just wanted to chime in to mention that i started aquiring DVDs and Blu-Rays in the beginning of the year. Initially I just wanted to watch my favorite movie in the best available quality without having to download an 80GB torrent. it also felt cute to have the movie as a physical object. i mention it like this because i'm a zoomer, so buying physical discs to me is like millenials buying vinyls, at least that's what it feels like.
anyways, in the span of nine months i now got more movies than space on the shelf i started putting them. but i love it. feels nice to have physical copies of movies you really like.
and i absolutely love (some) menus. especially DVD menus. there are some Blu-Ray menus which are cool as well, but a lot of them are very corpo-feeling. mandatory watch of movie trailers, unskippable 'you wouldnt download a car' crap and sometimes broken interfaces because of some java-whatever.
there are some Blu-Ray menus which are insane and add interactive games and trivia stuff to the movie. but the simplicity of DVD menus is beautiful.
i think i'm making this connection because i used to roll my eyes at people a bit older than me who started buying vinyls. "just stream your music, unc."
then i started buying physical movies and had a, "ah shit, guess that's me now..."-moment :D
wonder what the next step will be. "jake actually bought a PC again instead of using a cloudbox like everyone else"(hope not).
Hard disagree. The demoscene is entirely comprised of code that produces art, with insane tricks which are themselves art. Which sort of blurs the entire concept, as you can stretch this reasoning to kind of encompass anything, as per the pen and paper example you provided.
For example, is .kkrieger demo? Is it art? Is the game itself art or just the textures, 3d models and locations and enemies and everything else that it produces? Though only the code generates everything, like in demoscenes, so is the code art?
seems as the question is, if one considers the process of creating an artwork art itself. i guess people finding ingenious ways to create art with code can be considered some form of performance art. it still feels a bit far-fetched to me, but that's just a personal feeling, and as you've said, it's subjective anyways. interesting to think about.
i'd immediately agree for code which looks like art by looking at it, so in cases where the code really is the art. i can also imagine that there's code which looks like art and "generates" it as well, so that seems like code as an artwork.
for cases where code was written/engineered well to create an artwork with the least amount of lines, i'd consider the generated artwork to be art, and the code the result of a competitive coding challenge. again, subjective.
when comparing it to other forms of art i'm not that sure. i've mentioned performance art, which feels a bit like the exception breaking the rule. there's conceptual art as well. is the act of painting art itself? is a photographer finding the optimal place to stand to take a picture art? almost starts to sound like an artwork vs. artform discussion.
The thing about .kkreiger is that most of the size savings they got at the last minute were from extremely aggressive "dead code" elimination [1]. So, uhh, is the art really the code that was gutted by tools? Or is the art everything around the artifact?
Do you have beefy hardware? i dream of using a local LLM, but neither my 24GB RAM M4 Air nor my PC with a RTX3080 and 16GB of RAM seem usable (yet).
i could label them usable if "prompt it and then wait for 6 minutes for it to change a single line" is deemed usable, which i don't.
spent the last weekend in a rabbit-hole of which models to use in what kind of setup, but i think with my hardware i'm just out of luck for now.
for private matters I can use Cloud AIs, but not allowed to use it for work-related matters, which is where i could use it the most. they do provide us an isolated AI environment where we can use Claude etc. for work stuff, but heavily rated (about 20 prompts per week per Claude model).
You're super close on your PC. It seems like the sweet spot right now is 24gb vram + lots of RAM for qwen 3.8 flash next or a dgx spark like machine with buckets of unified RAM.
You could run some decent models on your PC l, but nothing that would totally replace serious work. Qwen 3.7 35b is pretty okay. Maybe you could try the new bonsai quant for 3.8 27b but I doubt it would be awesome.
i did in fact test different Qwen's! :) qwen3.5:9b and qwen2.5-coder:14b, i think.
but i struggled with speed and them being stuck in "Hmm, wait, no, that doesn't work, let me analyze again"-loops. on the M4 Air I was able to start some bigger models. definitely the first time i burned through 25% of battery in half an hour while getting first-degree burns on my lap.
maybe in 1-2 years my hardware will be enough for fast local-AI. maybe by then i can afford new hardware. (think with current trends option #2 gets less realistic each quarter).
not sure if i lost a bit of curiosity and spark. there's so many models, tools, harnesses, tweaks for harnesses, edited models and so many things. ultimately i don't care enough, it seems vapid to stay bleeding-edge informed about LLMs, if one's career does not directly depend on it. i mean, what the fuck even is a bonsai quant, this stuff makes me feel like an uninformed excel boomer even tho i absolutely don't am one :D
not a software engineer per se so i don't need 16 agents running 24/7 with openclaw. i want a local buddy who helps me write ansible/python faster, better, helps me analyze bugs, refactors small things. basically what Claude Web does, with the benefit of it reading the files itself and running locally.
maybe i just ignore the whole AI/LLM part and just buy some new hardware so i can use higher graphics settings while gaming, WAIT NO, that market was nuked by AI as well, guess i'll continue using my i5 from 2019.
to me, grape and unalive seem a bit different, semantically (not sure if that's the right word). of course both appeared because of algorithmic censorship.
unalive may be new, but by now it's just a synonym for suicide. sure, older people or people who are less online might not know it, but that's how language works. but in the end, suicide and unaliving both mean to kill oneself.
grape on the other hand is 100% just a way to censor the word, especially because that allows people to just use a grape-emoji to ensure that people know what they mean. could be that this escapes the online word as well, as it sounds "cute", making the act of talking about this subject a bit more palatable, maybe.
i get the point of the article, but it's a bit of a circlejerk to me - "huzzah, stop minding the algorithm, talk as you wish!". well yeah...but people started using these words because they couldn't use the original words, on these platforms. and now they're used to it. seems a bit "old man telling at clouds because other words are being used now".
i 100% resonate with the points about the billionaire-class being involved in language and causing people to talk differently, but that's not exclusive to online platforms. always has been, unfortunately. (can't mention the word socialism or communism when talking to people, explain the same rhetoric without using these words and suddenly everything is fine, to name one example).
should we go back to calling people ret##### fag####, was that censorship as well? or does language evolve and tolerances for certain words change?
i really don't get the fuss about 'unalive', the more i think about it. so 'suicide' is the word we should use, not 'unalive'. is 'killing oneself' okay? what about 'self-murder', 'ending it all', 'self-destruction'? are those okay because they're older synonyms? should we overall stop using synonyms which were created to make something sound less horrific (which humans do a lot). should we still talk about master/slave in IT?
i did plan to upgrade my hardware in 2026. i formed that plan a couple of years ago. 2026 is now at 75% and i don't see a future where i can realistically afford a new gaming PC with equal performance to what i got right now.
RTX 3080 is the only upgrade i got over the years, otherwise it's an overclocked i5 with 16GB of RAM from 2018, all for around $2300(2018) or adjusted for inflation, $3000.
so AI steals my access to new hardware but doesn't run on my current hardware, love it.
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo (Never read it until now, quite like it actually) EDIT: scrolled through the comments and saw a different person also reading this right now. I know that it's a popular book, still a bit fun that two HNers are reading a book from the 19th century at the same time. EDIT#2: okay, a bunch of people seem to be reading this right now, must be even more popular than i thought.
Neal Stevenson - Diamond Age
Rudy Rucker - Ware Tetralogy (old-school cyberpunk / high-scifi. i read Juicy Ghosts by Rucker last year and really dig his extravagant ideas. I had trouble understanding Juicy Ghosts at times, but the concepts that man is able to bundle together and flesh out, while creating an engaging page-turner is amazing. not much fluff.)
Just out of curiousity : the recent movie adaptation had a huuuge success in France two years ago (deservedly so, in my opinion), did that cross the Atlantic ?
No idea, but probably not because it didn't even make it across the Channel. Sadly, British/American audiences hate foreign language films generally. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, though, I'll watch it after I've finished reading.
there was a recent PBS tv series with Sam Claflin as Edmond Dantès and Jeremy Irons as the Abbé Faria but I don't recall a French movie. thanks for the tip!
I always say, "okay, unlock your phone and give it to me for 30 minutes". of course they refuse. "so you don't give your phone to a friend for half an hour, but it's fine if the government and intelligence agencies spy on you 24/7?"
anyways, in the span of nine months i now got more movies than space on the shelf i started putting them. but i love it. feels nice to have physical copies of movies you really like.
and i absolutely love (some) menus. especially DVD menus. there are some Blu-Ray menus which are cool as well, but a lot of them are very corpo-feeling. mandatory watch of movie trailers, unskippable 'you wouldnt download a car' crap and sometimes broken interfaces because of some java-whatever.
there are some Blu-Ray menus which are insane and add interactive games and trivia stuff to the movie. but the simplicity of DVD menus is beautiful.
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