Hacker News: gary_0

New comment by gary_0 in "Our Warrant Canary"

gary_0 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:57:10 +0000

The point of a canary is that it's cryptographically signed, and it's possible to set up a duress passphrase that will delete the key when entered, so if everything works correctly an unauthorized party can't keep posting signed canaries.

New comment by gary_0 in "Keep Android Open"

gary_0 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 20:40:24 +0000

Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of "security alert" and "device not supported". Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.

New comment by gary_0 in "AI makes you boring"

gary_0 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:31:41 +0000

I would argue the term "gatekeeping" is being twisted around when it comes to AI. I see genuine gatekeeping when people with a certain skill or qualification try to discourage newcomers by making their field seem mysterious and only able to be done by super special people, and intimidating or making fun of newbies who come along and ask naive questions.

"Gatekeeping" is NOT when you require someone to be willing learn a skill in order to join a community of people with that skill.

And in fact, saying "you are too stupid to learn that on your own, use an AI instead" is kind of gatekeeping on its own, because it implicitly creates a shrinking elite who actually have the knowledge (that is fed to the AI so it can be regurgitated for everyone else), shutting out the majority who are stuck in the "LLM slum".

New comment by gary_0 in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

gary_0 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:10:36 +0000

I'm pretty sure quantum mechanics already forgoes conventional causality. Attosecond interactions take place in such narrow slices of time that the uncertainty principle turns everything into a blur where events can't be described linearly. In other words, the math sometimes requires that effect precedes cause. As far as we can tell, causality and conservation of energy is only preserved on a macroscopic scale. (IANAQP, but I'm going off my recollections of books by people who are.)

New comment by gary_0 in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

gary_0 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 07:52:01 +0000

Einstein laid the theoretical foundations for lasers in 1917, and it took over 40 years of "impractical" scientific work before the first functioning laser was built. It took decades more for them to become a cheap, ubiquitous technological building-block. The research is still continuing, and there's no reason to assume it will stop eventually bearing fruit (for the societies that haven't decimated their scientific workforce, anyways). Look at the insanity required to design and build the EUV lasers in ASML's machines, which were used to fabricate the CPU I'm using right now, over a century after Einstein first scribbled down those obscure equations!

New comment by gary_0 in "Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better"

gary_0 — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 07:25:09 +0000

Thanks for sharing. Just curious, is there any way to perform globbing over a list of path-like strings instead of only directly on the filesystem?

New comment by gary_0 in "Zig Libc"

gary_0 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 01:54:16 +0000

As I understand it, compiling each source file separately and linking together the result was historically kind of a hack too, or at least a compromise, because early unix machines didn't have enough memory to compile the whole program at once (or even just hold multiple source files in memory at a time). Although later on, doing it this way did allow for faster recompilation because you didn't need to re-ingest source files that hadn't been changed (although this stopped being true for template-heavy C++ code).

New comment by gary_0 in "Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All"

gary_0 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 02:40:13 +0000

The chips themselves add a bunch of new failure states to consider beyond software bugs, too. Maybe a bad wire or component puts too much load on the microcontroller's wee internal pin drivers and they melt into a permanent "on" state. Or a voltage fluctuation browns out the chip on boot, partially randomizing its RAM or registers. Or the chip manufacturer fixes some errata or discontinues a particular part number and now a pin you've left floating has become a hardware heisenbug. Or the wrong bit flips in your EEPROM after being in a hot machine for a few years. Suddenly a boring 555 looks pretty good. (Keep in mind, we're talking about "turn off heater after pulses stop", not "abort launch sequence if tank 3 pressure low". The latter is way above my pay grade.)

New comment by gary_0 in "Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report"

gary_0 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 22:26:29 +0000

> quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky

Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content but they're ignoring the curvaceous elephant in the room. I think maybe bsky has improved things now, but a while back their adult content filters were not up to the task. When I first made an account I almost gave up on it because until I got all the right filter words set up it was nothing but weird porn whac-a-mole (actually that's probably a poor choice of words...)

New comment by gary_0 in "Bluesky 2025 Transparency Report"

gary_0 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:09:10 +0000

I absolutely do not understand moving "report spam" under "report misleading". The UX for this is terrible. There are lots of bots posting SEO junk, at a rate and scale that definitely wastes resources, and now bsky has interfered with one of the signals it should be using to combat the problem.

New comment by gary_0 in "Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All"

gary_0 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:51:17 +0000

Yes, a simple purpose-made chip designed to be used in safety-critical situations, with high tolerances for voltage etc, would probably be better. Although one thing the 555 design has going for it is that a seasoned EE could take one look at the physical circuit and know exactly what it does.

But I would never trust anything that ran software for something like this.

New comment by gary_0 in "Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All"

gary_0 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:06:45 +0000

I would absolutely not want to use a microcontroller or a complicated chip for something like that. Simplicity is the point.

New comment by gary_0 in "Doin' It with a 555: One Chip to Rule Them All"

gary_0 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 08:12:25 +0000

I designed the electronics for a heavy-duty industrial 3D printer and used a 555 in the failsafe circuit (alongside the manual e-stop). If it didn't get reset by a heartbeat from the embedded computer/software, it would unpower the heaters and actuators.

New comment by gary_0 in "Try text scaling support in Chrome Canary"

gary_0 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 05:10:16 +0000

My memory that far back is hazy but I seem to recall being able to do full-page zoom in Opera circa 2003.

New comment by gary_0 in "JPEG XL Test Page"

gary_0 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:04:16 +0000

If I download the image, Fedora KDE shows it properly in Dolphin and Gwenview.

New comment by gary_0 in "Just the Browser"

gary_0 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:46:28 +0000

Leaving aside the externalities of constantly breaking everyone's workflow and potentially introducing disastrous bugs, there's an opportunity cost to innovating where there isn’t a clear need. Google and others are wasting massive resources endlessly tweaking browsers and the Web because that's all they know how to do, their users are locked in and without recourse, and they don't feel threatened by any competitors or upstarts. I would argue the web and smartphones and similar tech are boring now but because the market is controlled by only a few huge companies, the tech hasn't been allowed to become low-margin, standardized cookie-cutter commodities. Instead these attempts to make this old boring tech seem exciting is getting to the point where it's sad and comical.

New comment by gary_0 in "Just the Browser"

gary_0 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:19:19 +0000

I highly doubt there's a steering input device so superior to the current wheel shape that it's worth throwing out the existing standard. Yes, at one point how steering should work (or how you should navigate the Web) was uncertain, but eventually everyone settled on something that worked well enough that it was no longer worthwhile to mess with it.

Although, one thought I had is that there's nothing wrong with experimenting with non-standard interfaces as long as you still have the option to still just buy, say, a Toyota with a standard steering wheel instead of 3D Moebius Steering or whatever. The problem is when the biggest manufacturers keep forcing changes by top-down worldwide fiat, forcing customers to either grin and bear it or quit driving (or using the Web) entirely.

New comment by gary_0 in "Just the Browser"

gary_0 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:14:52 +0000

Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say).

Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.

New comment by gary_0 in "Max Payne – two decades later – Graphics Critique (2021)"

gary_0 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 20:51:11 +0000

Early to mid 00's was peak Moore's Law. Every year left last year's computers on the curb. Graphics hardware acceleration and programmable shaders were expanding their capabilities in ungainly leaps and bounds. Every new piece of popular hardware wasn't just the marketing number going up, it was Christmas for software. You didn't need 100+ devs to compete in the big leagues. And yeah there were a lot of moody FPS games, but I can't describe the delight of first seeing a Katamari Damacy or a Portal. It was a time of untilled earth and unplucked fruit.

New comment by gary_0 in "Max Payne – two decades later – Graphics Critique (2021)"

gary_0 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:31:50 +0000

> e.g. if they used a seperate rendering package or mostly painted by hand

IIRC Max Payne was one of the earlier games to rely heavily on photo-reference textures (instead of hand drawing or computer generating them). Keep in mind that in 2001 digital cameras were rare, expensive, and low-res, so people often just used film cameras and scanned in the physical photo with a flatbed scanner. Max Payne was far from the first, though; even 1998's Half-Life used some photo-ref textures.

The lighting in Max Payne's textures was probably mostly just the lighting from the original photo. Every texture had to be hand-manipulated to make it usable on 3D models, so changing the lighting would have added even more work and would have looked less realistic.