Hacker News: dmpk2k

New comment by dmpk2k in "Emacs Turns 50"

dmpk2k — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 15:17:43 +0000

We have finite time in our lives. I'd argue it's eminently reasonable to spend time on things other that Emacs' guts, unless that's what tickles your interest.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Spain train crash: 'At least 10 dead' in high-speed collision"

dmpk2k — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 10:59:50 +0000

What concrete evidence do you have that this crash, or the one earlier this year, was caused by the Russians?

You must have an incredibly high P(h)...

New comment by dmpk2k in "Imagine an AI future where being banned means you are now economically useless"

dmpk2k — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 16:41:30 +0000

This is what American discourse has devolved to. "I saw the other side saying it!"

You're just proving my point without realizing it. I'm not even American, and have no horse in your race.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Imagine an AI future where being banned means you are now economically useless"

dmpk2k — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 15:47:29 +0000

Lawfare has been an increasing problem for several administrations now. Like the parent poster says, each side is largely blind to their own abuses, but they're still abuses.

And then the other side uses it as justification to escalate further.

New comment by dmpk2k in "DeepInfer: High-performance inference framework for DeepSeek models"

dmpk2k — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 18:36:51 +0000

Hyperbole and trappings aside, that describes all mixed-market economies. And all major states have champion industries.

New comment by dmpk2k in "I Love Software Rendering"

dmpk2k — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:53:05 +0000

A few years ago I seriously contemplated making a game using software rendering, in part because the only target was SDL. I actually got a 3D engine running 2K@60Hz with HL2-level scenes, with the CPU basically idle, so it's not a terrible idea.

(Then LLMs started taking off and I decided I needed to reskill out of the industry, just in case)

New comment by dmpk2k in "I love software rendering"

dmpk2k — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:50:05 +0000

That quote about Shadow Warrior doesn't pass the smell test. You're right there must be bottlenecks in the way.

The Build engine's rendering was stunningly simple (and dare I say: elegant). You could run hundreds of instances of Shadow Warrior on a single EPYC (since they mentioned Xeon) at that resolution and framerate if you rewrote the engine with modern mechanical sympathy in mind. On a modern desktop CPU it'd probably be over a hundred instances.

People, including many programmers, just don't grasp how much power we have under the hood nowadays...

Edit: my old iPhone SE, fully utilized, can produce the same GFLOPS as the Cray T3E (the one with thousands of DEC Alphas inside). This is our reality.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Huawei and Qualcomm announce broad patent license agreement"

dmpk2k — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:09:01 +0000

That was two decades ago. Things have changed a lot since then.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update"

dmpk2k — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:58:30 +0000

An official update hard (and permanently) bricked my S8 phone back when it was still the flagship. Samsung refused to fix or replace it because I had moved overseas meanwhile.

While "technically" valid, this never happened with iPhones despite frequent travels.

Don't buy Samsung consumer devices.

New comment by dmpk2k in "The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing?"

dmpk2k — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:56:03 +0000

Likewise. I'm only interested in books that were either published before 2024, or are by authors I respect (e.g. Patterson & Hennessy), or by respectable academic publishers (e.g. Cambridge University Press). I used not to be so picky.

It also presents a bit of chicken & egg for new authors: nobody knows them, and now few will risk it, so they stay unknown. They must pursue other avenues to gain traction; far more than was needed a few years ago.

The deluge of AI books on Amazon has really been quite amazing. Between them and the higher risk of poorly-printed books, I don't buy from Amazon anymore. Now it's always direct from publishers.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Elixir-lang.org has a new design"

dmpk2k — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:29:42 +0000

It's a JIT nowadays. Admittedly an extremely simple one, to minimize compile times and maintenance overhead.

You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Book: RISC-V System-on-Chip Design"

dmpk2k — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:45:49 +0000

Maybe it's just a regional thing, but it's showing 78 euros for the paperback for me. Plus I bought the paperback recently at that price too.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Book: RISC-V System-on-Chip Design"

dmpk2k — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:57:39 +0000

You can get it direct from Elsevier for ~78 euros: https://shop.elsevier.com/books/risc-v-system-on-chip-design...

New comment by dmpk2k in "U.S. science is in chaos"

dmpk2k — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:26:33 +0000

You're right, and yet it's also true that existing institutions have ossified. There is immense inertia.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

dmpk2k — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:44:09 +0000

You're right that a lot of material really does require a physical book. Anything even remotely technical.

That said, I would argue that a voice actor is far more significant than page formatting when it comes to novels. A good voice actor can turn a good story great, and sometimes a poor story to... acceptable.

I've read thousands of novels over the decades, both with and without audio, so I'm reasonably confident about the above.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Cheap Iranian drone downed $25M US Army helicopter–maybe by chance"

dmpk2k — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:06:11 +0000

The same Oman Trump was recently threatening to blow up? Heh.

New comment by dmpk2k in "To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks"

dmpk2k — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:54:35 +0000

It's weird for physicists to complain about nuclear weapons. They did it. Own it.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?"

dmpk2k — Sun, 24 May 2026 11:21:03 +0000

For all its faults, you won’t get a rug-pull like this with OSS CAD Suite and something like the ECP5, especially as a hobbyist.

New comment by dmpk2k in "Everything in C is undefined behavior"

dmpk2k — Wed, 20 May 2026 10:18:37 +0000

Embedded developers often suffer under archaic toolchains. There's plenty of reasons for that, but one of them is UB: a newer version of the compiler can completely change an embedded program's behaviour.

New comment by dmpk2k in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

dmpk2k — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:56:53 +0000

I find your emotional language truly quite fascinating. I've heard people talk like that about drugs.