1. Doom, the Gallery Experience
Total comment counts : 32
Summary
DOOM: The Gallery Experience is an interactive art piece that parodies the pretentious atmosphere of art gallery openings. Set within the first level (E1M1) of the classic 1993 game DOOM, this experience allows players to explore an art gallery while enjoying typical gallery amenities like wine and hors d’oeuvres. Here are the key points:
Gameplay: Players can move around using WASD or arrow keys, interact with objects, drink beverages, and navigate menus. The game supports mobile devices and gamepads.
Art and Theme: The game features art pieces, with a satirical take on modern art critique. One highlighted piece, titled “ME,” explores themes of self-absorption and human vulnerability.
Technical Notes:
- There’s no “run” button, impacting access to some secrets from the original DOOM level.
- The game has encountered issues with Google Chrome flagging it as a potential virus due to it being an unsigned application, though it’s safe and identical to its web version.
Reception: The game has been well-received, with players appreciating its cultural and humorous take on art gallery experiences. Suggestions for enhancements include adding more interactive elements like art pieces appearing after certain actions.
Development: The game was not created using the original DOOM engine but was developed in Construct 3, which limits distribution options for free versions of the software.
Overall, “DOOM: The Gallery Experience” successfully blends video game nostalgia with a playful critique of the art world, offering both entertainment and a unique gallery experience.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article lists eight specific achievements or medals in a game, which include:
- Finding all insights (presumably interacting with all NPCs).
- Picking up all items.
- Spending all money (999 coins) on the correct items.
- Finding all three secrets.
- Reaching the exit quickly (in less than 20 seconds).
- Drinking 64 glasses of water.
- Reaching the exit slowly (in more than 15 minutes).
- Completing the game with “Lazy Mode” turned on.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article describes the author’s experience at the Louvre in Paris, where they observed numerous visitors taking photos of artworks with their cellphones. The author appreciates the ability to zoom in on each piece of art in the museum for a closer look, which they find brilliant.
2. Stimulation Clicker
Total comment counts : 164
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a unique feature within a game called “Stimulation Clicker” by Neal.fun, which includes a hidden 40-minute parody podcast on true crime with a mermaid theme. This podcast appears to be custom-made for the game as there are no external references to the characters or content online. The podcast can be accessed via a direct link, but the author advises caution regarding bandwidth usage. Additionally, the article mentions a humorous line from the podcast, “Aww, he was all cat ’n tonic when he first saw her,” expressing curiosity and appreciation for the creativity behind this hidden gem.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses a clicker game that appears to satirize the overwhelming and addictive nature of internet content. Despite initial reactions of the game being an overwhelming or negative reflection of internet culture, it has been popular enough to reach the front page. The game features various content creators in a way that seems to critique the internet’s role in fostering addiction, yet it also gives these creators a positive mention, adding to the game’s ironic tone. At the game’s conclusion, players are shown a serene ocean scene, which contrasts sharply with the preceding chaos of the game, highlighting a human tendency to seek tranquility but often get distracted by trivial pursuits. The author reflects on whether humanity’s engagement with such games reveals a refusal to confront deeper issues or simply showcases our preference for engaging, albeit meaningless, activities over serene contemplation.
3. Hitting OKRs vs. Doing Your Job
Total comment counts : 39
Summary
The article discusses the role of OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) in different departments, specifically contrasting their application in Engineering and Marketing:
Engineering OKRs: The author critiques the common practice of aligning engineering OKRs too closely with the product roadmap, suggesting this often results in redundancy. Instead, OKRs should highlight what’s different or special about the current quarter, focusing on improvements, changes in process, or critical projects like the “Smooth launch of Frontend Observability.” This OKR indicates a priority shift, emphasizing responsiveness and support for a key release.
Marketing OKRs: Here, OKRs serve a clearer purpose by defining new campaigns, audiences, or channels, thus focusing on shifts in strategy or targets. Marketing’s core activities like running ads or webinars are ongoing, but OKRs specify what new efforts are being made to improve or alter these activities, avoiding duplication with regular campaign briefs.
Comparison and Insight: The article points out that while Marketing’s projects often fit neatly into quarterly cycles, engineering work is more continuous. Therefore, OKRs in engineering should not merely restate the roadmap but should indicate new goals or changes in focus. The author suggests that when OKRs merely duplicate the roadmap, it might signal a lack of innovation or improvement in the team’s approach.
In summary, OKRs should be used to highlight what’s unique or changing in the current period, not to restate routine tasks or existing plans, thereby ensuring they drive strategic shifts and focus on innovation or improvement in both marketing and engineering contexts.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article reflects on the author’s experience transitioning from working at a large corporation like FB (presumably referring to Meta/Facebook) to smaller teams. The author highlights several points:
Relief from Corporate Metrics: The author appreciates not having to deal with Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), performance reviews, and the associated corporate politics, which they found mentally exhausting. These processes required them to constantly market themselves and their team internally.
Critique of OKRs: From a systems-thinking perspective, the author criticizes OKRs for not effectively measuring true value, especially in roles that aren’t purely mechanistic. They argue that reducing human activities to metrics often distorts the actual goals, leading to unintended consequences.
Perverse Incentives: An example given is from a hypothetical suicide prevention team at FB. Here, the focus on a specific OKR like “number of suicides averted” could lead to over-flagging of content or misaligned interventions, potentially causing harm or misallocation of resources due to the pressure to meet metrics.
Loss of Connection to Real Problems: The author suggests that reliance on metrics can detach teams from the actual issues they’re meant to address, turning the focus into a game of hitting numbers rather than solving real-world problems.
Overall, the article expresses a preference for working environments free from the constraints and distortions of corporate metric-driven cultures, advocating for a more nuanced understanding and approach to workplace productivity and value.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses an anecdote from W. Edwards Deming’s book “The Essential Deming” about a company that transports oil using barges. Initially, the operation was unprofitable. A new manager introduced a system where he tracked and displayed performance metrics on each barge without setting specific performance targets or incentives. By simply making the metrics visible to all, the barge captains began to compete informally among themselves to reduce costs and improve efficiency. This self-initiated competition led to significant savings, particularly in sourcing fuel from the cheapest available locations, which varied daily. The key takeaway is that when employees are given relevant information and autonomy, they naturally strive to perform better, demonstrating the effectiveness of transparency and empowerment over micromanagement.
4. Kakizome: Japanese way of new-years resolution
Total comment counts : 17
Summary
The article discusses the author’s celebration of the Japanese New Year, highlighting the tradition of Kakizome, or the first calligraphy of the year, which involves writing an aspiration or theme for the year ahead. The author explains that instead of setting specific New Year’s resolutions, which can be rigid and fail when life’s unpredictability intervenes, one might adopt a theme or a guiding principle, akin to using a compass rather than following a set path. This year, the author chose the idiom 温故知新 (onkochishin), which translates to developing new ideas based on the study of the past, reflecting their personal journey of revisiting and refining their knowledge in robotics. The practice of Kakizome is not only about setting a theme but also about reflecting at the year’s end on how one has lived up to this theme, which provides insights for the next year. The article encourages readers to consider their own themes for past and future years, suggesting that this reflective practice can be both fun and insightful.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the tradition of “元旦开笔” (Yuan Dan Kai Bi), which translates to “The First Writing of the New Year,” a ritual practiced by ancient Chinese intellectuals on New Year’s Day, dating back about 1,000 years. During the Qing Dynasty, this ceremony was expanded, particularly by the emperor, to include writing blessings with ornate brushes, symbolically turning the calendar pages (with influence from European missionaries who helped refine the Chinese calendar), and drinking from a symbolic golden cup representing the eternal borders of the empire. Interestingly, one of these golden cups was looted by French forces during the Second Opium War.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses several cultural practices in Japan related to “kakizome,” which is the first calligraphy of the New Year:
Elementary School Kakizome: At the end of December, elementary students across Japan participate in writing kakizome. Each grade writes the same phrase or word, and these calligraphies are displayed in school hallways.
Dondoyaki: Around mid-January, many people participate in a festival called Dondoyaki where they burn their kakizome. This is part of a tradition to cleanse and start anew.
Importance of Writing: The process of writing kakizome is emphasized, focusing not only on the final product but also on the posture, attention, and care taken during the writing.
Kanji of the Year: Unrelated to kakizome, the article mentions that Japan’s officially chosen kanji for 2024 was “金” (kin), which can mean gold, money, or even Friday, symbolizing various aspects of prosperity and value.
5. Republishing my Simpsons fan site, twenty years later
Total comment counts : 21
Summary
The text provided is not an article but a copyright notice from Bingeclock, Inc., indicating that the company holds all rights for the content or product associated with this notice from 2014 to 2025.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses a personal anecdote where the author reflects on a Star Trek fan site they created in 2000 at the age of 13. This site, hosted by a free server, is surprisingly still online despite the author having lost access to it. They find it amusing and somewhat embarrassing, especially noting a factual error where they mistakenly referred to the Star Trek movie “Generations” as a series. The link to the site is provided for viewing.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article recounts the author’s experience of creating their first website, a fan site for the video game Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64. This site was built around 1999 using Angelfire, where the author learned HTML. The site featured cheats, walkthroughs, humor, and animated GIFs, but was notably remembered for a misspelling in the URL (“license to kill”). The site used a frames layout with navigation on the left, which was somewhat advanced for its time but lacked server-side includes due to the author’s then-limited knowledge. Although many old sites from that era still exist on Angelfire, the author’s site is no longer available.
6. DeepFace: A lightweight deep face recognition library for Python
Total comment counts : 13
Summary
Summary of the Article:
The article discusses DeepFace, a Python library designed for lightweight face recognition and facial attribute analysis. Here are the key points:
Functionality: DeepFace provides tools for facial recognition, verification, and analysis of attributes like age, gender, emotion, and race. It integrates multiple state-of-the-art models such as VGG-Face, FaceNet, and others to perform these tasks.
Installation: DeepFace can be installed via PyPI or from its source code, which might include features not yet released on PyPI.
Usage: Users can perform face verification, recognition, and attribute analysis with simple function calls. The library handles complex stages like detection, alignment, normalization, representation, and verification in the background.
Performance: It claims to have surpassed human-level accuracy in facial recognition tasks, with models achieving over 97.53% accuracy.
Features:
- Verification: Checks if two face images belong to the same person.
- Recognition: Identifies faces by comparing against a database, with facial embeddings stored for efficiency.
- Embeddings: Represents faces as vectors, useful for various applications.
- Attribute Analysis: Analyzes age, gender, emotion, and race with high accuracy for some attributes.
Technical Details:
- DeepFace uses various metrics like cosine similarity to determine facial similarity.
- The library includes a module for facial attribute analysis which predicts demographic and emotional attributes.
- It emphasizes the importance of face detection and alignment for improving recognition accuracy.
Overall, DeepFace simplifies the process of facial recognition and attribute analysis, making it accessible even to those without deep technical knowledge in these areas.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article praises a software package for its comprehensive set of tools for face recognition, detection, and feature extraction. Key points include:
- The package includes numerous functions tailored for these tasks.
- It features well-documented
readme.mdfiles that help users get acquainted with the basic functionalities. - It supports multiple models or backends, allowing users to experiment with different methods for the same tasks without needing to code custom functions.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses a performance focus on correctness in image processing, where APIs are designed to handle individual images. Although the underlying models support batch processing, the user primarily utilized these models directly by extracting the architecture code, rather than using the full DeepFace framework.
7. Lord of the Io_uring (2020)
Total comment counts : 8
Summary
Summary:
io_uring is a new, advanced method for performing asynchronous I/O operations in Linux, overcoming limitations of older I/O systems. This guide, authored by Shuveb Hussain of unixism.net, offers detailed information on io_uring. It includes:
- A comprehensive tutorial on io_uring.
- References for both liburing and io_uring.
- A changelog for tracking updates.
The guide’s source code and example programs are hosted on GitHub, where users can report issues or contribute by submitting pull requests. However, contributions should focus on bug fixes rather than feature additions to keep the examples straightforward. The author, who also shares tech-related content on Twitter, encourages community involvement through GitHub for improving the documentation and code.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the author’s preference for using epoll over io_uring due to security concerns. Here are the key points:
- Security Concerns:
io_uringbypasses seccomp, a security feature, which is problematic in secure environments. - Usage Context: The author mentions using
epollin scenarios whereio_uringwould be ideal but is disabled due to security policies (e.g., in container runtimes, hardened kernels, ChromeOS). - Practical Decision: Since
io_uringoften requires anepollfallback in secure environments, the author chooses to stick withepollto avoid the complexity of maintaining two asynchronous backends.
The summary suggests that for applications requiring robust security, sticking with epoll is more practical than dealing with the limitations of io_uring in these contexts.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the use of the io_uring API for enhancing I/O operations:
- io_uring is used in conjunction with epoll to manage events through eventfd, allowing for efficient handling of I/O completions.
- The author has developed implementations for a barrier and thread-safe techniques, aiming to convert these into a command-line tool to simplify the creation of high-performance, thread-safe servers.
- Performance optimization includes the use of bloom filters for fast set intersection operations, with plans to incorporate SIMD instructions to further speed up hash computations for these filters.
8. In my life, I’ve witnessed three elite salespeople at work
Total comment counts : 52
Summary
The article discusses the author’s personal experiences with exceptional salespeople and his own brief career as a top telemarketing salesman. He recounts an encounter in jail where a fellow inmate captivated others by sharing dubious criminal tips, showcasing his innate salesmanship. The author then reflects on his own stint as a telemarketer, where he claims to have been one of the best in the country, working in a time when telemarketing was a booming industry due to the competition in long-distance phone services. He describes the environment of the telemarketing office as grim and the job as a last resort after failing in other employment attempts. The narrative touches on themes of desperation, the transient nature of certain jobs, and the cultural shift influenced by technology and economic changes. The author also mentions watching an HBO docuseries on telemarketers, which rekindled his memories of that period.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the characteristics of top sales professionals, emphasizing that the best ones are not typical salespeople but are strategic thinkers. These individuals:
Gain Deep Industry Knowledge: They develop an in-depth understanding of their customer’s business and industry.
Build Strong Client Relationships: They forge strong connections with high-level executives at client companies, often contributing to their clients’ career advancements through exceptional work.
Lead Teams Effectively: They excel in creating and guiding teams that can operate autonomously, ensuring high-quality work.
Deliver Difficult News: They are adept at communicating challenging information to clients, which often leads to increased business rather than loss.
The article contrasts these elite professionals with less effective “sleazy sales people” who might achieve short-term sales goals but lack the strategic depth and integrity that define true sales excellence.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article suggests that the key to a successful sales career largely depends on being associated with a company that has a top market product. According to the text, this factor alone can overshadow most individual efforts in sales, as evidenced by the example of inexperienced salespeople (“complete noobs”) succeeding at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
9. Time-Series Anomaly Detection: A Decade Review
Total comment counts : 18
Summary
The article outlines updates regarding arXiv’s services:
Privacy Policy: The privacy policy for arXiv has been updated, and users must agree to it to continue using arxiv.org.
arXivLabs: This is a new initiative allowing collaborators to develop and share features directly on arXiv’s website. It emphasizes values like openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy, ensuring that both individuals and organizations adhere to these principles when working with arXiv.
Operational Status: Users can sign up to receive notifications about the operational status of arXiv via email or Slack, indicating a commitment to transparency and user engagement.
The text encourages users with project ideas that could benefit the community to engage with arXivLabs, highlighting a collaborative approach to enhancing the platform.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article highlights the UCR Matrix Profile, a highly efficient tool for time series analysis. It’s praised for its ability to effortlessly identify motifs and anomalies in data across various fields like manufacturing, ECG analysis, and earthquake detection. The key advantage is its efficiency and simplicity, as it does not require the user to adjust window sizes or set thresholds, unlike traditional methods.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses using the offset function in Prometheus to create dynamic monitoring thresholds by averaging metric values over past weeks. Specifically:
The author uses metrics offset by 1, 2, 3, and 4 weeks to calculate an average, which helps in setting alarms that adjust for weekly cycles. This method ensures that alerts are relevant regardless of the time or day, adapting to the “seasonal” nature of the system’s usage.
This approach allows for anomaly detection by comparing current metric values against historical weekly averages, making thresholds dynamic and more accurate for alerting purposes.
For more complex scenarios like holidays, adjustments can be made within Prometheus, as hinted by a referenced presentation from PromCon 2019.
A more detailed explanation of this methodology can be found in a blog post from GitLab linked in the article.
10. Uncut Currency
Total comment counts : 23
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses an interesting practice involving U.S. currency. When the Treasury Department began issuing uncut sheets of dollar bills, some individuals would cut these sheets into irregular shapes and sell them as “miscut error” notes. In response, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) modified the serial numbers on these sheets to make them easily identifiable. For $1 bills, serial numbers starting with “99” indicate they are from uncut sheets. The author advises that if you encounter a “miscut dollar error” for sale, checking the serial number can help verify its authenticity; if it starts with “99,” it’s likely just a cut piece from an uncut sheet rather than a genuine printing error.
Top 2 Comment Summary
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, used an unconventional method to distribute tips by purchasing sheets of $2 bills, which he had perforated and turned into pads. He would then tear off individual $2 bills to pay or tip people, often surprising them because many are not familiar with this denomination of currency.