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literallywho

44 karma · joined April 4, 2025

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literallywho··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Idk, when I was young I was drinking heavily, today I drink some beers and smoke weed and I feel I’m much better for it. It doesn’t ruin the next day and I can do more things. But you can definitely overdo it. Psychedelics definitely can mess with your head, though, if not careful.
literallywho··on Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
Right, but they are one of the biggest DMCA abusers. They killed many fan projects. They killed game renting in Japan as a concept. They killed Yuzu (a Switch emulator). And they could change their mind at any time.
literallywho··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
These are pathetic excuses for a company with 400 billion in revenue. If they can't afford to hire people and develop systems, that means they don't have a viable business model that doesn't rely on scamming. Simple as that. I'm so tired of such excuses used for companies that make insane profits. What, they get to do that because alternatives are too complicated? I'm too stupid to get a phd in [insert field here], so I should be able to make a living running scams? These are the people who are claiming to work on AI and potentially AGI. Utterly ridiculous.
literallywho··on Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
I remember hearing in an old podcast (Dad & Sons), one of the guys there worked at Rockstar in QA in 2012 and he's still listed in the credits for Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), so the policies are unclear to say the least.
literallywho··on Every novel is boring until it isn't
>I feel enormously fortunate for being fluent in Russian, reading Bulgakov and Tolstoy in original is pure joy, any translation removes subtleties

As a native Russian speaker, I find it easier to experience their writings in English (and I don't feel anything of importance has been lost). And I've also heard other russian speakers claim that English prose (i.e. Shakespeare) is too dry, so I'm assuming this all comes entirely from people's subjective perceptions and is not an objective fact.

literallywho··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
What about languages, such as Russian, where every single noun has a gender assigned (he, she or it) and AI is a he by default (and everything else is already using pronouns in similar way, like a car is a she, a ship is a he).
literallywho··on OpenLogi
I have a "G" series 512 keyboard. And it seemingly can't save anything into the memory (on windows I had to use the logitech's bloatware). And the absolute worst part is that it is set to RGB colors moving around by default, so I've been running openrgb every OS boot to set the lights to a neutral, non-flashing, much much less intensive color. Happy to see alternatives to that.
literallywho··on Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast
Don't frontier labs distill their own bigger models into smaller ones? Opus 5 was probably distilled from Fable/Mythos. Since Chinese labs now have competitive models, they can distill those into their smaller version in Kimi K3.1 or something and achieve better intelligence per parameter results.
literallywho··on Kill The Cookie Banner
>How long did it take x user to navigate from x screen to y screen is one of the most valuable metrics for any site

Stats like that are only used to implement dark patterns better and justify user hostile decisions since pretty much the time the idea of telemetry was introduced. Otherwise, we'd live in the world of perfect web ui and we're not.

literallywho··on Kimi Work
I've been subbing to Claude for 2 years and somehow the questions of whatever happened in Tiananmen (I know already anyway) have never once came up, but Claude (especially Fable) is now famous for refusing to work on things people want. And even pushed back against me when I was doing asking to research some people famous (infamous) in Israel-Palestine conflict. I really don't get why these "chinese gotchas" are keep coming up in every thread, they are mostly entirely inconsequential to getting actual work stuff done while same can't be said about Fable or others. Once, Gemini refused to help me make an infographic about women in STEM because the specific woman I was doing research about has died a few years ago, other models had no such qualms. All these "gotchas" are quite arbitrary.
literallywho··on Windows 11 users are tired of MS account requirements creeping into everything
Go away? I've been replaying Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) and it recompiles the shaders even on alt-tab (to clarify that feature has been there always since release). It's more on the developers to fix. After all, not even Windows games on winodws are free from shader stutter (with less ways to fix it than linux!)
literallywho··on I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
"Revolutionizing" is nonsense when the stuff we currently have isn't even implemented correctly. My personal assessment (from my own education and having worked in teaching positions) is that we need realistically quadruple the number of teachers and they should be paid double to attract and keep actual talent. Nobody is spending that much money. Trying to revolutionize it without massive increases in spending is pretty much a cope. You can find lectures from 20-30 years ago saying things like that and yet nothing was achieved at all.
literallywho··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
I recently spent an equivalent of MacBook Air M4 price + import tax to get a linux laptop called Starlabs Horizon that advertises up to 14 hours of battery life. Maybe in a TTY it could do that, but in practice, I haven't yet seen any x86 laptops from any company, linux or not, to match even 50% of a macbook's battery. Realistically it's 4-5 hours like the rest of them. Not to mention that for that money I got a cpu that is a power equivalent of pre-M1 chip mac. Also they put speaker grills at the bottom (what were they thinking??)
literallywho··on Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
I don't really understand what's he on about. Even the best SC game (Chaos Theory) has tons of places where it's really unclear whether you can be seen or not. You pretty much always have to look at the light indicator. And sometimes it shows you as 0% visible, even though it doesn't look like it. And that, of course, also happens in every single classic SC game (I've not played Blacklist).
literallywho··on Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam
IIRCC, Eul, the guy who made Dota originally, also works at Valve.
literallywho··on Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan
I don't think it's faster than a windows game running Vulkan, though, is it? Like, if you benchmarked a game that has native DX12 and Vulkan modes (such as Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, I believe), it will probably have higher FPS in Vulkan mode, right?
literallywho··on The only moat left is money?
There are so many of them, aren't there? There's Roam Research (might be the OG one), Logseq (FOSS Obsidian basically), Notion, Emacs' Org-Roam, Anytype, etc. Neovim has like 5 extensions implementing the same idea (such as Neorg), Bram's Vim probably has its own plugins in Vim9script.
literallywho··on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun
Yeah, but... QR codes are annoying. I live in Thailand and I have to scan them every day. Pretty much every time, I wish it was as seamless as Apple Pay.
literallywho··on Android’s desktop interface leaks
I think only the folder is still named Ubuntu12 or something (like Dota 2's folder is still called Dota 2 Beta), libraries in it surely are more recent than that. And even then, native Linux ports of games don't run that well anyway. Especially older ones, like Tomb Raider 2013, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Alien: Isolaton, those all will run much better over Wine. I kind of expect newer ports to fall apart as well in the future. I was playing Hollow Knight the other day (native port) and it drops FPS quite often on my laptop (hybrid amd+nvidia), while through Wine those drops don't exist almost at all.
literallywho··on Oneplus phone update introduces hardware anti-rollback
Fascinating. I've had a OnePlus 6 from 2018 until 2023 (all on stock software) and I've not had or noticed any issues like that.
literallywho··on Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
Pretty sure it's been over 20 years. I actually wonder what makes Ubisoft so committed to the project. Even Michel Ancel himself left in 2020. I'd love to see those original 2008 builds of the game, they had to have made TONS of content over the years that just remains locked away on some file server forever.
literallywho··on Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios
Usually gone or retooled for something else. Even just within the Prince of Persia series, they had a game called Prince of Persia: Assassins that was canceled and turned into Assassin's Creed. There was also a sequel to Prince of Persia 2008 in development that was cancelled and never showed up again. You can even find footage from both of these games online, but they will never see the light of day unless someone leaks them (which does happen sometimes).
literallywho··on Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?
> You can combine the phone tree with literal runners

And I thought Mirror’s Edge world was too far fetched back in 2008. But, apparently, it’s the reality now or where things are headed after all.

literallywho··on Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
I ain't doing a water fast. And most people will not. Again, your argument is essentially "just use your will power". Clearly, people don't have that level of will power.
literallywho··on Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy
There are plenty of shortcuts. I've fixed my sleeping schedule by taking lorazepam and melatonin every night. I've gotten over many illnesses faster than healing naturally by taking many a pill. Why shouldn't there be medicine for issues with weight, especially for people who haven't been able to beat it themselves in decades? I've been fat most of my life and managed to lose a significant chunk of it by myself and regained it all over the following 5 years. Honestly, at this point, it's not happening without something like Ozempic. And I think it's the same for many people. Also, I don't care for the "not natural" debate, personally. If I wanted everything to be natural, I'd live in the woods and hunt animals.
literallywho··on Xfce is great
I've tried Cosmic recently and it's glitches galore right now (on nvidia at least). I think safest point is KDE. The most familiar paradigm, mature wayland support with mixed refresh rate displays, HDR and other modern features that XFCE can't do.
literallywho··on Anti-cheat evolution in Windows 11
Valve let bots infest and ruin TF2 servers for 8 (eight) years straight before doing anything. There's no way they'd add anything like that to TF2 within one year.
literallywho··on The Post-American Internet
ECHELON was quite popular in games back then. In the Splinter Cell games from the same era (2002), you're an operative of a US black ops organization called "Third Echelon" (and there's a second Echelon too, I guess).
literallywho··on Things I learnt about passkeys when building passkeybot
If I lose the device that has all my passkeys, I wouldn't be able to login into my emails either.
literallywho··on Things I learnt about passkeys when building passkeybot
Not in the western countries yet, I guess. I live in Thailand and have accounts in two banks and both of them only allow usage through an app that's only available through the App/Play store. Android version of Krungthai's bank app freaks out if you have developer settings enabled (even without changing anything, just enabling the access is enough to lock you out). And to use that app in the first place, you have to go to a branch and have staff set the app for, as passing the facial scan checks is impossible for foreigners.
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