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naoru

178 karma · joined November 3, 2014

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naoru··on Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
Shortages or not, there's little demand for cool new motherboards and CPUs from the enthusiast corner of the market because hardware platforms themselves are stagnating performance-wise.

13-14gen Intel Cores are still more than enough for your average home gamer, Zen 5 shows only marginal improvement over Zen 4 except for a very narrow range of workloads, getting wider than 128bit memory bus is prohibitively expensive while relatively cheap consumer boxes like Mac Mini run circles around dual-channel DDR5 setups, so on, so forth.

Sure, presenting this as a consequence of AI boom is convenient for a news outlet, but even before the craze both Intel and AMD were dragging their feet.

I'm not buying it. Both the premise and the new motherboard, that is.

naoru··on Claude Opus 4.7
You'd like Emmet notation. Just look at the cheat sheet: https://docs.emmet.io/cheat-sheet/
naoru··on Latest SteamOS Beta Now Includes Ntsync Kernel Driver
What's wrong with Desktop mode?
naoru··on Sony PS5 ROM keys leaked – jailbreaking could be made easier with BootROM codes
The article says:

> According to The Cybersec Guru, this is an unpatchable problem for Sony, because these keys cannot be changed and are burned directly in the APU.

I'm just speculating at this point, but what could prevent Sony from anticipating this exact situation and burning several keys in the APU? I mean, eFuse is not exactly a new technology. That way, once a key is leaked, Sony could push a firmware update switching the APU to a new key which hasn't been leaked yet.

naoru··on Most expensive laptops
Top five are 18". Are you sure?
naoru··on Telephone colophon: Or, how I overengineered my call audio (2020)
I've tried several different mics but eventually settled on a wired headset and Revelator io44 audio interface. The latter one is a goofy brick but it has a TRRS audio jack and built-in DSP so I don't have to fiddle with loopbacks, DAWs and VSTs.

And if I'm not able to lug that brick I can just plug the headset directly into my laptop.

naoru··on QuakeNotch: Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch
Thanks, ChatGPT.
naoru··on Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor
Oh and you also might be interested in this one too: https://github.com/cakama3a/Polling

Although it's for gamepads, it's pretty much indispensable in debugging gamepad-related latency issues. For example, I found that my presumably 1000Hz controller can do only 500Hz in ideal conditions and it starts to drop at a much lower distance from the computer than advertised. Neat stuff.

naoru··on Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor
Seems like it doesn't properly handle mouse events on Safari in macOS and only shows "frames with no pointer events". I assume it's because "pointerrawupdate" event is not supported there.

Also it's interesting that with ProMotion enabled it reports 16.67ms per frame (indicating 60Hz redraw rate) in Safari, but in Chrome it's 8.33.

naoru··on VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles
Not all of his translations were nowhere near the original. For example, his translation of Guy Ritchie's Snatch was excellent (in my opinion of course) and is still quoted to this day. I'd say it's the only one that absolutely nails it and then some.

On the other hand, his Lord of The Rings was an "alternative" dub as you described. Didn't watch that one though.

naoru··on CRT Simulation in a GPU Shader, Looks Better Than Black Frame Insertion
This is better than BFI, although 120Hz demo on my screen looks like it's just alternating two or three parts of the image. Maybe there is a way to use fake interlacing to make it look convincing.

240Hz demo in 144Hz mode looks flickery but much more realistic.

naoru··on Vintage digicams are an artistic statement
Nope, color bleeding was virtually non-issue with SECAM color encoding. I've grown up in a SECAM country, but we had a lot of PAL content. PAL always looked bad and smudgy in comparison. NTSC was just plain awful and intolerable even by my pre-teen standards.
naoru··on M4 Mac mini's efficiency
> components that shouldn't even be produced anymore

That's kinda harsh. For what it's worth, the base model isn't that bad and the storage can be (theoretically) upgraded down the road, even though it might cost a fair bit more than a standard m.2 SSD.

Sure, in raw compute it's slower than competition, but objectively it's still plenty fast and more trustworthy in terms of reliability.

naoru··on M4 Mac mini's efficiency
Beelink EQR6 has an internal PSU and is also quite small, a bit smaller in footprint actually. It even comes with two full-size m.2 slots and expandable RAM.

Mini is great, exceptionally so, I actually just got a rather souped-up one (that's the reason I'm in this thread) but x86 vendors are catching up and there's a certain possibility that more established brands will pick up.

naoru··on M4 Mac mini's efficiency
That's a valid concern but I personally avoid going into this rabbit hole just for the sake of my (already fragile) sanity.

Speaking of issues, the other one with these low cost mini PCs is low-quality SSDs. The one that my UN100D was supplied with was pure garboleum in terms of speed so it had to be replaced.

naoru··on M4 Mac mini's efficiency
Welp. You're definitely correct. But that's the only machine in my opinion that comes close (and offers some advantage like a whole PCIe 5.0 x16 slot). There are other mini PCs that are cheaper, some other commenter suggested Beelinks which are also quite popular among enthusiasts, SER8 for example: Ryzen 8745HS, 24 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD for 467 Euro. Seems competitive enough.
naoru··on M4 Mac mini's efficiency is incredible
I can only speak of experience with their UN100D mini PC which I use as a home server in a fairly constrained closet. Not a hot machine by any means, far from that, but the cooling seems pretty decent even for this low power CPU.

BD790i that I just received (didn't even install anywhere) has a rather substantial heatsink over the CPU similar to high wattage GPUs. The chip itself is rated at 55W TDP so it shouldn't be that much of a problem cooling it. The motherboard doesn't come with a fan and I'm definitely not going to spend extra on high-end ones at least just yet.

I don't know anything about the thermals of 790S7's case though. It looks like they gave it at least some thought judging by the duct over the CPU, but how it actually performs I have no idea.

naoru··on M4 Mac mini's efficiency
A comparable option in my opinion would be Minisforum 790S7. They also have a separate mini-ITX motherboard from that one if you want to DIY.

The CPU in it is faster in raw multi-thread performance, single-threaded it's a bit slower, but still quite impressive.

The only problem I had with Minisforum is that they couldn't supply the exact hardware I ordered and their suggested solution was either to wait for 1+ month or get a sligtly different configuration. Two times out of two.

Quality-wise they're pretty good though, no complaints there.

naoru··on AMD's Radeon 890M: Strix Point's Bigger iGPU
Me too. There's at least one manufacturer who makes pretty sweet mini-ITX motherboard with R9 7945HX, I hope they will follow up with Strix Halo once it's released.
naoru··on PicoMEM by FreddyV – All in One 8-Bit ISA Expansion Card
Look at PicoGUS [0], at first it was a similar semi-prototype board with an off-the-shelf Pico module and then it was redesigned into a neat simple expansion card.

Give it some time.

[0] https://picog.us/

naoru··on High Definition CSS Color Guide
By some weird coincidence I've been trying to make a wide gamut display work properly on Windows just yesterday. Short version: no success. We're so close but still so far.

Long rant: I've got a Windows 10 machine with NVidia graphics, a company issued Windows 11 laptop with an integrated Intel GPU and a fairly recent Macbook. The display in question is MSI MAG274UPF, which can be considered wide gamut.

Mac (presumably) pulls RGB primaries from the EDID and performs the necessary gamut mapping without losing the ability to display images in P3 space. Colors are perfect, wide gamut tests pass, everyone's happy.

Windows 10 has no idea what to do with WCG and displays everything in ultra vivid, extra saturated colors even after trying to mess with vendor-provided ICC profile. WCG tests fail.

Windows 11 should have Auto Color Management, which in theory should bring us roughly to feature parity with macOS, but for some reason it allows me to turn it on only on the laptop's internal display, which has ~60% sRGB coverage. Apparently Windows does not want to enable gamut mapping in SDR mode on HDR certified displays, even if they conform only to DisplayHDR 400 specification, which is an abomination in itself. Results are the same as with Windows 10.

My disappointment is immeasurable. We could have proper WCG support in Windows world.

naoru··on He spent his life building a $1M stereo
RF capture of Laserdiscs as in the Domesday Duplicator?

https://github.com/simoninns/DomesdayDuplicator/wiki/Overvie...

naoru··on Show HN: Audio plugin for circuit-bent MP3 compression sounds
"tubular" really brings back memories of slightly incompatible mp3 encoders and decoders. Some combinations produced this short and distinct tone on sharp transitions in sound, I wasn't sure what was the cause but I suspect this has something to do with VBR.

Thanks!

naoru··on Many of today’s unhealthy foods were brought to you by Big Tobacco
For a Russian Huel is even more off-putting, "ohuel" (охуел) is a swear word which roughly means "out of his mind", derived from "huy" (хуй), which means "dick".

I don't want no dick in my food, thank you very much.

naoru··on Reverse-engineering the classic MK4116 16-kilobit DRAM chip (2020)
Afaik 386SL was in fact not a 386, but a cutdown 486. This might explain the difference in transistor count.
naoru··on Using HDMI radio interference for high-speed data transfer
I assume that it's not the HDMI output from the Pi that produces this kind of interference but rather the monitor itself.

Though it's entirely possible that Pi leaks HDMI into the ether. Someone with a Pi4 and a RTL-SDR could easily verify it: pixel clock frequency of a 1024x768 signal is around 50 MHz.

naoru··on AMD CEO: The Next Challenge Is Energy Efficiency
Anecdotally, I use a CPU from an aliexpress mystery seller in my desktop machine. It's a i9-9980HK with about 40W TDP...

Which I unlocked to ~300W and installed a water cooling system.

It can idle at around 5W, but a synthetic load (e. g. prime95) quickly makes it draw full 300W and then throttle a bit. Fun stuff, definitely wouldn't do it again due to enormous strain on the PSU and an unreasonably high power draw relative to performance.

naoru··on My “favorite” magtape story
Haha. Our team has about 10 or so "talking buttons" with sounds of various crassness recorded on them for comedic relief. On a particularly dry day someone noticed that static electricity does not only mess with half of the monitors, but spontaneously triggers a random button.

We found that when one of our engineers sat down on a chair which triggered a button with an obscenely wet fart sound.

Needless to say, our productivity went through the roof that day.

naoru··on Fake Parallel Printer – A Parallel Port Traffic Capturing Tool
There's nothing maddening in soldering 0804/0603 SMD if you have the right tools. With a good flux you can even do it with your eyes closed. Smaller sizes require at least a magnifying glass and a steady hand though.
naoru··on Ask HN: Does anyone review code on their iPad/tablet?
I sometimes review code on my phone, because a) I could never think of a use case for an iPad in my daily life and b) a tablet is kinda unwieldy to grab every time you go to the loo.

Granted, it's usually just web stuff, nothing too complicated.

Ok, I lied. Sometimes it's cafeteria and not the bathroom.

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