Nice job. I like the Atari 2600 retro aesthetic. As someone who has practically made his entire arm go numb spamming the fire button in games like Galaga and Space Invaders, I also appreciate the auto-fire.
I might suggest reducing the "vertical jitter" in the enemies. At first I thought it was a glitch but I think it's intentional.
Thanks for this. As engineers, I think it’s natural for us to look at things like executive orders and pardons, tools that seemingly have no real restrictions or caps, and immediately see them as open to exploitation by bad actors.
The pardon system in particular needs a serious overhaul. For every case where a pardon is used to correct an "unjust ruling", it swings just as easily in the opposite direction. Frankly I have more faith in a decision that goes through the proper judicial process than in one made unilaterally by a single person with zero oversight. There's a reason it's been historically called the "royal pardon".
We need a combination of:
- hard caps on the maximum number of pardons a president can issue per term
- congressional review before those pardons take effect
Nice job. It kind of reminds me a bit of Scrabble stems, where there are certain high‑probability ones to bingo using additional letters, e.g. RETAIN you can add an S → RETINAS, add a D → TRAINED, etc.
Feedback - the landing page demo file which links to https://lingle.ai/demo.mp4 doesn't seem to play, instead it results in a 307 redirect to the sign-in page.
Also I've personally never tried it, but there was a fairly popular video based language chat tutor program called Call Annie which seems similar (talk with a virtual tutor who manages plan/vocab/etc). I don't think its active anymore but it might be a good reference point for you in terms of product fit.
Thanks for pointing out the issue with the video, should be fixed now. Interesting product you sent, although personally I'm not a huge fan of these uncanny valley-esque AI avatar tutors. Might just be me though.
Yeah, I think it came out a couple of years ago, which in the world of generative tech is basically the Stone Age. So it definitely has that sort of weird almost early Pixar/Wallace and Gromit look.
Oh god, I just went to the Call Annie landing page and first thing I see is the freaky AI slop avatar...her face is the last thing I'd want to stare at while I stumble through my Japanese study session every day. I'd rather talk to the Duolingo owl I think. The lingle approach of just having my face on the screen is actually kinda clever. Maybe it could recognize by my expression when I'm confused and help me out lol. I can also see how I actually look during the conversation which imo is a big part of communicating.
Of course everything looks bad with 20/20 hindsight. it's better than 90% of AI slop products out there right now.
This was back when agents were referred to as NLP generative chatbots lol, and I can guarantee you at a minimum the devs knew how to properly handle something as simple as say connection pooling, whereas most slop products these days are just an absolute shitshow behind the scenes.
the classic defense of every failed product... "trust me, the plumbing was solid." users don't care. they saw a creepy AI face and closed the tab. you're essentially arguing that the titanic had excellent rivets.
I think you mean kool-aid, which refers to the well known American fruit-flavored drink mix brand. "Cool aid" on the other hand is completely nonsensical.
1. Make sure you’re using nearest-neighbor for scaling otherwise you end up with blurry aliased fringing on assets that are supposed to represent pixel art.
2. The character is moving left to right - why are the oxen on the wrong side? Are they pushing the cart? :)
Same thing occurs when you die of "tech debt dysentery". The oxen is on the left side, but the wheels are rotating clockwise.
3. On a widescreen monitor, make sure to wrap the text section; otherwise you end up with lines that are far too long.
Thanks for trying it, and keen eye! Fixing (with Claude code) but also taking time to try to learn a bit about the canvas drawing/pixel art, which I'm not super familiar with.
Sure! If you’re just drawing things directly polygons, lines, and other primitive shapes, then you can usually get away with just turning off anti-aliasing, and that will fix most visual artifacts and get you closer to that classic Apple II Oregon Trail look.
However, if you’re using pre-rendered sprite sheets, you’ll probably need to enforce integer scaling to avoid fringing or blurring.
Thanks perilunar - I see from your profile you're a clock enthusiast as well! I'm starting to think we should start an HN web ring for clocks.
A bit of feedback for your sun clock: since it asks for my location, by the time I clicked “Allow,” it had already timed out while trying to get the location. You may want to have it continuously check for permission changes and then initialize the sunrise and sunset features once access is granted. Cheers!
Thanks for this! I've been using it for less than a minute, and it has already exceeded my expectations:
Installed, opened the raw view in the GitHub link to the dark mode style linked to above to copy it into the clipboard, and was pleasently surprised that it opened in the extension with syntax highlighting and a button to install.
Clicked "Install", back back to HN, reload, dark mode.
Cheers! I feel like the vast majority of extensions could be rewritten as either TamperMonkey or Stylus scripts.
I’m always leery of installing new extensions (nothing against Orange Juice) because of all the high-profile cases where they get bought out by unscrupulous companies and basically turn into malware payload delivery systems.
It’s nice to be able to reduce the attack surface down to just these two extensions, which have been around for a long time.
I agree, though I use Violentmonkey instead of Tampermonkey because open source, and uBlock Origin because rewriting it as a *monkey script is somewhere between "Implement a MIDI Machine Control interface to my turntable" and "Rewrite FreeBSD in Rust" on my project list.
Haha yeah - same I only run three extensions (uBlock Origin, Stylus, and Tampermonkey) but I'll be swapping over to violentmonkey [1]. Thanks for the recommendation - didn't realize there was a FOSS equivalent.
I might suggest reducing the "vertical jitter" in the enemies. At first I thought it was a glitch but I think it's intentional.
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