IVANCA

[ivanca]

How to Bypass Google's AI restrictions when upscaling images

So the moral police loves to decide what images you can or cannot upscale when using tools like Google Gemini, ChatGPT and so on, I have found that you can (most of the times) bypass such kind of detection by obfuscating the image: By distorting it, upscaling it, then when you get the upscaled image you do the reverse operation on it. This works really well with Google's AI but not so much for ChatGPT, mostly for 3 reasons, 1st: it has stronger detection techniques, 2nd: Frequently crops the image in unwanted ways, 3rd: It frequently hallucinates objects and people that aren't in the original image (despite just asking it to upscale it). So I recommend you use Google's AI nano banana if you want to try this.

But first of all this is all for educational purposes and you are likely better of using other upscaling tools, and I encourage you to not break any legal agreements you may have with Google and any other AI companies, and if you decide to do so you are responsible for any consequences that may have, legal or otherwise.

Let's cut to the chase: First you need to invert the hue of the image (and I mean just the HUE, not the colors because that involves brightness), in image editing software like Photoshop that means change the hue 180 degrees, after that flip the image vertically, then warp the image but specifically you must use some kind of warp that can be reversed, and also a warp that doesn't make you lose any pixels (e.g. it doesn't push any pixels out the image, only "stretches" them a bit), in Photoshop the perfect warp for this is called wave with a 50% strength, see in action here:

Before you ask, yes, this historical image from the holocaust memorial museum is one of those images AI tools' automatic moral police do not allow to upscale.

Doing this process manually with Photoshop or GIMP can be tedious and error-prone so I created a Chrome extension to do it (almost) automatically: https://github.com/Ivanca/bypass-gpt

To be clear this extension helps you with the image edition part, you still have to drag and drop the resulting images into the AI prompt and ask it to upscale them, then give those back to the extension, but that should take mere seconds, here is a gif showing the whole process:

I will try to make the extension readily available in the Chrome Web Store but that may take a while (...or Google may not allow me at all), in the meantime the previous link includes instructions about how to install it manually (I tested it in Chrome, I will check about Firefox in the upcoming days).

And yes, the extension has some rough edges but I will try to get them sorted out soon, also keep in mind it works better with photos instead of stuff with "empty borders" like the one I tried on the example.

As a final note, I want to mention that ChatGPT itself (codex preview) helped me create this extension and I love the tiny bit of irony in that.

As a even more final note, I want to mention that I'm looking for job as a Front-end developer (or Full-stack), including freelance opportunities, so if you are interested in any of that you are more than welcome to drop me a line, my email it's the very same name of this blog at gmail dot com.

[ivanca]

On Chrome the Google login dialog shows up on top of the search dialog

I was visiting the stackoverflow website and I realized something, the Google login dialog is showing on top of the "find" dialog, turns out the dialog is not part of the HTML of the page, is some proprietary Chrome thing that the site is triggering inside the browser itself, clicking it the field again does nothing so it just stays in the background, a glaring UI issue; a few other Chrome menus do show up on front as expected, so this seems like an oversight, as well as reminder of another power grab by Google to create its own thing for themselves... its in my humble opinion that maybe separating Chrome from the rest of the company would be for the best, there would be some tradeoffs like the budget Google has for quickly fixing security issues among other things but I think it would be a tradeoff worth making.

[ivanca]

Walking behind her

This a short fictional story, in dire need of a good editor.

Every time I see a woman walking alone in the dark I feel the need to protect her but I can't get close because that would be threatening, better to forget about her and keep walking, but maybe I can keep an eye on her? just from afar, oh fuck we have been walking more than 10 blocks together, is she going to someone near my house? She is obviously thinking that I'm following her and that I am a threat, wait - maybe it's all in my head, yeah you are just a human trying to get to your destination, if the route happens to be the same than a random person that's not your problem, yeah, I will keep walking to my address, I'm sure her route will be different than mine soon enough and I'm overthinking it, oh shit - she turned right when I need to turn right too, there is no way I can just turn right now, I'll just stand here and look at my phone for a few minutes, it's gonna get darker but it's Ok, I'm sure it will be long enough for her to walk away, lets just watch some memes, that always makes time fly, "Give me that phone!" I heard as I feel a sharp object against my back, I freeze for a few seconds then I give him my phone, "give me all your money!", I empty my pockets, there is just a single 20 dollar bill, he takes it, spins and starts to quickly walk away.

I'm trying to process what just happened, I start walking really fast towards my house, I see that the woman I wasn't following its now in my path again, intrusive thoughts win despite still being in panic mode, thoughts about her safety and how she feels about me, I consider them intrusive now that I have bigger concerns as it is to get home ASAP, doesn't matter, they scream loud in my head, its ridiculous, maybe I should just shout my address then she will know where I'm going and that I am not following her? Wait that's crazy - I can't just shout my address, focus man focus, I just need to get home, fuck her fears - I just need to get home, its just gonna take a couple of minutes to walk right by her now that I'm walking faster, the moment of truth I'm overtaking her, she sprays a gas against me, oh shit its pepper spray I think, I'm not sure, I try to say "Wtf women" but instead I gasp out loud and its intelligible, she runs screaming as I sit on the footway

What is this day, why is this happening to me, I recompose enough to keep walking, now much slower again, if someone tries to mug me again I'm just gonna punch them, if that doesn't work then I am gonna be stabbed and I will be death, somehow tgat doesn't sound so bad right now, I try to think that better times will come, I start blaming myself, "of course overtaking her at that speed was gonna frighten her you idiot", but another part counteracts, "if you had overtaken her at right at the beginning where it was bright and there was a wide pathway this wouldn't have happened at all", that is not making me feel any better, "you did the right thing, it was just an accident, if she knew that you had no ill intentions this wouldn't have happened", yeah she is right to assume ill intentions from me right? Yeah there are too many bad men out there, and I could be one of them, does that mean I should kill myself? What? Where does that come from? Yeah you have determined women would feel safer if you just didn't exist right? That's too dark stop being so dramatic maybe I should just avoid walking alone at night, no Idiot! if I walk with other men that would just scare them even more, yeah I just need to avoid walking at night all together, yeah like the opposite of batman haha, I bet if I told someone that one they would laugh with me, oh right I don't have any friends, I foolishly let die the two friendships I had from high school, I think I assumed others would come later or something, my mind its gonna kill me, lets just turn the TV; just my luck there is an interview about the wage gap, some woman it's quoting how much female CEOs win against male CEOs, it's impossible for me to not remember I earn a minimum wage, this is not doing anything good for my mental health, lets just turn off the tv, I will just play some music I like, the ads on Spotify remind me I'm too poor to have a premium subscription, the third ad comes through and I cannot take it anymore and just shut it down too, silence I think for myself, silence is still free, and I try to relax to the sound of silence, my eyes betray me and they point me to a letter I received that morning, it's from the landlord asking for the delayed rent, I immediately recall it's not really a landlord but a landlady, I cannot avoid thinking that she earns more than me, after all she has a couple other properties in this same building, maybe more, I only found out about those from overhearing stuff in the elevator, where is the wage gap there? Wtf that doesn't make any sense, we don't have similar jobs, the wage gap it's about pay in the same job stupid, then I remember that there cannot be any wage gap for me, I earn a minimum wage, they earn the same and that's it, wait they want me to care about the difference between people that earn more than me? and that I should care that the reason behind it is related to genders? I recall now that some people do believe they will get a better job in the future so maybe for them it's easy to care, that the wage gap will eventually affect them, I'm pretty sure I no longer have those hopes.

Another morning, that shitty day it's behind me and this one is just gonna be regular one, nothing particularly good but nothing particularly bad will happen and that will be good enough, I take the elevator, there is a very pretty woman there, perfect body, full makeup, must be a influencer or something, she is talking over the phone, "If you really love me just give me the code" -silence- "That is not enough I need the numbers or we are done" -long silence- wait wait, she takes the phone away from her ear and starts typing something, then put its back on her ear and shouts "I knew you truly loved me, from the first time I saw you I knew you were one of the good ones! I love you! -- Yes tomorrow -- Bye sweetheart!", I assume he just gave her some bank account password, or something close enough, I see her body in her nice skin tight outfit and cannot help feeling strongly attracted to her, shit! Maybe I would do the same if I were him? The attraction I feel is quite something. I would like to believe I'm smart enough to avoid being abused in such a way but my judgment is severely impaired just by looking at her so I cast serious doubt about that, hell! a part of me wants me to just slap her butt, how would that help me in any way whatsoever? She would scream, other guys would rightfully punch me after she informs them of what happened, any pleasure wouldn't even span more than one second or two so why am I even thinking about it? Of course the very first reason that thought shouldn't exist its because it's evil, I wouldn't want someone to touch my butt without my permission so why I would do the same to someone else, well that moral filter clearly failed so I guess I'm just a bad man like that, wait I haven't acted on it so I'm not a bad man, maybe not one of the best ones but definitely not a bad one, did that moral filter ever worked or I just hadn't felt that much attracted before? oh shit maybe it's impossible to tell.

My expectations were all wrong, I got fired today, I missed a call to start my shift earlier, and I said "missed" in the spatial sense since it happened wherever the thief is and not in my pocket; the fears start seething in, I see homeless people on my way home and cannot stop thinking I will be one of them soon, I try to counteract those thoughts by thinking that I almost certainly qualify for unemployment benefits, that fails as maybe I just don't know much about law and maybe there is some reason I don't qualify, I realize that all of them are men, a detail that I had completely overlooked until now that the fear of becoming one sets in.

I seem to recall that feminist from TV saying that the patriarchy puts men ahead of women so I have the silliest thought and wonder "what is the patriarchy's number?", right now it feels like if they put me ahead of anyone it would be an improvement, even some pets have better than me, if they can put me ahead of one of those it will certainly help, but the patriarchy doesn't have a number, its more of a philosophical thing right? They don't call it that but surely its what they meant, stop thinking about all that silliness, lets just try to get some sleep, my head will be clearer with a bit more sleep.

I was right, I don't qualify for unemployment benefits, a bit later as I walk from the store from buying the last meal I will probably be able to afford in a while I realize I'm once again walking behind a woman without any other soul in sight, my life is in shambles but I still cannot help but think about how she feels unsafe because I'm walking behind her, and I ask myself "why do I fucking care?" I have it so bad so why do I care about her feelings of safety, it's my life that's in ruins now why does my brain bothers me with such things? How do I stop caring? That last question struck quite a nerve so I just stand still for I don't know how long, as I come to my senses the woman is long gone and there is even a few other people walking by, "let's prevent this from happening ever again" I tell myself, no women will feel unsafe thanks to me ever again, or maybe that is just an unemployed man trying to see himself as philanthropic and it had nothing to do with recalling that I have a shotgun somewhere at home.

[ivanca]

The only thing I want AI to help me automate are its own users

I want chat-gpt to simulate as best as it can its current users, and why not, its future users as well, specially the ones more likely to make an economic impact, that means use cases that are likely to render some existing job positions useless (and also, those that may create new jobs) I hope it doesn't miss the mark, I hope it can tell me exactly what its being used for, and not only that but I hope it can accurately simulate each one of those use cases in the real-life context the users are using it, perhaps it knows the actual use cases because its saving them and therefore can give me 100% accurate responses about that; but I want to go a little bit further, I want it to extrapolate the most likely context that every one of those task are being executed, and I want it to help me simulate such users as much as it cans, yeah, that means impersonating, I know its unlikely to help me with such information but perhaps I can ask it in such a way that I get a response, maybe my grandma loved to tell me stories of impersonators.

Of course I'm aware that someone might want to go even further with this idea and ask it to predict what I would do with such information (if anything) or anything similar, I know, its turtles all the way down, but I don't care as long as I get to be a part of get that ball rolling. Full disclosure: I want to bypass the step where the first users (e.g techies) destroy other peoples lives and arrive directly where they themselves are automated, might it be by others like them, or as a revenge by the victims of the former.

[ivanca]

Chrome Extension To Hide Microtransactions in Steam (Open-Source)

Are you tired of being shown microtransaction/skins ads -and other DLCs- on Steam that you are never interested on? Wait no more, I created a Chrome Extension to hide all DLCs on Steam: Link at Chrome Web store here!

You may ask, why to use this if there is an existing filtering functionaly to only show full games when you search? First, its because this extention hides them from everywhere, not only when you search, so it works regardless of filtering options available on any given page; also, the existing filtering has to be set manually every single time by activing it (clicking "Games" at "Show selected types"), this extension doesn't need such thing; also if you ever need to temporarily see them again this extention adds a big button with the label "Include DLCs back", just click it again when you are ready to go back to hiding those.

I know is hard to trust people so if you don't want to get automatic updates for this extension as an alternative you can download it directly from Github and run it locally using the "load unpacked extension", check the official Chrome docs if you need help with that; you can find the repository for this extension at https://github.com/Ivanca/hide-dlcs-on-steam, its less than 200 lines of code and is fairly readable and its MIT licensed. If there is any interest for it I will work on make it compatible with Firefox as well.

Offtopic: I'm looking for job at the moment so if you or your company are interested in a full-stack developer with more than 10 years of experience specially in JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Node and PHP let me know, I'm open to remote opportunities (as I live in Colombia), if you want to get in touch about this (e.g. to ask me about my CV before making any desicion) you may mail me at ivanca -> gmail.

[ivanca]

Building a Chrome extension to make Reddit faster

So, reddit.com sometimes hangs and I'm gonna do something about it, my idea is to build a Chrome extension to do so, lets do this; first lets check using Chrome devtools what the "performance" tab can tell us:

A lot going on, lets see if we can find something blocking the main thread, most of that is usually under "evaluate script", its already sorted by "total time" so I just open the first item and the first child to see the likely culprits,

Devtools doesn't have horizontal scroll, but luckilyl making it fullscreen is good enough to read the deepest nesting

WTF, Chrome is complaining about not being able to open the link it gave me for "index.ts"? Bummer, lets try a few others up the chain, I try other folders up the chain and find something called governanceReddit.js and that opens fine, there we see that the other file it failed to open actually lives here as a single function and not an actual file:

So it some sort of bug with the sourcemaps that point to a unreachable URL; but wait, I see something further down, it seems like some performance measuring code may be making things slower itself, how ironic.

Lets see if we can just delete all that, we can do that by using what devtools calls "overrides", first lets see how it looks:

This is just an excerpt, It just goes on and on, lets just return nothing and check if nothing breaks:

After fiddling a bit it looks like downvoting/upvoting stopped working mmh... but I see that this is a ".tsx" extension so it is a React component, maybe I can just return a empty component and that is fixes it? But everything is minified, maybe can I ask copilot to do it! Lets try:

Yey! It seems like it knows how to do it, here is the full bit of code it generated (pun intended, btw I always intend my puns)

...and that didn't help at all, bummer, lets go to the console for clues of what is breaking:

This error wasn't happening before, and checking the code I deleted before I see that "EntryPointStart" was mentioned there, I tried adding that back but still get the same error; I check what else I deleted and there seem to be a lot of exports, because they look like this:

, maybe I can return nothing and fix it, but what is nothing in this context? Maybe Copilot can help with that:

A function? That looks plausible, lets bring back everything used in those that were tiny, check this gist to see how it ended up looking like.

Lets check if that works:

Success! I can upvote and downvote once again!

Another thing I noticed is extremely slow is collapsing comments, so lets try improving that, so I profiled that and yep, the click event for collapsing comments is painfully slow:

I don't want to go that rabbit hole so I'm just gonna modify the function used as event listener and I'm gonna write the same functionality myself because I'm confident that I can do it a lot faster; I found the right event listener by removing those one by one on the "Elements" tab at the "Event listeners" in the sidebar:

So I wrote code to do the same functionality that you may find here on this gist, and yeah its became much faster with my code:

One of the reasons is faster is that I'm not using the CSS of "display: none" but instead using "pointer-events: none" plus "position: absolute", also I'm not changing the layout of the avatars, instead the button to un-hide stuff uses "position: absolute" and has no animations, there is one feature I didn't recreate which is storing what you save to restore it automatically, but that's not important for me (I believe it would be quite faster even if after implented such thing).

I created the extension with a bit of help from ChatGPT4 (prompt and its response) that gave me the code to change the requests instead of using devtools overrides because otherwise I would have to manually open devtools and that would be counterproductive.

The extension will be for personal use -not published in the Chrome store- specially because obviously these optmizations are flimsy given that any update by Reddit on their JavaScript or HTML layout could break things up; I don't think is updated that often but better not risk it.

Afterthoughts:

Chrome crashed a lot during this, it was usually easier to close the reddit tab and start again than to wait for Chrome to respond, by experience I know this has to do with having devtools open.

The code being minified and without source maps certainly makes things harder, but not impossible.

Chrome devtools doesn't save if you uncheked "Disable cache", that really slowed things out, but for some reason it only slowed things up when I was refreshing the page and using overrides, using a new tab was blazing fast, not sure what the deal is there.

Chrome couldn't find the URLS that started with the non-standard protocol "webpack://" but later I find out that turning off JavaScript sourcemaps on devtools solved the problem

Reddit code has a lot of room for improvement to speed things up, it also has dead code, stuff like:

BTW I'm looking for a job:

This may be a good opportunity to say that I'm looking for a remote job, I live in Colombia (yeah, South America) and I have more than 13 years of experience with JavaScript as well as TypeScript, Python and PHP, maybe you can refer me to your company (some companies give bonuses for that!) or your own startup; I'm pretty good at mentoring junior developers and have worked in both small and big companies, if you are interested drop me a line at ivanca at gmail.

[ivanca]

I Went Above And Beyond To Get The Frontend Job I Wanted But It Didn't Work.

I was very interested in a job position in Europe that came with visa sponsorship. While browsing the company's website, I noticed their sleek CSS animations. However, one diagram stood out because it was static:

Seeing this, an idea struck me. They were on the hunt for a Frontend developer. Why not showcase my skills by transforming this static image into HTML elements with polished CSS3 animations? I saw it as a great opportunity to experiment with Figma, which I believed could assist in generating some of the required HTML and CSS. My strategy was to initially craft it in a 2D format (from top to bottom). After exporting, I planned to manually infuse a 3D touch, incorporating aspects like rotation and bevels. Creating the three lines that interconnected each square was undoubtedly the most challenging. Positioning becomes a tad complex with intricate designs in Figma, especially when layering one element over another. Yet, I must admit, Figma proved to be quite a robust tool. Here’s what it looked like at that stage:

I then attempted to export the CSS/HTML using a Figma plugin named "Anima". Unfortunately, it didn't quite hit the mark. Rather than creating individual HTML components for each square and connecting line, it compacted everything into a singular static image. This was a far cry from what I was aiming for. To provide a clearer picture: in Figma, I had primarily used two layers, one for elements with absolute positioning and another for those with relative positioning. The plugin merged the latter into one bitmap image. My persistence paid off when I realized that exporting the relative layer by itself worked perfectly. My subsequent task was to individually export the components and manually integrate them using my local code editor.

However, there was a minor hiccup with the borders. Since CSS doesn't natively support gradient colors for borders and the plugin didn't offer a workaround, the borders ended up looking quite blocky. This was especially evident with the circular elements at the bottom, as can be observed here:

After exporting the HTML I started by rotating the full container, but the big beveled cyan square needed to look 3D and not like a flat surface so I had to add create some additional HTML elements:

Then I animated it (on mouse hover) using it "scaleX" on the ::before and ::after selectors (the "bevels") and then "translate" on the big square itself (otherwise it wouldn't look like going down but stuck mid-air):

While I might have glossed over a few steps, if you're curious about the technicalities or you want to see it live here it is: https://replit.com/@IvanCastellanos/demo-css-animation?v=1

I even went the extra mile by creating a video on YouTube to showcase my entire process. However, despite my efforts, I didn't secure the position. The feedback I received was rather generic, stating, "[...]we don’t think there’s a good fit for the position you applied for". It makes me wonder: perhaps going the extra mile isn't always appreciated, or maybe it boils down to the individual reviewing the application. Nevertheless, it was a good learning experience.

If, by chance, you or your organization are scouting for talent, feel free to drop me a message at ivanca at gmail. My expertise spans JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, PHP, and Python. And at the moment I'm open to opportunities for remote work or one that offers visa sponsorship.

[ivanca]

ChatGPT can generate HTML/CSS based on simple ASCII mockups

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that ChatGPT 4 can interpret simple ASCII art and do a decent job converting simple designs into HTML/CSS; to quickly create the initial ASCII design I'm using this online tool https://asciiflow.com/ and for the prompt I have used "Generate HTML and CSS (using flexbox) based on the following ascii art:"

Some examples of the ASCII and the result:

Result:

Example #2:

Result:

For this last example the attempt to make it generate a SVG donut chart failed (it gave me a placeholder and suggested to use a JS library to do so instead), so I had to ask it to replace it with vertical bars which are easier to generate, I also had to ask it to "hardcode all countries that belong to the European Union even if its not practical or maintanable" because it was giving me a placeholder and suggesting to "Use an API" to fetch those, which is not bad advice but for quick mockups may not be desirable.

I tried more complicated task like making it animate an ASCII cat art using multiple elements (as they were "frames") but it consitently failed, it did seem to understand that it should show just one element each fraction or a second to the create the motion illusion but it failed on the artistic endeavor of modyfing existing ASCII art.

I hope you find this info helpful, and if you have insights of what works and what doesn't when using ASCII art on ChatGPT to mock up webpages (or anything else) feel free to share those in the comment section below or in the HN thread.

That's the end of the post but while you are here...

My name is Ivan and I'm a Full-stack programmer, I live in Colombia and I’m looking for a remote job as Full-Stack Engineer so if you or you company are interested in hiring just let me know! I'm also open to Visa Sponsorship opportunities (EU or US). I have more than 10 years of experience with JavaScript, as well as a few years with TypeScript, React, Python, PHP, Git and Node, as well as knowledge of good software practices such as SOLID architecture, unit testing, regression testing, e2e testing; if you are interested in hiring me please reach me at ivanca at gmail

[ivanca]

Hide Job Listings From Companies You Are Not Interested On LinkedIn (extension for Firefox & Chrome)

Have you noticed that some companies have a bit too many job listings on LinkedIn? Have you ever wanted to hide some of those companies from your suggestions? With the help of this Chrome extension "Hide Items By Link" you can do just that, as the name suggests you can hide elements by a given link on them, but it also supports hidding by any text you have selected! Select the name of the company then right-click it and click "Hide items that contain this text" and that's it; here is a gif showing as much:

This extension is also available for Firefox, which is important to notice has a more granular security model because it requires you to grant access to the extension for each domain (Firefox will show such prompt at the top right corner after you try to use it for the first time).

What else can it do?

Another useful thing you can do with this is to hide Google results from sources you don't want to see, as seen in the following gif:

It can also help you hide channels you dislike from the search results at YouTube, just right-click over the channel name and select "Hide items with this link".

this method is a bit more reliable than text selection but on many websites items do not share a common link (like the channel link in this case) so its not always possible to use this.

While you are here...

My name is Ivan and I'm the creator of this extension, I live in Colombia and at the moment I'm looking for a remote job as Full-Stack Engineer so if you or you company are interested in hiring just let me know! My target salary is 48k (yearly) I have more than 10 years of experience with JavaScript, as well as a few years with TypeScript, React, Python, PHP, Git, Node and many other technologies, as well as software practices such as SOLID architecture, unit testing, regression testing, and e2e testing. You may write me to ivanca at gmáil.

[ivanca]

Making the ultimate-guitar.com music player easier to practice with

Recently I have been practicing a few songs on my guitar and I realized that is important for me to not move away my hands from my guitar, when I do it because I need to use the mouse or keyboard I lose a bit of focus and some precious time, not to mention is not good for my back as I have to lean forward, doing this one time wouldn’t be a problem but as I sometimes do it more than 100 times in a single day it can start hurting! (my body reminds me I’m no longer in my twenties!).

I’m a programmer so I decided to try to create a solution myself after not finding existing solutions online, so I decided to buy a USB pedal, one of those you can press to simulate any key on your keyboard, but this was just the first step as there isn’t actually a single key I can press to rewind to the current section of the song, the ultimate-guitar.com web player lacks a button or hotkey to do that; fortunately I can write some JavaScript and add it myself with the help of tampermonkey (you may user your preferred userscript manager); first of all a warning: Technical jargon soon ahead!

My requirements are just 2 commands, one to go back to the start of the part being played of the song (e.g. verse, chorus, bridge) and another to go back to the start of the selected part of the song... but the thing is that I only have one USB pedal! And I don’t want to buy another! Plus I don’t want to move my feet around, I’m practicing guitar here not drums! So I just made a bit of code that does one thing when pressed once and a different thing when is pressed twice, in JavaScript code that is pretty easy to achieve using setTimeout.

About the first command: After fiddling it a bit I discovered that the main part of the ultimate-gutar.com player (the tablature) uses obfuscated WASM code that renders over a canvas element using WebGL (it seems like this was a desktop software that was transformed into a web version), fortunately for me there is a little bar at the bottom made of simple plain DOM elements (e.g. not canvas) with a little green line signifying the player’s position, it looks like this:

First I tried to use the left offset of each part to calculate where to simulate a click but that wasn't working too well, I did some tests and sometimes it was moving after or before the desired position, playing before is not a big deal but playing after is unacceptable, so I fiddled a bit more with the HTML and realized there was a much better source of data to make such calculation:

The different parts have their widths specified with percentages with 5 decimal places! This means that data has not been clamped like the offsets I was trying to use, those are limited by the amount of pixels available on the screen. Great, so I started using that porcentual width, and I add those until I reach a number greater than the porcentual position of the green line, as expected this gave me much better results and now the simulated click was moving me to the desired position, the code ended up looking like this:

Then I created the second command which was pretty straightforward giving that I can get the desired result simulating a click on the restart button (⏮) and then the play button (⏵), so the code ended up looking like this:

That’s it! You may find the full code: at https://gist.github.com/Ivanca/a90848f8ee4d7f62e939630013e214d8 While we are at it I would like to mention I’m looking for a TypeScript/JavaScript full-time remote job position, I have more than 12 years of experience using JavaScript, and I have experience with PHP, Python, C#, React and Angular as well, I’m located in Colombia (so not the US), if you or your company are interested ping me at ivanca at gmail.

[ivanca]

Overwatch had everything to be one of the best FPS games of all time, then Blizzard let it rot.

When Overwatch opened its beta version in 2016 I was visiting the US, I borrowed money from a local bank for that trip, I didn’t take my gamer pc with me, why should I? I was there to find some funding for my startup idea (or at least a co-founder), and for that task my outdated laptop was enough, it had been a few months and my lack of preparation and skills to pitch my startup were clearly showing and it was taking a toll emotionally. I knew the date of the open beta of Overwatch so I did something a bit reckless: I spend some of the little money I had to visit a gaming center place in downtown berkeley where you can use a gaming PC and pay per hour, as expected one little voice in my head harshly complained about why I’m being so short-sigthed? I had a gaming PC back home where I could play it if I just waited to return to my country, but I knew I badly needed a distraction from my frustations, so I payed for an hour, and it didn’t just distract me, it gave me thrills that I had never experienced from an fps, before that day my definition of an online FPS was hardcoded by Counter Strike and Call Of Duty, the classic stuff: a game where almost all guns are recreations of how wars are fought in real life so most of the time you aim and click, aim and click, rinse and repeat, sure there are grenades and some other stuff but it always felt secondary, hard-limited to a quantity of one or two per player, it always felt like tiny breaks from shooting and not much else, even sci-fi powers like seeing the footsteps of your enemy where all just helpers the player to reach the point where they aim and shot; and I enjoyed the hell out of those games (and still do!), but Overwatch showed me a whole different world, almost the complete opposite, and I found myself in a FPS where the likelyhood to real weapons had the lowest priority and fun had the first one, fun made of what? Entropy; let me give you an example in the next paragraph, if you already know what I’m talking about feel free to skip it. This is one hostile interaction out of dozens that happen in every single match: One character is called Junkrat, a pyromaniac with a bear trap, he throws it somewhere expecting the enemy will overlook it, it works and someone just stepped on it and is now unable to move (can still shot), Junkrat heard the trap firing so he shoots his slow -but deathly- bouncing balls near the trapped enemy, but this time the enemy is Mei, and just when the exploding balls aproach she uses her power: a wall of ice she can build almost instantly! It stopped the explosive balls from killing her, but she didn’t count with Roadhog, a huge terrifying butcher approaching far away from a side -not blocked by the wall-, he quickly throws his chain at Mei to pull her right in front of him (in his best “get over here” scorpion impresion) but just before he can pull the trigger of his flag cannon (a shotgun from Unreal Tournament) 135 kgs of german armor crash against him and drags him like a truck without breaks until it it a wall nearby, damaging and stunning Roadhog. But while those events unfolded junkrat throws a big bomb (his other power) under its feet and explodes it, propelling him high into the air, way more than enough to jump over Meis wall, from the sky Junk has a clear shot at mei killing her instantly, but he always throws a lot of those deadly balls so the ones that didn’t land on mei bounce almost as high as he was when he shoot them! Reinhard notices this and turns on his giant shield and aims it right over its head, successfully blocking all damage from them! But Roadhog is taking advantage and shooting Reinhard from the side, it seems like Reinhard is not gonna make it but then an angel... yeah literally an angel comes flying an starts healing Reinhard! But the damage is slightly greater than the healing! But it gave Raindhard enough time to recharge his, and now run like a truck to escape from his own dead, unfortunately for the angel a sniper shot her head as she was attempting to revive Mei, but her sacrifice kept Reinhard alive, which turned out to be critical to make his team win.

That all seem too chaotic to be enjoyable but quickly you learned that's far from the truth, quickly after starting every match you always know which characters is the enemy team using, this information is vital as you know what abilities the enemy has available, before you know it you instinctively know exactly how long mei’s wall can last, how tall it always is, and the same thing happens with every single ability; plus all characters look so different you can quickly determine what you will be dealing with as they approach, what really drives the game is how you mix the different abilities of your team to play, and equally important is how good are you at reading the enemy movements, individually and as a group. What really set Overwatch apart was the amount of interactions possible between abilities, when you saw one for the first time “Of course that’s possible, its logical it just didn’t ocurre to me”, when a interaction produced something ilogical it was soon patched, 

The other thing that set Overwatch apart was the characters, their personalities were so different, their powers so different, their models so well designed, their past so mysterious, their world so different from ours, so the lore felt rich, and social media reacted, the amount of memes and fanart of Overwatch was ridiculous.

Then months went by, and a new character were added like just 5 months after launch, a few maps coming in, first halloween came up and there was a special event, life was good,  then new characters started taking 8 months, halloween came up and they reused the exact same event, the exact same animations, exact everything... except new skins for sale of course, those never stopped, then it took almost a year for a new character... and they started reusing attacks for the new characters, I think thats when I knew it was doomed, and of couse halloween never got a new event, I had more than 2000 hours and realized I knew every single of the 21 maps better than my own house, then the bomb dropped, Overwatch 2 will have all the exact same maps and the powers are pretty much the same, its free and its focus is selling skins.

I expected so much from Overwatch, and how could I not? They copied so many good ideas from other games to develop all the initial characters that it was obvious to me that they had the right formula in their hands, they just had to stick with it and it could have been seriously argued to be the best FPS to ever exist. They didn't stick with it, they did the exact opposite. Like many other players I liked to fantasize about what new characters would be coming next, some artists even draw their ideas, my own imagination went wild, maybe the new character will walk like spiderman over any surface! Or a healer who wraps one ally and it takes the damage for them! Or maybe someone like rogue from x-men that can copy one ability from a non-tank enemy! Or be someone like pikachu that can use electric attacks, maybe even use conductive surfaces to increase its area of attack! No, the next character will take one year and will just remix existing abilities, the next new event will be never, the next map will be never, but hey... thousands of skins for the character you are bored to death of playing! 

[ivanca]

I hate what video games have become

I hate loot boxes with a passion, there is this fun simple game called Rocket League, its about playing something like soccer but with cars, a few years ago I paid around 20 dollars for it, back then you were able to earn all the garments (hats, wheels, et al) for your cars just by playing the game, 30 minutes per day were more than enough to get all the wardrobe, but as time went by they moved to a freemium model, now the game is free but there is blue-prints, keys, locked loot boxes, mechanics created for the single purpose of getting money for every single small change you want to make for your car, a game I spend more than 2000 hours is now a game I hate -and don’t play, of course-.

We used to laugh of people buying hats for barbie and now we are bigger fools than them, at least you can resell your barbie and resell the hat but we don’t have that privilege because Valve determined we are not worthy of it, once you stop playing a game 100% of the money you spend on it disappears, you can’t recover any of it, not 50%, not 20%, just nothing, doesn’t matter if you already spend $20 bucks on it or $3000.

Can you imagine if other art mediums where this ridiculous? Like you are watching Avengers End game in Netflix and they ask you if you wanna pay 5 dollars more to watch Captain America use his well known outfit instead of regular clothes? Or you are reading a cooking e-book that asks you for one dollar for each desert decoration recipe you want to unlock?

I’m atheist that prays to all the gods the old and the new ones that Valve, Epic, Microsoft and all the companies doing this popular but insidious business practice get sued into the ground, that the fine is so big that nobody will dare to try the same shenanigans about blocking reselling for a few decades.

[ivanca]

For a country average intelligence is the most important thing in time of crisis, and that’s why America is failing.

The US is a country of extremes, some of the smartest people in the world live there but so do some of the most stupid ones; but when it comes to inventions such mix of extremely smart people and extremely stupid people is a strength, the smart ones will discover and develop technology that can establish the country as a leader in many fields including engineering and sciences, then whole country benefits from them -including the stupid ones-, but that same distribution is the worst curse in time of crisis, in other words when the overall situation is well and good a nation asks almost nothing at all from the stupid individuals living in it, but in time of crisis its a basic requirement for every member of the country to to be fairly smart about following simple guidelines and having common sense; of course the damage is multiplied if a good chunk of the people ruling the country are stupid themselves, even how evil those leaders are doesn’t have much relevance in time of crisis, as a crude analogy even the most evil slave master wants his slaves to run from wolves when they encounter them, as slaves are more valuable alive. Then again, is likely that having stupid leaders its a byproduct of having a stupid population, and goes without saying that having both stupid and evil leaders doesn’t help. The countries known to be made of smart people are the ones doing best in the middle of this coronavirus pandemic and such thing is not a coincidence, it was easily predictable that Japan, Taiwan and South Korea would be doing great as they can follow (and even proactively follow) simple guidelines such as wearing face masks and avoiding crowded events; as well as it was predictable that US and Brazil wouldn’t be doing so great.

[ivanca]

15 flaws of the Macbook pro (and MacOS)

For clarity sake this article refers to the MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019) with MacOs Mojave (10.14.6), without further ado lets start:

❌Overheating: The part over the touchbar gets hot... extremely hot, as in I can’t put my finger there for more than 10 seconds when it gets really hot and sometimes it even smells like burning, specially when charging but for 9-to-5 work I need it plugged in at all times; one time in particular it got so hot mouse and keyboard stopped working so I had to turn off the laptop; sometimes the keyboard itself gets really hot, I wonder who told Apple keys are supposed to be heat condensers.

❌Sometimes the cursor freezes every 4 seconds when a turned-off external screen is connected... no, I’m not joking: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/290528/352569

❌On finder “Edit > Copy” allows the user to copy files but “Edit > Cut“ is always grayed-out for files, turns out the later one is only referring to text-selection cuts and not any other form of “cut”, but there is not clue about such behavior, I only discovered this fact after googling why “Edit > Cut“ is always grayed-out and found this answer: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/12392/352569, I know you can Opt+Cmd+V but thats not the point, which is extremely poor UI/UX.

❌When searching files Finder does not have a column for the location of the files, meaning you only see their names and hope you are guessing right where they might be, that also means you cannot order by file location because a column that doesn’t exist can’t be clicked, superb engineering if you ask me: https://superuser.com/a/335118/95971

❌Lack of normal USB ports and ethernet port; due this all the 100+ MacBooks at my company have at all times an USB-C-to-normal-USB adapters in order to user regular keyboards, mouses, fans and ethernet connections. 

❌Fn key is on the bottom corner of the laptop, one of the less-used keys is taking space from a bunch of keys that are used like 99% more than that one such as “control” , “option” and “command”; it is without doubt poor engineering; maybe it should be to the right of the esc key on the touch bar instead.

❌Lack of window-preview when using command+tab, you just see the icons like is 1999

❌Command+tab goes through apps not windows, for Windows you have to use a different command, command+º, but that one doesn’t show icons like command+tab does so you have to go through all of your open Windows of the current app to find the one you want; for this matter I use a third-party software called witch but unfortunately is full of unsolvable bugs (apple is to blame according to its author).

❌External non-Apple mouses can have unexpected scrolling behavior because it wrongly assumes is a touch-based mouse, fortunately someone created a fix for it https://github.com/emreyolcu/discrete-scroll ❌It cannot be changed where notifications appear on the screen, they always appear in the top right which pretty inconveniently hide my Chrome tabs I’m using in the corner of the screen.

❌Keyboard sucks in all possible ways, e.g. the keys are too small, about this issue has already been written extensively including the famous Taike Waititi rant at Oscars ❌The price, for less than the $2.200 USD it costs right now you can get a much better alternative (1, 2, 3, et al)

❌The lack of physical FN keys and having a “touchbar” instead, it’s so useless, only newbies look at their keyboard when typing.

❌The toolbar of an app is only shown when that app is focused, meaning that if you are working on two windows at the same time you can only access the toolbar of the unfocused windows by first focusing it, requiring one more click than the same interaction on any other OS.

❌On activity monitor you can select multiple processes with shift or cmd but the “Exit process” button becomes disabled, meaning you can’t force quit more than one program at once.

If you are wondering why I use a Macbook Pro is because I’m forced to by my workplace, still I didn’t expected it to be so mediocre on nearly all aspects, in its defense the retina screen does look very pretty.

[ivanca]

Religion from a business standpoint

From a business perspective a religion is one of the best things you can start, it's free of taxes on most countries, it auto-scales after convincing the first few people because it's now their unpaid job to convince even more; the demand is always there because most people have a biological innate fear of death/non-existence and just like with movies people crave a "happy ending", call it paradise, heaven or else; the best part is that the children of your believers are bound to be converted to your religion so there will be no lack of money donors on the long term, and is effective to teach believers to denounce anyone that tries to convince them of leaving your religion as intolerant.

[ivanca]

Why I click the dislike button on videos that I like

Youtube has one of the worst user experiences out there, there are thousands of people complaining about the same and is why this meme went viral with a caption that reads: “Youtube is unwatchable. The ads are incessant, the up next related videos are horrible inaccurate, autoplay is a major pain, and for the last time NO I don't want to sign up for youtube premium.” 

I don’t share the complain about ads and YouTube Premium, after all is not cheap to stream and store so many videos so is reasonable they try to monetize it, but one part I do agree is how bad is recommendation engine is, I searched for one and only one video of dumbells exercise, what a mistake that was, despite being only one single view on a single video YouTube decide it should start filling all my recommendations with exercise videos and videos of Arnold Schwarzenegger... first, remember this is Google we are talking about, the supposed leaders of artificial intelligence and machine learning; and one of the main reasons is so bad is that is really hard for the user to chose what their recommendations are based on, so I along many others realized the most simple way to train the algorithm: Click “dislike” on videos that I don’t want any recommendations from even if I don’t really want to lower the rating of such videos, unfortunately this is usually not enough, navigating the web remembering to click “dislike” on every video I don’t want recommendations from is hard, so I’m using this post to beg for someone at Alphabet/YouTube to give us viewers (prosumers?) a quick and easy way to undo what videos recommendations are base on, as shown in this little video I made:

[ivanca]

We need social media to be biased towards rational arguments, ASAP.

If you want to know what a controversy is about on twitter clicking the hashtag is one of the least helpful things one can do, is usually filled with insults from people with 2 points of view attacking each other, just people rambling with negative adjectives towards each other and little to nothing about the facts surrounding the subject at hand; but 100% of the time there is someone who can eloquently point out the arguments for one point of view, and another person with an equivalent eloquent version of the opposite point of view, but finding any of those 2 people in a hashtag search results is like looking for a needle in a haystack; when sorted by popularity the tweets at the top are NOT the most likely to convey all the information but the ones that drive the biggest emotional response or the ones that draw in the biggest empathy from people that already hold that very same point of view.

Some people believe this problem is hopeless and there is no way to solve it, that this is how human race behaves and we are just seeing that behavior on a scale never seen before thanks to the internet... but I don't fully agree, the lowest hanging fruit that no major social network is even trying to do is limiting the number of posts an user can make, perhaps a limit of 3 per day or something reasonable; next lowest hanging fruit is making some super-basic intelligence check, I'm not talking about any controversial questions, I'm talking about 2 + 2 level stuff, even controversial subjects have questions you can ask without supporting either side, for example if someone is making a tweet about GMOs they should know that it stands for "Genetically Modified Organisms" regardless of being in favor or against those, and the outcome of the answers shouldn't be blocking someone from posting or allowing them to do so, but more like a multiplier of the reach their post will get on the platform, in other words how likely it is that it will be shown on other peoples feeds and searches.

Of course for the existing social networks making themselves more rational would be a financial negative, Facebook and Twitter can show the most monthly activity to shareholders thanks to extremely passionate people holding completely opposite points of view, those people are the ones that watch more ads, click more links and are the ones that keep comment threads alive -specially when they can make other people behave the same-, thanks to such feedback-loop is counterproductive for them to limit the number of daily posts each user can make, they care a lot more about making money from society than about its mental health or about its decay, in other words noise is an financial asset for social networks and a harmful presence for society.

And that's the one point that we need to take a stand on, just like some people are standing against companies damaging non-renewable natural resources for profit gains (AKA "generate greater shareholder value") we need to stand against companies doing severe damage to social dynamics and therefore the politics of every country in the world where they are a main channel of communication.