Hacker News: ShroudedNight

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

ShroudedNight — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:06:00 +0000

It has been associated with 3D rendering, but given that things like the S3 86C911 are listed on the Wikipedia GPU page, saying "Accelerated GUIs don't need GPU" feels like attempting to win an argument by insisting on a term definition that is significantly divergent from standard vulgar usage [1], which doesn't provide any insight to the problem originally being discussed.

[1] Maybe I've just been blindly ignorant for 30 years, but as far as I could tell, 'GPU' seemed to emerge as a more Huffman-efficient encoding for the same thing we were calling a 'video card'

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

ShroudedNight — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:57:13 +0000

Is that what's going on? So many touch gestures seem to rely on landing in the right 2mm diameter area, but the minimum reliable resolution for touch seems to be a 4mm diameter circle. It's even worse for my father, even though cognitively, he would have no trouble understanding the hypothetical requirement. It's also noticeably worse during the depths of winter.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

ShroudedNight — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:21:46 +0000

What does "GPU" mean here? Previous uses of the term seemed to imply "dedicated hardware for improving rendering performance" which the SVGA stuff would seem to fall squarely under.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

ShroudedNight — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:05:43 +0000

Was it the same 1% that was using each of the long-tail features? I suspect that by refusing to invest effort in at least some amount of niche features, we essentially alienate _everybody_

New comment by ShroudedNight in "HN is drowning in AI comments"

ShroudedNight — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:11:28 +0000

"I think" is explicitly disclaiming authority. Omitting it changes the social signaling of the response significantly.

Switching "wooden" for "a bit unnatural" also does a disservice: "wooden" describes a specific quality of deviance.

Over-all, I would definitely consider the revision stiffer and more reserved than the original.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Addressing Antigravity Bans and Reinstating Access"

ShroudedNight — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:17:27 +0000

I would take things somewhat further: I'd be happy to pay the equivalent of $20 2015 dollars for this service if it were comprehensive. Unfortunately, that might allow for a consumer surplus to occur in the viewing experience and the motion picture industry ties with maybe nVidia for peak pathological hostility to retail consumer surplus.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "The largest number representable in 64 bits"

ShroudedNight — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 01:57:41 +0000

Wouldn't browser prefetching subvert these small frictions to entry?

New comment by ShroudedNight in "xAI joins SpaceX"

ShroudedNight — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:22:08 +0000

Are you suggesting that beggars would ride, if only wishes were horses!?

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company"

ShroudedNight — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:20:34 +0000

Also worth remembering that around 2010, the music and film industry associations of America were claiming entitlement to $50 billion dollars annually in piracy-related losses beyond what could be accounted for in direct lost revenue (which _might_ have been as much as 10 billion, or 1/6th of their claim):

https://youtu.be/GZadCj8O1-0

These guys pathologically have had a chip on their shoulder since Napster.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Oneplus phone update introduces hardware anti-rollback"

ShroudedNight — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 02:13:34 +0000

"No security features should exist for anyone" is itself fanatically hyperbolic narrative. The primary reason this event has elicited such a reaction is because OnePlus has historically been perceived as one of the brands specifically catering to people that wanted ultimate sovereignty over their devices.

As time goes on, the options available for those that require such sovereignty seem to be thinning to such an extent that [at least absent significant disposable wealth] the remaining options will appear to necessitate adopting lifestyle changes comparable to high-cost religious practices and social withdrawal, and likely without the legal protections afforded those protected classes. Given the "big tech's" general hostility to user agency and contempt for values that don't consent to being subservient to its influence peddling, intense emotional reaction to loss of already diminished traditional allies seem like something that would reasonably viewed compassionately, rather than with hostility.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "What came first: the CNAME or the A record?"

ShroudedNight — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:58:25 +0000

At one point I could have sworn they were sticking obsoletion notices in the header, but now I can only find them in the right side-bar:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5245

I agree, that it would be much more helpful if made obvious in the document itself.

It's not obvious that "updated by" notices are treated in any more of a helpful manner than "obsoletes"

New comment by ShroudedNight in "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth"

ShroudedNight — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:48:34 +0000

For the audience: I had never heard of Brian Berletic previously. In an attempt to understand what this person's undisclosed conflicts of interest were, I found numerous reports of him painting the Myanmar Junta in a positive light:

https://www.reddit.com/r/InformedTankie/comments/ufq4oq/a_co...

https://forsea.co/bangkok-based-conspiracy-blogger-brian-ber...

There's a certain event-horizon where bitterness taints / skews perspective enough that even what would otherwise be helpful insights becomes so costly to disentangle from grudge-extrapolation that it's not obvious if any of it ends up being worth the cost of entry. At least to me, this person's work seems well beyond that point.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth"

ShroudedNight — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:59:17 +0000

If the political environment gets bad enough, you may expect to die anyway, and the TTL difference that obfuscation provides means the difference between making a small improvement before the inevitable, or not.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "What came first: the CNAME or the A record?"

ShroudedNight — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 18:27:42 +0000

I'm not an IETF process expert. Would this be worth filing errata against the original RFC in addition to their new proposed update?

Also, what's the right mental framework behind deciding when to release a patch RFC vs obsoleting the old standard for a comprehensive update?

New comment by ShroudedNight in "APT Rust requirement raises questions"

ShroudedNight — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:13:26 +0000

It does look like there are legitimate issues with x87 floating-point: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/114479

New comment by ShroudedNight in "APT Rust requirement raises questions"

ShroudedNight — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:07:54 +0000

Yeah, that sucks. I assume this is SSE2?

New comment by ShroudedNight in "APT Rust requirement raises questions"

ShroudedNight — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:50:33 +0000

I thought the Pentium Pro _was_ a 686?

Wikipedia seems to correlate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro, as do discussions on CMOV: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4429563

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change"

ShroudedNight — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 19:27:57 +0000

It's not just that, current sentiment around the CFAA is that any kind of unsanctioned third-party user agent for anything that isn't the open web is potentially prosecutable. Plus, if the big user platforms decide they don't like some aspect of what you're doing, they will shut down all of your access, and potentially access of others close to you, everywhere, and aggressively prevent you from reestablishing even a baseline of inoffensive participation, at great potential cost to your well-being.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill"

ShroudedNight — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:03:59 +0000

Isn't it usually one bill, but an omnibus bill? My understanding is that the actual guard rail that the US congress has discarded is requiring that the contents of the bill be limited to the purview described by the bill's title.

New comment by ShroudedNight in "Hemp ban hidden inside government shutdown bill"

ShroudedNight — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:00:58 +0000

I agree with the sentiment in general, but in this case it seems extremely well known:

https://www.lpm.org/news/2025-11-11/mcconnell-paul-clash-ove...