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aarroyoc

1,896 karma · joined October 28, 2018

https://adrianistan.eu

meet.hn/city/41.6521807,-4.728605/Valladolid

Socials: - github.com/aarroyoc

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aarroyoc··on Tcl/Tk 9.1
Last time I checked, there was no Wayland support (other than executing in XWayland). Has it changed?
aarroyoc··on Better Batteries
Yes! I've never been against languages with batteries included. In fact nowadays I prefer them. It's one of my biggest issues with Rust, but the problem also exists in Haskell. Funnily enough, in Node.js, which gave birth to npm, you can now do many stuff without external dependencies (last one I've seen are the sqlite functions).

But yes, in languages with batteries included sometimes they feel like an afterthought. It's not just Python. Java also used to have a big standard library, with many useful things including GUI programming which has been neglected a little bit.

aarroyoc··on The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
It depends on the country I guess. In Spain I never saw a person using Texas Instruments calculators. Casio and HP are way more popular.
aarroyoc··on RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues
There are several RISC-V machines. In the microcontroller world it's becoming more and more usual, but those won't have RVV. SpacemiT K3 based machines are probably your best bet when it comes to RISC-V processors with SIMD support. There are several manufacturers: Milk-V with the Jupiter II, Sipeed, Banana Pi, ...
aarroyoc··on GnuCash is right. It's also why I built my own finance app
Big fan of hedger! It's not easy to start but I think it's one of the best ways to keep track of accounting, PTA files are very convenient.

They leave you with lots of options though, which could be a problem if you're starting into accounting

aarroyoc··on Bun support is now limited and deprecated
They need a JavaScript runtime to execute some challenges that certain pages present (like YouTube)
aarroyoc··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
This is written from a French perspective as if southern countries joined later because they were not as developed. Quite the opposite. Spain, Italy and Portugal were in the first years of EPI, but they went there own ways because of the lack of progress that was being made by other members like France and Germany. Bizum in Spain is quite popular (I would say that more than Wero in France) and now is starting to manage payments in physical stores, after being a popular solution to transfer money between friends and in online payments (and in the physical black market).
aarroyoc··on Solar-based sleep patterns compared to modern norms
As someone who lives in Spain, a country that also has a tradition of siestas (that's where that name comes from after all), I have a lot of doubts and I think people romanticize the idea too much. First of all I have no doubts about the health benefit of siestas, but in the current society they have some issues.

When I was younger I hated siestas because I had energy and everything was closed, you couldn't do anything in those hours. It felt like a waste. In fact I think that sports clubs, book clubs and similar things are not as important here as in other countries of Europe (at least from my perspective, no data) because people don't have time. After siesta, stores open and you have to do your chores, giving you no time to have a leisure activity (other than going to the bar and drink, that is).

And if you work keep in mind the shift is 8 hours, so how do you fit siesta in it? A way is to start working early and having lunch very late, working like 7-15. Some government offices and factories work this way. Some people like this schedule but waking up so early, specially during winter I think defeats the point of siesta, as you're probably damaging your body in the morning. Other like me have a split schedule with lunch in the middle, more similar to Europe but the problem is that you leave later. Because at some jobs the mandatory stop is 2 hours.

Now, schools have also different schedules to fit better into their parents schedules and there's been an infinite discussion about which one is better for children. The reality is that is a mess. If we could work less than 8 hours, it would be much better but 8 hours plus siesta is difficult to put up with.

aarroyoc··on Every single board computer I tested in 2025
RK3588 is well supported right now and is present in many SBCs
aarroyoc··on Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
The last time I attended a mass (Spain) it was about some people in the village that were not helping the church enough (with an activity they had to do but also I think there was some money involved) but it was a bit cryptic, so only the ones that were directed the message to could fully understand it.
aarroyoc··on US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
In Spain many parts of the Internet are shut down when there's a LaLiga match to "prevent piracy". They usually block Cloudflare as a whole but also Vercel, GitHub,... had issues. For example last Sunday I couldn't access some of the stories submitted here. I could also not access the documentation of hledger, a FOSS contability tool.
aarroyoc··on If you’re an LLM, please read this
I'm on O2 in Spain and loads fine for me. That's interesting
aarroyoc··on The state of Linux music players in 2026
It is still GPL, it is still free software, the source code is there. Only the Windows and macOS binaries are behind a paywall, but you can build yourself the binaries, or use it on Linux. RedHat does this and is "an example of free software monetization", Strawberry does it "and it should no longer be called free software".
aarroyoc··on High-speed train collision in Spain kills at least 39
Updated to 39 people now, but probably the number can still go up
aarroyoc··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://adrianistan.eu
aarroyoc··on What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)
Yes, I often say that the gold from America was a poisonous gift. It made the country so rich that they stopped caring about other stuff, they could just buy them from elsewhere. So there was little incentive to manufacture first, and industrialize later. Which is ironic because some of first steam engines you can find in Europe were invented in Spain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jer%C3%B3nimo_de_Ayanz_y_Beaum...). It also enabled the funding of numerous stupid wars, with the human cost they bring. The name of this process is called the Dutch Disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

Arab states could get into the same trap

aarroyoc··on Are We Loong Yet?
Loongson started with MIPS CPUs but current CPUs are not MIPS-compatible. LoongArch, while being very similar to MIPS, uses a different encoding. And some other details have changed. Better to say, MIPS-inspired.
aarroyoc··on Are We Loong Yet?
It's not. Before LoongArch, Loongson made MIPS64 CPUs. But this is about LoongArch which is similar but incompatible with MIPS64.
aarroyoc··on No Graphics API
Impressive post, so many details. I could only understand some parts of it, but I think this article will probably be a reference for future graphics API.

I think it's fair to say that for most gamers, Vulkan/DX12 hasn't really been a net positive, the PSO problem affected many popular games and while Vulkan has been trying to improve, WebGPU is tricky as it has is roots on the first versions of Vulkan.

Perhaps it was a bad idea to go all in to a low level API that exposes many details when the hardware underneath is evolving so fast. Maybe CUDA, as the post says in some places, with its more generic computing support is the right way after all.

aarroyoc··on Scala 3 slowed us down?
At least where I work, writing new Java code is discouraged and you should instead use Kotlin for backend services. Spring Boot which is the framework we use, supports Kotlin just fine, at the same level as Java. And if you use Jetbrains tools, Kotlin tooling is also pretty good (outside Jetbrains I will admit it is worse than Java). Now, even in new Java projects you can still be using Kotlin because it is the default language for Gradle (previously it was Groovy).
aarroyoc··on Itiner-e: A high-resolution dataset of roads of the Roman Empire
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45864341
aarroyoc··on My dad could still be alive, but he's not
So sorry for your loss. Some months ago I was very angry to found out that a person was dead for a bike injury that can be easily solved but he had to wait for almost 50 minutes for the ambulance. Not because he was far away, but because he was in between two regions and the 112 was discussing who should send the ambulance. In fact, they initially send one and later told the driver to go back while in the highway. He's dead just because he happened to have the accident near the border of two regions of the same country, each one with its own public health system.

Link (Spanish): https://www.elespanol.com/alicante/vega-baja/20251028/hijo-c...

aarroyoc··on Itiner-e: the Google Maps of Roman Roads
After a quick research, there's no evidence of a bridge there and it seems difficult to do even for Romans. But there could have been some people with boats in Cale to help cross the river and still be considered part of the road.
aarroyoc··on Itiner-e: the Google Maps of Roman Roads
As always with this kind of stuff, there are so many inaccuracies, at least in the parts I know of. Roads are mostly ok, although some of them are more like "suppositions" that real roads we have found. Let's take a look at the area around Valladolid: https://imgur.com/xMW6yiY

- Pintia is almost confirmed to be near the Duero/Douro river, much more to the south and to the east. It is one of the most explored pre-Roman settlements in the area and while there has not been a definitive proof, there are many hints that show that it's on the place I showed and not where it's shown on the map

- Amallobriga is also, for most historians, located in Tiedra, but it shows Tordesillas. As you can see on the map, the actual location of Tiedra is also a road intersection. The location in Tiedra is consistent with archeological evidence and with route books that show the distance from Amallobriga to other cities we know.

- Nobody really knows where Intercatia or Tela are. But note that a there's a big road intersection at the south. It is confirmed that there was a settlement but we do not know the name of it, several have been proposed. In any case, Intercatia is very difficult to be located as it is shown in the map with no roads going to it. Many archaeologists say it could be in the actual town of Paredes de Nava.

- I don't think there's any real evidence of a bridge that crosses the Douro/Duero river there. What we know is that there's a medieval bridge closer to Septimanca and that it could have had a Roman origin, but according to the map there's no road there.

aarroyoc··on Easy RISC-V
Having learned assembly with the book "Computer Organization And Design" from Patterson and Hennessy, it really shows how much RISC-V takes from MIPS. After all they share some of the people involved in both ISAs and they have learned from the MIPS mistakes (no delay slots!). Basically if you come from a MIPS the assembly is very very similar, as it was my case.

Now that book is also available with a RISC-V edition, which has a very interesting chapter comparing all different RISC ISAs and what they do differently (SH, Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, ARM, ...),...

However I've been exploring AArch64 for some time and I think it has some very interesting ideas too. Maybe not as clean as RISC-V but with very pragmatic design and some choices that make me question if RISC-V was too conservative in its design.

aarroyoc··on A tutorial for the Mercury programming language
> As a mathematician doing a fair amount of numerical analysis, I must know several programming languages, all of which do roughly the same sort of thing.

But Mercury is not a language of the same paradigm as those (imperative, array oriented maybe). It's a logical programming language which I must guess, you probably never used any language of this category. In fact many features of logic programming languages never made to mainstream programming languages or they're behind some uncommon libraries.

aarroyoc··on Delete FROM users WHERE location = 'Iran';
These sanctions are not really effective. I think Cuba is the country that has had them for the most amount of time and... Nothing changed. Instead they force them to develop in house tech which may be better for them in the long term
aarroyoc··on LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain
There's one recourse in the Constitutional Court driven by Clouflare and RootedCON but the thing about the Constitutional Court is that it can be very slow and it's heavily politicized and I'm not really sure the government position on this. Right now, only one leftist Catalan party has said anything against the blocks in the Congress. Also many mass media are not reporting this issues because they're also an interested party.
aarroyoc··on LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain
I just wanted to to enter https://www.osnews.com and it's blocked because of LaLiga. Infuriating...
aarroyoc··on Growing the Java Language [video]
One important focus for Kotlin is mobile app development. However if you're just a thin layer over Java you can't create iOS apps, that's the whole story behind Kotlin Native/Kotlin Multiplatform. Being able to have apps that share code between Android and iOS. On the other hand I think a good Kotlin Native backend could be a great language in the Go space. Scala Native and Jank (Clojure) show that some people want a JVM less version of them. But currently Native is less performant than the JVM version. And now there's GraalVM, which is the Java solution for AOT and Kotlin could use it too. But it was invented after Kotlin Native.

The same thing with coroutines and virtual threads. Or with Kotlin data classes and Java records. Kotlin was first, Java then implements something to solve the same issue but it's not the same way as Kotlin.

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