Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | Xophmeister's commentslogin

Neat :) When I was a teenager, some 25+ years ago, I wrote a chaotic attractor visualiser like this — but only in 2D — and it occurred to me, “What if instead of visualising it, I rendered it to audio?” I don’t remember the details: I think frequency was correlated with polar angle and amplitude to magnitude. It forced me to learn how to write WAV format — which was my first introduction to endianness — but the result wasn’t completely inaudible! A bit like the sound effects for computers in old sci-fi movies; random(ish) but not discordant beeps and boops!

Along these lines there are at least two modules that I know of in Eurorack focused on strange attractors, and they're both a LOT of fun adding this kind of unpredictable-but-cyclical movement to your sounds:

- Hypster by Nonlinear Circuits (https://modulargrid.net/e/nonlinearcircuits-ian-fritz-s-hyps...)

- Orbit 3 by Joranalogue (https://modulargrid.net/e/joranalogue-audio-design-orbit-3)


I've done this in my Claude settings, but it still doesn't seem that keen on following it:

> Please be measured and critical in your response. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I highly doubt everything I say is “brilliant” or “astute”, etc.! I prefer objectivity to sycophancy.


Remove everything after .... 'in your response' and you will likely get better results.


> I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I highly doubt everything I say is “brilliant” or “astute”, etc.!

Is this part useful as instruction for a model? Seems targeted to a human. And even then I'm not sure how useful it would be.

The first and last sentence should suffice, no?


I wonder if asking it to respond in the style of Linus Torvalds would be an improvement.


Too much context tokens.


I seem to remember a similar Star Trek episode; DS9, IIRC.


"playing god", s2e17


I remember that, and the enormous plot hole that they could move the thing in a transporter!


I have a similar problem: For purely vanity reasons, I have a .co e-mail. Whenever giving it over the phone, I say something like "blah blah blah, dot co; no UK, just dot co". So far this has worked, but -- along with my difficult to spell domain -- I somewhat regret my decision!


Palatino with Microtype is my go to for all my LaTeX documents. It looks so good.


My standard font package is "mathpazo", which is Palatino with maths support. I obviously like Palatino - and if it isn't available, Garamond is similar.

If ever have to do much LaTeX again though, I'll check out the alternatives because the mess of partially compatible modules and the troubles with figure placement are still bad in LaTeX.


It’s hard to see Palatino and Garamond as similar, but perhaps that’s just my typographic training at play. Palatino is much closer to its calligraphic origins than Garamond and has a darker color on the page (the seldom seen Palatino Book weight is a great improvement over the Palatino Medium that’s the default Palatino weight for extended text).

Note also that Palatino was originally designed for Linotype hot metal typesetting and has incorporated in its design the limitations of that system (which, in some ways is actually a bonus for naïve digital setting where ligatures may be limited or non-existent). The most obvious case of this is the lack of character kerns—that is, characters cannot extend beyond their typeset width. This makes the italics look cramped since, e.g., d, l and f cannot reach over the following letter with their ascenders.


They are both derived from medieval scripts and they have fairly bold serifs, right? Would you agree that they are more similar to each other than to Times New Roman or Computer Modern (which I both dislike for their thin and pointy serifs)?


Microtype is such an insanely good package, I love it


Palatino and Baskerville are underrated. I don’t know why Times is the default in so many things.


Back in school we were told essays had to be submitted (as paper printouts, this was early 2000s of course) in Times. The rebel that I am, I submitted them set in Baskerville as I loved how much better it looked.


Palatino has been my favorite font since it first appeared on the Macintosh.


As the only oldstyle font in the "original 35" Postscript desktop publishing fonts (think "original seven" Mercury astronauts), Palatino saw overuse. Among some designers it's second only to Comic Sans for its amateur use infamy.

I'm among the guilty. Palatino does appear spread out compared to alternatives, for better or worse.

The article does note that Palatino was originally designed for display text. I had long heard that Hermann Zapf was horrified at its adoption as a body font, which I couldn't confirm. The best I could do was to find a quote,

"One day I got up the nerve to ask 'Mr Zapf, what do you do?' He replied, 'I correct the errors of my youth.'"


April fools day has messed with my ability to identify satire at this time of year. Let's look at the evidence:

Posting date: 2025-04-02T01:57:13 1743559033 <-- too late

LoC: 35,000 <-- That's a _lot_

Front page: "Elon Musk Dirty Pants", "Heroin Hashbrowns", "AI Slop Stew", "Sweet Tooth Delight Made with Human Teeth" <-- WTF?

This is a joke, right?


He's Finnish, not Swedish.


Both Finnish and Swedish are official languages in Finland. Linus' parents are from the region of Finland that primarily speaks Swedish, so Linus grew up speaking Swedish at home.


Part of the beauty of the (current) WWW is that last W: the web. By design, everything is (or at least "can/should be") interlinked and scripting/computation is a layer on top of that. (See Fielding's thesis.[1]) Inverting to opaque WASM blobs as the information layer seems like throwing all that out.

Sure, WASM could still simulate interlinking -- because it's so general -- but that generality also imposes an implementation bar. Who's going to write an HTML renderer in WASM just so they can get links to work how they used to? If someone comes up with some simpler WASM-linking solution, how long will it be before there are 15 competing simpler solutions which are all mutually incompatible?

[1]: https://ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/fielding_dis...


Bumblebee headband?


Prince Harry’s real name is Henry.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: