Hacker News: bpye

New comment by bpye in "The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux"

bpye — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 07:24:17 +0000

For video decode if it supports the codec you want you're set, but video encode has definitely improved on more modern GPUs. Older GPUs work but you'll likely get worse quality for a given bitrate.

New comment by bpye in "The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux"

bpye — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 07:23:19 +0000

The 9070 (XT) is great on Linux if you're happy to give up RT. It works but there is a significant perf gap vs Windows.

New comment by bpye in "Sudo – A dedicated music player designed around listening to music"

bpye — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:27:28 +0000

I do like my Tangara, though I use an ancient Sansa Clip more just because it's so much smaller.

New comment by bpye in "Windows 11½"

bpye — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:30:43 +0000

I've been using KDE for the last few years, it's been the most familiar experience.

New comment by bpye in "Windows 11½"

bpye — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:30:13 +0000

CAD and video games are the areas where I struggle to ditch Windows. Many games work well under Proton and I have had luck with running Windows with an assigned GPU - but that does sometimes break for seemingly no reason.

New comment by bpye in "Pirating the Pirates"

bpye — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:57:32 +0000

I am quite happy to give Mubi my money each month, even if I don't use it a _huge_ amount. I have seen some great films on the platform, and I really do want to see them be successful.

Some content has overlap with conventional streaming services, but then films like "Do not expect much from the end of the world" probably wouldn't see a streaming release elsewhere?

New comment by bpye in "Meta VR Glasses"

bpye — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 06:01:33 +0000

I'm very interested in Valve's approach, shifting some of the weight to the back.

New comment by bpye in "Meta VR Glasses"

bpye — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:16:46 +0000

> Can't imagine how restrictive it might be on 70 x 66.

Ouch, that's a tough sell. Maybe useful for AR type stuff, but I wouldn't want to go from a Quest/Index/Frame/etc to that for VR.

New comment by bpye in "ReBarUEFI: Resizable BAR for almost any UEFI system"

bpye — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:44:29 +0000

IOMMU branding at least makes a little bit of sense. AMDs and Intels virtualisation ISA are completely different, including their IOMMU.

New comment by bpye in "ReBarUEFI: Resizable BAR for almost any UEFI system"

bpye — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:43:25 +0000

> sufficient tricks (that Intel GPUs lack)

Isn't it just being able to shift the window of GPU memory visible to the CPU?

New comment by bpye in "ReBarUEFI: Resizable BAR for almost any UEFI system"

bpye — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:42:39 +0000

I patched my old Haswell system to add an NVMe DXE so I could boot from a modern SSD. I currently have a Lets Note laptop that definitely has UEFI, but pretty much pretends to be BIOS - apparently it's possible to modify to expose UEFI features but I have yet to try...

New comment by bpye in "EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'"

bpye — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:20:08 +0000

Blackberry might not be, but RIM are still around, QNX is still in use.

New comment by bpye in "Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month"

bpye — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:37:21 +0000

Nvidia's kernel module is open source these days, it's the usermode stack that's still closed.

New comment by bpye in "Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft"

bpye — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 06:16:01 +0000

> Conversion of legacy nontrivial C++ code bases into Rust (or anything else for that matter) feels like it should be one of the "Millenium problems" for AGI.

Whilst I have no doubt that LLMs will be useful here, I still have reservations about validation. I think experience tells us that test coverage is generally insufficient to ensure functional equivalence, and not all components are well specified.

New comment by bpye in "The "$60 Gaming PC" – AMD BC-250 (2025)"

bpye — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:32:31 +0000

Are there DP-HDMI adapters that work with HD audio bitstreaming and VRR? Different use case, but I've not had much luck finding good options.

New comment by bpye in "Gmail to end support for "Send as" for third-party addresses, such as @yahoo.com"

bpye — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:53:03 +0000

I pay just for individual with its 60GB, it really hasn't been an issue.

New comment by bpye in "Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again"

bpye — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:09:06 +0000

What do you use on Android instead of Google Maps, OsmAnd or something else?

New comment by bpye in "What's new in Emacs 31.1"

bpye — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 06:56:43 +0000

Is there a better way to get started with Emacs than the built in tutorial? I've tried a couple times (due to increasing annoyance with VS Code), but have struggled to get to a point where I feel productive enough.

New comment by bpye in "Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months"

bpye — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:07:43 +0000

Not just SSDs, HDDs are also way more expensive. End of 2024 I bought 4 14TB drives for ~$250 CAD each, $400+ for even a refurb drive now.

The possibility that these fail does concern me.

New comment by bpye in "Pixel 11 Pro Fold"

bpye — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:26:58 +0000

I have a Z Flip 7. The Z Flip 8 is practically indistinguishable except for the SoC where they've gone from an Exynos to a Snapdragon.