices that do this are heavy clunky and hot

Meta is investing billions to get out ahead of this shift and to own the entertainment and data (and thus advertising) layers that sit on top of the real world through these glasses

The rumor mill is abuzz that Facebook finally making a play for it in the next set of smart glasses after a few years of sticking to VR headsets and audio/camera only glasses


Why do they call the smart glasses when they just send everything to the smart phone? Nothing is done on device.


They're also called smartwatches, when most of them are pretty useless without a phone. Even if they offload everything to the phone, they're still much "smarter" than normal glasses, which just sit there doing nothing but correcting vision.


You know, I never thought of this until I took my phone into a repair shop. I was just like “give me a call, I have my watch.”

Two seconds after I walked out … I was like, “oh, that’s not going to work…” so I just sat around for an hour.


If you have wifi calling enabled on your mobile account and your watch has wifi connection, you can receive calls to it. Or you can get a watch that has mobile data connection.


You still need the original phone to forward the call. If it is out of commission, nothing will happen.


It's a marketing term not a technical term


Facebook is trying so very hard to be Innovative Online Industries.


"I get that reference."


And that's the whole book


No deep insights there, but it was a beautiful romp while it lasted :)


The "old man yelling at the sky" part of me can only hope the side effects of something like this gaining traction might be that physical-world advertisements fade away.


I'd love ad-blokcer in my glasses. Replace every billboard I see with fine art.


They’ve actually had this cool feature at art galleries and museums for quite a while now ;)


Or dad jokes.


Has anyone gotten access to Imagen 4 for image editing, inpaint/outpaint or using reference images yet? That's core to my workflow and their docs just lead to a google form. I've submitted but it feels like it's a bit of a black hole.


I highly recommend the command line AI coding tool, AIder. You fill its context window with a few relevant files, ask questions, and then set it to code mode and it starts making commits. It’s all git, so you can back anything out, see the history, etc.

It’s remarkable, and I agree Claude 3.5 makes playing with local LLMs seem silly in comparison. Claude is useful for generating real work.


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