skalarproduktr's comments

On: The Illustrated Guide to a PhD

[skalarproduktr]

Thank you, Matt! Loved your guide when I started my own PhD in ye olden days, and I've shown it to a lot of people since then.

[mattmight → skalarproduktr]

Happy to hear that! Thank you for sharing it with others. :)

On: The Illustrated Guide to a PhD

[skalarproduktr]

Matt has also written a great follow-up, "How to get tenure", see https://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/

Highly relevant for the aspiring researcher, and it describes really well the nonlinearities of (academic) life.

On: The Illustrated Guide to a PhD

[skalarproduktr]

Please consider that not everyone has the luxury of having (had) a PhD advisor who really cares. There's a wide spectrum, ranging from micromanagers, to people you see once during your PhD, to advisors that are genuinely great (intellectually and as a person) and caring.

I wish you the best of luck for your PhD, a caring and supportive advisor, and great results!

On: The Illustrated Guide to a PhD

[skalarproduktr]

I can only second this after having advised a few students from bachelor to PhD level. The ones who do well are (usually) the ones who are genuinely excited. Not only about the thing they're doing, but in general. It really helps getting over the lows.

Furthermore, do not underestimate the importance of sheer luck. Exaggerating a bit, deep learning was just another subfield of ML, until GPU-powered DL really took off and made the researches behind the most fundamental ideas superstars. This is not a given, and it might take years or decades until it's really clear whether you're making an impact or not.

I wish you the best of luck, InkCanon, and stay excited!

[InkCanon → skalarproduktr]

Thanks!

On: Building Bauble

[skalarproduktr]

Congrats, Ian, on the amazing side project and the thorough and thoroughly enjoyable writeup.

You really got me with the tests for the original Bauble, I had a good laugh after that paragraph!

I’m now also somewhat inclined to have a deeper look into Janet, it looks both useful and interesting.

On: Sub-pixel distance transform (2023)

[skalarproduktr]

Steven's articles are always a joy. I love that he often delves into details others miss or leave out on purpose. For SDF fonts in particular, most articles skip the fact that in Valve's paper, very high-res per-glyph textures are used to produce SDFs of satisfying quality, making realtime generation rather difficult. Steven explains very nicely how to circumvent that, while still being fast and accurate (enough).

On: Show HN: Svader – Create GPU-rendered Svelte components

[skalarproduktr]

Chrome on iOS also uses WebKit as backend, as iOS restrictions don’t allow other engines. Same goes for Firefox, Brave, etc…

Edit: Actually not fully true anymore, as of iOS 17.4, you _could_ bring your own engine (https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...) - with restrictions, of course.

On: My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010)

[skalarproduktr]

This is a great summary how to use regexps, complete with some very nice examples. Thank you!

On: A washing machine for human beings, from 1970

[skalarproduktr]

Came here with the idea of this being about how someone made terrible pre-1970 washing machine UX into something much better. Can’t say I’m disappointed though! I’m wondering if cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?

[qball → skalarproduktr]

>cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?

Apart from it being loud as fuck? (They say it's ultrasonic, but there's some harmonic around 15,000 Hz that they all exhibit for some reason- both the bucket cleaners and the plaque picks at the dentist's office- and if you can still hear that frequency it is quite unpleasant.)

Most of the cleaning action of this thing is just mechanically being sprayed; I think they threw the ultrasonic cleaning action in just because they could. I'm sure it makes you feel cleaner though.