Hacker News: AshamedCaptain

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32"

AshamedCaptain — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:39:46 +0000

I am quite sure AMD is already using a fork of the Linux amdgpu KMD for their proprietary driver on Windows (which in part explains why a project like this can even be done)

Porting Linux drivers to anywhere is generally hard. It either makes your kernel very Linux-like (and lots of manpower to translate the abstractions), or forces you to put Linux on it. There are bazillions of projects to put recent Intel drivers on 9x and none suceeded, for example.

Plus my recent observation that for Haiku it was easier to port the out-of-tree nvidia driver and fork Mesa, than it was to port the Linux amdgpu one.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "DMARC has been public since 2012 but most company domains still don't enforce it"

AshamedCaptain — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:09:55 +0000

And SPF doesn't?

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS"

AshamedCaptain — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:24:08 +0000

But there is no evidence whatsoever for what you are saying (in fact the nvidia drivers are portable and may perform comparably or even better than the free ones).

On the other hand here we have evidence of how this has made it impossible for any OS other than Linux to provide support for amdgpu (except if you rip a huge chunk of Linux code, which only works if your OS is extremely UNIX-like to begin with), while other OSes support NVidia cards just fine (which do not really have a complete free driver to begin with!).

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS"

AshamedCaptain — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:45:51 +0000

See the first message of TFA. The author complains that amdgpu has way too many linuxisms that make it impractical to port it to non-Linux ( unless you are already emulating Linux). On the other hand, the nv kernel driver is portable, up to the point that it is easier to port that to Haiku and then change the entire Mesa to use it than it is to port amdgpu (which wouldn't need Mesa changes).

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS"

AshamedCaptain — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:41:31 +0000

They are literally the only one who has managed to do it,, and they do so by having a huge layer of compatibility that takes years to update to new versions and support newer generations. We do not know if it would be easier for BSD to support nvidia either ... because they already have nvidia drivers (released by nvidia itself).

On the other hand here we have a random guy that adds support for nvidia gpus, by himself, on a non-linux, non-bsd kernel. And specifically claims he will not do the radeon one because he finds it too much work.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS"

AshamedCaptain — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:36:00 +0000

What I find depressing is because of idiotic Linux policies, it turns out nvidia hardware is easier to run on a 3rd party OS than hardware with otherwise fully open source drivers like Radeon.

This is just yet another example that you may think things in the hardware world have changed now that Linux "rules", but they have not.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Patreon laying off 20% of staff"

AshamedCaptain — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:55:34 +0000

Even big US companies today are full of "Is this good for the company?", "Our company values" and other cringe-inducing loyalty/ethics-related propaganda, about as much as 30 years ago. So they are keeping the charade, for better or worse, even though it is as much hypocrisy today as it was 30 years ago.

(Maybe 60 years ago it wasn't hypocrisy, but I lack personal evidence).

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Who Is America's Homer?"

AshamedCaptain — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:34:20 +0000

I always found it relevant that in Spanish-dubs they translate the name of Homer to "Homero" which would be basically how you would refer to the classic author rather than to some american layman. (as if e.g. in France I translated Homer as Homère instead of plainly Homer).

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source"

AshamedCaptain — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:36:22 +0000

I remember implementing the paper at some point, and though it was fun enough that it would make for a slightly less boring programming project for students.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "EU now one step away from reviving private message scanning rules"

AshamedCaptain — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:05:16 +0000

I think the name is meaningless to the average layman, therefore useless. Something like "(private) chat police" would probably transmit what this is about but is not as catchy.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries"

AshamedCaptain — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:21:12 +0000

You are generalizing. The design may very well be simpler, just more expensive.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries"

AshamedCaptain — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:20:11 +0000

Glad to hear, because that's how much a battery will degrade by itself in 1 to 2 years if you're average lucky.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries"

AshamedCaptain — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:19:06 +0000

More like just 1 year later even if you just store it unused, considering typical battery degradation.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "8086 Segmented Memory was a good idea"

AshamedCaptain — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:12:57 +0000

That's almost like saying that with 2 registers you can only do additions with 2 operands. True, but missing the picture. The number of segments is not limited by the number of segment registers, or even (gasp!) by the number of segment descriptors.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "8086 Segmented Memory was a good idea"

AshamedCaptain — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:19:05 +0000

I think you are missing the entire point of the article (which I kinda agree with), and just repeating the popular wisdom.

In the era a machine with "object addressing" sounded like a perfectly valid futuristic design (what a Lisp machine strived to be; I guess today you would call it tagged memory of some kind). The 8086 is not that, but the original design would have allowed to evolve it into something like that.

The article's point is that since programmers simply treated it as a sliding window (instead of an opaque object handle), the plan could not be implemented, and the half-assed thing became stuck.

Having seen other Intel RISC designs, I fully agree with the premise.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "AURpocalypse now: a look at the recent AUR attacks"

AshamedCaptain — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 23:48:19 +0000

I'll note that OpenSuse also has Packman which a shitton of people enable (for codecs), has also 'one namespace only' an looser policies than the main distro.

I do not think this something you can escape by switching distro.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"

AshamedCaptain — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:20:59 +0000

What native apps is Microsoft developing as of lately?

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module"

AshamedCaptain — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:26:13 +0000

I am using 10G over an ~15m 4 twisted pair phone cable (PTT, common in France even decades ago for ISDN, but no cat cable at all) and don't remember seeing a frame lost in quite some years.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module"

AshamedCaptain — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:34:26 +0000

No, the transceivers get hot. This is because of plenty of small metal surfaces, so even if they do not consume too much they will immediately get warm to the touch.

New comment by AshamedCaptain in "10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module"

AshamedCaptain — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:32:20 +0000

"High power consumption" is debatable, since even these hot transceivers are consuming about 3W, and the replacement ones are closer to 1W. At 1W per port, the switch you'll put them in likely has higher overhead...

It is difficult, but possible, to find a SFP+-capable switch where idle consumption scales at around 1W/port, but less than that I have not found.