This is not the kind of sprites I'm interested in
Design and Implementation of Sprites
21–30 of 111 posts
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#22I appreciate the Fly.io team’s enthusiasm and am optimistic this will mature into a product I’d pay for, but my initial impression was of a lack of polish. Documentation is sparse, or not even available? The API docs don’t tell you much about the service itself, and a Google search for docs returns an inaccessible website as the first result ( https://docs.sprites.dev ). Blog posts and forum threads and Claude skills…
You're not wrong. The documentation actually had a hallucinated link to an Anthropic dependency in it when we shipped. Right now the attitude is mostly "if we have to document it extensively, we're doing something wrong". It's been in the works for awhile , with a small team, and we're just getting it out there right now. I've been needling Kurt for several months now that if we wait until it's polished enough that w…
I'm sure this is a difference-of-learning or whatever, but I'm usually unwilling to try a product until I can understand it and how it works from the documentation
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#23[flagged]
the US is the centre of the world, and AI is at the centre of US attention!
why would anyone do anything else, anywhere else?
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not wrong. The documentation actually had a hallucinated link to an Anthropic dependency in it when we shipped. Right now the attitude is mostly "if we have to document it extensively, we're doing something wrong". It's been in the works for awhile , with a small team, and we're just getting it out there right now. I've been needling Kurt for several months now that if we wait until it's polished enough that w…
I'm sure this is a difference-of-learning or whatever, but I'm usually unwilling to try a product until I can understand it and how it works from the documentation
Understandable. Our current take is that there's not really much to know, and that the people this will really light up are good with that. Of course, we'll flesh out documentation!
I'm really jazzed about this particular product as a product (I just really enjoy using it), but the post is mostly about how we built it, and deliberately not much about how best to use it.
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#25Tried it. Docker wasn't preinstalled so asked Claude to do it and make sure it's running (supervisord or the likes isn't preinstalled). It neatly did so and "registered" it as a sprite service. Then I exited my session, waiting for the sprite to go idle, but I don't think it ever does.. Still have it active. Don't know how to idle it. Can't tell for sure if this means I'm losing credits as there is no billing usage s…
There's no way to stop sprites from the CLI.
Supposedly they auto-stop when inactive.
But I've tried multiple times and they don't stop, and it's not just Docker that prevents them from stopping.
I created a new sprite and installed ffmpeg. Then exited. Next day I run `sprite ls` and it's been running continuously for 23 hours.
No way to tell if I'm being billed for it or not.
And the per-hour pricing is extremely expensive.
So for now it's `sprite destroy -s spritename`.
Maybe I'll check it out again in a few months after the fly team has iterated on this a few times.
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#26The sprite is a pretty outdated thing these days, but is the term sufficiently unused to make it free for reuse?
What's a sprite?
A graphical object composited just in time in display scanning process.
(Or in other words, a graphical object on screen that is not present in a framebuffer of any kind.)
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#27This is not the kind of sprites I'm interested in
Thought this was going to be a deep dive into sprite sheets.
Low and behold, yet another AI product selling advertisement + veiled promotion on HN.
It's almost as if the guidelines don't matter anymore. From [0].
'Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.'
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a hardware-isolated Linux shell with a durable disk you can conjure out of the sky on 1.5 seconds notice that costs virtually nothing when you're not actively using it. If we could have shipped this in 2021, before anyone thought coding agents would work, we'd have barfed on our shoes with excitement.
[flagged]
Please read and follow the HN Guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#29Tried it. Docker wasn't preinstalled so asked Claude to do it and make sure it's running (supervisord or the likes isn't preinstalled). It neatly did so and "registered" it as a sprite service. Then I exited my session, waiting for the sprite to go idle, but I don't think it ever does.. Still have it active. Don't know how to idle it. Can't tell for sure if this means I'm losing credits as there is no billing usage s…
There's no way to stop sprites from the CLI. Supposedly they auto-stop when inactive. But I've tried multiple times and they don't stop, and it's not just Docker that prevents them from stopping. I created a new sprite and installed ffmpeg. Then exited. Next day I run `sprite ls` and it's been running continuously for 23 hours. No way to tell if I'm being billed for it or not. And the per-hour pricing is extremely ex…
Sprites are active when:
* They're servicing an incoming HTTP request.
* You're interacting with a console.
They're hair-trigger inactive otherwise. They don't bill CPU unless they're active. The idea is that there isn't really any uncertainty about when it's running; when you stop interacting with it it stops metering.
This is a new shape for a cloud computing thingy and there'll be snags this week with it, but we don't make our money by billing people for stuff they don't want. We've always gone out of our way not to nickel-and-dime casual users and we're trying hard to find new ways to lean into that here.
(Destroying a Sprite you're done with is a perfectly reasonable move; they're disposable.)
Re: Design and Implementation of Sprites
#30Tried it. Docker wasn't preinstalled so asked Claude to do it and make sure it's running (supervisord or the likes isn't preinstalled). It neatly did so and "registered" it as a sprite service. Then I exited my session, waiting for the sprite to go idle, but I don't think it ever does.. Still have it active. Don't know how to idle it. Can't tell for sure if this means I'm losing credits as there is no billing usage s…
There's no way to stop sprites from the CLI. Supposedly they auto-stop when inactive. But I've tried multiple times and they don't stop, and it's not just Docker that prevents them from stopping. I created a new sprite and installed ffmpeg. Then exited. Next day I run `sprite ls` and it's been running continuously for 23 hours. No way to tell if I'm being billed for it or not. And the per-hour pricing is extremely ex…
Yeah. My sprites never idled inspite of having nothing running in them and had to be destroyed. Ideally there should be two settings
1. A timeout after the last console session is exited 2. Force idle using the CLI