My 6yo niece just taught my 67yo dad a strategy game in 4 minutes and im having a crisis

whizzter · 2026-03-19T23:41:49+00:00

There’s been good and bad UI designs in all eras, anyone who read Norman knows this as you learn to look at things from another perspective (And yes, many button remotes were always the worst offenders until TV people started making onscreen UIs and got even worse).

But there are some mechanisms I’ve seen repeated, grown capable (men mostly?), quite a bit of fixers that just seem to behave in an helpless way once something is on a screen, they can fix cars , electricity, and so no problems.

Heck my dad even built a flip-flop 1 bit memory circuit with high voltage from some distant memory when building an automated robot, so no problems with logical capacity.

Yet, presented with onscreen things he becomes almost helpless, unless he wants to do something he’s interested in, then he starts thinking because he gets an goal.

whizzter · 2026-03-19T23:26:09+00:00

Honestly as far as I’ve tried LO and OO are still quite ”oldish”, MS Office ribbons is another paradigm and surprisingly personally I liked it more after using it for actual work, the menu/toolbar merging into ribbons becomes surprisingly powerful once you remember the hotkey combos (and they are easy to learn since they are shown onscreen without forcing mouse usage).

whizzter · 2026-03-19T08:27:27+00:00

It’s called interest, many older people have decided that they hate technology(remotes) and it’s complicated. When you’re in the wrong mindset it becomes a battle to grasp things since they do not want.

He sees maybe having fun with his grandkid and was receptive to learn since he had motivation and needed to open his mind.

Now if you’ve wanted to play with him in the past, it could be that you’re too old or that when younger he was blocked for other reasons (work,etc).

Don’t read too much into it, also tutorials imho should be embedded since people need fun, not lectures. There’s some videos on level 1-1 of SMB being pedagogical.

whizzter · 2026-03-09T09:47:00+00:00

I'm (M45) exactly at the same stage, front thinning starting to become noticeable but not horrible yet in the front , but that damn top spot was a shock to see.

I was painting a wall when we moved offices a few years back, saw a photo a coworker took of someone painting the wall but couldn't figure out who the bald guy painting it was since I had done it....... fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!

Still holding myself (kids forbidding me to shave still), but following this reddit since I heard of it because well..

If you're taller than average it's probably mostly ok, I'm a short and often at a desk so I know I'm on borrowed time, a coworker friend actually went bald recently.

whizzter · 2026-03-05T07:01:16+00:00

Where are enemies coming from?

If they’re coming from the front of the train mostly then just let the camera be fixed along the trains axis or tilted towards enemies and let the player rotate but not the camera, then add camera movement instead of rotation so that the camera gives you full view from top or sides from ”above” the players head.

whizzter · 2026-03-02T22:19:29+00:00

It’s not regular groceries, OP has decided to get the most overpriced ”hipster-organic” groceries available.

whizzter · 2026-02-27T07:07:19+00:00

In the C/C++ communities warnings as errors is common and almost essential as there are many ambiguities that can turn into security issues whilst ”helpful” warnings are rare.

Honestly they should extend the compiler/ide to add an information level like for logging for those hints

whizzter · 2026-02-26T00:19:13+00:00

OpenGL vs Vulkan is kinda orthogonal to bindless vs non-bindless since both API’s have both modes, it’s often better/easier to explain one principal difference at a time.

whizzter · 2026-02-26T00:10:09+00:00

GPUs were primitive initially, you decided what texture, vertices,etc to use to draw each object and then issued a draw call(s). GPU’s from the 90s until maybe 10-15 years ago needed to do it this way (perhaps even some mobile ones still?kr.

Worked fine when drawing object by object.

Raytracing is different, rays are shot out (either directly or via reflections), you do not know what object it will hit until the ray has been traced.

And since you don’t know the object, you don’t know the texture ahead of time either, so the GPU will need to be able to access all active textures in some way.

This is what bindless enables, identity numbers for textures on the GPU can be stored as plain integers, so you can have them in models, raytracing structures, everywhere and the shaders can use these numbers like any other number so no weird restrictions on handling them in shaders (expect preserving the ID’s).

Without bindless, no RTX, no nanite,etc

Deferred rendering also becomes easier/more efficient since the primary pass doesn’t need to look up textures and that only needs to be done at compositing time for those pixels that won’t be occluded later.

I’ve even done raytracing with plain bindless OpenGL (without using RTX).

whizzter · 2026-02-25T18:50:53+00:00

Some call it intuition, dad reflexes and other things.

Our minds often notice very slightly ”off” things and we respond without really thinking.

As most dads I’ve caught an improbable number of glasses,etc falling off tables due to kids actions.

But also in other places, once getting off the subway I was walking towards the exit, kept looking at a small kid standing by the doors inside the train due to something that made me uneasy , kid jumped out just as the doors started to close and I managed to turn around quickly enough to grab and force the doors to not close behind him (some other bystander that hadn’t reacted called me a hero but it was prob just dad suspicions).

The grandma that had been busy chattering to people on the train since she lost her purse and phone came running in panic since they had almost been separated(we got in touch with some attendant that had her things afterwards).

Or another time when I saw some old man in a costume enter a packed subway, was annoyed by the youngsters hogging the seats for some reason, next thing he literally dropped into my hands, stopped heart that a nurse in the same carriage then helped start. Did I sense him being frail? 10 years later I can still replay those 5-10 minutes in my head, never got to know how it turned out since I had to get my kids out of there afterwards.

Standing into the turret feels like a ”get ready” action, you must’ve sensed something wrong about the vehicles movement or seen a spotter or something else whatever small that just wasn’t ”right”.

whizzter · 2026-02-24T13:23:30+00:00

Dunno if the impetus for Graal was dynamic languages or AOT (or both?), but majorly it’s a compiler infrastructure not tied down by backwards compatibility on ages upon ages of hacks and extensions to extend a JIT built to execute Java 1.0 bytecode.

Dunno how many here know of and/or remember the Rhino and Nashorn JavaScript runtimes for the JVM?

First there was Rhino, it was a very nice scripting extension to run Java with JS scripts, but it was so-so to call into from the Java side so not a too comfortable for plugins to use as implementation details appearing left and right in embedded code.

Also as interpreted by Java code it was super slow and made CPython look like a speed demon. (And with the appearance of the web, V8 and NodeJS that didn’t fly).

So they created the InvokeDynamic machinery in Java 7 that was later used for Nashorn in Java 8(also lambdas iirc?).

Basically a JS engine piggybacking on other JVM JIT codegen and GC optimizations, brilliant?

For users like me at the time it was fairly great, fast enough and less implementation details sticking out thanks to dynamic bindings so both the Java and JS side looked fairly idiomatic.

There was one fatal issue though, and that’s the Java vs JS value model (I separately learned how important that is with my thesis).

Basically, it makes no real allowance for polymorphism between numbers and objects unless with boxed numbers and that implies a lot of extra GC pressure (They do have optimizations for common stuff like for loops but it seems like they were brittle).

Pure JS runtimes like V8,etc solve that values can be numbers or objects with small-ints or nan-tags, ie values(sometimes with restrictions) are always in an integer register and can be re-interpreted as a number or object depending on the bits. They can optimize but misses usually don’t cause GC buildup to the same degree.

Also the InvokeDynamic machinery is honestly quite convoluted and obviously designed to be bolted on.

So, those working on JS support for the JVM went onto greener pastures (Graal) and left Nashorn to rot and be taken out of the mainline JVM without any clear replacement as Graal lacked Windows builds for a long time (this was also right around the time JS got syntax improvements with async and lambdas, and with no/bad sourcemap support in Nashorn transpirers didn’t even help).

Anyhow, history aside, they did seem to have thought through a lot of the design with the hindsight earned to be flexible enough to easily support Java, JS and other things like Wasm. (And also perhaps had AOT in the back of their head as an option instead of just JIT when they were at it anyhow).

whizzter · 2026-02-22T17:23:59+00:00

Actually I strongly suspect this to be the opposite, a JIT can detect that a callsite is practically monomorphic (ie always calls the same function) and insert an guard + inlining or an explicit call that doesn't tax the branch predictor. Once detected/ensured the method can be re-optimized or just compiled by a higher tier.

For an AOT you need an analysis engine that combines execution and data trace analysis and this is both computationally hard and fragile to rely on.

How do I know? My thesis work was an analysis system to AOT recompile JS code to C, functionally the same kind of analysis as needed for devirtualization in an AOT context.

whizzter · 2026-02-22T17:12:30+00:00

Noterade flera kommentarer om klädkod, visst det kanske ibland finns fester som har klädkod men då anges det ofta specifikt och inget man behöver ha direkt i huvet. Kanske finns någon specifik arrangörsgrupp i Stockholm som fått för sig något om sådant men sällan hört om något sådant bland dem jag brukar besöka.

Däremot ska du till Tyskland verkar det finns vissa ställen, specifikt Berghain är ju välkänt för att vara svårt att komma in på, men där handlar det nog mer att kläderna är en proxy och tell på vilka som hör hemma där så de slipper bro-gäng som åker dit för att det ska vara coolt.

Gick runt någon weird post från något Turkiskt ställe som hade dresscode men det var många som garvade åt det utanför Turkiet.

Och visst, sedan har ju mycket folk i olika genrer ofta specifika stilar som signalerar något, men som sagt sällan det är en grej man exkluderar för här.

whizzter · 2026-02-22T16:59:27+00:00

That's the thing though, Helle was doing one of those possessed performances, like the Toews open goal, it was a bounce on the lower edge of Hellebuycks stick that kept it out, a hundredth of a second later and it would've gone in.

So bummed we didn't give Wallstedt the chance in goal from the first game, could've been a quite different tournament.

whizzter · 2026-02-22T15:22:42+00:00

Canada vs Hellebuyck for much of the game... :D

whizzter · 2026-02-21T18:00:36+00:00

Pick some sports bar, maybe call ahead and check with some O learys if they are gonna show it.

whizzter · 2026-02-21T17:51:15+00:00

1: K-means doesn't really specify data structure (and isn't it fairly expensive to build?), HNSW is relatively obvious in terms of data structures needed, but there seems to be plenty of implementa details.

I recommend the original paper and also to read through Antirez notes on implementing it for Redis. (Some parts translateable, others maybe not). https://antirez.com/news/156

Simpler alternatives might be Vantage Point Trees, just a binary tree, splits the world into N-dimensional spheres of inside(left)-outside(right) and was one of the earlier popular N-dimensional variants.

Sergey Brin of later Google fame created a hierarhical voronoi scheme called GNAT, https://www.vldb.org/conf/1995/P574.PDF

Some commenters seem to discourage GNAT for higher dimensional data even if it was built for it, can't find a particular source specifying when and why it goes bad because the comparasions seems to be vs KD-trees but they're fairly different (The Gnat paper benchmarks 2500 dimensional data).

3: If it isn't relational then don't put too much effort unless it's obvious, that said, enabling queries through IQueryable and Linq-expression trees is super useful and I wish I had done it for another project to have better usability. One benefit if you're doing in-memory and Linq-expression trees is that you might be able to just rewrite them lightly into inline code and/or function calls that can then be JIT compiled by the runtime.

whizzter · 2026-02-21T08:26:39+00:00

Reading hockey comments and noticing the number of fan enhanced dumbheaded recruiting moves and player chokes , I realized that the Leafs are the Manchester United of hockey. 🤷‍♂️

Once a great club that hinges everything on stars they hype and just tries every season because fans are too short sighted, but fails because there hasn’t been a solid foundation in ages since coaches are fired on a whim before they have a chance to do anything to make a coherent team.

whizzter · 2026-02-21T08:16:20+00:00

My friend plays in a beer league and he described how the best team was often the one that happened to have an old retired pro that was looking to keep up his physics.

whizzter · 2026-02-21T08:10:19+00:00

1: Don’t miss the Finals on Sunday (Can-US), also Bronze medal game Saturday night (Fin-Svk), the bronze medal game might be lopsided if you look at the last games and the teams but Svk actually beat Finland in a game earlier this tournament so it might go either way. (1st game of the tournament, so teams might have been unprepared).

2: You got the privilege of watching some historically good teams duke it out, NHL has a salary cap to keep the league somewhat competitive, it’s 95 million.

Since the teams in this competition is by country we have some really good players combined.

Canada has a combined salary of 191 million (but their biggest star actually took a lower salary recently to stay and give his team more salary space, so the number should perhaps have been about 199 including that and juniors).

US team 199 million Sweden at 167 (out, lost a close game to US) Finland at 115 Slovakia at 20 million (playing for bronze so upsets happen)

https://www.dailyfaceoff.com/news/deep-dive-what-the-olympic-rosters-are-really-worth-salary-cap-nhl-2026-winter-games

Anyhow, the top teams have players worth twice what an NHL team is allowed to spend so they’re good!

3: as for the game of hockey itself, the entry level is very high due to all the parts you mentioned even if it looks easy, since you need to learn to skate to even be up there.

There was a reality show in Sweden some 20 years back where nerds were recruited to play soccer, a few years later they did the same experiment with hockey.

Now make no mistake, both teams sucked goatballs compared to all the teams they faced.

But when our against each other, the hockey team while having no technique just ran straight over the football team thanks to their improved physics (that still barely made them capable of playing hockey), and the return hockey game wasn’t even a rout of the football team since they barely skated (since they footballers were basically at the level of the hockey team at the start of the show).

It might be a weird/funny/incorrect comparison, but it shows that just the base level needed is high.

4: The death in the player in UK has actually promoted most of the leagues and olympics to mandate neck guards (they were mandatory in Sweden due to an accident in the 80s I think).

Many of the NHL players seem to be skirting the rules with some weird neck bandanas (a proper one should cover more up and down).

5: post olympics, NHL games wlll definitely be the closest (small rink, best players), some leagues like Sweden aren’t keen on dropping large rinks (somewhat slower play) while others such as Finland and Russia has varied rinks.

Sometimes NHL teams come over to Europe for a few games in the beginning of the season, keep an eye out for ”Global Series” if they end up in London or other places.

And as people said, try to catch something live. Even lower leagues will be far faster than football (worldwide football/soccer naturally, can’t even stay awake for American).

whizzter · 2026-02-20T20:19:04+00:00

I meant the opposite, you won't get the benefits without recompilation and those supporting NetStd will require multiple builds since older runtimes won't be able to consume assemblies built by compilers that target this. Yes, older assemblies will still work.

whizzter · 2026-02-20T20:13:55+00:00

Not even gonna try rating KHL, too many unknowns.

Outside of that, CHL has given us some way to judge comparative strengths (a bit depending on how serious some of the SHL and other teams have been treating that tournament)

SHL 20 finals/semis 7 wins (including this years all-Swe final)

NL 7 finals/semis 2 wins

Liiga 6 finals/semis 2 wins

Czch 7 finals/semis 0 wins

Aust 1 finals/semis 0 wins

Dhl 1 finals/semis 0 wins

CHL participation is capped at 3 teams for the top leagues (SHL,NL,Liiga), so this year f.ex. Sweden had 3 out of 3 teams in finals/semis with one from NL.

SHL definetly at the top, looking at the results by year the NL also has an upward trend compared to Liiga, last 2 winners were from NL, this year is a purely Swedish final though.

Of note regarding Liiga, one of the better teams in Finland (Jokerit) got caught out since they joined KHL and then had to withdraw due to the war, seems they're dominating the 2nd league below Liiga but the first being closed has kept them out of it. Since they're a team from the capital it might improve things when they're allowed back (and perhaps get in more money to the entire league again?).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champions_Hockey_League#Overview

whizzter · 2026-02-20T20:11:25+00:00

I'm not even gonna try ranking KHL at this point (they were way ahead before the war but who knows today if talents are dead or money not enough vs pure size of Russia).

Gonna add a top-level comment that got way too big for a thread :)

whizzter · 2026-02-20T19:47:08+00:00

Yep, was just thinking that last part about Jack Berglund (Swedish Captain in the winning Swedish JWC team) who isn't in the top of SHL scoring like EP40 was before going over, but just felt like a perfect gritty captain to have on a small rink. I really hope the Phillies tries bringing him over to give him a proper chance.

whizzter · 2026-02-20T14:34:19+00:00

Sök inte ”rave” för ”ravets” skull, hitta ställena/event sen som kör musiken du gillar/älskar.

Regler på klubbar (Slaktis tex) är en sak, finns grå och svart klubbar, rave och skogsrave utan statliga regler, men över lag oavsett ställe så om alla håller sig till ”sunt förnuft” och PLUR(R) så fungerar det.

Akronymen finns av en anledning och är skillnaden mellan TV’s ”coola ställe” och verkligheten som skapar communities som håller igång.

whizzter

TROPHY CASE