Regardless of the usage of the term Sprite, the real measure of how appropriate it is to use the term for something else is how many people get confused in this manner. I can't really tell what the average reader would think because my background is in game development, so my view is not representative.
I think people can get bogged down in the technical weeds over what a sprite is in graphics. Historically it started out as mini graphics overlays in hardware. There was a transition period motivated by Amiga documentation to have Sprites and Bobs, to distinguish, and perhaps advertise, the use of the Blitter. When software or Blitter Sprites became nearly ubiquitous, they returned to simply being called Sprites, the fairly rare use of the original form became known as Hardware Sprites. Usually it was only mouse pointers that remained as Hardware Sprites
Obviously the term Hardware Sprites is not strictly a distinguishing label either. They are all controlled by software using hardware with some degree of balance between the two.
Most Android devices have hardware that's capable of rather interesting version of hardware sprites. Hardware real-time compositing with scaling and colorspace conversions.
For those that don’t know Project Farm, and are ready to hit ‘back’ after hearing him talk for 2 seconds, stick it out.
He’s incredibly thorough and detailed in how he tests and ranks things. And he tests all kinds of things, from drill bits and bed liner paints to portable battery banks.
Exactly, I was initially put off by how weird his videos are, but dude has serious conviction to presenting pure content with no fluff. He pays for all the stuff himself, and reviews kinda weird things you wouldn't expect.
I've bought a few things based off of his recommendations, like bungee straps and wrenches. Not always his top pick because I don't always agree with his weightings, but he flashes the raw data so you can make your own calls.
I got bored with his shtick. He could condense each of his videos to the 3 or so graphs that he puts up, in the middle and at the end. Sometimes I fast foward to those if it's something I'm interested in. But he's usually too superficial anyway.
Torque Test Channel is a lot better and more watchable imho.
Some of his videos are result of testing things for a couple of years, like headlight restorers.
Also, some of the things he shows are pretty through. If it was a wall-of-text sans videos or images, it'd not have this kind of details and information.
Because as everyone and their horse say, while he has a ranking and weighing, you can decide what to buy (if you need it) through the video by seeing how it's applied/works/fails/excels. This is hard to convey with text only.
I appreciate that TTC goes the extra mile with the continually updated global rankings spreadsheet[1]. It’s a lot easier to poke back at the recommendations from TTC than it is from PF. It’s also another clever source of revenue to keep the channel running cleanly.
Eh. AvE was amusing for a while, but the shtick grew old to me and it all feels much more theatrical and artificial (not necessarily artificial as in faking data, but artificial as in the entire process designed to be amusing rather than useful) as opposed to the no-nonsense "here's the methodology and the data" of project farm.
I don’t agree with canadian oilmen’s politics generally but I defend their (and everyone’s) right to protest loudly about whatever grievances they may have.
AvE is ok in my book. His channel is more posturing and fluff and in-jokes than useful content, but supporting legitimate political protests (even if you don’t share their political views) isn’t cancel-worthy.
My issue is that a large share of what he tests are Amazon products with alphabet soup brand names, where QA is likely nonexistent and the conclusions are often based on a sample size of N=1. Even if you wanted to buy the "winner", the exact same product may be sold under a different name a week later.
I also find his testing methodology inconsistent. In some cases he takes manufacturer specs at face value without actually verifying them, in others he goes out of his way to comprehensively measure things that don’t matter much (to me anyways), while skipping things that seem genuinely important (self-discharge of jump starter packs for example).
That said, he's doing this with his own time and money, and makes it available for free to anyone. A lot of this also comes down to personal preference in what you value in a test.
I’m honestly curious what drives this kind of response. You’re aiming a lot of negativity at someone who’s voluntarily spending his own time and money to do something that, until recently, simply didn’t exist at this level of detail. Yes, there are scientific limitations and fair critiques to be made—but the tone here feels less like constructive criticism and more like punishing the effort itself. That pattern is exactly what drains the internet of anything generous or experimental: people stop sharing when every imperfect attempt is met with hostility. It’s a bit like being stranded in the desert, dying of thirst, finally offered water, and rejecting it because it isn’t cold enough. You don’t have to call the work perfect to acknowledge that it’s valuable, imperfect progress rather than something deserving of contempt.
I don't know if the parent comment has been edited, but in its current form I read it much differently from you! It seems like fair criticism without any added snark or contempt. I don't want hostility or gratuitous negativity, but IMHO it's just not present here in the way you describe.
(Also the guy has millions of subscribers and a consistent weekly posting schedule, and this video is on the front page of HN, so I don't think his channel falls into the category of obscure hobby projects where it might be rude to criticise them at all rather than just ignoring them.)
Yup. He lays things out in a way that gives you power to make a decision. Perhaps you don't like his methodology or his weights, totally fine, you can understand what's important to you and feel pretty happy with a different pick.
Style wise, he's like a product reviewer version of kipkay lol. I do think that I'd prefer an NPR whisper version of his reviews though.
No, sorry. I just can't listen to him for more than a few seconds, it's something about the way he speaks, the fast cuts, the flashing, it's simply too much for me.
I hate that all content that would be better off as text has to be presented as videos now. Thanks for nothing, big tech.
To me, this doesn't show the weakness of current models, it shows the variability of prompts and the influence on responses. Because without the prompt it's hard to tell what influenced the outcome.
I had this long discussion today with a co-worker about the merits of detailed queries with lots of guidance .md documents, vs just asking fairly open ended questions. Spelling out in great detail what you want, vs just generally describing what you want the outcomes to be in general then working from there.
His approach was to write a lot of agent files spelling out all kinds of things like code formatting style, well defined personas, etc. And here's me asking vague questions like, "I'm thinking of splitting off parts of this code base into a separate service, what do you think in general? Are there parts that might benefit from this?"
It is definitely a weakness of current models. The fact that people find ways around those weaknesses does not mean the weaknesses do not exist.
Your approach is also very similar to spec driven development. Your spec is just a conversation instead of a planning document. Both approaches get ideas from your brain into the context window.
Challenging to answer, because we're at different levels of programming. I'm Senior / Architect type with many years of experience programming, and he's an ME using code to help him with data processing and analysis.
I have a hunch if you asked which approach we took based on background, you'd think I was the one using the detailed prompt approach and him the vague.
Sure, an impressive bit of tech, but the potential for misuse is immense.
To mock their user reviews...
> “Graylark helped me find the person I'm stalking in under 20 minutes. This tool is unbelievable — a true game-changer for those with restraining orders like me who just want to get back at them for that court order."
Do you think criminalizing an activity will stop criminals from highly lucrative criminal activity without going to North Korea levels of societal control?
This mentality is kind of dumb, no offense. We have a bunch of laws. You could just as easily use your argument to say murder should be legal, or rape, and certainly people have.
Laws do, actually, work, for the most part. No they're not perfect, but they don't need to be.
Legalizing capital crimes would barely make them increase in prevalence. The state punishes people for those things mostly so that other people don't.
Laws are basically codified morals, but shitty because they need to be written to be some semblance of objectivity. You typically get stupid results when you try and surgically codify niche things or try and legislate controversial things.
I'd much rather live in a world with LLM image location stalking than one where people just punt everything to the state.
I'm not disagreeing, but that article reeks of "we counted all the petty BS we don't even try to solve to make the numbers look bad to justify asking for more resources"
no, it's not, those things are illegal but cars and trains are not illegal even though you can use them to run over people. Knives, same thing. Alcohol is not illegal even though you can use them to get people too drunk to resist you.
Criminalizing everything that could be used to do bad things is an extreme position. Instead of jumping right to "ban it" you should probably first have a discussion where you consider whether (A) that ban will make any difference to its availability to most people who are criminally-minded anyway and (B) whether it has positive benefits to the law-abiding.
I don't think there's a legitimate purpose for this. I do think no legislature is capable of outlawing this in a way that's both enforceable with some degree of impartiality (i.e. does not provide plausible deniability for a prosecutor to drag a legitimate service through a courtroom for political reasons) and incurs acceptable collateral damages (e.g. doesn't outlaw unrelated stuff that's fine).
>1. They’re not talking about any lucrative activity — the primary worry is longterm sexual harassment via stalking.
There's potential for far more, and far more lucrative corporate and state harassment here. Think like low effort red light camera mail ticket but for the general case.
"We see that someone has posted a picture of X at your location. Here is a copy. This is a violation of a) your leas b) the zoning code, please pay us $1000, if you would like to appeal please fill out the attached form and include the $500 appeal fee and if you lose the fine will be $2000. Reminder: you agreed to this in subsection ABC of <your lease|the zoning code>"
How in the world do people even discover these things? Certainly not by clicking cells to set up an initial population then hit "Go". Brute force approach works I suppose.
Rider fair is only one way to fund transit. My city (Corvallis, OR) provides free bus service city wide since 2011. The newest addition is free bus service to surrounding cities (up to McMinville and down to Eugene).
It's paid for with state and federal grants, university (OSU) contribution, as well as a utility fee.
Speaking generally, free fairs also provide various benefits to a community such as reduced use of cars and easier access for lower income access to jobs and services.
you probably dont live in Boston, because there is no one on the planet that drives into boston rather than taking the T because its too expensive. people drive downtown and pay $40 for parking instead of taking the T.
That's assuming there is nothing else on the ledger.
Suppose you have to choose between a suburban house without any convenient access to mass transit (i.e. you're going to have to drive everywhere) or a more expensive unit which is closer to the city and is near a transit stop. Paying $40 for parking is going to offset the cost advantage of the less expensive housing and leave a lot of people near the breakeven point, and then a $100/mo difference in transit fares could be the deciding factor.
theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations. theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city. nothing about what you said is relevant.
rich people (of which boston has plenty even in the burbs where average house prices are 800k+) pay to avoid existing near poor people. they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.
if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
> theres plenty of essentially free park and ride stations.
Which is a huge pain, because now you need to have a car, and already be in it to drive to the park and ride. A drive on which there could be traffic. Which means you could miss your train unless you leave early, but then you're standing around the train station doing nothing (and not getting paid) even when there isn't traffic, instead of spending that time either at home or at work. Whereas if you lived near the train stop you wouldn't have to leave early to not miss your train.
Meanwhile if you already need to have a car, and you're already in it and driving it, most people aren't going to drive northeast to the park and ride and then take a train southeast to their destination instead of saving time by just driving directly east all the way to the destination. So the thing that gets them on the train is not having to drive to get to it.
> theres commuter rail access in basically a 1 hour drive radius of the city.
There's commuter rail lines that go an hour from the center of the city. That's not at all the same thing as there being a stop within walking distance of every suburban home.
> they think they are going to get stabbed on the subway.
The people who think they're going to get stabbed on the subway are not going to use the subway. We're talking about the people who might actually use it.
> if the subway was faster, safer, cleaner, but more expensive, more people would use it.
The way you make it faster is to get more people to use it so you can justify more frequent service, which eliminating fares facilitates. The way to make it safer and cleaner is to get more people to use it, so there are more people who care if it's safer and cleaner because they're using it. Which is again facilitated by eliminating fares.
The only thing fares get you is an amount of money that represents less than 1% of the state budget, and then you lose a significant proportion of that to the cost of collecting the fares. It's taking a privacy-invasive deadweight loss to create a deterrent to something you're trying to encourage people to do.
There is nothing convenient about doing park and ride. It's something you do because whatever your other options are suck worse. Commuter rail inevitably dumps you somewhere you don't need to be so then you have to take the T from there. There is no way not to make it a slog of a commute with that many transitions.
Though really amazing engineering, I'd say not all of them show "how they pulled it off". I'd like to know how the Byzantine geared mechanical calendar was "pulled off", especially those gears.
The gear teeth are cut with a file. For the angularity, draw a circle with a compass and subdivide it by measuring linearly with a measuring tool. This can be done larger than the part, and the teeth locations marked with a straightedge. By cutting the teeth where marked, you avoid a stack-up of error.
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