<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: MindSpunk</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MindSpunk</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:24:55 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=MindSpunk" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "The Mechanics of Steins Gate (2023) [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not recommending the Steins;Gate anime adaption is pretty wild, it's an incredibly highly rated Anime series. The story telling language of a VN and an Anime are very different so it's no surprise they don't perfectly capture the complexities of the other medium. They don't have to be the same to be worth watching.<p>fwiw: no idea on the other anime adaptions quality</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:30:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47657310</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47657310</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47657310</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The hard part of Linux ports isn't the first 90% (Using the Linux APIs). It's the second 90%.<p>Platform bugs, build issues, distro differences, implicitly relying on behavior of Windows. It's not just "use Linux API", there's a lot of effort to ship properly. Lots of effort for a tiny user base. There's more users now, but proton is probably a better target than native Linux for games.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:27:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511054</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511054</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511054</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Our commitment to Windows quality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As if you don't get a jumble of UI frameworks on Linux too.<p>You can run KDE but depending on the app  and containerization you open you'll get a Qt environment, a Qt environment that doesn't respect the system theme, random GTK apps that don't follow the system theme, random GTK apps that only follow a light/dark mode toggle. The GTK apps render their own window decorations too. Sometimes the cursor will change size and theme depending on the window it's on top of.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:24:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462696</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462696</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462696</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Our commitment to Windows quality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)<p>That's not at all how that works. DirectX12 isn't slow by any stretch of the imagination. In my personal and professional experience Vulkan is about on par depending on the driver. The main differences are in CPU cost, the GPU ultimately runs basically the same code.<p>There's no magic Vulkan can pull out of thin air to be faster than DX12, they're both doing basically the same thing and they're not far off the "speed of light" for driving the GPU hardware.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:12:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462609</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462609</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462609</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Rust is just a tool"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Being so absolutist is silly but their counter argument is very weak. Can I invalidate any memory safe language by dredging up old bug reports? Java had a bug once I guess it's over, everyone back to C. The argument is so thin it's hard to tell what they're trying to say.<p>It's just as reductive as the person they're replying to.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:25:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47196390</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47196390</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47196390</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Why every automaker is quietly bringing back the inline-six engine"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>fwiw, the M139 engine they're putting on those AMGs is completely insane.<p>It's a production 2.0L 4-cylinder engine making (in the most powerful config) 350kw. From the factory. Insane.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:54:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159826</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159826</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159826</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Why every automaker is quietly bringing back the inline-six engine"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Toyota with the G family and JZ family + Nissan with the RB family too. They were prolific in RWD cars.<p>Daewoo put one in a FWD car in the mid 2000s for some reason too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:45:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159718</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159718</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159718</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes? That's called a bug? The standard library incorrectly labelled something as safe, and then changed it. The root was an unsafe FFI call which was incorrectly marked as safe.<p>It's no different than a bug in an unsafe pure Rust function.<p>I'm choosing to ignore that libc is typically dynamically linked, but linking in foreign code and marking it safe is a choice to trust the code. Under dynamic linking anything could get linked in, unlike static linking. At least a static link only includes the code you (theoretically) audited and decided is safe.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:11:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135662</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135662</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135662</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "What it means that Ubuntu is using Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What is a <i>safe</i> ABI? An ABI can't control whether one or both parties either end of the interface are honest.<p>You can't have safe dynamic linking, dynamic linking requires you to trust the library you load with no ability to verify.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:29:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133551</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133551</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133551</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're both wrong, the Mirai uses a fuel cell as the voltage source for an otherwise EV drive train. The Mirai is an EV with a fuel cell instead of a battery.<p>There is no ICE in a Mirai.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:23:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47106642</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47106642</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47106642</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I remember Star Wars Jedi Survivor had a 5-6 minute shader pre-compile on my 5950X. I heard of people well into the 30 minute mark on lower core count machines. Battlefield 6 was a few minutes on my 9950X, higher again on lower core count CPUs.<p>Really depends on the game.<p>There's no easy way around this problem. It never came up as much in the OpenGL/D3D11 era because we didn't make as many shaders back then. Shader graphs and letting artists author shaders really opened pandoras box on this problem, but OpenGL was already on its way out by the time these techniques were proliferating so Vulkan gets lumped in as the cause.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:37:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070633</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070633</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070633</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, many games do that too. Depending on how many shaders the game uses and how fast the user's CPU is an exhaustive pre-compile could take half an hour or more.<p>But in reality the exhaustive pre-compile will compile way more than will be used by any given game session (on average) and waste lots of time. Also you would have to recompile every time the user upgraded their driver version or changed hardware. And you're likely to churn a lot of customers if you smack them with a 30+ minute loading screen.<p>Precisely which shaders get used by the game can only be correctly discovered at runtime in many games, it depends on the precise state of the game/renderer and the quality settings and often hardware vendor if there are vendor-specific code paths.<p>Some games will get QA to play a bunch of the game, or maybe setup automated scripts to fly through all the levels and log which shaders get used. Then that log gets replayed in a startup pre-compile loading screen so you're at least pre-compiling shaders you know will be used.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:09:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070153</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070153</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070153</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Depends what you're precompiling.<p>For Vulkan you already ship "pre-compiled" shaders in SPIR-V form. The SPIR-V needs to be compiled to GPU ISA before it can run.<p>You can't, in general, pre-compile the SPIR-V to GPU ISA because you don't know the target device you're running on until the app launches. You would have to precompile ISA for every GPU you ever plan to run on, for every platform, for every driver version they've ever released that you will run on. Also you need to know when new hardware and drivers come out and have pre-compiled ISA ready for them.<p>Steam tries to do this. They store pre-compiled ISA tagged with the GPU+Driver+Platform, then ship it to you. Kinda works if they have the shaders for a game compiled for your GPU/Driver/Platform. In reality your cache hit rate will be spotty and plenty of people are going to stutter.<p>OpenGL/DirectX11 still has this problem too, but it's all hidden in the driver. Drivers would do a lot of heroics to hide compilation stutter. They'd still often fail though and developers had no way to really manage it out outside of some truly disgusting hacks.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Feb 2026 04:17:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069862</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069862</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47069862</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "BarraCUDA Open-source CUDA compiler targeting AMD GPUs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The CPUs in their SOCs were not up to snuff for a non-portable game console until very recently. They used (and largely still do I believe) off the shelf ARM Cortex designs. The SOC fabric is their own, but the cores are standard.<p>In performance even the aging Zen2 would demolish the best Tegra you could get at the time.<p>You should note that the Switch, the only major handheld console for the last 10 years, is the only one using a Tegra.<p>And from everything I've heard Nvidia is a garbage hardware partner who you absolutely don't want to base your entire business on because they will screw you. The consoles all use custom AMD SOCs, if you're going to that deep level of partnering you'd want a partner who isn't out to stab you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:52:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068057</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068057</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068057</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It pains me how important TKO is for Ivanova's character because it's otherwise got to be one of, if not the worst episodes in the whole show's run.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:23:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012720</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012720</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012720</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's probably worth watching TNG before DS9. The contrast between TNG and DS9 with DS9's darker tone is an important part of the show. Probably the best episode in the whole series, "In The Pale Moonlight", is made all the better when you've seen what they're contrasting against.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:18:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012697</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012697</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012697</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The first season is definitely the most conventional (for the time) and I think that reflects in some of JMS's statements saying the show was still getting onto its feet through the first season. Having the serialized story was very unfamiliar territory for Hollywood television back then, they were learning on their feet.<p>If I recall correctly JMS wrote basically every episode after season 1, where as season 1 had a few guest writers. The guest written episodes did not do well, including episode 14 which is probably the worst episode in the entire series.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:06:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012642</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012642</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47012642</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>WGPU is just a layer over the top of the native APIs on any given platform so unless Zed's DirectX/Metal renderers were particularly bad it's unlikely WGPU will be better here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:47:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47004035</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47004035</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47004035</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Simplifying Vulkan one subsystem at a time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What exactly is the difference between these?<p>cuMemAlloc -> vmaAllocate + VMA_MEMORY_USAGE_GPU_ONLY<p>cuMemAllocHost -> vmaAllocate + VMA_MEMORY_USAGE_CPU_ONLY<p>It seems like the functionality is the same, just the memory usage is implicit in cuMemAlloc instead of being typed out? If it's that big of a deal write a wrapper function and be done with it?<p>Usage flags never come up in CUDA because everything is just a bag-of-bytes buffer. Vulkan needs to deal with render targets and textures too which historically had to be placed in special memory regions, and are still accessed through big blocks of fixed function hardware that are very much still relevant. And each of the ~6 different GPU vendors across 10+ years of generational iterations does this all differently and has different memory architectures and performance cliffs.<p>It's cumbersome, but can also be wrapped (i.e. VMA). Who cares if the "easy mode" comes in vulkan.h or vma.h, someone's got to implement it anyway. At least if it's in vma.h I can fix issues, unlike if we trusted all the vendors to do it right (they wont).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:29:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969152</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969152</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969152</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by MindSpunk in "Luce: First Electric Ferrari"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The McMurtry is a race car so it's not surprising it's that light. However it still pays a price compared to its contemporaries (go look at the weights of various LMP1 or LMP2 cars, even old cars like the Mazda 787B was ~850kg iirc). The only number I've found so far is "under 1000kg" so I assume it's probably quite close to that 1000kg number.<p>The weight of the batteries isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I expect car makers will prioritize range. I think the engineering to make an EV truly light like an old Integra Type R (1100kg) will be obscenely expensive and sacrifice so much on practicality it just won't be a viable product as a road car.<p>The car would be so compromised to be that light nobody will make the car, at least at an affordable price. You'll end up with a limited range, limited power, uncomfortable car for a price way out of line with what you're getting.<p>I think you could make a ~150kw-180kw EV pretty light, but considering the ongoing power pissing contest in modern cars I'm not sure how well it would market test.<p>So I expect the market will stick to heavy cars with big power because it's easier to build and easier to sell.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953411</link><dc:creator>MindSpunk</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953411</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46953411</guid></item></channel></rss>