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Comment by heywhatupboys | Hacker News Reader

I did not expect the coding live streams of GPU engineering to be presented by a virtual anime persona with a squeaky voice.

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Me either.

I don't really get the V-Tuber thing (other than wanting to stay anonymous) but having code explained to me by an anime character is hilarious.

I don't mind that much thr anime character. But the voice is simply unbearable.

As interesting as it would be to watch some of these streams, it's completely unbearable to watch and listen with this persona involved. If they were trying for something that would ensure a very niche audience, this was a good choice.

I honestly find it very hard to take someone seriously who chooses this kind of persona, even though it's hard to argue with their technical ability and results.

It's just Marcan being weird and creepy.

Marcan is very busy with a lot of other things, like upstreaming patches to the Linux mainline and improving platform support.

He's been clear that he's not Asahi Lina... and he's also not a GPU hacker as far as I know.

> and he's also not a GPU hacker as far as I know.

I'm not really willing to indulge the greater discussion, but marcan has done some serious GPU hacking before, reverse engineering the microcode (not shaders) of the PS4's GPU to fix bugs that the PS4 hacked around in the drivers.

Asahi Lina has the same spanish-sounding accent as Hector but pitched up and falsetto. "raider" - the hostname of the developer machine is that same as the hostname of Hector's machine.

He even did a super-cringe "take over" video, where Asahi Lina "broke into" one of streams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effHrj0qmwk

She said she did that by using his stream key which she somehow obtained from his computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effHrj0qmwk&lc=UgzNfomvdiD0j...

Yeah so that's called a joke.

Well then it must be legit. Who among us hasn't accidentally leaked a cryptographic secret key to a screeching vtuber who has the exact same accent as we do.

Ok ok you've got a point. I'm probably too naive to take someone like Marcan at his word.

Even if you had the stream key¹, I wouldn’t expect you to be able to take over a stream with that kind of clean cutting from marcan to loading throbber to Asahi Lina. Without any knowledge of what YouTube Live actually does about conflicting input streams, I would expect the takeover to (a) be instant, (b) fail, or (c) produce a garbled mess. What the thirteen second throbber delay would be adequate for is starting up whatever software you need to play the part of Asahi Lina.

I have no specific knowledge, but it seems very clear to me that at the very least marcan is a collaborator in the persona of Asahi Lina; and absent further contrary evidence, them being the same makes sense.

—⁂—

¹ And if stream key exfiltration actually happened, I find it hard to imagine anything but acrimony arising.

This line at the end of the article also indicates that Asahi Lina either is marcan, or is personally directly and proportionally sponsored by marcan.

> If you want to support my work, you can donate to marcan’s Asahi Linux support fund on GitHub Sponsors or Patreon, which helps me out too!

That looks pre-recorded, and the second person talking with Lina is clearly following a script, I don't think they could do it that well on one sitting, and the animations are probably not automatic.

Probably some pre-recorded, agreed upon advertisement to promote a new channel.

> He's been clear that he's not Asahi Lina

You cannot be this gullible. "Asahi Lina" is a pseudonym for Marcan.

Guess I am.

LOL. To be fair, his behaviour is extremely weird so I don't blame you for being confused by his insane bullshit, as I was at first.

What’s your deal? What a weird denial.

I thought it must be him, but saw where he denied it publicly on Twitter, so I took him at his word.

what's your deal? what weird attempt at doxxing, this shit shouldn't be allowed here.

Is identifying a silly VTuber as a well-known person considered doxxing?

Yes.

proof they're the same person (screenshot from one of their livestreams): https://0x0.st/H-Uq.png

/home/marcan and /home/lina on the same box.

Having profiles on the same box may lend credibility to claims that they are the same person, but its very much not proof of that.

Personally, I was more suprised by the wii sports music and all the pink.

AFAIK, that is music made by Marcan (Lina) him/her self. Amongst other talents, Marcan also appears to be musician. There are a few interviews with Marcan where you can see pianos in the background, for example here: https://youtu.be/dF2YQ92WKpM?t=989

He/she is quite the creative person I must say.

Better believe in cyberpunk futures; you're in one.

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