TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
The history of Visual Basic (VB) is a rollercoaster of successes and failures, ultimately leading to a rather bad reputation due to subpar coding in the early days. However, VB6 emerged as a polished and powerful programming language, still widely used today, despite being labeled as “dead” for nearly two decades. XYplorer, a highly acclaimed […]
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Cuttle, a combat card game dating back to the 1970s, involves two players aiming to reach 21 points first. Cards can be used for their point value or to attack the opponent’s layout by destroying or capturing cards. The game includes point cards, one-off effect cards, and permanent effect cards. Unique card interactions like scuttling […]
After attending ICRA 2024, I’m sharing my insights on the differences between robotics and AI research. Contrary to common belief, AI advancements, like ChatGPT, don’t directly translate to robotics due to the complexity of sensorimotor tasks. Moravec’s Paradox highlights that skills below conscious awareness, like perception, are harder for AI than reasoning. Hardware limitations in […]
The author dives into a detailed explanation of Quake’s visibility system, focusing on base visibility and portal culling to reduce overdraw in 3D games. The article delves into the concept of portals and potentially visible sets (PVS), discussing how Quake’s map tooling connects leaves with portals. The author also provides insight into the Quake map […]
The author stumbled upon a video of a 9-year-old girl on a German TV show who quickly identifies differences between two similar images, which baffled the author. By crossing their eyes and overlapping the images, a third image is created where the differences stand out. The author felt like they gained a special superpower and […]
Boulette is a terminal confirmation prompt that protects you from accidentally shutting down remote hosts by raising a warning prompt on dangerous commands. Unique challenge types like asking users to enter the hostname or a random sequence to resume command execution add an extra layer of security. Boulette can be used over SSH only, ensuring […]
NVIDIA-Ingest is a powerful microservice focused on extracting data and metadata from various document types. It supports PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, and images, allowing users to extract text, tables, charts, and images for downstream generative applications. Surprisingly, it offers multiple extraction methods for each document type to balance throughput and accuracy, such as pdfium, Unstructured.io, and […]
The author managed to extract level data and graphics from the c64 version of Bubble Bobble, studying disassembled binary code in detail. They crafted a tool in typescript to reveal all 100 levels, highlighting the complexity behind platform graphics and monster arrays while unveiling shortcuts taken by developers. The intriguing revelation about wind currents followed […]
This web content provides a port of ‘lc’ from MWC Coherent UNIX, with the original source tarball available for download. The original source file is located in the COHERENT/romana/relic/d/bin/lc.c archive. The manual page for ‘lc’ is included, and the port includes support for symlinks with the addition of the -l command-line option. The port is […]
Anna’s Archive boasts the largest fully open “list of books” in history, condensed into a single 1000×800 pixel image, with each pixel representing 2,500 ISBNs. The project aims to back up all human knowledge, highlighting the importance of preserving books. The unique approach involves mapping ISBNs since the 1970s, leveraging various metadata sources. A $10,000 […]