Hacker News: astrobe_

New comment by astrobe_ in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

astrobe_ — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:50:08 +0000

I haven't shipped millions of units but I do have occasional glimpses of the HW side as a firmware programmer. My impression is that decisions regarding costs are not always entirely rational, hence my questioning. Thanks for the answers.

New comment by astrobe_ in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

astrobe_ — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:14:15 +0000

It depends on the HW:SW cost ratio and the volume. In favourable case the extra bit on the price tag can amount to a rounding error. Moreover, the price tag includes a profit margin, which is usually adjusted to match the competition already.

Besides, "ignorant" HN comments on e.g. FOSS software and funding problems have mentioned that the paperwork you have to do to buy software licences can be a PITA, so free software can be perceived as a plus when the R&D selects the parts.

People have already thought of that, sure. But has it been thought about and executed properly? Like the added value of open-sourcing the SW (made a lot easier when you don't need to copy-protect it). Or do they just go for the extra source of profit the SW licence sales provides, anyway?

New comment by astrobe_ in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

astrobe_ — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:06:42 +0000

SW dev costs can be accounted for in the HW price tag, especially when you sell a lot of units, and assuming the SW is much better than "good enough". HW is the best licensing key; if you can do that, go for it.

New comment by astrobe_ in "Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash"

astrobe_ — Sun, 24 May 2026 10:21:46 +0000

You can't send a "moral person" to jail, unlike "physical persons". But sometimes I wonder if taking a fraction of their shares from them would make them more... Moral I guess.

New comment by astrobe_ in "C++26 Shipped a SIMD Library Nobody Asked For"

astrobe_ — Sun, 17 May 2026 12:01:05 +0000

Besides Spolsky's law of leaky abstractions, "abstractions" can also result in "lowest common denominator" situations, which are the opposite of performance optimization. Talking negatively about abstractions is not what deals damage; you are shooting the messenger here. It's the abstractions themselves that deal damage when misplaced. "Zero-cost abstractions" is the true hyperbole.

New comment by astrobe_ in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

astrobe_ — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:11:50 +0000

Indeed, even I can guess. I see two answers that end with the same word, so the correct answer is probably one of those.

New comment by astrobe_ in "A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life"

astrobe_ — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:58:36 +0000

So "modern" is a synonym for "current" here, if one puts aside warnings about its decline due to human activity?

New comment by astrobe_ in "Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing"

astrobe_ — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:50:44 +0000

The thing is, "better" is an ambiguous word. I can change a program in some way and make it smaller. I can change it in some other way and make it faster. Both are "better", but in different ways. More often than not, however, you can't have both smaller and faster - or else your are just fixing a performance bug. Often even improving one property makes some other property less good, as you can see in the numerous "pick two" rules.

So "better" means "more specialized" more often that it means "more optimized". I don't say it is a bad thing per se, but it is best to keep in mind that they are two types of improvement, fixes and specializations, because the latter is a commitment.

New comment by astrobe_ in "Sam Altman's Creepy Eyeball-Scanning Company Gets in Bed with Zoom and Tinder"

astrobe_ — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:55:51 +0000

"I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks"

- M. Zuckerberg, ~2000.

Also: Blade Runner, anyone?

New comment by astrobe_ in "Laws of Software Engineering"

astrobe_ — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:10:42 +0000

This reminds me of a comment I read here a long time ago; it was about XML and how DTDs were supposed to permit one to be strict. However, in reality, the person said, if the the other end who is sending you broken XML is a big corp who refuses to fix it, then you have no choice but accept it.

Bottom line: it's all a matter of balance of powers. If you're the smaller guy in the equation, you'll be "Postel'ed" anyway.

Yet Postel's law is still in the "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" category, for the reason you explain very well (AKA XKCD #1172 "Workflow"). Wikipedia even lists a couple of major critics about it [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

New comment by astrobe_ in "Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game"

astrobe_ — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 12:08:44 +0000

That's sort of the point TFA. You make implementation choices that feel OK and then the time comes to implement the "trivial" pause function...

In other domains, adding the delta time of your main loop to your timers can cause (logical) clock drifts in the long term because of resolution errors.

New comment by astrobe_ in "Game Devs Explain the Tricks Involved with Letting You Pause a Game"

astrobe_ — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:27:37 +0000

It depends on how your timers are implemented. If they are implemented as a "rendez-vous" absolute date (as in UTC for instance - not in local time unless you want to add "eastern eggs" related to daylight saving time...), this will cause bugs. If you implement your own in-game monotonic clock that you can stop, it should be ok.

New comment by astrobe_ in "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]"

astrobe_ — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:55:10 +0000

> The flip side is everything is being degraded by random mutation

"degraded"? Aren't random mutations precisely one of the core mechanism of adaptation?

New comment by astrobe_ in "France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins"

astrobe_ — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:39:17 +0000

There's a negligible amount of "power users" among government employees; I think the majority of them are trained in reading and applying laws, and given the strong scientific/literary divide in the French culture, they usually think of themselves as inapt with computers (and the erratic behavior of MS products didn't help, if you ask me).

But knowing France, what to really worry about is execution, in particular for administrations. Probably people working there who read the TFA already think "oh, big mess incoming" even though they don't know what this "Linux" thing is.

I think standard IT/sysadmin training focuses mainly on Windows server etc., Linux being a second class citizen (because that's what the vast majority of small/mid sized businesses use). So recruiting good Linux sysadmins could be an issue, especially since the wages in government agencies are not exactly attractive.

New comment by astrobe_ in "Microsoft terminates VeraCrypt account, halting Windows updates"

astrobe_ — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:25:01 +0000

Frankly: that's stupid. In case you didn't figure it out, I work in the field and I can tell you that this is was not the mindset at the places where I worked.

New comment by astrobe_ in "Microsoft terminates VeraCrypt account, halting Windows updates"

astrobe_ — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:18:51 +0000

Well, that's a different market. What I say is that there are markets in which customers wants to be sure that the firmware is from "us".

And those markets are certainly not IoT gizmos, which I suspect induce some knee-jerk reactions and I understand that cause I'm a consumer too.

But big/serious customers actually look at the wealthiness of the company they buy from, and would certainly consider running their own firmware on someone else's product; they buy off-the-shelf products because it's not their domain of expertise (software development and/or whatever the device does), most of the times.

New comment by astrobe_ in "Microsoft terminates VeraCrypt account, halting Windows updates"

astrobe_ — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:07:43 +0000

Yes, BIOS is really a PC-thing, AFAIK. Embedded processors have "bootloaders" which often serve a similar purpose of performing the minimal viable hardware initializations in order to load the OS kernel.

New comment by astrobe_ in "Microsoft terminates VeraCrypt account, halting Windows updates"

astrobe_ — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:54:46 +0000

I don't know about executable signing, but in the embedded world SecureBoot is also used to serve the customer; id est provide guarantees to the customer that the firmware of the device they receive has not been tampered with at some point in the supply chain.

New comment by astrobe_ in "Neanderthals survived on a knife's edge for 350k years"

astrobe_ — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:22:33 +0000

One thing that confused me in TFA is that it says that "[neanderthals were] maybe a couple of thousand breeding individuals", yet they were enough to inter-breed with sapiens at some point(s) [1]. In my mind, tribes of "far-flung populations of just a few dozen individuals" would be shy and difficult to find.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics

New comment by astrobe_ in "French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?"

astrobe_ — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 18:27:24 +0000

Ambiguë (ambiguous) and aiguë (acute) [1], but these are "old" spellings.

For instance, this word "ambiguë" was changed in the 1990 spelling reform to "ambigüe" [2] probably to emphasis the fact that the U is not mute (because for most -gue words it is, like for "fatigue" in french and english).

Like with ï and ü, the tréma mark is precisely the mark of an exception.

[1] https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambigu%C3%AB , https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/aigu%C3%AB

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambig%C3%BCe