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MBCook

35,530 karma · joined December 24, 2011

Want to email me? Username is ‘foobarsoft’. Domain is ‘foobarsoft.com’.
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MBCook··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
Correct.

Though I don’t see how this is anything like a keylogger.

MBCook··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
This exists for a very good reason.

It’s so if an app is showing a password or bank account number or other piece of sensitive information it doesn’t accidentally end up in a screenshot. I think there are other places sensitive information won’t show.

Bluesky, and apparently others, are abusing the functionality for advertising purposes.

I think it’s a good thing it’s there. This functionality should be easy for apps.

I’d say this is one for app review or an App Store rule. But we all know those are a total joke.

MBCook··on GPU Offload in Rust: Portable, Safe, and Fast
How so? I don’t know anything about this area.
MBCook··on St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
I’m absolutely willing to believe there are some people that stupid.

I doubt anyone who works on reactors is that stupid.

But some idiot somewhere is going to put some industrial stuff under AI control pretty soon and murder a few people at minimum.

MBCook··on St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
The rods prevent an emergency. They’re a fail-safe.

It’s possible nothing was wrong and some sort of “blip” triggered them when they weren’t needed. And if so that’s annoying for the operators, but nothing bad was happening. And it confirmed the failsafe works.

If anything was starting to happen and the rods dropped and immediately stopped it that’s a failsafe working perfectly.

Either way this is fine. I know nuclear + unexpected = scary for many (maybe not you), but I don’t think that’s necessary here.

MBCook··on St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core
> But, I think "single rod-drop" will not shut down a reactor

Why do you think that? When rods are used to control the reaction rate I thought it was by raising and lowering them small amounts usually.

Being able to have a single fully inserted rod stop things would certainly make it more likely dropping rods into the core would stop an even than if you needed (say) all 3 to be fully inserted.

3x the chance of successfully stopping a serious problem, 1/3rd the chance of a blockage prevent the emergency shutdown.

MBCook··on A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Responds to "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better"
So “you were born somewhere ‘unlucky’, that’s how it goes, sucks to be you”.

Is that really your take?

MBCook··on A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
As an American, it’s extremely Silicon Valley centric, at least in mindset.

Extremely. The valley/startup lens is absolutely the dominant one.

MBCook··on Every Fucking Website
Every paragraph (maybe sentence) needs to fade in as I attempt to scroll. If I can read the first paragraph easily when the page loads (ignoring the pop-ups) then the website is too well designed.
MBCook··on Old.reddit.com Stops Working
Works for me.

The you must be logged in thing has been there for a while.

MBCook··on Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
You could easily make the law require you have that ability.
MBCook··on Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
No it’s not.

Laws are.

Why ask that the fire doors in a building are unlocked when it’s on fire? Maybe they just shouldn’t ever be locked.

MBCook··on Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
That’s dumb. Why should you have to unlock?
MBCook··on Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
And thats the solution. Not lawsuits. Regulation.
MBCook··on Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
Not quite. Grocery stores make common products and clones.

Sony’s 1st party stuff is (often) exceptional. It’s the reason an Xbox or PC isn’t a complete replacement.

MBCook··on Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
What prevents Sony from charging the retailers $60 for the code to a $60 game?

Congratulations, you can buy anywhere you want. You don’t have to buy from Sony. It just costs more.

Yeah, that’s gonna be real great for making games cheaper for you.

MBCook··on Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
Exactly. This is stupid. Physical is dead, there’s no point in arguing otherwise. And you will not win. Sony never signed a contract with you saying they would keep making physical forever.

Hell they could pull an old-school Apple, stop selling the PS5, make a tiny change, call it PS6 and be done with you. They could even announce that digital games for the PS6 are also compatible with the PS5! Wow, aren’t they nice.

We need laws providing consumer rights. Nothing else will work.

MBCook··on Crickets as pets
They’re insanely intelligent for something so small.
MBCook··on Ask HN: My dev blog has 11k followers. I stopped writing it. What would you do?
I get that. I suspect that’s how most things end.
MBCook··on Ask HN: My dev blog has 11k followers. I stopped writing it. What would you do?
I think it would be kind to make a post explaining the blog is ending, even if you choose not to explain the exact reasons.
MBCook··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
It might be used a little bit in other places, wouldn’t surprise me one bit. And it’s good that the computers are capable of it. Even if someone can’t get a more powerful computer, it’s nice that they have the ability to use it for almost anything (within some limits) if they’re patient.

But as you said, if your workflow really needs FP64 you’re probably not reaching for a MacBook Neo or this Intel thing.

MBCook··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
I haven’t followed the PC chip business anywhere near as much as I used to around the turn of the millennium. I was under the impression Intel actually made a few chips that could go quite low power. The problem was their performance sucked.

It’s good that this performs good and can go low power, but the big question to me is whether they can scale it up without it becoming a power sucking furnace.

There’s no other comment somewhere in here, where someone is pointing out that that was in FP64, which is not something most people use. Especially people who are going to buy a computer like this.

I suspect for me personally, integer use matters far, far, far more than anything else.

MBCook··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
I suspect that the comment is more about this not being Apple’s best standard consumer CPU for computers, which would be the M5 (though to your point that’s also in iPads).

It’s good Intel can match anything while staying cool and efficient. That’s a great step. But I’d like to see them match the M5.

MBCook··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
Plus it’s a phone chip. Yeah it’s used in the Neo but it’s no M5.

It’s good Intel got to this point, but you can’t declare them tied with Apple. They qualified for the real race, which us great, but they're not going to win with that chip.

MBCook··on Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
Apple has been working ruthlessly on battery efficiency for a long time because of the phones and their tendency to minimize battery sizes on Macs for thinness.

The exact design of the cores, how they’re scheduled, the way background stuff is handled on MacOS. All of it. The chips are made on a fantastic process too, but that alone isn’t it. For example they’ve been putting the ability to drop refresh rate really low when nothing changes to more and more of their machines.

It could be that the Intel chip is close, IDK.

But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers. And any of those alone or in combination could be part of the differences.

MBCook··on US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
You’re kidding right?
MBCook··on A Physicist Rigged His Pet Hamster’s Wheel to Upload to Strava
It does! Sort of.

The company Niteangel sells a pedometer for their hamster wheels. It doesn’t provide times or speeds, but it does give you the number of revolutions per night.

I have thought it would be interesting to hook something up to be able to get the times and speeds. It never occurred to me that you could use something like Strava to record it.

MBCook··on A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava
My hamster broke his record with 22k revolutions on his 10” wheel a few nights ago. That’s about 11.5 miles.

That’s much higher than usual, but when they want they can go.

MBCook··on Apple Vision Pro Speeds Up Endoscopic Surgery by Almost 20%
I don’t think it would’ve sold like hot cakes. But I think it could’ve gotten a decent toehold. Be more than the near joke it is now.

I know two people who have them and like them quite a bit. I bought one to try it, but returned it during the initial window. Neat technology, but it wasn’t there for me.

What it needs is apps and good use cases. Every barrier you put in front of that, like Apple’s ridiculous App Store policies, is only going to keep that away.

There are other issues. They could’ve made it cheaper and lighter. Not even lending them to selected developers before the launch seems like a complete failure.

So instead it does media consumption, like an iPad or a quest, acts as a virtual Mac display, which some people really like, and runs iPad apps.

For $3500.

Surely someone would’ve thought of something neat to do with it if they weren’t trapped in the sandbox.

MBCook··on Executable Emoji
Why the Safari bash?

Every single one works. Apple keeps their emoji list pretty up to date.

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