Hacker News: galangalalgol

New comment by galangalalgol in "The curious case of retro demo scene graphics"

galangalalgol — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:09:03 +0000

At least they know who to cite, even if they don't. I like to have a diffusion model generate an image of my desired subject in whatever media I choose then look at it as make something close but not quite the same. I'm copying tons of people I don't even know. But I am also just practicing and don't try to pass it off as my own creation.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed"

galangalalgol — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:26:38 +0000

Yeah competition works. I don't like nexus that much but they accept every ticket I've opened and fix it the next release. Two things I think affect that. One, my ticket has the name of a fortune 100 next to it. Two, artifactory will eat them alive if they don't keep customers happy.

New comment by galangalalgol in "VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS"

galangalalgol — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 11:32:02 +0000

I think itbis the reverse, it is haiku with a linux kernel so it works with more hardware.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Department of State advises Americans worldwide to exercise increased caution"

galangalalgol — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 02:33:28 +0000

It seems like about 20% of people judge the actions of a us administration independent of their partisan positions. I am recently joined and cannot claim it is from any virtue on my part. A backlash against an attempted autocratic takeover is a common starting point for successful ones by an opposing party. Leftist autocratic coups are only slightly rarer than rightist ones. We are in the middle of an attempted rightist one, but that doesn't mean we are safe if we remove them.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Why craft-lovers are losing their craft"

galangalalgol — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 03:30:32 +0000

That really is a great thing. I do wonder at the segment of the population that from the 70s to today that sculpted their brain to think like a von Neumann machine. What will be lost when the last of us passes. It will likely be viewed as an oddity by future generations and people will try to replicate it as a hobby. But many of us began shortly after learning a primary human language, and that degree of specialization isn't something a hobby can reproduce.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"

galangalalgol — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:14:27 +0000

The ev and chip market may indeed be insurmountable to their subsidy model, but it has worked on so many other sectors that now only exist in China. They do have troubles discontinuing subsidies to sectors that capture government. But mostly the subsidize to bootstrap has worked wonderfully for them. Tariffs are one counter. But subsidizing your own existing sector to counter it is necessary as well and tariffs have the down side of making your industries uncompetitive globally. Argentina demonstrated this for us. An evenhanded subsidybthat doesn't pick winners is also necessary. China broke capitalism the same way VC does. Come in with a big enough bank roll and it doesn't matter if you are better if you can keep spending until the competition folds. The open question is if China's demographic issues will outpace productivity gains.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Western carmakers' retreat from electric risks dooming them to irrelevance"

galangalalgol — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 14:52:13 +0000

Ive seen plenty of fords in Europe but they have evs

New comment by galangalalgol in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

galangalalgol — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 04:01:55 +0000

There are the ones that are partly rounded and only attached for a cm or so at the top. They are fine. Then there are the square ones that are attached for half or more of the length and don't always break apart cleanly. They have never poked me, but they have shed bits into my food before that I had to pick out. I will stop cleaning up the ones that don't actually need it. I didn't realize it was offensive.

New comment by galangalalgol in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"

galangalalgol — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:30:16 +0000

I always do the splinter thing. I thought that was normal. If the place has disposable chopsticks it isn't the sort of place etiquette matters is it?

New comment by galangalalgol in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

galangalalgol — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:28:25 +0000

If it spends enough to trigger the debt bomb literally pounding sand, that could do it. It isn't Iran that is the danger though. The US could just walk away any time and be fine.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?"

galangalalgol — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:30:14 +0000

I still see software sold as soa compliant, whatever that means. I think we have just started recycling and mixing sw memes at this loint. Like you see someone wearing bell-bottoms with an 80s dayglo jacket. We do agile soap waterfall kanban model driven design here.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Life as an OnlyFans 'chatter'"

galangalalgol — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:37:45 +0000

Is there anywhere with one term limits for law makers with no staggered terms? If every member of a parliament is yoloing it, I'm not aure if things would be better or worse.

New comment by galangalalgol in "RISC-V Is Sloooow"

galangalalgol — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:50:31 +0000

I have a couple c3 I was playing with. Are you talking about the P4 or C6? Aren't their xtensa offerings still faster?

New comment by galangalalgol in "Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults"

galangalalgol — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 02:56:59 +0000

Interesting, and what are your thoughts on the star variant? Also what is so bad about irv?

New comment by galangalalgol in "Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults"

galangalalgol — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:12:54 +0000

With scoring isn't the logical play to score your favorite the highest and zero out everyone else? Then it just devolves to fptp.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults"

galangalalgol — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:29:31 +0000

Montesquieu, Wittfogel, and Sachs are the old ones. Modern writers acknowledge geography isn't destiny, but it would definitely be fighting uphill for Russia to maintain democracy. Mobile middle class seems to be the real driver of democracy, and coastal trade is what created that in most modern democracies. Seems like maybe technology could change that. But big regions make mobility harder. If you have to move half a world away to reach different laws the pressure to retain you is less. Where a doctor in Hungary can pack up and take a train to find a government more to their liking. The shrinking of the middle class drives authoritarianism fairly reliably according to these sources. Sometimes the older ones call it the merchant class.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults"

galangalalgol — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:16:44 +0000

I think pointing to a single puppet master is reductive. Demography and geography predict essentially all of these changes. Protesting and civil disobedience can obviously tip matters, but the authoritarianism taking the us has been a long time coming just based on the centralization of federal power that started almost as soon as the ink was dry. The tendencies of landlocked resource heavy states are going to be authoritarian. Coastal trade based states will tend to go pluralist. Giant continent spanning states need coordination and continuity, so they go authoritarian. The federated nature of the original US, the EU and countries like Switzerland let those differing tendencies coexist. So once the US began centralizing power it was only a matter of time.

The fix is only barely in the realm of the possible. US states have to be given back their power, and the federal government must be limited to its original remit. This will let coastal states tend to pluralism, and resource heavy and or landlocked states tend to authoritarianism and as long as money and feet are free to cross state borders. It will all work out. Ditching first past the poles and mitigating gerrymandering would also obviously help.

New comment by galangalalgol in "TCXO Failure Analysis"

galangalalgol — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:42:21 +0000

Compensating for the temperature will never be as accurate as actually controlling it (O is for ovenized). I keep reading about chip scale atomic clocks coming down in price but I've yet to see them as the oscillator in anything mass produced.

New comment by galangalalgol in "No leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2026"

galangalalgol — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:54:28 +0000

I have it on good authority they just used unixtime for everyone but put all the leapseconds in the tz table.

New comment by galangalalgol in "FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font"

galangalalgol — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:44:53 +0000

My understanding is that they started turning away from it, but have turned back in many states. We were told it was important that we delay teaching our child typing until they had finished learning cursive because it had been discovered that teaching cursive developed something or other that I zoned out on while waiting to ask when that would be. Education has fads that don't seem to line up with peer reviewed articles that well. For instance, current reading instruction is non optimal for dyslexic students, while early 20th century instruction seems to (not entirely intentionally) worked much better.

Edit: Apparently it has to do with dyslexia and executive functioning. California and Texas amongst others have now required it be resumed. So there is a roughly decade long gap in cursive in the us, maybe a little less.