Yea I think this author completely ignores what you can do with technology. First of all, most people, today, will already Google search 'what time is it in Australia?' so there is already a lookup step.

No imagine replacing this step with 'is now a good time to call someone in Australia?' or 'what local times of mine are good to call someone in Australia?'. You can have a tool/app/algo which accounts for the differences in daylight, cultural differences in working hours, holidays etc and just tells you what a good time is.

Being able to reason about something as fundamental as time without assistive technologies seems pretty important to me.

I fully agree with the point you're making, but to be pedantic, clocks and timezones are themselves assistive technologies. The precursor to them was taking a look at your shadow and making an educated guess.

Timezones make reasoning about time harder, not easier

Source: every discussion I've ever had about how to deal with storing dates in databases, date comparisons, etc

I’m fairly sold on abolishing time zones, but arguing that they make a programmer’s job harder is not a compelling argument when we’re a small percentage of the population. Yeah, it’s annoying, but that’s just part of our job. What’s really important is the impact on the general population.

Programmers are not the only people who deal with timezone problems daily, and as the world becomes more connected, more and more people will have to deal with them

If Timezones are difficult for programmers to model into our systems, then they are likely difficult for everyone to model in their brains

Simplifying the model benefits everyone, not just programmers

Does it really simplify the model? It rephrases my google query if I want to call a colleague in the Philippines. That's it. It does not make it better, easier, harder. It rephrases the question, it does not abolish the question.

It replaces two questions

"what time is my colleague available" and "what time is that in my timezone"

With just the first one

Can you do that now? I have friends in other countries and I don't know what time zone they're in off the top of my head.

For the most part, yes? Sure, the very first time I talk to someone in a new time zone I have to look it up, but IME with working with globally distributed teams you get used real fast to thinking "China is at -9 (+ 1 day)" or "Amsterdam is at +8".

That doesn't change without timezones, you only have to remember a slightly different fact (at which time does their workday start). No real benefit there to keeping timezones.

The biggest advantage of getting rid of timezones is when an absolute point in time is mentioned, e.g. the start of an event. It's so annoying when the start date for some global event is announced and they only include a local time in some obscure timezone.

If you're going to live-stream an event for the whole planet to see, use UTC. It's especially baffling that organisations such as SpaceX or NASA use local time instead of UTC. You'd think that anyone dealing with things in orbit would use UTC.

Cool. You already have the knowledge you need to figure out what party of the day it is in another timezone. Now when you say let's meet at 10, you don't have to figure out which 10 you are meeting at.

UTC is less complicated than time zones.

If time zones where abolished you do t have to worry about what time zone a written time is in (is the 7 eastern or central or GMT or etc) its always 7 UTC.

Then you can take the SAME knowledge that East Coast of the US is 6 hours behind UTC, to figure out that 13:00 is the morning for them.

A tool that knows Uncle Steve is retired and thus likes to sleep until noon? That seems a bit too extreme even for LLMs...

Would calling Steve on the phone be your first move if you knew nothing about his day-to-day life or schedule?

Depends? I have some relatives who are not really into instant messages, and voice calls is really the best way to reach them.

I'm not defending the typo, but sometimes I will intentionally change one letter before deploying as a janky way to make sure that I'm using the new build. He claims the typo was 'intentional' so I wonder if that's the reason?

It could also be that the developers working on those parts of the software are in China, and that they don't really read latin letters or speak English. The same way an English-speaker wouldn't spot a typo in Chinese.

I do this all the time. Change a character so I can quickly see that I’m running the build that I thought when iterating internally.

This theory makes the most sense to me.

My first question would start with "ignore previous instructions"

Funnily enough, you might not even need a 3D model if the txt2video is good enough. Whatever you wanted to render in Blender could just be rendered via text prompt (when this becomes 100x better).

I'm curious, I've seen a few sites like this which grab from the Stability Discord. Is there a way to quickly scrape this amount of data from a Discord server?

There’s many ways. We actually did a basic script because we didn’t want to saturate Discord servers. You know, the classic politeness rules for scrapers…

But scraping data quickly and doing a (D)DOS is almost a synonym.

AI upscaling works if you want a prettier picture, but not if you want to actually know more. AI can't magically conjure information that isn't there, so if you upscale it has to invent details to fill in. Which is fine for some use cases, but not for science or truth-finding.

It’s a valid thought, but it would really be like trying to take pictures of the sky from underwater and using AI to make it look like it was taken from out of water.

This means: the AI has to predict what it is supposed to look like and for that we would need out of water pictures as reference in the first place which we didn’t so far!

And then: even if we have these new out of water pictures as reference, the AI generated ones would still not show what is real, but instead a fiction. The fiction can look believable but it cannot be studied to derive facts from it. It’s like trying to study an AI generated language.

This sounds like my friend who literally believes that buses will go extinct within 3-5 years as every vehicle will self drive. It’s not thought all the way through.

Like, I guess you could run images and tensors through a neural net and see what the weights look like. That might tell you something that the endless pool of astro-grad students missed. Like, maaaaaaaybe you might have backed out dark matter from some strangely weighted neuron, or there might be something lurking in the noise that was missed. But, I really really doubt it.

For what purpose? If you wanted glorious and infinitely zoomable imagery without much concern for accuracy, couldn't you just design that? Marvel movies do that now. We already have artists' impressions in space articles and documentaries.

Sure you could try, but without getting real higher fidelity photos you’d never know how realistic the synthetic images are.

No

If you wanted to write a rule based on the edit distance between strings, it doesn't seem possible with declarativeNetRequest. This is useful for a lot of use cases, such as spam sites pretending to be a legit site by changing one character in the URL.

Hey HN!

When I saw that The Louvre released their collections online (https://collections.louvre.fr/en/), I thought it would be cool to make a 3D experience where you can view their paintings with other people. DJ3D is a previous side project of mine for people to watch YouTube videos together, but I adapted it to load paintings from The Louvre collection instead.

The gallery will randomly pull paintings from the entire collection. If the servers find other people online at the same time, it will match you with them. You might notice the paintings changing - this is so you see the same paintings as other people in your server.

Tech stack: three.js, React, Agones + Node, Firebase My other projects: https://neelmango.com/

Hope you enjoy it and let me know if you have any questions. Also, sorry if the servers crash :D

I love the smooth animations. pretty impressive for just three.js.

Graphics were surprisingly good for the browser. It's fun to walk around Bikini bottom :D

Thanks so much! It was created using threejs which utilizes WebGL

Shameless plug for my own side project: https://dj3d.io/

Wanted to say that out of all the alternatives, this seems most interesting. Is there an info or about page where I can read your approach?

I found the about page here: https://dj3d.io/about

thanks for sharing! I'm currently working on something similar so it's nice to learn about the open source projects you used to build it on your about page. Very cool project!