I agree with the author in that there are such things as "fuck off" contact pages; I deal with them often looking for hardware and software and professional services. The gating of contact behind a sales department is one method of "fucking off" a person, but so is omitting necessary contact information, gating it behind some absolutely hostile AI chat agent, or just burying the page entirely. Certain large American ISPs are very guilty of this behavior, even going so far as to make the entire process of contacting them one giant, deliberately engineered "fuck off and die" experience across literally every medium of contact (web, mail, phone call, etc.).
Though to be fair, this is a bit rich coming from a blog that I'd describe as a "fuck off blog". This was incredibly difficult to read. I'm all for people doing whatever they want with their site (I'm guilty of doing ornery things on my site because I enjoy it and the aesthetic), but I find the irony palpable.
Regarding the communicative iterations where you desperately (read: hopelessly) try to convince a client otherwise as they demand something unreasonable; 100% on-point. In my consultations with a close friend I've found that it's not only hard, but interpersonally challenging to say "no" to someone when you're either being compensated by them or in some personal relationship with them that you don't want to jeopardize. The best advice I've recieved regarding business operations is "don't do business with friends", and I imagine this kind of situation is one of the biiggest reasons why. Someone being set on a terrible idea and relying on you to implement it is not pleasant. My experience with this to date has been informal, but I'd imagine that once legal contracts are involved it becomes hair loss-tier stressful to deal with.
Very cool project. I love the detail the poster went into in their linked video post about working with the sensor and their implementation.
> Optical computer mice work by detecting movement with a photoelectric cell (or sensor) and a light. The light is emitted downward, striking a desk or mousepad, and then reflecting to the sensor. The sensor has a lens to help direct the reflected light, enabling the mouse to convert precise physical movement into an input for the computer’s on-screen cursor. The way the reflected changes in response to movement is translated into cursor movement values.
I can't tell if this grammatical error is a result of nonchalant editing and a lack of proofreading or a person touching-up LLM content.
> It’s a clever solution for a fundamental computer problem: how to control the cursor. For most computer users, that’s fine, and they can happily use their mouse and go about their day. But when Dycus came across a PCB from an old optical mouse, which they had saved because they knew it was possible to read images from an optical mouse sensor, the itch to build a mouse-based camera was too much to ignore.
Ah, it's an LLM. Dogshit grifter article. Honestly, the HN link should be changed to the reddit post.
LLM or not doesn't matter as much as it's just bad reader-hostile writing with a dump of trivial details while also glossing over the relevant part (how does a mouse detect movement).
I'd posit a potential reason that these fields are currently hiring is a combination of that it destroys your body without recourse and many of these positions require certifications that take a long time to achieve (either through apprenticeships or training programs). You will also generally not get any kind of meaningful benefits from these jobs, and your body will disintigreate before your very eyes as you work yourself to bone for a pittance. The compensation for these roles is poor in comparison to white collar work despite the perceived demand for them, there is no safety net in many cases (401k, pension, reasonable health insurance, etc. outside of union shops, which are rare outside of say welders and pipefitters (and getting rarer every day!)).
And frankly the work is miserable. I've crawled through suspended ductwork to run conduit and wiring in antifreeze recycling plants that were filled with god-knows-what reagents covering everything in dust thick enough to paint a clown. PPE be damned, my skin burned for days. It was hot, loud, cramped, wet with chemicals, uncomfortable, dangerous, and unpleasant. These jobsites are the bread and butter of blue collar anything; awful and dangerous conditions outside of your control, but required by your contract because not doing it means not getting paid.
Sure, an agent isn't going to be replacing the poor bastard who has to do that, but is our only response the the deliberate and systematic murder of the white collar job market "you can suffer for less money so you'll be fine"? That's a pathetic whimpering way to just accept the very loud and public murder of class mobility.
> there is no safety net in many cases (401k, pension, reasonable health insurance, etc. outside of union shops
Residential construction is the absolute bottom of the barrel. It is trades equivalent of webdev monkeys flinging javascript poo at the web. You get benefits by not sucking and getting out of residential and into something else.
>I am not sure what the solution is but the situation is getting worse and quickly.
The solution is legislation and enforcement. Driving at night now makes me afraid for my safety because I'm literally blinded by oncoming traffic, and I'm sure that many other people share the same sentiment. I would happily argue that driving with lights bright enough to impair other drivers counts as wreckless driving and ought to be treated as such, but as far as I can tell, there are no legislative limits on directional lumen output or directional calibration for front-facing lights on cars, which leaves "wreckless" open to interpretation. This issue requires legislation that affects car manufacturers to prevent them from putting dangerous lights in their cars, and legislation that requires regular inspection of cars regarding their lumen output and headlight calibration. Most US states already require yearly inspections for emissions for most cars in order to re-register them; there are already means and methods in place for this to happen, it just needs to be done.
I'm sick of feeling like im going to die every time I drive home because some asshole wants to see everything a mile in front of him.
Adaptive headlights that actively shield oncoming drivers were finally made legal in the US in 2022 but complicated bureaucratic hoops make them hard to implement. BMW seems to have them working as I find their higher-end lighting (ex: ICON Adaptive w/ Laser Light) to be among the best to oncoming drivers—at least to my eyes.
CNN writes about why headlight brightness is worse in the US than in other countries:
The USA seems to suffer from a not-invented-here problem when it comes to automotive regulations. Most of the world adopted the European standard for adaptive headlights, but the USA had to spend years coming up with its own incompatible standard.
It's not a bug, it's a feature? US manufacturers are not widely known for technological innovations. Deviating standards are a way to keep them competitive in their domestic market.
There is a reason US school buses look like WW2 troop transport and the long haul trucks are museum pieces in all aspects. It's not even NIH, it's just protectionism.
BMW have one of the more annoying matrix main beam setups, as far as I'm concerned -- it's not great at picking out my car, and seems worse than others I've encountered. A redeeming feature is that it does seem to be smart enough to stop blinding me if I flash my own main beams.
The (2017) Ford Galaxy has actually pretty decent auto-main-beams. Importantly, the stalk controls don't stop working but also if I'm just a fraction of a second late in turning them off manually and the system beats me to it, they stay off. They also stay off when driving on roads with street lights.
I have a car with LED lights. It's easily the best car I've had for vision at night. We very occasionally get someone flashing us at night, wrongly believing our high beams are on.
However, from a safety point of view, I'm not convinced the trade off is actually in favour of reducing illumination for everyone.
No one is truly blinding you. Even old incandescent headlights can be unpleasant. Some people are more sensitive to it than others and things like a car coming over a slight hill or bend in the adverse direction can change the alignment of the lights in such a way that they appear much brighter.
The point I was trying to make is that reducing the brightness isn't a simple trade off. How many accidents are caused by people being "blinded" vs people not seeing something until it was too late?
If it needs regulation to fix then that regulation should try to balance those things. Perhaps by automatically adjusting the headlights when another car is detected (maybe matrix style headlights, or a simple angle adjustment).
Your comment is not considering the possibility of ICE being used as a secret police force under the guise of enforcing immigration. There are strong indicators of this being the case.
The point is that ICE has been given a mandate to ignore any notion of due process in their handling of immigrants, very visibly and officially. This allows them to deport anyone they want, including American citizens who get on the bad side of the regime, by just claiming that the person is an illegal immigrant and they don't have time for looking at silly papers like a birth certificate.
So ICE, is in fact being shaped into a secret police that can be used to punish anyone speaking against the regime, under the guise of being a brutal anti-immigration force.
Not to pull the Godwin lever, but the German SS went from being security guards to overseeing the entire national police force to running gas chambers in about 10-15 years. The function of an organization can change over time. The purpose of a system is what it does.
When a domestic law enforcement agency is spending 600% more year-over-year on weapons to point at people in frog costumes it's reasonable to wonder if that may reflect a de facto change in that organization.
Are you not an American? (Giving you the benefit of the doubt here)
In America, immigration enforcement is not a criminal issue but a civil issue. So the proper (as in, according to the laws and norms of the last many decades) and appropriate channels through which the enforcement of immigration is meant to be resolved is the courts. The current usage of ICE as a gestapo is literally illegal (it deprives "suspects" of due process and civil/human rights), in violation of Geneva conventions, and so on.
Furthermore even if we accept the blatantly immoral and illegal idea that federal agents should be able to break and enter into homes and kidnap, traumatize, and traffic people without the slightest pretense of legal justfiability (warrants etc), the fact is that they are not even attempting to choose people by any discernable metric other than their skin color. So it is objectively not about the enforcement of the law, it is about stochastic terrorism and ethnic cleansing, as that is the only thing their actions consistently demonstrate.
Can you explain more how you reached the conclusion that the enforcement of immigration is meant to be resolved in courts? Parking is not a criminal issue, does it also mean that I need a court order to tow a car blocking my driveway? Building code is not a criminal issue, does it mean I need a court order to install a power outlet? What about car licensing, do you go to court for new tags or to DMV/whatever is your state agency for that? Insurance? Any regulation, really?
It's exactly because this is not a criminal issue, the due process in immigration does not require court hearing, bails etc. The immigration court is not an Article 3 court, it could as well be named "immigration adjudication department" because it's an Executive office. If you believe you had been wronged in the immigration process then you can try to sue the government for the damages in an actual civil court, but the law does not require the government to sue you in order to enforce the immigration laws.
Your bad-faith argument does not merit a lengthy reply so I will simply say that the way this has been handled for DECADES has been to do so by sending formal notice, having court hearings to determine whether someone should be deported, THEN deporting them. The way things are being done now is the gestapo simply identify people with brown skin (now "legal" in a technical sense due to a corrupt SCOTUS ruling but ACTUALLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL and IMMORAL in reality) and shipping them to concentration camps and/or countries they have no relation to, to be used as slave labor in quid-pro-quo arrangements with foreign entities. No due process in all of that equates to cruel and unusual extrajudicial punishment and in some cases, death. NOTE that the lack of due process or even warrants or reasonable search requirements means that this CAN HAPPEN and IS HAPPENING to US citizens - to whom immigration enforcement should never even apply. NOTE that the lack of guardrails granted by SCOTUS that empowers ICE (the "E" stands for enforcement) to act as in lieu of an actual JUDICIAL process.
Next time, try not to be a nazi. All people are equally deserving of basic human rights, and that includes not being racially profiled and rounded up like slave meat for the grinder just because of the color of their skin.
You're misunderstanding what I'm saying; ICE is an already-established organization meant for enforcing immigration law, but it's entirely possible that ICE is being/will be used as a secret police force to attack or dissuade political dissidents of the American right wing while claiming they are only enforcing immigration laws. Many American citizens have already been arrested and even deported by ICE, and the FBI has already been used to intimidate American citizens regarding their political speech. ICE is not supposed to be a secret police force, but it's certainly starting to become one.
It's not an irrational fear, but the frightening bit depends on whether or not this actually takes off. I very much doubt it ever will. The browser ecosystem, despite being in desperate need of upheaval, is largely resiliant to it because things that work don't tend to get replaced unless they are broken to a point where even the most basic of users are inconvenienced. Or forced to change (due to vendor pressure). Oh, there's the rational fear.
Another reminder that you should always instantly download everything you ever find interesting or valuable. The internet is temporal because it's backed by people and infrastructure which are fallible and fragile in the face of law and talk.
Shops can shut down for more reasons than not having enough work, such as tariffs and regulations affecting CoGS, low hiring capability, CoGS changing (like energy), and especially tool and material shortages (also affected by the same issues). I remember one of my bosses closing his shop due to these issues, as well as the compounding factors of corporate buyouts of smaller outfits and job offshoring, too. America is an expensive place, and market makers do not like expensive places.
Also for comparison, the Runescapes (both RS3 and Oldschool Runescape) have a 0.6 tick/second system (100 ticks/minute). It works rather well for these games, which I guess highlights that some games either a) can get away with high latencies depending on their gameplay mechanics, or b) will evolve gameplay mechanics based on the inherent limitations of their engines/these latencies. RS3 initially leaned into the 0.6s tick system (which is a remnant of its transitions from DeviousMUD to Runescape Classic to RS2) and eventually developed an ability-based combat system on top of what was previously a purely point-and-click combat system, whereas OSRS has evolved new mechanics that play into this 0.6s tick system and integrate seamlessly into the point-and-click combat system.
Having played both of these games for years (literally, years of logged-in in-game time), most FPS games with faster tick systems generally feel pretty fluid to me, to the point where I don't think I've ever noticed the tick system acting strange in an FPS beyond extreme network issues. The technical challenges that go into making this so are incredible, as outlined in TFA.
OSRS exists in a pretty fascinating place, mechanically.
High level PVP play is basically a turn-based-tactics game, with some moves (attacks or spells) taking more "ticks" than others, meaning there's a lot of bluffing and mind games in anticipating what your opponent will do next.
If you're really fast, you can even equip tank gear for your opponent's attack, then swap back to mage gear for your own. Very strong if you can pull it off consistently due to how paper thin mage robes are. Not sure how many other games are that...slow?
And yeah, a lot of people are quite predictable and easy to read. In fairness there are only a handful of things you could possibly do in a fight :-)
They're right, when they said 0.6s tick they mean there's a tick every 0.6 seconds.
It's important to some players because you can get some odd behaviour out of the game by starting multiple actions on the same tick or on the tick after you started a different action. It's ridiculous click intensive but you can get weird benefits like cutting the time to take an action short or get xp in 2 skills at once.
For those unfamiliar, the act of absuing the tick system to "stack" actions like this is called "tick manipulation". It's a relatively common practice among high-efficiency players and PKers (player killers, players who engage in PvP). Many players eventually come to use this mechanic in PvE regarding "hard food", "soft food", and potions. Typically, your character is limited to one action per tick, but due to engine limitations and quirks, multiple actions can be performed in the same tick that would, out of "correct" order, take multiple ticks. A great example of this is eating a piece of hard food, eating a piece of soft food, and drinking a dose of a potion in the same tick. Out of order, this isn't possible and your character is limited to healing once per tick. Done in the correct order, your character may heal three times in a single tick.
RS3 has almost seemingly leaned into this quirk of the engine, causing many high level activities to top out around 250-300 actions per minute (2.5-3x the tick rate of the game itself, as measured by keypresses in some streamers' software setup; this doesnt include mouse interactions). These extra actions include swapping weapons, casting spells, swapping gear, using items, eating food and consuming potions, changing prayers (character effects/buffs), and movement. Gameplay becomes incredibly complex due to the nuances of the engines interpretation of actions, despite the limited temporal fidelity of actions. These actions become so rhythmic in fact, that many players will play 100 or 200 BPM music as they play to subconsciously sync their actions to the game engine.
Though to be fair, this is a bit rich coming from a blog that I'd describe as a "fuck off blog". This was incredibly difficult to read. I'm all for people doing whatever they want with their site (I'm guilty of doing ornery things on my site because I enjoy it and the aesthetic), but I find the irony palpable.
Regarding the communicative iterations where you desperately (read: hopelessly) try to convince a client otherwise as they demand something unreasonable; 100% on-point. In my consultations with a close friend I've found that it's not only hard, but interpersonally challenging to say "no" to someone when you're either being compensated by them or in some personal relationship with them that you don't want to jeopardize. The best advice I've recieved regarding business operations is "don't do business with friends", and I imagine this kind of situation is one of the biiggest reasons why. Someone being set on a terrible idea and relying on you to implement it is not pleasant. My experience with this to date has been informal, but I'd imagine that once legal contracts are involved it becomes hair loss-tier stressful to deal with.
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