201–210 of 323 posts
For those that can't stand Twitter's UI: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1345146328058269696.html
One of the things they mentioned briefly in a little documentary on the making of Soul is that all of the animators work on fairly dumb terminals connected to a back end instance. I can appreciate that working well when people are in the office, but I'm amazed that worked out for them when people moved to work from home. I have trouble getting some of my engineers to have a stable connection stable enough for VS Code…
Where can I watch the documentary?
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I for one am saying Twitter has many, many people working on UX and the web interface is still terrible. Hardly any interface made for such a broad spectrum of people gets it just right for all its users, but Twitter is doing an exceptionally bad job at it.
I don't think you (or anyone else on this website) understand the scale at which twitter operates. Including all replies to a thread by default on a site with that amount of traffic will increase the load of ... everything. Dramatically. Yes, their UI sucks. No, they haven't fixed it. I would not be surprised at all if that were due to necessity rather than incompetence. Even tiny changes at that scale make large dif…
I think it's a UI that's been designed for one very clear, specific use-case; that's been stretched beyond belief by people cramming it to fit radically different use-cases. Developers I'm sure are simply stuck; do they optimize for original use-case and its legions of users; or other use-cases and those legions of users; I genuinely believe they cannot make everybody happy.
But as a user:
1. As an author, you have a choice not to try to cram a square kitchen through a round sink (long-form articles onto twitter)
2. As a reader, you have a choice not to consume content from a platform not designed or well-supporting of that content.
There's a million lifetimes worth of fascinating, useful, interesting, readable content out there.
Puzzling through a maze that is Twitter long-form article threads... is not how I choose to spend my time :).
As I asked in another post, I'm not sure what your underlying point is - that the UI is good and fit for purpose? Or that we should put up with it? Or that we should be more understanding of it, and that implies not criticizing it?
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> Just ... Scroll ... Down ... Click where it says "read more" or "show more replies" That doesn't work. Neither "read more" nor "show more replies" appears on the page [1]. Nor does "show replies", which turns out to be what you actually need to click once you go to a place it appears. In fact, there's no indication that there even are more replies, or that "replies" are actually the main content. To see the content…
> It is not usable in any real sense. Absolutely untrue. I can use it. Again, (for about the 4th time) I'm not saying it's good, I'm saying it's usable. I want everyone who is disagreeing with me to spend a SINGLE EFFING DAY with a para- or quadrapalegic and then tell me that TWITTER is unusable. What I'm trying to say is that "you have no idea what unusable really means." You people are spoiled rotten and you not on…
I think you are using a more extreme definition of "usable" than most people.
Originally, I clicked on the link, saw there was almost nothing there and no visible way of getting more, and went looking for a usable mirror in HN comments.
I'm 41. I'm not a paraplegic, but I am physically disabled; I've spent most of my adult life unable to use keyboards, for example, and there are many ordinary things that most people take for granted that I simply can't do. I think I have a fair and reasonable definition of "usable".
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I think they can't as their system is built with many of these limitations and preconceptions and it's hard for it to evolve easily.
It may be difficult to evolve, but it should be possible.
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It's very painful to follow a conversation on Twitter. I'm not sure why they think the way they've done things makes sense.
As a reading medium seeing a bunch of tweets strung together is not fantastic as implemented today. As an authoring medium though, the character constraints force you to write succinct points that keep the reader engaged. You can focus your writing just on one point at a time, committing to them when you tweet, and you can stop anytime. If you're struggling with writing longer form pieces a tweet thread is a great on…
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In the end it’s still more profitable to hire performance engineers than hardware. For the last decade I’ve heard the “toss more HW” argument. It hasn’t held because the amount of compute and storage goes up too.
That’s very much an exaggeration. Pixar/Google etc can’t run on a single desktop CPU and spends a lot of money on hardware. The best estimate I have seen is it’s scale dependent. At small budgets your generally spending most of that on people, but as the budget increase the ratio tends to shift to ever more hardware.
My understanding (I am not an authority) is that for a long time, it has taken Pixar roughly an equal amount of time to render one frame of film. Something on the order of 24 hours. I don’t know what the real units are though (core-hours? machine-hours? simple wall clock?) I am not surprised that they “make the film fit the box”, because managing compute expenditures is such a big deal! (Edit: When I say "simple wall…
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That is correct. It's pretty common for a technical artist to have a 24-32 core machine, with 128 GB of RAM, and a modern GPU. Not to mention that the entirety of the movie is stored on a NFS and can approach many hundreds of terabytes. When you're talking about that amount of power and data, it makes more sense to connect into the on-site datacenter.
I’m guessing Pixar is using a distributed file system opposed to traditional NFS? Do you have any idea what storage system render farms tend to use? At my workplace we have a smallish HPC center and ended up moving off of NFS at about 2PB of storage since we were starting to hit the limits of NFS (think 1TB of RAM and 88 cores on a single NFS server).
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> How do they provision it ex VFX sysadmin here. I'm not sure if they use their own scheduler or not. IF they do, they use tractor(might be tractor 2 now), which looks after putting the processes in the right places. Think K8s, but actually easy to use, well documented and reliable. (just not distributed, but then it scales way higher and is nowhere near as chatty) They would have a whole bunch of machines, some old…
Out of curiosity, did you move outside VFX and if yes to what industry, have you been enjoying and what motivated you? Cheers