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miffy900

536 karma · joined October 11, 2014

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miffy900··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
that's because it was a full blown relational database - it literally shipped with a desktop variant of SQL server (MSDE) and the WinFS bits were implemented in .NET on top of that.

I recall installing the WinFS beta 1 release and suddenly the winfs-related background processes were eating up 150MB+ of RAM at a minimum, even with no stores created or files indexed - when machines back in 2005 had 512MB of memory that's actually a lot for what is supposed to be a background service.

Windows XP back then only needed 128MB of ram to run. they made a mistake in not building it on top of something akin to sqlite - hell they could've implemented maybe 70% of what they shipped in beta 1 with just sqlite alone.

miffy900··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
> XP has no search function in the Start menu. Hell, I don't recall Vista having that, either.

Vista definitely had that out of the box; Windows 7 perfected the search functionality - specifically it ended up performing faster than Vista. then windows 8 had to ruin it, and windows 10 never recovered - MS seemingly forgot what a good local search experience was after that.

miffy900··on CrowdSec Source Code Leak
> CrowdSec source code consists of two parts: a private one and another that hosts our Free Open Source Software (i.e., the Security Engine), which is public by design and therefore out of scope. The private part, though, contains the source code for our SaaS console, some AWS Cloud routines, some connectors, and automations.

This leak seems incredibly mundane. customers would have the security engine installed, but not the console.

miffy900··on Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint
yes, actually I do think the phrase 'N times faster' is sensible and logical

if I say 'this Apple M5 chip is 3x faster' than this intel chip, it implies two things:

- the run time of most operations that runs on it is now reduced (so one quantity is smaller)

- but also: MORE WORK is being completed per unit of time compared to the intel chip (so this quantity is greater)

So yes, a greater quantity is being measured in the apple chip compared to the intel when you say apple is N times faster. i guess this a quirk with the word 'faster' - it actually measures two things, time and work performed per unit of time. the word smaller just measures size.

like, if I give a customer a cup of coffee one day, then give them a SMALLER cup of coffee the next day, for the same price, but declare "It's now 2X more space efficient!" i.e. it's now half the size, I'm certain the customer is gonna be pissed.

miffy900··on Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint
I really wish people would stop saying N times smaller than something when making a comparison; that makes no sense - it's 1/9th (11.11%) the size. You don't get a smaller quantity by multiplying by a number greater than 1.0. You could instead reverse the subjects being compared - "the original model is 9x bigger than this new smaller, efficient model" or some such. That makes sense.

I keep seeing this being used when people talk about efficiency or performance gains and it's just very unintuitive language.

miffy900··on Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft
Windows is built using BuildXL, a very different build system from MSbuild used in Visual Studio: https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL/blob/main/Documentation...

> BuildXL has also been proven to scale to large codebases (e.g., Windows/Office repositories) where builds can consist of millions of processes with terabytes of outputs

BuildXL is also NOT compatible with VS and they have no plans to make it so. from the readme in the repo: https://github.com/microsoft/BuildXL

> There are currently no plans to integrate it into Visual Studio.

miffy900··on iPhone Duo
also another thing people forget is that merely 10 weeks after the first iphone launched, Apple cut the price by $200 in sept 2007. it then launched the 2nd gen iphone (iphone 3g) at an even lower price the next year due to carrier subsidies.
miffy900··on SwiftUI After 7 Years
So in other words you have no response to any of the arguments in the link? just some silly ad-hominem attack on the author. right.
miffy900··on Microsoft has released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes
it's still an opt-in setting though. Windows and OS-components like drivers and Edge do get auto updated yes, but to enable Microsoft Update, you still need to turn on a setting in the Settings app. even setting up a new PC/laptop with windows, this is off by default.
miffy900··on Microsoft has released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes
highly unlikely for many of them. SharePoint, bitlocker, Active directory, hyper-v, rdp, DHCP and MSMQ are all software/technologies that have decades of history and long pre-dated LLMs. seriously, do people not realise it was entirely possible to write insecure or bad code before LLMs?
miffy900··on Full Writeup of the Windows GDID
Maybe try reading the writeup? GDID's are 64 bit for one thing, not 128 like GUIDs.
miffy900··on SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B
Yep. there's absolutely no way that Cursor is worth that much.

for contrast, Elon paid $44b for twitter back in 2022. When you adjust for inflation, Twitter was acquired for $49b in 2026 money. Cursor getting bought for 1.22x more is just insanity.

Elon seems unwilling to shake off the image that he has basically no idea what he's doing.

miffy900··on Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
well for backend development, yes - I technically never stopped as I had existing projects to maintain. But after trying out Swift a couple times, I've dropped it entirely for backend. For new backend work it's C#/.NET all the way.

I wanted to try using a native language other than C++ and Swift ostensibly seemed easier to pick up. I continue to use Swift for iOS app development though where it is much easier to use; but that has its own share of compromises and trade-offs - but not centred around Swift, around SwiftUI vs UIKit.

miffy900··on Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
As someone who first began using Swift in 2021, after almost 10 years in C#/.NET land, I was already a bit grumpy at how complex C# was, (C# was 21 years at that point), but then coming to Swift, I couldn't believe how complex Swift was compared to C# - Swift was released in 2014, so would've been 8 years old in 2022. How is a language less than half the age of C# MORE complex than C#?

And this was me trying to use Swift for a data access layer + backend web API. There's barely any guidance or existing knowledge on using Swift for backend APIs, let alone a web browser of all projects.

There's no precedent or existing implementation you can look at for reference; known best practices in Swift are geared almost entirely towards using it with Apple platform APIs, so tons of knowledge about using the language itself simply cannot be applied outside the domain of building client-running apps for Apple hardware.

To use swift outside its usual domain is to become a pioneer, and try something truly untested. It was always a longshot.

miffy900··on Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
To be fair, work on Swift began in 2010, which would technically predate Tim Cook's accession to the position of CEO by a year or so.
miffy900··on Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]
I recall the source code for Windows XP was leaked some years ago; not just isolated parts of the code base, like with the earlier Windows NT4/2000 source code leak, but a completely buildable repository.

If I write an article on training an LLM on the leaked Windows XP source code, blithely mark the source code repo as in 'the public domain', but used Azure resources for the how-to steps, would that would make it OK Microsoft? You know, your Azure division might get some money...

Seriously, this is just so...blatant. It's like we've all collectively decided that copyright just doesn't matter anymore. Just readin this article, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

miffy900··on Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
> though the "about notepad" dialog shows the windows 11 version for some reason??

For many built in windows apps, the 'about this program' menu item just invokes a separate program, 'winver'. If you go Start -> Run and type in winver, it does the same thing.

miffy900··on GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
Are you even responding to the right comment? I read your comment and the parent comment you've responded to and this response doesn't make sense - it reads like a non-sequitur.
miffy900··on Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance
>Canada dumps good milk down the drain while people go hungry and suffer high food prices

I'm not sure if you realise this, but the exact same thing happens in the US.

miffy900··on Employee quits job over an Nvidia RTX 5060
> The firm gradually grew more contentious, demanding that the RTX 5060 be handed in because the event it was acquired at was part of a business trip, entirely paid for by the company. The employee would never have won the GPU had the firm not enabled him to attend the venue. Our winner refused, arguing that it belonged to him because he had won it on his own by pure luck.

Hmm...I feel like the company's reasoning here is almost acceptable. Almost, because I know as a (paid) employee, all of the code I write, any inventions or IP I come up with are the company's property, so it almost makes sense that the company might also want to assert its right to claim that any physical things given or gifted in the course of work-related trips that employees take on company time.

but the article mentions the winner was an intern, not an employee, and I know many interns i've worked with never actually signed an employment agreement, because they dont actually get paid. They sign NDAs but not full on employment agreements, so how can any company treat them like an employee? if I wasn't getting paid, I'd 100% hold my ground like the intern did and take it.

miffy900··on Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)
What name calling? Calling the author 'an unserious person' isn't name calling. Might be worth reading the article:

> "If you like Windows 8’s look, you are a bad person. You are the one Steve Jobs was talking about when he said Microsoft had no taste."

yeah you don't need to read very much of this to know this author hasn't exactly written a substantive article; they certainly aren't bothering to backup their claims with any reasoning. the whole post itself is 'this version of windows was ugly, this one wasn't etc'.

miffy900··on Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)
That was exactly the same behaviour in Windows 7 though; it wasn't exactly novel. At least Windows 7 searched your apps, and documents all at once. Windows 8 limited you to just apps. Windows 8 was a huge step down in usability.
miffy900··on Steam Machine
They can afford to make a big song and dance about this because chances are they are not selling the hardware at a loss and they have the regular steam store to offset the short term costs. If they were selling the hardware at a loss, I think their marketing trying to sell this device would be very different.
miffy900··on Dead Framework Theory
I feel like there could be a loophole here for the new-framework-author. Stick to using JSX for the view; JSX is just syntax sugar for built in react functions for constructing a tree, which can be easily swappable with your own implementation. I recall years ago using a babel plugin that just emitted static HTML from JSX. I know Vue.js v2 also had JSX support that way.

I think LLMs, despite already being trained massively on React, can easily adapt their output to suit a new framework's-specific API surface with a simple adjustment to the prompt. Maybe include an abbreviated list of type/function signatures that are specific to your new framework and just tell the LLM to use JSX for the views?

What I think will definitely be a challenge for new library authors in the age of LLMs is state management. There are already tons of libraries that basically achieve the same thing but have vastly different APIs. In this case, new lib-authors may be forced to just write pluggable re-implementations of existing libraries just to enable LLMs to emit compilable/runnable code. Though I dont know of any state management library that dominates the web like React does with the view layer.

miffy900··on Nearly 90% of Windows Games Now Run on Linux
for the longest time, no one in linux land cared about API stability or backward compatibility - then app/game developers realised if they could port a portion of Win32 to Linux via WINE, they could just target the win32 API or at least a portion of it and so long as WINE was installed, their app/game would always work. i find it a bit ironic; desktop Linux is being enabled by re-implementing APIs from another OS.
miffy900··on Apple M5 chip
To be fair, Microsoft has always had a culture of strong backwards compatibility, even between major OS versions - this is something they cultivate internally AND also tell their customers/users about.

Apple has had no such culture internally and they sure as heck don't emphasise backward compatibility to their customers (users or otherwise) - if anything, Apple prods and nags their developers to stick to the latest SDK/platform APIs, and shove the burden of software compatibility and maintenance onto them and hand wave away the breaking changes as being part and parcel of membership in the Apple ecosystem. This attitude can be traced back to the Steve Jobs era at Apple. It's definitely not new and comparing what Microsoft does with software and backward compatibility and expecting Apple to do the same is not fair - they really are different companies.

miffy900··on Zed is now available on Windows
Just wanted to mention that some basic Windows-OS keyboard shortcuts don't work, like ALT+F to open the File menu. Also things like ALT+SPACEBAR to bring up the system context menu for the focussed window (the menu with maximise, minimise, close options etc.) do not seem to work. I'm guessing with the DirectX rendering backend, the 'app' is rendered more akin to a video game than a native win32 process.

Also after install, the install directory takes up 400MB+. Even VSCode only takes up around 380MB. I believe it when they say it's not an Electron app, but I do wonder what's being packed in there. I was always under the impresion that Rust apps are pretty lightweight, but that install size is nearing Java levels of binary/dependency bloat.

miffy900··on Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
I think this idealism reveals a naive viewpoint about what users really care about. They care that apps work - that they do what they're supposed to and do it fast or efficiently. Not even Microsoft makes apps for their own platform that are native apps (example Teams, the new Outlook), and they service millions of users. Indeed, if you look at Microsoft's UI over the years, they are inconsistent as hell (all of the Office apps throughout the years is a good example), but so long as performance, functionality and usability hasn't suffered too much, users are OK with non-native apps that do not appear native. Another example is iTunes on Windows - looks nothing like a native Windows app.

There's also the fact that having control over your own apps UI/design language is better over the long term. What if Apple decides to ditch this liquid glass for something else years in the future? They ditched their own design language in iOS7, and now with iOS26 they've done it again.

And the basis for UI redesigns as wide ranging as this are almost entirely nonsensical. Does liquid glass suddenly improve usability by whatever percent? Nope - I guarantee Apple does NOT interrogate or benchmark their UI designs in the same way as NN Group does. Usability is actually hurt by the fact users need to re-learn basic interactions, and existing ones are now slower. Is overall performance improved over the previous version? Absolutely not - performance metrics such as battery life and UI responsiveness have regressed with the over use of visual effects like translucency and minute pixel manipulations. Why bother following changes to a design language when they are not based on real reasoning backed up by actual data or solid logic, and they end up regressing performance to an even worse state? Why should any app vendor be obligated to follow what are ultimately arbitrary and whimsical changes?

Redesigns such as this result in literally more work for the sake of it, zero net improvements and whole lot of wasted effort, all for what? Just to look different for a while, until the next redesign?

miffy900··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
> Charlie Kirk is hardly responsible for the 2nd amendment so trying to blame him for public shootings seems grossly unfair. So anyone who believes in the 2nd amendment deserves to be gunned down in public? Where does this end?

Please re-read the post you replied to; literally no one was blaming Kirk for public shootings happening. They were mentioning that Kirk has previously remarked about how shootings are ultimately a necessary trade-off for 2A rights. Seriously, you might also want to read the Newsweek article that the OP linked to; Kirk is quoted:

> "You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death," Kirk said at a Turning Point USA Faith event on Wednesday, as reported by Media Matters for America. "That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I am—I think it's worth it. "I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe."

Kirk SAID THIS; there's video of him saying this as well; I had to double check this myself as, putting aside the irony of his own death, how can anyone rationalise this way? Let alone say it out loud? I never heard of this guy before now and the more I read about him, the more I am astounded in the worst possibly ways.

> The left really needs to get a grip and look in the mirror. I have seen way too many 'normal' democrats mocking his death and implying it was justified because he was a 2nd amendment supporter. So are many of your friends, relatively, coworkers. When they see you express that opinion, we realize you're a sociopath and you're the fascist who thinks anyone who disagrees deserves death.

You are now ranting against a made-up argument that literally NO ONE made, but you.

miffy900··on Uncertain<T>
This is still some code, as opposed to no code. It does seem to model everything in the research paper.

Aside from the original research paper needing to be included in the repo, it definitely does not need anything more than what's already there. It all builds and compiles without errors, only 2 warnings for the library proper and 6 warnings for the test project. Oh and it comes with a unit testing project: 59 tests written that covers about 73% of the library code. Only 2 tests failed.

Even having a unit testing library means it beats out like 50% of all repos you see on GitHub.

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