Hacker News: SquareWheel

New comment by SquareWheel in "VOID: Video Object and Interaction Deletion"

SquareWheel — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:14:07 +0000

Removing film crew, boom mics, and missed props from a scene would surely be useful to studios. It may even enable some shots that previously would have been impossible due to the positioning of cameras, etc.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS"

SquareWheel — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:10:12 +0000

Windows has a native (cloud-based) dictation software built-in[1], so there's likely less demand for it. Nonetheless, there are still a handful of community options available to choose from.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-voice-typing...

New comment by SquareWheel in "Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March"

SquareWheel — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:34:41 +0000

Bazzite KDE picked up my 8BitDo controller immediately, with no prior configuration. I didn't even have to manually pair the Bluetooth. I was very impressed.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)"

SquareWheel — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 06:15:34 +0000

Many people will likely be watching this show for the first time based on this thread. Please don't spoil major plot events for them.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Animated AVIF for the Modern Web"

SquareWheel — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:55:08 +0000

Just in case you missed it, your quote was referring to encoding requirements. Decoding (eg. Netflix users) will have a different set of requirements. The situation will also improve over time as dedicated hardware encoders and decoders become available.

For the moment, I don't really mind if it requires more GPU power to encode media, since it only needs to happen once. I expect it will still be possible on a weaker card, but it would just take longer.

New comment by SquareWheel in "The HTML Element"

SquareWheel — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 10:08:23 +0000

Contextual permissions are a big improvement over early and uncertain prompts. I will never agree to grant my permission when first loading a page, however, I may do so if intentionally activating a map widget. At least then I understand the context by which it's being asked, and can make a more informed decision.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Meta announces nuclear energy projects"

SquareWheel — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 20:56:54 +0000

Well, because it means that other energy generation sources like oil, gas, and coal aren't being used there instead. Since they cause far, far more harm than nuclear waste does, it's a net win.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Claude in Chrome"

SquareWheel — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:35:12 +0000

Thanks for clarifying. It looks like I needed to refresh my memory of the browser APIs.

Reading further, this API only works remotely for CSS via chrome.scripting.insertCSS. For JS, however, the chrome.scripting.executeScript JS needs to be packaged locally with the extension, as you said.

It seems the advanced method is to use chrome.userScripts, which allows for arbitrary script injection, but requires the user be in Dev Mode and have an extra flag enabled for permission. This API enables extensions like TamperMonkey.

Since the Claude extension doesn't seem to require this extra permission flag, I'm curious what method they're using in this case. Browser extensions are de facto visible-source, so it should be possible to figure out with a little review.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Ruby website redesigned"

SquareWheel — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 21:30:47 +0000

Note that a checkbox's indeterminate state can only be set via JavaScript, so that lessens the elegance of a CSS-based approach.

I agree that using radios would be better. Or just prefers-color-scheme, which sidesteps the FOUT issue that often occurs when storing theme settings in localStorage.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Claude in Chrome"

SquareWheel — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:22:57 +0000

Not having looked at the extension, I would assume they use the chrome.scripting API in MV3.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/s...

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/crx-scripting-api

New comment by SquareWheel in "Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025"

SquareWheel — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:40:17 +0000

> "probably should’ve added a disclaimer"

It's a violation of the Amazon Associates program to not have one.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Google unkills JPEG XL?"

SquareWheel — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:47:37 +0000

It means exactly what it says: "What other parties do you mean?". Key players are already in lockstep on this decision, so insisting that Google must submit to the other WHATWG members doesn't make any sense in an argument for restoring XSLT or JPEG XL.

You seem to be reading subtext into a statement that was put plainly.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Google unkills JPEG XL?"

SquareWheel — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 10:11:18 +0000

I made no such implication. Mozilla is certainly an other party, and their positions on standards hold water. They successfully argued for Web Assembly over Native Client, and have blocked other proposals such as HTML Import in the Web Components API. They are still a key member of the WHATWG.

The fact that Mozilla aligns with Google on both of these deprecations suggests the reasons are valid.

I personally see no reason for XSLT today. Outside of the novelty of theming RSS feeds, it sees very little use. And JPEG XL carries a large security surface area which neither company was comfortable including in its current shape. That may change based on adoption and availability of memory-safe decoders.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Google unkills JPEG XL?"

SquareWheel — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:39:57 +0000

Which other parties? Because Mozilla's stance on JPEG XL and XSLT are identical to Google's. They don't want to create a maintenance burden for features that offer little benefit over existing options.

New comment by SquareWheel in "CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution"

SquareWheel — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:38:06 +0000

It's one thing to judge somebody for supporting an unjust and illegal war. It's another thing entirely to judge them for where they were born. None of us chooses our nationality.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming"

SquareWheel — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 05:34:02 +0000

Why do you say that? If they drop 32-bit support, maybe I won't be able to play games for a time - at least until somebody rigs up a fix - but at least my operating system will still be supported.

If Bazzite goes poof overnight, though, that's a major problem. At least Fedora's official spins will continue to receive necessary updates.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Bazzite: Operating System for Linux gaming"

SquareWheel — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 05:24:41 +0000

I was using Bazzite, but they started talking about potentially shutting it down due to a removal of 32-bit support. It seems a bit safer to choose one of the mainline Fedora spins. Maybe Kinoite or Silverblue if you're into atomicity, though there's still some rough edges to be aware of.

New comment by SquareWheel in "New layouts with CSS Subgrid"

SquareWheel — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 03:58:02 +0000

They're complimentary. As a general (though not exclusive) rule, consider flex for one-dimensional layouts, and grids for two-dimensional layouts.

New comment by SquareWheel in "Blocking LLM crawlers without JavaScript"

SquareWheel — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 01:51:52 +0000

That may work for blocking bad automated crawlers, but an agent acting on behalf of a user wouldn't follow robots.txt. They'd run the risk of hitting the bad URL when trying to understand the page.

New comment by SquareWheel in "GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT"

SquareWheel — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:45:23 +0000

Forcing shorter answers will definitely reduce their quality. Every token an LLM generates is like a little bit of extra thinking time. Sometimes it needs to work up to an answer. If you end a response too quickly, such as by demanding one-word answers, it's much more likely to produce hallucinations.