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akdor1154

1,727 karma · joined June 25, 2018

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akdor1154··on Pandas Should Go Extinct
Sup Eddie, the actual motivating example is we finally nixed Pandas from Data Ingestion, now reading excel files takes 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes. However unfortunately your

> TODO: rewrite this entire service

remains.

akdor1154··on EasyEffects can improve laptop speaker sound quality
My limited and fuzzy recollection is that while the freq response of most cheap to mid speakers is balls, the freq response of most cheap mics is quite good - sure not studio quality, but much better than the equivalent speaker.
akdor1154··on The Road to MS-DOS 2.0
> under MS-DOS command line parsing was left completely to a a loaded program

And in the many decades and OS rewrites since, they have long since corrected this mistake... right?

akdor1154··on ECHR confirms ethical veganism is a protected philosophical belief
Jains would be vegan though i assume?
akdor1154··on macOS needs its grid back
Questions for those who like the grid layout of virtual desktops - how does it (or should it?) interact with multi monitor setups? Feels like this would break or at least compromise the spatial metaphor.

- Each monitor has own grid?

- The VD 'spans' the pair of monitors?

- VDs only on one monitor?

- The monitors form a fixed 'window' into the grid?

- Something else?

akdor1154··on On Rendering Diffs
Even the linked ghostty PR on your home shows this - this is Firefox Android on a Nokia XR21 / TA-1486.

It's not unuseable, but it definitely feels like 'js hacking my scrolling' and not a native surface flinging around.

The experience is actually worse with smaller movements, i guess because my brain is more conscious when breaking the 'finger physically moving the text' illusion.

I don't mean to be dismissive - you're working on a really hard problem, and you're clearly approaching it with a mindset of perfection. I'm posting because I know you're probably able to solve this too :)

Edit: as a point of (unfair) comparison, the codemirror Huge File demo works fine: https://codemirror.net/examples/million/ It does suffer from the occasional partial paint when quickly coasting, but I'm not bothered by this at all, it's far less intrusive than dropping frames / stuttering / etc.

akdor1154··on On Rendering Diffs
I disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth.

On mobile it kinda does. Scrolling diffs on mobile just kinda feels crap.

I have been spoiled by years of engineer hours spent getting scrolling to be 60- or even 120Hz smooth to match my finger, and diffs just.. isn't.

I know this is frustrating to hear, and that this is technically compounded by mobile probably having the lowest device performance to be playing with too, but.. There you go.

akdor1154··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
See what you get for saying things with subtlety instead of hype these days... sigh.
akdor1154··on The worst job interview I ever had
> I chalked it up to a power trip and the indignant behavior that comes along with it, as it is especially embedded in the culture of the country that I'm based out of.

That's a very globally-conscious way to refer to the USA!

akdor1154··on Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy
I have a consumer motion-triggered camera that is armed 24/7 and records for 30 seconds after each trigger. It has WiFi and serves playback itself, as well as of course video encoding. It's probably running Linux though i haven't verified.

It runs off a 25cm square solar panel screwed to a wall that only receives direct illumination for 5 hours a day, and is not in any way optimised beyond 'that looks roughly like it's pointing at the sun'.

Works great!

akdor1154··on Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons
I have often wondered if Chinese is a much 'better' language for LLMs - every character is a token, boom you're done. No weird subword nonsense, no strange semantics being applied to arbitrary chunks of words.. I feel like there must be benefits to being able to have the language tokenized in what must be very close to 1:1.
akdor1154··on Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7
That sounds really interesting, but my google-fu is not up to task here, I'm getting pages and pages of nonsense asking if Claude is conscious. Can you elaborate?
akdor1154··on Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick
I thought the term for those were 'sane languages', and I say that as a native English speaker :)
akdor1154··on CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root
Well yeah, if everything runs unsandboxed as root then there are no privilege escalations!

Less pithy, i seem to recall many issue with programs that relied on suid and permission dropping, which would be the 'oldschool' way of firming up the above.

You're not wrong that complexity has been introduced, and I'm not a a fan of snap either, but ultimately sandboxes (esp backwards compatible ones that don't need source level modifications) are complex.

If you want simple and secure, you're probably looking at OpenBSD and pledge.

akdor1154··on Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes
Yeah Goodin's stuff is often slop.. Probably human slop but slop nonetheless.
akdor1154··on Index, Count, Offset, Size
The 'same length for complementary names' thing is great.
akdor1154··on Exploring Different Keyboard Sensing Technologies
I want a keyboard switch with a weight on the end of a lever, typewriter or piano style. Or some other mechanism whereby the resistance would be constant or even reverse-linear-ish (from gravity and momentum), not linear (from a spring). But as far as I know no such thing exists. :(
akdor1154··on Show HN: ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)
The rendering is very cool, but what i really want is this as a renderer i can plug into Vega.

Vega/VGlite have amazing charting expressivity in their spec language, most other charting libs don't come close. It would be very cool to be able to take advantage of that.

akdor1154··on California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years
In the era of solar power saturating the grid in daytime, the energy cost is far less of an issue - At least, I assume California has similar characteristics to Australia in this regard.
akdor1154··on The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app
Singapore could be due to being a common VPN exit node for within SE Asia? Close by and avoids the most common regional blacklists (and gov firewalls of course).
akdor1154··on Stop Forwarding Errors, Start Designing Them
I think that was the intent of Go's design, but in practise i think it normally devolves into an overly verbose '?' with a poorly typed Result<_, String>.

As a Go dev, I'm looking at this article with great interest. I would very much like to apply this approach to Go as well, I think the author has got a very strong design there.

akdor1154··on Text rendering hates you (2019)
The issue (i think) is that the animation is done post-rasterizing. So a translate of integer pixels is fine, but scale? Skew? Suddenly you have really visible colour fringing appearing out of nowhere.
akdor1154··on Announcing the Beta release of ty
Wow, even if it wasn't so fast, I'd be tempted to use this solely due to their support of intersection (A & B) types! This is a sore omission from the standard python typing system.
akdor1154··on Pop_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC desktop environment
Gnome works OK with integer scaling, more granular than this and you're up shit creek.

E.G. can you set one screen to 150% and one to 175%? (I think the answer to this is 'technically yes but then everything goes a bit blurry because they do it by rendering at 2x then downscaling')

Proper mixed dpi scaling means stuff will render pixel-perfectly instead of downscaling hacks.

akdor1154··on Pop_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC desktop environment
Gnome is wayland, but they are very stubborn about the extensions they will/won't implement. For example, mixed dpi scaling, server side decorations, accessibility protocols all work differently on gnome or not at all.

This makes it very difficult for Wayland to evolve in a way that people want, as Gnome is the biggest player by user count.

akdor1154··on Pop_OS 24.04 LTS with COSMIC desktop environment
They attempt to avoid them, though snaps are still available if you wish.

Flatpak is installed by default and used by their app store, and Firefox is packaged as a deb so you can avoid the snap.

I consider it a deshittified Ubuntu.

akdor1154··on Japanese game devs face font dilemma as license increases from $380 to $20k
Interested in tangent replies to this, even if such fonts are artistically unsuitable for games - are open source fonts OK for Japanese? I understand that Unicode denotes single characters for both Chinese and Japanese (and Korean outside of Hangul?) even though there are differences between how nations write these 'single' characters, so the result is a Unicode font will look like a Chinese font, or a Japanese font, but not both.

How do the big Unicode OSS fonts like Noto, Deja Vu deal with this?

akdor1154··on GitLab discovers widespread NPM supply chain attack
Jesus Christ, i can't even get my own package to reliably self-publish in CI without ending up with a fragile pile of twigs, I'm awed they are able to automate infection like that.
akdor1154··on Venn Diagram for 7 Sets
Nor Firefox Android, even in Desktop mode.
akdor1154··on Apple’s Persona technology uses Gaussian splatting to create 3D facial scans
How's the latency? Latency is what makes Zoom et al painful for me now - it ruins the ability to politely interject, give confirmatiom, etc. Does Apple do a better job of this than Google/Zoom? In theory you could get 20-30ms (just spitballing numbers I used to get playing shooters!) but i've never got anywhere near that with vid conferencing.

Even so, latency-in-zoom kind of becomes an attribute of the medium and you learn to adapt. How does it feel with the Vision Pro though? The article talks about a really convincing sense of being in the same place with someone - how does latency affect that? (And does it differ based on if you're all physically in Silicon Valley or not?)

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