Almost all Poles are very surprised about the second country on that graph.
Edit: well, after some thinking and remembering all the banners for laser cutting and cnc machining in nearby areas (touristic region at that), there might be some truth to it.
The Polish manufacturing miracle is really well known among people who study economics so it's funny that natural Polish people wouldn't be aware of it.
I explain this with our national pessimism and constant complaints about everything. We also compare ourselves to rest of Europe, where wages are still better and many things are cheaper.
About 20 years ago there was a similar problem with demoscene creations. It was hard to capture demos in realtime in all their glory. So one guy created a tool[1] that waited for a frame render and presented proper time to demo so that frames would be paced properly. "All popular ways of getting time into the program are wrapped aswell - timeGetTime, QueryPerformanceCounter, you name it. This is necessary so .kkapture can make the program think it runs at a fixed framerate (whatever you specified)."
It's rather off-topic, but the linked blog is by the guy who made
.kkrieger, the tiny first-person shooter (only 96kB) in the early 2000s. Though the website for it is now gone, as .theprodukkt doesn't exist anymore, apparently. Nice to see his other stuff, didn't think to look at the time.
I remember kkrieger being impressively small but also requiring insane compute :) it would render at like 0.1 fps on my poor machine. (Aligns with this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14415567)
This is actually fascinating. This led me to find that he works at RAD Game Tools and that Rad (who I know of because of the Bink video codec) is now owned by Epic Games. Well good for them. Everything about this is full nostalgia juice. Thank you for observing what you did because I see now he has a blog and stuff. Now I've got a new RSS feed.
Indeed. The problem with that was that the browser would cache the whole bloody stream and that quickly led to issues. That's why we switched to JPEG, which also greatly improved the image quality over the GIF format, which really wasn't designed for dealing with camera generated images.
What this capturing software also does is it lies to the demo program about the time that passed between the frames, so the demo makers don't even care about running in realtime, because for them, it's like running on a PC that's almost infinitely powerful.
> I find this simultaneously the most useful and the most disturbing thing I’ve ever learned about human beings. Useful because - if you can see the playbook - you can choose not to be played. Disturbing because the playbook has been visible for a century, and we keep falling for it anyway.
If you can see the playbook, you can choose not to be played. But you will then see billions of people being played anyway. And then, you will be played again because someone will improve on that playbook so you won't see it in time to do anything.
Obvious solution: make children learn about countering techniques of manipulation at school. Result: a nation of anarchists?
From other articles I've read: the commanders have their own bodyguards and soldiers get their weapons only when actually sent to front. Also, there are castes of soldiers. Those who are cannon-fodder are sometimes even brought in handcuffs (there are even videos of this).
> I hardly ever find myself behaving unpredictably or out-of-control - I remember sometimes feeling that way as a child, but now? As an adult? It almost never happens.
Good for you. I almost parted with a very good friend just because I had a very bad day and a big headache yesterday. Fortunately she is understanding enough. Due to lack of mental clarity I've said things that are simply untrue but I felt that the words I'm writing were correct at the time. I felt it was wrong reaction pretty soon after sending and rereading.
But I'm not "often" out of control. It just happens once or twice a year.
JPEG compression can only move information at most 16px away, because it works on 8x8 pixel blocks, on a 2x down-sampled version of the chroma channels of the image (at least the most common form of it does)
I'm not super familiar with the jpeg format, but iirc h.264 uses 16x16 blocks, so if jpeg is the same then padding of 16px on all sides would presumably block all possible information leakage?
Except the size of the blocked section ofc. E.g If you know it's a person's name, from a fixed list of people, well "Huckleberry" and "Tom" are very different lengths.
Progress is a little slower this days in hardware, but it's there. Last year I finally assembled a new PC after surviving almosta a decade on my old laptop. The hardware spec jump made me remember old days. 8x more memory, 10x faster disk, 4x more cores and each one 2x faster!!! Gpu has as much memory as my previous laptop after upgrading it! Seeing the cpu usage and temps, also seeing how much data now I can download from net (I also got fiber recently and lan in old laptop was not working) was exhilarating. I can now ask my computer a question and it will respond (but slowly, local llm)!
To me the jump from my GF's celeron laptop with 2GB to her current 8GB high end Celeron (i5-i7 speeds, almost) and a Intel UHD was as big as a Pentium III 500 with a TNT2 compared to a Pentium 4 with SSE2 and a Geforce 2ti/3. A big jump in very few years from the PIII, for 12 years the gap of the laptop and the current one it's nothing.
By comparison the El Cheapo laptop she bought should have been able to play RTX bound games, and yet we are stuck there. Remember, 12 years it's 2x the time.
Except for the GL 2.1 ->Vulkan/GL 4.6 jump and videos from 1080p to 4k, the jump isn't that big. I would expect more. For young HNers, if the progress was like the 90s, in 12 you would buy a laptop for $300 and maybe play an RTX raytraced Quake... virtualized.
Edit: well, after some thinking and remembering all the banners for laser cutting and cnc machining in nearby areas (touristic region at that), there might be some truth to it.
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