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mpixel

122 karma · joined July 28, 2023

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mpixel··on Is "source available" that bad?
Ultimately, I think we disagree on the essence of the issue and many consider the 'almost enough' option to be worse than 'enough' which is the crust of this issue.

That said, I respect your opinion -- I've seen your comments on the thread and I see where you are coming from.

mpixel··on Is "source available" that bad?
The thing is, information leaks. You can go and read the Windows source code, if you want to, you just would get busted if you actually use it to build your own Windows or something.

Likewise source code is a shared a lot in my experience, i.e. the important software that's closed but has the important customer, the important customer gets the access when they ask for it. This depends on who you are and what you sell, of course.

So in practice, the difference isn't that huge.

That said, you are right too, THERE IS a difference. And it's better than entirely closed source.

So I will prefer the source-available over completely-closed-source, but I'm not going to be grateful about it.

And then there's realities, if I'm writing business critical software that my life depends on, I'll make it closed source in all likelihood. I'm not Stallman.

So I don't blame anyone for caring about their interests, it's entirely fair.

mpixel··on Swift was always going to be part of the OS (2022)
The tradeoff is that the app runs faster, looks better, works better -- in quite the indirect way.

Now that the developers on the core part don't need to spend time on compatibility -- or, just dont want have to make the base choice of being a runtime dependency -- they can spend time on other things instead.

This seems like a net negative at a glance, on the surface it means the apps are less compatible, so the second level is forced onto the older iterations, in practice, since each iteration has to worry about a lot less, the older iterations are _also_ a lot better instead.

It is of no surprise to me these Apple or Apple-like systems tend to be better overall, as opposed to the other philosophy of Android.

It leaks into all the levels. In the Java app, it is usual to see a deprecated warning that keeps working and it is maintained, and someone pays for that. The negative side is that there's no reason to get rid of the said dependency, either.

My point is that lowering the maintenance cost of _any_ app or systems in general, leaves room for improvement in all the other areas, as long as you don't fall behind -- if you are allowed to fall behind, you can afford to, if not, the end result is better given enough time.

mpixel··on The Linux Scheduler: A Decade of Wasted Cores (2016) [pdf]
Ultimately -- the thing is, if anyone is both capable and willing, they can, and sometimes do, fix it.

Granted, this combination is rather rare. Most people aren't capable. Of those who are, they have better things to do and they probably have very well paying jobs they could be focusing on instead.

With that being said, Linux is _still_ more efficient than Windows.

I don't want to say Linux is free, in practice it's not, those who are running the big powerful machines are using RHEL and paying hefty licenses.

Which are still better than any other alternative.

mpixel··on Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
As a supporting point, right now people have decent GPUs but as people get a taste of the streaming approach on a laptop for example, and with the GPU prices increasing, they might not want to spend a whole lot of money on it. A small subset.

And then the AAA-studio will see the hyper-paced style of game would be a bad experience and reduce the revenue, being more likely to prefer the styles that are more comfortable with the latency.

This in turn will make the approach itself more viable let alone the improvements in the area, and when the most popular games ensure they are viable on these platforms, you won't need to buy a 4XXX card.

People I know are looking into 3XXX and 4XXX cards at the moment when they are building a PC or buying a pre-built, 4XXX for the latter scenario, not necessarily 4090 or anything, really just the ones closer to the entry point, and honestly they aren't great value.

I don't like this situation but the writing is kind of on the wall, for the laptops I already see the streaming becoming common.

mpixel··on HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
And if you tell 2 experts to build something with W3Schools as the resource against better documentation, I'm sure the results will be the opposite.

That's not the point though, I'm not going to say different strokes for different folks.

Instead I'd say, if that beginner uses the 'slower' path instead, that will pay dividends in time -- they are better of learning to use the docs than getting paid peanuts for delivering that project which depends on the juniors faster.

mpixel··on JavaScript: Double Bitwise Not (~~) (2010)
Bitwise operators only work on the first 32-bits, so it isn't as easy as `instead of doing the Math.floor operations, check for edge cases and just the same operation as ~~`
mpixel··on You Win or You Learn
They don't spend 30 million per year, they spend 30 million over what they generate.

I don't think they'd generate peanuts so as to not even cover hardware costs.

mpixel··on SQLite 3.44: Interactive release notes
It's almost as if a site for tech has bias for tech commonly enjoyed by the readers of the said site.

I'm shocked, truly.

mpixel··on Caroline Ellison says FTX founder SBF hoped to be US president someday
> I'd wish it not be repeated, because we both know you don't really believe it.

I'm reasonably confident most people here understand the semantic behind the meme, rather than taking it at the face value as if it's a statement in a program.

mpixel··on Press Reviews of the AMD Ryzen 7040 Framework Laptop 13
I agree with all your points and also agree that honestly, these scenarios aren't far off from real world tasks.

I get the main issue, which is you could adjust the workload by 10% and achieve a 50% performance loss when you do this at the point where we cross the cache threshold and whatnot.

However I see CPUs unique in that I rank them _for_ these scenarios. A particular might be ranked unfairly, but as long as the test is equal, the better one is infact better, just not by the 50% the test might show but it's still going to be 5% better. I expect my GPU to be idle when it isn't training AI or rendering frames, but for the CPU, it's general purpose in real life, and anything goes.

mpixel··on Does anybody remember Google People
It had multiple angles it could succeed on really.

It had two major issues.

The first one was if you went beyond using it yourself or a very limited collab, it would desync, which was a major deal breaker for something like this. Nothing google with their vast amount of resources couldn't fix though.

The second one was it really was usable for multiple niches. This made it confusing for the general public, and the main audience doesn't even bias towards IT when you are at the scale google operates at.

You could use it as a note taking app yourself that you think might warrant sharing or collaborating later on.

You could use it as a spreadsheet, like how google sheets currently function.

You could use it to replace what we use Slack for these days.

And I really think that a niche or a community would find it useful for one of these and it would become a major tool they'd depend on if google just let it sit around for a while.

mpixel··on Azure dropping database support for MariaDB. Users advised to migrate to MySQL
There also other cloud companies to depend on that have been more sane. I doubt that in practice this will cause huge insurmountable challenges, but it's a headache and not a ton of fun.
mpixel··on Interactive GCC (igcc) is a read-eval-print loop (REPL) for C/C++
I'm not a C++ programmer, could you explain why this is a bad idea?
mpixel··on Why scalpers can get tickets
> People just don’t want to deal with the reality that the Taylor swift tickets that start at $40 or whatever were never real to begin with

This.

Here's a much more optimal semi-auction style solution. Tickets go on sale for 20 days, each day, all the seats and spots are worth the same price, you can buy anything, the price is always the same.

Day 1, the price is $2000. Day 20, the price is $10. So you'd only pay $60 at most for a ticket? Sure, just check in on day 16.

Since we start the price at the higher-than-scalp price, there's no scalping opportunity if you are paying the 'real market price'.

mpixel··on Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and the open-source community
It's making them money even if it doesn't up in a balance sheet. A push from MS that would threaten Steam's business model would only trigger a stronger push towards the Linux side of things and MS knowing that would tread carefully, which affects the Windows side of the business for Valve.
mpixel··on Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and the open-source community
Just to clarify, Steam came out in 2003 and GFWL in 2007.

Initial Steam was a horrible horrible experience, it also didn't have a store, and it was mainly just something you had for Counter Strike. Now, CS was MASSIVE, it still is, but that was enough to get a whole lot of people experience Steam.

It didn't help the internet connection back then was, to put it mildly, shit for most people, so a constantly disconnecting program wasn't a shocking outcome in hindsight, remember, this is 2003-2004.

It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware?

And then things have changed. It's my go-to shop, and their contributions to the Linux ecosystem is much welcome. There's self interest, since operating a shop on Windows comes with inherent risks, but I don't see the same interest in other parties, so I'll take it over anything else today.

mpixel··on Sonnet: High performance JSON decoder in Go
Which also show only a few commits, initial commit being dump of the project like this one.

Anyway, I'm not a fan of this style of using Git, but personal projects are ultimately, personal, to each their own.

mpixel··on v0: Generate UI with simple text prompts
Sorry, but this isn't just a waitlist page, it first lets you give your input, then asks you to register, and then adds you to the waitlist, it just doesn't work.
mpixel··on Google lays off hundreds on recruiting team
Yeah, even if we assume the decision is coming from a complete sociopath, there's still, somewhere on the line, someone saying 'look, are you sure about this?'

These companies are heartless.

People in the chain, much less so.

mpixel··on Here ends the story of 10K Riders Publishing
So absurd.

Their target is described as games almost-finished in 4 months at most, starting from 0, so they chose mobile tycoons, idle clickers, which are indeed finishable in 4 months if you scrub the bottom of the barrel.

For that reasons there is lots of them.

Then another case study is copying one of the most successful idlers and failing at it, yeah dawg that exists already.

It takes a fuck ton of more work with a 4 months deadline in a very small or one person team and actually making something meaningful that isn't an exact clone of something. Let alone exact clone, 4 months isn't even enough to clone something more complex.

This publisher also doesn't seem to have done anything to add value in the end anyway.

Had they bought ready-to-publish games that are of this type and reskinned it with passable assets and advertised it on tiktok, they'd have better chance at turning a profit.

Not to give any ideas though.

mpixel··on The tide is shifting: 1.3B outperforms 7B Llama 2
Do people want that though? I don't want phd level responses for my queries. I want it to be better than what I could come up in a minute or by searching half an hour. Rather than some highly advanced highly detailed response I could probably not understand if the topic is not something I'm sufficient in to begin with.

Think common use cases. A lot of users are students, do I want it to write an essay like a linguist? Or solve my homework using the better but more advanced techniques and style?

mpixel··on Reviewing a Dell Linux PC 23 years ago
Thing is, people just don't install an OS to begin with - as Torvalds once remarked himself.

You don't see Steam Deck users installing Windows, though they very well could, and I'm sure some would prefer to do so, but the experience in that device isn't bad enough - or bad at all for most - for people to bother, likewise the experience of Windows isn't bad enough for people to bother.

Framework won't suddenly cause a major shift, simply because they just don't sell that many devices. These kinds of things don't happen in a year.

mpixel··on Source: Google Pixel 8 will get more Android OS updates
iphone 6s came out in 2015. pixel 4a came out in 2020.
mpixel··on Source: Google Pixel 8 will get more Android OS updates
more than people not buying any phones
mpixel··on Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas
only lowercase alphabetic ascii for any path or file name, excluding space.

i will die on this hill.

mpixel··on Mullvad Browser
let's say windows 11 users who use google chrome
mpixel··on Michael Burry, of Big Short fame, just bet $1.6B on a stock market crash
heck, it might even be larger-than-usual hedge where he thinks a crash is possible and the reward is relatively high to the small loss he'd be making, there's a lot of nuance skipped over here.
mpixel··on Pentium floating-point division bug (1994)
what's interesting is that this isn't as serious as some of the issues today.

just following the example, the result is wrong after the 4th digit. this is absolutely 'could be handled in software with a significant performance loss' territory.

that isn't to say this isn't breaking -- it absolutely is.

what I'm getting at is that my CPU runs 30% slower with mitigations. if I were running multiple servers like the computer I use, and I was near the capacity of my resources, I would need to add some machine(s) -- and people do.

in the same way this is serious, these current issues are the same yet somehow we've lost some stuff along the way and we just don't do recalls or even receive any remedies. where's my check?

mpixel··on Supermarket AI meal planner app suggests recipe that would create chlorine gas
looks like it's a llm filtering itself, so 'taste' is a valid meal.
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