Also Graphical Adventure Creator for the Amstrad CPC. I loved it, but failed to produce even a single adventure. My perfectionist tendencies made sure any progress ground to a halt almost immediately over text, logic or graphics!

My family had a copy of Graphical Adventure Creator too, I similarly failed to produce anything of note but I do remember having a lot of fun playing around with it and trying to design screens.

I, rightly or wrongly, attribute my love of computers to playing around on the family CPC, I really want to encourage that in my kids but I don't know what the equivalent is - I'm pretty sure it's not buying them a tablet, Raspberry Pi 500 maybe?

Lots of kids still making games with engines like GameMaker Studio!

I think lots of kids will start playing around with Claude Code in this way as well.

Are you riding on roads or trails? How are you treated by other road users? I'm tempted by ebikes but live in semi-rural UK with very poor (and getting worse) road surface and lots of blind bends.

As a regular bike commuter in cities with hit and miss roads, With big enough tires (tyres?) it's totally fine, there are some ebikes out there with massive tires. I'd be more concerned about the blind bends and presumably due to semi-rural people driving very fast. If there's a broad shoulder or you can get off the road at a moments notice then it could be okay but as with most things the cars are the biggest danger.

I largely ride on paved bike trails that are wholly separate from the roads, or suburban residential roads that have a Swiss cheese of bike trails interconnecting via parks. It’s never the fastest way, but there’s almost always a “safe way” to bike somewhere, due to a lot of effort by our city council. I’m more avoidant of the major roads, an elderly man was extremely close to me and my kid in her bike trailer when he made a right turn, I think I’d be more cautious if I didn’t have so many accessible ways to bike separate from the roads.

Oddly a lot of the “guys with road bikes wearing full gear” seem to just ride on the road anyway. I have no idea why, I’ve double checked the laws and I’m allowed to ride there.

Did you use a fire grate with a big space underneath and keep it swept clean? Or did you build up a big bed of ash under the grate? On the advice of a chimney sweep I put a perimeter of bricks under the grate to form walls and we're currently filling it with more and more ash (it really takes a while). It's starting to make a difference in how much heat comes back into the room. Without that void underneath, the fire doesn't burn so hot and cold air doesn't get pulled through so quickly.

(It feels like it's getting warmer - may all be wishful thinking though, I haven't taken any measurements!)

You... you must have been quite some 5 year old.

ELI5 has meant friendly simplified explanations (not responses aimed at literal five-year-olds) since forever, at least on the subreddit where the concept originated.

Now, perhaps referring to differentiability isn't layperson-accessible, but this is HN after all. I found it to be the perfect degree of simplification personally.

Some things would be literally impossible to properly explain to a 5 year old.

If one actually tried to explain to a five year old, they can use things like analogy, simile, metaphor, and other forms of rhetoric. This was just a straight-up technical explanation.

Lol. Def not for 5 year olds but it's about exactly what I needed

How about this:

Take a lot of pictures of a scene from different angles, do some crazy math, and then you can later pretend to zoom and pan the camera around however you want

sure, but does that explanation really help anyone. Imo it might scare people off actually diving into things, the math isn't too crazy.

Anybody sufficiently interested would press further, not back away.

Saying math (even using it in a dismissive tldr) is immensely helpful. Specifically, I've never encountered these terms before:

- point cloud - fuzzy ellipsoid - view-dependent color - spherical harmonics - low order - differentiable renderer (what makes it differentiable? A renderer creates images, right?) - subtract the resulting image from the ground truth (good to know this means your original photos, but how do you subtract images from images?) - millions of ellipsoid parameters (the explanation previously mentioned 4 parameters by name. Where are the millions coming from?) - gradient descent (I've heard of this in AI, but usually ignore it because I haven't gotten deep enough into it to need to understand what it means) - 3D point cloud's positions (are all point clouds 3d? The point cloud mentioned earlier wasn't. Or was it? Is this the same point cloud?)

In other words, you've explained this at far too high a level for me. Given that the request was for ELI5, I expected an explanation that I could actually follow, without knowing any specific terminology. Do disregard specifics and call it math. Don't just call it math and skip past it entirely: call it math and explain what you're actually doing with the math, rather than trying to explain the math you're doing; same for all the other words. If a technical term is only needed once in a conversation, then don't use it.

Given that I actually do know what photogrammetry is at a basic level, I can make a best-effort translation here, but it's purely from 100% guessing rather than actually understanding:

1. Create a 3d scan of a real-life scene or object. It uses radar (intentionally incorrect term, more familiar) or multiple photographs at different angles to see the 3 dimensional shape.

2. For some reason, break up the stapes into smaller shapes.

This is where my understanding goes to nearly 0:

3-5: somehow, looking at the difference between a rendering of your 3d scene and a picture of the actual scene allows you to correct the errors in the 3d scene to make it more realistic. Using complex math works better and having the computer do it is less effort than manually correcting the models in your 3d scene.

The experience of driving in cities is inherently shittier as cities get larger.

I second the Yoto. My son and I have had much fun making our own cards and I got pretty good at extracting audiobooks from YouTube, processing them with audacity and making cards of book series that he was into. You can fit a staggering amount onto a single card (5hrs of audio if memory serves).

Honestly that was the biggest extra feature for us, we quickly exhausted all the Yoto store content that appealed, and weren't into any of the big franchise content (except a pleasantly surprising read of Pixar's "Cars") or joining the Yoto club.

Is the data stored on the card, or on the player? My guess is that each card just holds an id?

It's just an id. But the audio is stored on the yoto itself for offline play.

And second the blank/customizable cards, that's what 80% of our cards are and my daughter loves helping track down and extract content. Biggest hits for her have been Roald Dahl and random science stuff.

Roald Dahl has been great for the whole family, we do a lot of driving and listen to them in the car. We are very picky about the narrator's voice. Best so far have been The Witches (Miranda Richardson), Matilda (Kate Winslet) and the BFG (David Walliams - I don't like him personally but he is a great reader). Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a disappointment, the narrator garbles and throws away the lines.

Also David Tennant reading the How To Train Your Dragon series. He is a superb reader with an amazing range. Before he hit the big time with Dr Who he did a lot of radio.

We've also had family members record stories and I've put them onto cards. We gave my son a dictaphone to record his own stuff. He would do great long sagas of mayhem and battle, but he's lost interest in recent months.

There must be some pretty industrial strength compartmentalising going on.

Xfce has long been the only DE that gets out of my way enough for me to actually be productive instead of excited by the possibility of different configurations.

Have you tried a tiling window manager? All I want is an empty black screen and an app launcher.

I admit I'm intrigued by the idea. Do you have any recommendations?

The main tiling window manager using Wayland is Sway, although personally I like the simplicity of DWM. You can easily edit the configuration and compile it yourself.

One of the things I love about XFCE is its modularity. It's literally just a collection of programs that work independently, so while I use DWM, if I need a panel, I just type "panel" into dmenu, and XFCE panel runs right on top of it with no problems, aligning perfectly over the DWM top bar.

If you want to try a more complete DE, I'd recommend COSMIC. It's fresh and fast and very customizable.

Adobe programs were the worst offenders for this in my experience.

My dad told me of one Christmas he spent in Sheffield in the early 60s. He'd been ill or something and missed his train back home so he was moping about miserably. Then his Polish flatmate came home, took him to a park and taught him how to catch a duck (he mimed the actions used, with some string as a snare) which they roasted for Christmas dinner. There's something grim, damp, probably illegal, but also convivial and ingenious about the story that makes me think of Withnail and Marwood in Regent's Park.