Hacker News: Asooka

New comment by Asooka in "OpenRCT2 v0.5.1 "Swamp Castle" released Last version to support Windows 7"

Asooka — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:12:46 +0000

What is the issue with building for Windows 7 target on Windows 10/11 host? Not that the team is obligated to support ancient OSes, but I am not following their justification. If it is just the fact that they can't properly test if the build works on 7, then they could call it "best effort" support.

New comment by Asooka in "Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart"

Asooka — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:43:21 +0000

That is a clear-cut case of extortion. The defence is having the police do their job and apprehend the criminals in question. If you screen incoming messages and stop them from reaching their target, extortionists will switch to publicly releasing one risque image with threats of releasing more explicit ones. There is always an unprotected channel as you noted.

As an aside, please do not use the b-mail word. It is insensitive towards BIPOCs.

New comment by Asooka in "Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users"

Asooka — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:41:46 +0000

That sounds preposterous, it's the same word no matter your accent. I am sticking to my version.

New comment by Asooka in "Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users"

Asooka — Tue, 19 May 2026 13:58:47 +0000

Eh, every term for disabled people becomes a slur. Moron->idiot->retard (the latter being so unacceptable in modern speech it is labelled by the kids as "the hard r"). But you are right, we should simply not use terms for disabled people in software names. I propose "Thirty Years and Still Cannot Draw a Circle" or the hip short name :no-entry-sign: emoji.

New comment by Asooka in "GitHub is sinking"

Asooka — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:10:24 +0000

Ideally I would want the code review to be versioned as well with easily accessible history. That is, I would like to see the exact lines which a comment pertains to and when they were changed and switch back and forth. While e-mail is probably good enough as a protocol to exchange this data, the e-mail client is not a good way to view it in my opinion. Maybe we need a decentralised code review system as well.

New comment by Asooka in "GitHub is sinking"

Asooka — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:07:02 +0000

Wouldn't this break Go and other build systems (npm?) that pull packages from github by default? Not that I endorse the practise, but will Microsoft really kick out such a big class of users?

New comment by Asooka in "Space Cadet Pinball on Linux"

Asooka — Sun, 10 May 2026 15:47:37 +0000

I honestly do not think source code will be all that useful. Make it so redistribution, decompilation, reverse-engineering and reimplementation is legal after sales stop and that covers it.

New comment by Asooka in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

Asooka — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:31:38 +0000

Joe can walk into an Apple store (or wherever they purchased the device) and ask them to enable parental controls on it. We have people whose job it is to service computers and phones, they have been around for more than half a century. I am pretty sure most Joes don't service their cars either, yet they keep them road legal by visiting trained mechanics.

New comment by Asooka in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

Asooka — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:25:52 +0000

Parental controls can set browsers in "child mode" where the browser sends an "I am a child" header to the server and social networks etc. need to honour it. This has existed for twelve years already: https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2014/07/22/prefersafe-mak... . It can probably be amended with a more granular set of levels, but that would be the best way forward.

The problem of "parents are negligent" is also solved by existing laws which have fines for parents who are negligent towards their children, and governments absolutely love collecting fines, so all the incentives are properly aligned.

New comment by Asooka in "Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA"

Asooka — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:16:31 +0000

Or keep stealing IMEI IDs. Now regular people will start getting banned from the internet because of bot activity. You would open your phone one day and see "You have been disconnected from society" and there will be nothing you can do.

New comment by Asooka in "Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA"

Asooka — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:08:16 +0000

Google would throw homeless people in a furnace to generate electricity for their datacentres if they could. No, this is not sarcasm, I fully expect they would if they could.

New comment by Asooka in "Google Cloud fraud defense, the next evolution of reCAPTCHA"

Asooka — Thu, 07 May 2026 10:01:52 +0000

Apart from the horrifying privacy implications, this also means all a bot needs to do to access a website is send a screenshot to an Android device. They made the CAPTCHA machine-readable. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

New comment by Asooka in "Why TUIs are back"

Asooka — Sun, 03 May 2026 22:52:20 +0000

I kind of wish we had HTML but for GUI. Imagine if you had a "gui" flag in terminfo and you could send an escape sequence on stdout after which you could send out screen updates as a stripped down form of HTML on stdout and receive events on stdin. I mean something that can describe the simplest bog standard Windows 95 application with a menu bar, side bar, dialogs, buttons, and proportional text. Otherwise we could offer a GUI for applications over SSH by having the terminal open a local TCP socket connected to stdin/out and launch the user's browser, implementing the most barebones CGI.

New comment by Asooka in "It's OK to compare floating-points for equality"

Asooka — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 22:06:22 +0000

Well yeah, you would store your values in whatever representation fits your domain, then do the calculations with floats based on a suitable origin when needed. For example, for raytracing you would have each model defined in its local coordinate system with 32-bit floats for coordinates (because those are plenty accurate enough for single human-scale models), but offset them in the scene with 64-bit doubles (again, plenty enough of precision), and convert the ray coordinates to the local coordinates for ray-mesh intersection once the ray-box intersection passes.

New comment by Asooka in "It's OK to compare floating-points for equality"

Asooka — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 21:59:36 +0000

My one small nitpick is that vector length is usually 2 instructions with SSE4:

    dpps xmm0, xmm0, 0x17 ; dot product of 3 lanes, write lane 0
    sqrtss xmm0, xmm0
    ret

And is considerably faster than the fancy version, mainly because Intel still hasn't given us horizontal-max vector instruction! ARM is a bit better in that regard with their fancy vmaxvq_f32 and vmaxnmvq_f32...

New comment by Asooka in "The Case Against Gameplay Loops (2024)"

Asooka — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:43:53 +0000

The trolls (and haters) are always the most vocal. It was true 40 years ago and it is still true today: Do NOT feed the trolls.

New comment by Asooka in "Dr. Dobb's Developer Library DVD 6 (2010)"

Asooka — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:09:37 +0000

Ah, the e2 article says it was patented, so no wonder it never gained traction. Surely that patent is long expired, though?

New comment by Asooka in "LittleSnitch for Linux"

Asooka — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:47:12 +0000

Yeah I will also be safe if I never turn on the PC, but some of us use computers to do actual work.

New comment by Asooka in "The curious case of retro demo scene graphics"

Asooka — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:45:05 +0000

This sounds so insane to me. If I own land and grow a tree on it, the tree and its fruits are private property forever (mine until I die, then inherited by my children, then their children, or sold, transferred, etc ad nauseam). At no point does the tree become "public", that would be utter nonsense. It is property. Why should my ideas then be anything different? They come from my head. I own myself, including my head, thus I should own the fruits of my head like I own the fruits of my tree and they should remain property forever. The fact that copyright expires is one of the great tragedies of modern life, though at least I can take solace in knowing I own my ideas until I die.

New comment by Asooka in "An unstoppable mushroom is tearing through North American forests"

Asooka — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:41:45 +0000

Goatherd's pie.