We generally encourage people to buy a NetMD device as their first player, so they can simply drag-and-drop music onto disks via USB. Probably any working machine, except an Sony N1 or Sony N10.
I'm going to continue learning Rust by working on my TUI IRC client. I'd like to make some, any, contribution to keeping IRC alive. It was such a big part of my formative years!
I don't understand how adding WebRTC/Whip enables the bullet points you listed. Is the idea that we'll transcode locally and because of that, we can set up a cheap host? How does this impact the level of hardware we'll need locally?
I have one of these. It's only 'ok'. There is significant ghosting and it's not very good when the scene is dark, but it's much better than my BOOX tablet. I just got it so I'm still experimenting with different uses.
It functions like a normal monitor. It connected to my Macbook air (M2) and Windows machine without installing anything. It has a USB-C video port, but an HDMI->USB-C converter works too. It has an 1872x1404 (4:3) resolution, which is why I used Miami Vice for the video. It would not connect to my PS5, which I think comes down to the PS5 only supporting 16:9/21:9.
Thanks for all the discussion here. I use cloudflared to proxy a bunch of small sites I serve from home. I will take a look a other solutions mentioned in this thread.
How is the app triggered? There is a graphic that makes it seem like the app can detect impulse buys:
iPhone 16 Pro Max
$1,625
IMPULSE DETECTED
I think this is a good idea I'm just not convinced I would manually interrupt my impulse buys to pull up the app to stop my impulse buys. How does the app introduce friction to the purchase process?
For the time being, the "IMPULSE DETECTED" graphic is more of a conceptual representation than a real-time detection function.
The app currently depends on you manually recording a "impulse moment," which is essentially any time you catch yourself on the verge of making an unnecessary purchase. The idea is to create just enough friction to get you to stop doing things automatically.
Launch the app → input the item → feel the 24-hour timer and let work-hours cost hit you → ideally, choose to skip and "pay yourself" instead.
Having said that, I'm evaluating out potential future integrations because many users have requested automatic impulse detection or more intelligent nudges.
So short answer: currently user-triggered, future versions will make that trigger smarter and more automatic.
Really appreciate you asking. This kind of feedback helps me prioritise what to build next
SciFi did a miniseries, just before or just after they changed their name. It wasn't bad. I think it was about 10 hours.
The problem is that a lot of the payoff is at the end of book 3, and then book four tips the whole thing upside down with some deep religious and philosophical elements that I'm not sure everyone is ready for.
I'm always a little surprised how few people have read Dune relative to Lord of the Rings, but the more I think about Dune the more I get it.
I don't understand all the love for Dune. I read it, it was ok, and that was it. 3 underwhelming film adaptations is more than enough.
Special effects don't make a movie anymore. What matters is plot (and music). For example, "Colossus the Forbin Project" is very good. Some other very good scifi movies:
> I don't understand all the love for Dune. I read it, it was ok, and that was it. 3 underwhelming film adaptations is more than enough.
It's the Count of Monte Cristo meets Star Wars, with great world building, pretty good plot and characters and a lot of interesting philosophy, sociology, strategy and tactics. What's not to love?
The scifi miniseries was decent. The 1984 one was...barely Dune, though I enjoyed it. The current one is the first really good adaptation IMO, I don't think it's overrepresented at all.
You should read the count of monte cristo, it’s in an entirely different league in terms of writing compared to Dune. The philosophy is transparent, the tactics and strategy are basically nonexistent, and the sociology is missing any kind of coherence.
Kinda strange considering its movie that turned him away from making big movies. He hates the final version, was not allowed to the cutting room and the studio basically tried to make very different much more pop shorter vision with material Lynch shot.
I think there are still rumors about him having/making directors cut that could happen. That would surely be very dofferent movie.
I agree so much. The new dune is expertly made but it washed of so much of the trippy stuff from books. Even the aesthetics are playing it on the very safe side.
Then again this is the directors style. It would be probably end up worse if they would bend too much out of their comfort zone.
While Dune can certainly stand on its own as a great work, it's best appreciated as a critical response to the utopic techno-determinism of Asimov's Foundation series. The discourse between these two series contains some of the most interesting ideas ever penned in science fiction. I think you'd need to read at least the first three Foundation books and the first four Dune books to get a handle on it, but this is a good primer: https://www.oreilly.com/tim/herbert/ch05.html
I'm not sure I understand why you find those lines particularly comedic. Campy? Most definitely. They also don't really work out of context, so I sat down and watched the actual scene and well... they're still not a particularly funny line, and I don't think the scene is meant to be funny. Are you suggesting that they're intentionally hamming it up? Honestly, I can't even tell if this point.
Wikipedia seems to support this theory as well:
"Lorenzo Semple Jr. wrote the script. He later recalled:
Dino wanted to make Flash Gordon humorous. At the time, I thought that was a possible way to go, but, in hindsight, I realize it was a terrible mistake. We kept fiddling around with the script, trying to decide whether to be funny or realistic. That was a catastrophic thing to do, with so much money involved... I never thought the character of Flash in the script was particularly good. But there was no pressure to make it any better. Dino had a vision of a comic-strip character treated in a comic style. That was silly, because Flash Gordon was never intended to be funny. The entire film got way out of control."
It seems like the kind of show that would fit well in mystery science theater though. This is likely just one of those things that is more of a time capsule, or a period piece, it's likely very difficult for people who grew up watching this type of show to be able to objectively have an opinion about it without nostalgia creeping in.
Personally, I can't fathom thinking the 1980s Flash Gordon was a good movie while the 1980s Dune movie was not.
It was supposed to be an acting vehicle for a football player. It's so camp.
But it also has Max von Sydow in it, and Brian Blessed is every bit as over the top as he is in season 1 of Black Adder.
It occupies much the same genre as Big Trouble in Little China and the Evil Dead movies. If you're looking for something deep, you're in the wrong place.
There are some fun themes in there and I appreciate that it begins as a somewhat typical "hero's journey" tale and then turns that whole idea inside out. I like the intrigue and plotting and how various factions are always plotting several steps ahead.
But none of that is why I absolutely love Dune (the novel). For me it just has this vibe that I've never been able to explain.
Maybe that's why I like it: because I can't even figure out why I like it.
Anyway, that's all crazy subjective and I can easily see why many are not enchanted by it.
Star Wars: I saw it the day after it was released. It was groundbreaking in every way. Nobody had seen anything like it before. It just blew everybody away. ESB just did not have the impact SW did.
T1 was very focused. Again, nobody had seen anything like it before. The terminator stayed true to form in its relentless purpose, summed up in Reese's little speech. T2 rehashed the same plot, adding an asperger sidekick robot for comic relief. (I thought Harlan Ellison was way off base claiming that T1 was stolen from him.)
These are great sequels, but they are Hollywood action movies compared to their predecessors. I do prefer ESB, but Star Wars has better structure and a more satisfying ending, so it is close.
The best thing about ALien is that when it came out, you had no idea who the "hero" was in the crew. Tom Skerritt was the biggest star, had first billing, and was the white male captain. There was no expectation the someone else would be the hero and survivor.
And you have to let everybody know just how bad you think Dune is, in the most snarky and belittling way possible. Seriously, every reply of yours on this entire topic is combative.
Have you considered what your agenda here is, and whether you’re participating in this discussion in good faith?
Oof, looks like I touched a nerve. I’m providing a measured response to the unexamined breathless enthusiasm for mediocre writing. I’ve had to talk lots of people into reading a second sci-fi series because they started with Dune and decided that the genre isn’t worth it.
Dune is fine. But people need to re-read it as adults or something before extolling it’s virtues from the rooftops as they do in this thread.
You should consider that you feeling attacked is as much about you as it is about me.
I’m not feeling attacked, and didn’t say I was. I'm just sorry for the folks you’re responding to.
Edit to clarify: for the precise reason that “you have terrible taste” is ad hominem, and contributes nothing to the discussion. This isn’t appreciated on HN.
I think if you worked on your delivery you might find folks have different reception to your ideas.
I might give your words some weight if it wasn’t for the great big pile of upvotes on my comments. I like that reception just fine, but thanks I guess?
If they have an issue they are welcome to raise it, no need to go white knighting people.
I enjoy Aliens—it's the bigger, more over-the-top production of the two.
But I prefer Alien for its intimacy and slowly growing horror. John Hurt's character's arc stunned me as a child, and is still one of my favorite turns of storytelling. I love the set design and overall tone of the movie. It's a different space mood than other space movies. And it nails that feeling of being hunted on a spaceship (so far as I would know).
There’s so much good dialog in Aliens that I’m always amazed was written in the mid 80s and would play just as well if it were new today (mostly spoken by Hudson): “Game over, man!”, “yeah, but it’s a dry heat”, “ Somebody said "alien" she thought they said ‘illegal alien’ and signed up!”
Aliens is more of a vanilla monster movie than scifi. I don't recall any science in it, other than the setting.
Alien was based on a short story in "Voyage of the Space Beagle", though the implementation of it was fresh. The discovery and exploration of the alien's life cycle was good scifi.
Can't agree with you there. I think even Cameron would be the first to say that Aliens is primarily a thrill ride. But it is also objectively true that at least two hard scifi elements provide the scaffolding for the events of the movie.
Two of the most central themes of the movie were fairly hard sci-fi... although admittedly one of them was nearly entirely deleted from the theatrical cut.
One: What would a person experience after decades of hibernation? In many ways the film revolves around or is set in motion by Ripley's extended cryosleep after Alien. She is now alone in a strange world where her skills are no longer relevant or current. This primes her for manipulation by Burke. She has also missed out on her deceased daughter's entire life, which primes her to think of Newt as a surrogate daughter and protect her with a mother's ferocity. (Unfortunately, the exposition about her daughter was removed from the theatrical cut. Huge miss.)
Two: How would mankind react to alien contact? Would we treat it with ontological reverence or would it be business as usual for warmongering corporations? The second half of the movie is set in motion by Burke doing the latter on behalf of Weyland-Yutani.
The terraforming stuff.... yeah I agree it's just a setting.
You do raise some good points. I never thought those issues were the central theme of the movie - just a setup for, for lack of a better term, a bug hunt.
Science fiction doesn’t imply science being in it.
>fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or time travel and life on other planets.
Aliens isn't much more than NYC with monsters in the sewers, with a different backdrop. It was ok and I didn't feel like it was a waste of time, but that's about it.
I don't know if that bit of dialogue was in the original script, but it is pretty much the story of how the actress Jenette Goldstein went to audition for the movie - she thought it would be about immigrants (she was one herself, an American in the UK).
Agreed, the dialog had some good laughs. When Paxton asks Gomez "did anyone ever think you were a man?" and she replied "no, did anyone think that of you?" A comeback worthy of Winston Churchill.
Not GP, but I think I made it to about 20 pages into the third book before giving up. I actually enjoyed the first book, but it just got more ponderous as it went on. And this was around the same time I read the Foundation series by Asimov, so I didn't necessarily need at pot-boiler.
I'm not sure if one of us misunderstood "pot-boiler" but Dune is surely no popcorn entertainment. It felt ponderous because its author invests much time into the development of characters, philosophy and politics. It's not for everybody, but it surely is not a pot-boiler.
It’s a cargo cult. Dune itself is pretty standard sci-fi. The sequels are where it goes from good to great. People deify the first one because they think that’s where the great reputation comes from, not understanding that the really interesting stuff is in the later books. I mean, the giant worm-man, the endless clones experiencing existential dread, and the trans stuff all come after book 2 and really after book 3.
I've only read the series once, >20 years ago, but I thought the opposite. To me it started out good but ended weird and stupid (I admit I remember almost no details though, so can only give the impression I'm left with). I've read other books I thought much better than any of them though.
I couldn't make it after the second book, Dune Messiah. But I enjoyed the games, especially the RTS, the miniseries and the recent movie which is quite good.
All of those are popcorn. Even Alien - which is a jump scare creature feature expanded with some token politics and superb horror aesthetics. And Star Wars, which is a fantasy for ten year olds in space (according to George Lucas), but with ground-breaking special effects.
Dune - the book - is not popcorn. The series is probably the most brutally surgical examination of power, politics, religion, and economics ever to appear in print.
There are giant worms and weird drugs and such, but they're all metaphors.
If you're looking for the literary equivalent of CGI, that's very much not what it's about.
>with some deep religious and philosophical elements that I'm not sure everyone is ready for.
This is how I felt about Battlestar. I barely remember watching the original series as a kid, but I just remember a couple of character names, Cylons (which I thought were cool), the space ships, and the human in the dark room ontop of the pyramid shape the Cylons talked to. That was it. Then I watched the reboot, and was shocked by the religious overtones. Clearly, I never researched anything about it until that point, and then it all made sense.
I'm nervous about Buck Rogers (biddybiddup, what's up Buck!) might turn out the same way on a reboot.
Religious overtones or are ancient religious texts the original sci-fi where its adherents a few generations removed never got the memo? Only kinda joking. I too picked up on battlestar, resurrection, the twelve tribes (or colonies?) lords ok Kobol and so on. I think someone told me at some point the original was Mormons in space.
The original show's creator, Glen Larson, was a Mormon - so it tracks that the show incorporated a lot of that theology. Also, one of the main antagonists is Count Iblis, someone who seeks to lead the colonists to follow him, though he is revealed to be essentially a prince of darkness. "Iblis" is the Islamic name for Satan, so another religious element. Even his backstory is similar to the Abrahamic view of the devil, "he [Count Iblis] was previously a Being of Light who fell from grace after using his powers for evil purposes."
Ron Moore's reimagined version of Battlestar includes strong themes of reincarnation and life being a cycle, which also tracks with Moore's past interest in Hinduism and other Eastern religions.
You can never reboot Max "perhaps you should execute their trainer" von Sydow as Ming the Merciless. Melody Anderson. Queen soundtrack. A true masterpiece.
Slightly unrelated, but there is a 19 hour fan-edit of the Hobbit + Lord of the Rings -- i.e someone glued all 3 Hobbit movies and all 3 LotR movies into a 19 hour video.
In the "2-3 hours of the hobbit which was good" are you including the animated versions as well? I'd be hard pressed to find 2-3 hours from the travesty that Jackson made
Even in LOTR there are some wobbly sections outside the big story beats, when you re-watch it now. It's a good book to film adaptation of difficult material though.
With all of the creative licensing that was taken with the content, I was really hoping that the Hobbit would have reduced the camp and gave it different tone to match the rest of the "universe". Instead, we got 20 minutes of dwarves throwing plates around and singing songs that does nothing except show examples of how the thinnest book was turned into 3 friggin' movies.
That's just one of the issues I had, but they don't get any nicer from there
Different person, but just about everything. It simply wasn't enjoyable, at all. I'm just talking about the first hobbit, I have somehow managed to purge the memory of seeing the others from my memory.
I liked the LotR adaptations, though there were a few things I was pretty disappointed with.
But when it came to the Hobbit films it was a different story entirely, I saw the first and didn't love it. I saw the second and actively disliked it, so I figured I'd save myself the pain and haven't seen the third and I have no intention of watching it.
It's a shame that it was badly rushed, and split (needlessly) into three parts. But despite the close association it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the LotR films, which I rewatch every few years.
You probably want the "Maple Edit" of the Hobbit (also known as "J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit"). It is 247 minutes and is setup as a single film with intermissions.
"people copied our cool effects for Matrix 1, what if we make the action scenes so long and expensive no one would even bother to copy them because they all went home before they were over?"
I wouldn't mind sitting in a screening of Dune pt1 followed by Dune pt2 when it comes out. Sounds like something Alamo would do. While not 10-14 hours, I would be willing to sit in the theater for 4-5 hours.
AMC by me did all 3 LOTR films in 3 nights just before the hobbit came out. I enjoyed it a lot but by god by the time the 3rd movie ended I was done, and then I still had to sit through another 45 minutes of endings.
This is really cool. It seems very 'pure' in comparison to what my code history will look like. In 2040, a lot of my code will show how I used a bunch of libraries and frameworks that nobody uses 'these days'. This doesn't seem good or bad, just a reflection of the times.
And unless you put in the effort to archive those dependencies yourself, nobody may be able to truly read or build your code anyway.
Today’s trendy development practices are shockingly ephemeral and fragile. Very little of today’s projects would survive one decade left fallow, let alone four.
A few years back my office threw away a PC running Windows XP with no service packs. It was left in a closet for many years just in case we had to fix a bug in some safety critical code.
A few years ago we tried to rebuild some safety critical code from sometime back and were unable to because the certificates had expired and so the machine that can build the source code refused to connect to our version control system.
This is why I really like Debians policy of being self-contained, that everything in Debian is built from sources that are in the Debian system.
It takes a lot more effort to package stuff, since you can't just download your dependencies from the internet. But you also create something that isn't as ephemeral.
Reading this thread makes me think about archiving my code too. I have backups of my project folders going back to the 90s when I started programming. But I often delete node_modules and other build artifacts before archiving because that stuff takes up so much space.
But maybe it’s worth going through and actively and explicitly downloading all those dependencies too. Who knows when npm will get hacked again, or old package versions will get yanked. Disk space is cheap. I’ve written a lot of code over the years. It would be nice to know it all still runs.
I think that's somewhat the curse of technology. It's so hard to make anything from scratch. How do you get metallurgy working without already having metals? How do you get electricity running without an outlet, or at least powerful, easily sourced magnets?
Thinking about the "dependency tree" for any modern convenience is truly staggering. I can't even start to think about how you can make a factory without first having a factory.
Even before... Trying to compile archived versions of the python 2.7 runtime on recent Linux distributions is an exercise in frustration. Thank god for the gentle souls that keep putting out lightly updated compilable 2.7 python runtimes, your efforts haven't gone unnoticed.
I have a directory full of prebuilt wheels for the entire dependency chains of several python applications I use. All you need to do is tell python to build all the wheels and save them to X directory, and point it back at that directory for installing.
In particular on Termux, there's a number of rarely-used python programs that have native dependencies, so I store them on my network drive to free up storage on my tablet. I have a similar setup for doing stuff on Colab.
It's entirely possible to use python/pip in an offline environment, as long as you've planned for it ahead of time; all you need is pip and possibly wheel, and the correct version of python.
Node predates npm. All node does is look for dependencies in the nearest node_modules directory. (And all npm does is download dependencies into that folder). So you can simply archive / check in your node_modules directory if you want to. I think there’s tools to help out and make sure the dependency versions are all pinned. (npm shrink-wrap and friends)
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