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Delk

1,147 karma · joined October 22, 2019

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Delk··on OpenGL: Mesh shaders in the current year
Well, not really to the OpenGL spec itself. It's about a new OpenGL extension being added to the extension registry. Vendors may implement it if they wish. AFAIK the core OpenGL spec hasn't been updated in years, so even though new extensions keep getting developed by vendors, the official baseline hasn't moved.

I suppose the same is true of Direct3D 11, though. Only the Direct3D 12 spec has been updated in years from what I can tell. (I'm not a graphics programmer.)

Delk··on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account
People probably feel less in control in an unfamiliar environment even if the superficial functionality is similar. I suspect this might be a greater factor for those who are somewhat tech-savvy and used to knowing their way around their computer to some degree. Once you go a bit beyond launching apps and using their UIs, the differences become apparent, bringing about a sense of unfamiliarity and a loss of a sense of control and competence.

People for whom the computer is just an appliance with limited applications (and who recognise their relationship to the computer as such) might even be better able to switch, provided that everything is set up for them. My elderly parents used a Linux box I set up for them for years at some point.

Delk··on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account
"Compatibility with Windows programs" is a massive undertaking in the first place, as evidenced by the huge amount of development effort that has gone into Wine without quite reaching 100% bug-for-bug compatibility. (The level of compatibility they've achieved is truly impressive but it's really difficult to get to 100% for a large existing base of arbitrary applications.)

Reliable real-world compatibility requires not only implementing Windows APIs as documented (or reverse-engineered) but also discovering and conforming to quirks, undocumented features, and permissive interpretations of the specs or even outright bugs in Windows that some applications have either intentionally or unintentionally ended up relying on over the years.

I don't know if modern apps would tend to be better engineered to actually follow the spec and to only build on features as documented but for example older Windows games were sometimes notorious for being quite finicky.

And of course if the goal is a full-scale independent OS rather than a compatibility layer on top of an existing one, there's the whole "operating system" part to implement as well.

Delk··on IG Nobel Prize Winners 2025
Of course Ig Nobel prizes aren't necessarily intended only for absurd or ridiculous research. Their stated purpose is to honour achievements that "make people laugh, then think".

Sometimes that means the achievement (or "achievement") is something genuinely absurd. Other times it's not.

Delk··on IG Nobel Prize Winners 2025
I thought it was common knowledge that it makes you feel like you could speak a foreign language better. I don't think it's that obvious that the improvement would be objective or that others around you would feel the same way about you.

(And of course there's a Ballmer peak in any case.)

Delk··on KDE is now my favorite desktop
> Supposing I did, the only hamburger menus I can think of contain lesser-important functions of each app

gEdit places almost everything in the hamburger menu; opening and saving files have dedicated buttons but for example find/replace is behind the burger, as is "save as". It may not matter much if you use keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+f is pretty common for find and I never try to look for it in the menu) but one might still expect a GUI to allow its features to be easily accessed without the use of a keyboard. I don't think the mix of a few dedicated buttons and a single hamburger menu is necessarily good for discoverability either.

The Image Viewer puts file management and image rotating in the hamburger menu. Oddly enough, other image editing options are available in a separate editing mode that's accessed via its own dedicated button. Also, although file management features are behind the hamburger menu, for some reason image properties are behind a dedicated button.

In both cases the only reason the hamburger menus aren't more populated is because there just isn't that much functionality in either app to begin with.

Evince (the document viewer) also puts almost everything in the hamburger menu -- although in that case, if a traditional menu bar were used instead of the hamburger, most of its functions would probably only be split between "file" and "view" menus or something along those lines.

I'm not sure if those apps are still Gnome defaults but they're some of the examples of what I'd consider somewhat poorly considered use of the hamburger menu.

Outside of Gnome, the new UI in JetBrains IDEs has switched to hiding typical menu bar menus behind a hamburger menu button. I honestly don't understand that decision at all: the menus are still the same, they just require an additional click to access, and since the selection of available menus is only revealed after clicking the button, you can only start scanning for the menu you're looking for after the reveal. While separate from free software desktop design, the new UI in those IDEs is another example of what I would also consider mobile-influenced degradation of desktop UIs -- and a particularly weird one at that.

Delk··on Myocardial infarction may be an infectious disease
I've never heard of machine language engineers. Machine learning engineer, on the other hand, is a fairly common title nowadays.
Delk··on Seedship – Text-Based Game
I somehow ended up with an interesting combination of medieval-tech cosmic enlightenment along with friendly iron age native neighbours.

https://www.johnayliff.com/games/seedship/index.html?bmmopfi...

I hadn't played the game in a while but I used to play it quite a bit some years ago. The game is rather RNG-heavy, and although you can usually pick your poison, luck is a large factor in how good a result you can get.

If you aim for the best possible result on each run individually, in a sense the game is about exploration vs. exploitation, or whether to settle with what you've got or try your luck for more.

(If you want to aim for record scores overall, it probably makes sense to take high risks and fail lots of runs.)

Delk··on Lucky 13: a look at Debian trixie
Or, more generally, "stable" is supposed to mean things don't change within the release apart from security and bug fixes. "Unstable" is apt to change, both in terms of package versions or features and in terms of the way the system is structured. It can temporarily have broken dependencies or breaking changes as well. Or at least that's how it was when I used to run unstable years and years ago.

I stopped running sid not because of any instability or unreliability in the included programs themselves but because unstable required more active administration: apart from temporarily broken dependencies or upgrade paths, it made sense to stay informed on potential breaking changes. Stable(r) releases or distros rarely require almost any active care nowadays apart from installing security updates.

Again, my experience with sid was years and years ago but I don't suppose its fundamental nature as the active development branch has changed.

Delk··on Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
I get 8 to 10 hours of light use on my personal ThinkPad. Or ~6 h of Netflix at 50% screen brightness, despite the lack of hardware decoding for DRM encrypted video on Linux. All of these are with a max charge threshold of 80%. 5 hours of battery life sounds rather limited to me, too.

But then the numbers are hardly comparable without having comparable workloads. If I were regularly running builds or had some other moderate load throughout a working day, that'd probably cost a couple of hours.

Delk··on The F-35 is losing the trade war
To be fair, the exact sentence is "we like to tone them down about 10%", which suggests a more common practice rather than only a plan specifically for the F-47.

Of course it's also a quote from Trump, so who knows how much of it is from his random sentence generator. Although I'd guess he's quoting another official or someone from the defence industry.

Delk··on Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?
It could also just try making the request with javascript. Or try a websocket connection.
Delk··on Thai Air Force seals deal for Swedish Gripen jets
If Trump were to broker a deal that would "instantly end the war", it would be only by and for the sake of looking after his own interests. In the process he would ignore the interests and long-term security of Ukraine while likely yielding to Putin's wishes where he -- not Ukraine -- feels like he isn't losing a lot.

There's no other way Trump can broker a quick end to the war. He doesn't have the kind of leverage to persuade a peace deal without giving Putin what Putin wants, and even if he did, there's a good chance the calculating manipulator Putin would still play him like a fiddle due to Trump's egotism.

Even if Trump were to be able to broker a quick peace -- which he has been promising since day one but obviously not achieved -- he would not be doing that for the sake of the allies of the US.

Delk··on AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
I lived in a city but I got a connection at ~48k on a V.90 regularly.

It did depend on line quality, though. We had some kinds of splitters and internal cabling in the house for allowing multiple phones (and eventually the modem), and I remember that prior to some changes made to that, I only used to get up to ~40k.

Delk··on AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
I remember downloading Debian 3.0 ISO images over what I think might have been ISDN. I didn't know you didn't need all six or seven CDs in order to install.

(It might also have been slow early DSL. I'm not sure when exactly this was or when the transition happened.)

Delk··on Car has more than 1.2M km on it – and it's still going strong
Gm, not Tm. A kilo is a thousand, and a million kilos is a billion. So giga, not tera.
Delk··on Fixing a Direct3D9 bug in Far Cry (2018)
The post is from 2018, so dxvk either wasn't there or was too immature.

From today's point of view, the post may not be that interesting in the practical sense of running the game. But some might find the obscure feature of custom clip planes interesting, or how a change or a detail in API specs lead to a regression.

If course today you'd want to use dxvk.

Delk··on Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use more power?
I'm still a little curious of what's causing the increase in power use. A single additional wakeup per second should not have a two-digit percentage impact on power use when even an idle machine is probably going to have dozens of wakeups per second anyway. I wonder if updating the seconds display somehow causes lots of extra wakeups instead.
Delk··on Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use more power?
Mentioning that some setting uses more power can be useful and desirable. I think Jaxan might be irked by "energy recommendations" Windows gives you in power & battery settings, though. It suggests applying "energy saving recommendations" to lower your carbon footprint, and while I absolutely support energy saving, I also find those "recommendations" obnoxious.

The recommendations suggest, among other things, switching to power-saving mode, turning on dark mode, setting screen brightness for energy efficiency, and auto-suspending and turning the screen off after 3 minutes.

Power-saving mode saves little at least on most laptops but has a significant performance impact, dark mode only saves power on LED displays (LCDs have a slight inverse effect), and both dark/light mode and screen brightness should be set based on ergonomics, not based on saving three watts.

When these kinds of recommendations are given to the consumer for "lowering your carbon footprint", with a green leaf symbol for impact, while Microsoft's data centres keep spending enormous amounts of power on data analysis, I find it hard to see that as anything more than greenwashing.

Delk··on Breakthrough cancer test predicts whether chemotherapy will work
The expected effectiveness of chemo treatment would depend on several factors that could inform the choice a lot even before some kind of a specific test.

Some forms of cancer are rather susceptible to known chemotherapeutic cocktails and have such high cure rates (in some cases over 90 %) with chemo that you'd have to be suicidal not to take the treatment.

Other forms can be significantly less susceptible, and the prognosis can be rather bleak even with the most effective known treatments. I can see how one might not want to suffer intensive chemo for a minuscule chance of survival or to extend life by a few months.

Also, n=1 and I don't know how my experience compares to others or to the average, but my experience with chemo wasn't that terrible. Definitely not pleasant, and there's a chance of side effects that could even be permanent. But not terrible. I've got the impression that the treatments for associated nausea etc. have also improved over the decades, and I didn't really have a whole lot of that.

Delk··on Marble Blast
Gyroscopic control might be even more suited for something like Neverball where the physics are based on tilting the board. In Marble Blast the board was stationary but the ball could be moved by acceleration which turns out to be quite different in terms of controls.
Delk··on AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns
> For this paper, It is absolutely sufficient to prove that a) this cannot be reached algorithmically and that b) evidence clearly shows that humans can (somehow) do this , as they have already done this (quite often).

The problem with these kinds of arguments is always that they conflate two possibly related but non-equivalent kinds of computational problem solving.

In computability theory, an uncomputability result essentially only proves that it's impossible to have an algorithm that will in all cases produce the correct result to a given problem. Such an impossibility result is valuable as a purely mathematical result, but also because what computer science generally wants is a provably correct algorithm: one that will, when performed exactly, always produce the correct answer.

However, similarly to any mathematical proof, a single counter-example is enough to invalidate a proof of correctness. Showing that an algorithm fails in a single corner case makes the algorithm not correct in a classical algorithmic sense. Similarly, for a computational problem, showing that any purported algorithm will inevitably fail even in a single case is enough to prove the problem uncomputable -- again, in the classical computability theory sense.

If you cannot have an exact algorithm, for either theoretical or practical reasons, and you still want a computational method for solving the problem in practice, you then turn to heuristics or something else that doesn't guarantee correctness but which might produce workable results often enough to be useful.

Even though something like the halting problem is uncomputable in the classical, always-inevitably-produces-correct-answer-in-finite-time sense, that does not necessarily stop it from being solved in a subset of cases, or to be solved often enough by some kind of a heuristic or non-exact algorithm to be useful.

When you say that something cannot be reached algorithmically, you're saying it's impossible to have an algorithm that would inevitably, systematically, always reach that solution in finite time. And you would in many cases be correct. Symbolic AI research ran into this problem due to the uncomputability of reasoning in predicate logic. (Uncomputability is not the main problem that symbolic AI ran into but it was one of them.)

The problem is that when you say that humans can somehow do this computationally impossible thing, you're not holding human cognition or problem solving to the same standard of computational correctness. We do find solutions to problems, answers to questions, and logical chains of reasoning, but we aren't guaranteed to.

You do seem to be aware of this, of course.

But you then run into the inevitable question of what you mean by AGI. If you hold AGI to the standard of classical computational correctness, to which you don't hold humans, you're correct that it's impossible. But you have also proven nothing new.

A more typical understanding of AGI would be something similar to human cognition -- not having formal guarantees but working well enough for operating in, understanding, or producing useful results the real world. (Human brains do that well in the real world -- thanks to having evolved in it!)

In the latter case, uncomputability results do not prove that kind of AGI to be impossible.

Delk··on Root shell on a credit card terminal
I remember paying at a bike repair shop that used a physical card imprinter [1], some, I don't know, 15 years ago?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter

Delk··on Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
Generally, a single-slot class was 45 minutes. So a slot at "10 AM" would have started at 10:15 AM and ended at 11:00 AM.

Most lectures were allocated double slots, though, for example from 10 to 12. In that case the actual official lecture time would have been either 10:15 to 11:00, followed by a quarter hour break, and another 45 minutes from 11:15 to 12:00. Alternatively -- and probably more commonly -- there was no break, and the lecture was 1.5 hours from 10:15 to 11:45.

Delk··on Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
At least some games in the Arma series have also used a copy protection that messes with gameplay if it judged the game to be pirated. I don't know if it used tricks to trip crackers, though -- Wikipedia mentions intentional errors on optical media that didn't get passed on by disc copy software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE

Delk··on Amazon Japan ordered to pay 35M. yen for allowing listing of fakes
Looks like it's damages and not a fine. Also, I don't know the Japanese system but lots of jurisdictions don't have a US-style concept of punitive damages. So the sum is probably what it is because it's intended to compensate those particular plaintiffs for demonstrable damages rather than to deter Amazon.
Delk··on DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower
The original complaint mentions:

"7. March 3rd - I received a call during which an ACIO stated instructions were given that we were not to adhere to SOP with the doge account creation in regards to creating records. He specifically was told that there were to be no logs or records made of the accounts created for DOGE employees."

Which part of doing an audit, or some other DOGE employee's job, requires logs or records not to be made of their accounts?

Another quote:

"They were to be given what are referred to as “tenant owner” level accounts, with essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data. Note, these permissions are above even my CIO’s access level to our systems. Well above what level of access is required to pull metrics, efficiency reports, and any other details that would be needed to assess utilization or usage of systems in our agency. We have built in roles that auditors can use and have used extensively in the past but would not give the ability to make changes or access subsystems without approval. The suggestion that they use these accounts instead was not open to discussion."

Audits don't require being able to alter data.

Also, some of the data is mentioned as being sensitive. Although granting access to the data of another agency may make sense, I have trouble believing that direct access to data such as sensitive personal information of third parties would routinely be given to people from outside of the organization. Even within the organization the group of people given access to sensitive data should be as limited as possible.

Delk··on mIRC 7.81
Freenode kind of got destroyed after the organization operating it was sold, and the new owner made changes that caused lots of volunteers to resign. Channels and people mostly moved over to Libera Chat.
Delk··on Garfield Minus Garfield
The physical act of removing the Garfield figure from the frames is the least interesting part.

(It probably also isn't particularly difficult in many cases, considering the monochrome backgrounds.)

Delk··on Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?
Yes. I like being able to evaluate my sources. For programming or other technical topics, I'll rather read the original documentation, or third-party information whose credibility I can have some idea about.

For other topics, exact pedantic correctness may not always be as important, but I definitely do want to be able to evaluate my sources nevertheless, for other obvious reasons.

Search is actually pretty much what I want: a condensed list of possible sources of information for whatever I'm looking for. I can then build my own understanding of the topic by checking the sources and judging their credibility. Search seems to have been getting worse lately, sadly, but it's still useful.

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