Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
"These should just be vector images instead" is an argument made by someone who has never in their life attempted to create a vector image.
Comment · 1 month ago
> And 4:2:0 is just a poor fit for certain categories of images (like various kinds of illustrations, screenshots, etc).

I'd go even further and say that 4:2:0 is unsuitable for still images, period. Even for cases where it would be a suitable tradeoff for video. And even for video there's a significant chunk of content where it's undesirable.

In general I think we've come to accept some pretty gnarly limitations on image quality that really should not be such a given. 8 bits per channel is another one. You actually really do notice the banding with the naked eye in a fairly large range of situations, and if everything is 8 bits per channel then it gets really easy to exacerbate the problem on edit. Dithering in 8 bits per channel isn't really a solution because it's hard to do and it gets lost in compression quickly.

Comment · 4 months ago
The piracy will continue until morale improves.
Comment · 6 months ago
If this happened to me I would take it to the grave with me.
Comment · 6 months ago
I was once asked to install surveillance software on my personal PC, as a remote freelance worker. The person responsible on Slack told me "let me know when you've installed it". So I decided to just wait 15 minutes and then say "yeah I installed it" to see if they would notice that I didn't... and they didn't, they just said "OK, thanks" and I never heard anything about it ever again.

I realize this doesn't really help this conversation but that's all I can think of whenever this kind of subject comes up.

Comment · 9 months ago
> Two crypto thieves decided to settle an argument over who was wealthier by screensharing as they transferred crypto between wallets to prove ownership. In doing so, one of them — known online as "Lick" — revealed a wallet address that crypto sleuth zachxbt quickly tied to the theft of around $90 million from US government wallets containing seized crypto assets

Rapp snitches.

Comment · 9 months ago
It has also really accelerated the army of hustlers who can't actually code but want to get a contributor badge on major repos to put on their resume.

It's not like this sort of hustling didn't exist prior to LLMs but the volume has ballooned massively.

Comment · 9 months ago
The thing that really offends me about Windows 11 is that new right click menu that takes like 500 ms to appear each time you use it and is less useful than the old one.

Recently I've been experimenting with Atlas, Revi and Ghost Spectre, which are custom stripped versions of Windows, and it's such a breath of fresh air. It really makes me feel like if only they'd just ruthlessly pull out all the new garbage without regard for "but we just made and shipped this", Windows would actually be pretty good.

Say what you want about Apple and their slow descent into a fully walled garden where independent software development is slowly eroded and sabotaged, but even their most reviled update in years (macOS 26) is still miles ahead of Windows 11 in terms of cohesion and polish.

Comment · 11 months ago
> It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.

I get what you're saying, but thinking about it, I'd be very surprised if the personal computing world ends up seeing anything like a paradigm shift that is so unprecedented it will catch the likes of Apple unprepared. And I realize it might sound arrogant or even ludditic to say this, but we'd need some sort of shocking new concept that no one ever came up with even in sci-fi. It's no longer really a matter of being able to technically implement something, but more about coming up with a human interface that is both totally novel and more convenient and practical than what we have now.

The qwerty layout comes from 19th century typewriters and we're still using it. The mouse was conceived of in the 1960s. Tiny computers that fit in the hand and voice operated devices have been utilized in early sci-fi works. And there's obviously VR, even though I think that's more of a toy than anything.

The only thing that is potentially in that same league of usefulness that I can think of is a brain-computer interface of some sort but those are currently so far away from having competitive practicality that there's a huge amount of runway.

Comment · 1 year ago
It really is kind of incredible. I just saw the clip and there really is absolutely nothing there. This is not even 10% as poignant of what Jon Stewart would say in his day. He doesn't even say anything about Kirk himself, or even about the murder—he just talks about the reaction to it.

I already thought it was very suspicious that Sinclair's official press release just talks about how the remarks were "inappropriate and deeply insensitive" without describing anything about the actual remarks. And it even calls for the FCC to get involved?

What this really says is: you should be very afraid, because we will completely demolish if it suits us and we don't need a pretext.

Comment · 1 year ago
This is a 100x better explanation than what's in the blog post. The blog post is practically a tweet.
Comment · 1 year ago
Reading that set of quotes, it really is incredible how little Musk knows about even extremely basic things. He doesn't understand there are different problem spaces in tech, and that different problem spaces require completely different approaches and skill sets. To him, something like World of Warcraft is very impressive, so if you build Paypal on the same technology it will be impressive too. Like, honestly it's shocking that this guy is allowed near anything that has a button.
Comment · 2 years ago
I hate to be this person, but... it's scraping, not scrapping. You're scraping the information off the page regardless of what its structure is.
Comment · 2 years ago
"The uploader has not made this video available in your country."

First video on the page. I'm guessing this is probably a news report, right?

Comment · 2 years ago
> Back in 1999 I was the technical lead for the Mac OS X Finder at Apple. At that time the Finder code base was some 8 years old and had reached the end of its useful life. Making any changes to it require huge engineering effort, and any changes usually broke two or three seemingly unrelated features. For Mac OS X we decided to rewrite the Finder from scratch.

Not that I don't appreciate your work from back then, but as a longtime daily Mac user I cannot wait for the day that this is done once again. The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing. Not to mention it's actually capable of locking up waiting for network access in some circumstances.

I don't know what the Finder source code looks like today but I bet it's a similar kind of hell project as the Classic Finder was back then when they first rewrote it, considering how reluctant they are to do anything to it.

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