Viewing profile — gary_0

> If you use new parts, you might save 80$ Valve very obviously isn't enjoying a fat margin on Steam Machines, but they're not a public company so profit is profit. And people who …

The point of a canary is that it's cryptographically signed, and it's possible to set up a duress passphrase that will delete the key when entered, so if everything works correctly…

Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot o…

I would argue the term "gatekeeping" is being twisted around when it comes to AI. I see genuine gatekeeping when people with a certain skill or qualification try to discourage newc…

I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics already forgoes conventional causality. Attosecond interactions take place in such narrow slices of time that the uncertainty principle turns ever…

Einstein laid the theoretical foundations for lasers in 1917, and it took over 40 years of "impractical" scientific work before the first functioning laser was built. It took decad…

Thanks for sharing. Just curious, is there any way to perform globbing over a list of path-like strings instead of only directly on the filesystem?

As I understand it, compiling each source file separately and linking together the result was historically kind of a hack too, or at least a compromise, because early unix machines…

The chips themselves add a bunch of new failure states to consider beyond software bugs, too. Maybe a bad wire or component puts too much load on the microcontroller's wee internal…

> quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content but…

I absolutely do not understand moving "report spam" under "report misleading". The UX for this is terrible. There are lots of bots posting SEO junk, at a rate and scale that defini…

Yes, a simple purpose-made chip designed to be used in safety-critical situations, with high tolerances for voltage etc, would probably be better. Although one thing the 555 design…

I would absolutely not want to use a microcontroller or a complicated chip for something like that. Simplicity is the point.

I designed the electronics for a heavy-duty industrial 3D printer and used a 555 in the failsafe circuit (alongside the manual e-stop). If it didn't get reset by a heartbeat from t…

My memory that far back is hazy but I seem to recall being able to do full-page zoom in Opera circa 2003.

If I download the image, Fedora KDE shows it properly in Dolphin and Gwenview.

Leaving aside the externalities of constantly breaking everyone's workflow and potentially introducing disastrous bugs, there's an opportunity cost to innovating where there isn’t …

I highly doubt there's a steering input device so superior to the current wheel shape that it's worth throwing out the existing standard. Yes, at one point how steering should work…

Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" wal…

Early to mid 00's was peak Moore's Law. Every year left last year's computers on the curb. Graphics hardware acceleration and programmable shaders were expanding their capabilities…

> e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand IIRC Max Payne was one of the earlier games to rely heavily on photo-reference textures (instead of hand …

I feel old because the post talks about these techniques as if they're surprising innovations or compromises for more accurate simulations, but most of these tricks were industry s…

Both questions could fill many books. But having grown up in Canada and having visited Europe, they both seem to have a fundamental disinterest in technology and futuristic-ness, a…

"Killing the golden goose" is the phrase that has come to mind repeatedly in the past few years. As someone living in a country that has been brain-draining into the US for decades…

Yes, I know mmap already sort of allows this (and has for well over a decade). To elaborate: when I want to, say, parse a megabytes-sized file, I don't muck about with mmap(), I ju…