Hacker News: literallywho

New comment by literallywho in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

literallywho — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:51:49 +0000

"Revolutionizing" is nonsense when the stuff we currently have isn't even implemented correctly. My personal assessment (from my own education and having worked in teaching positions) is that we need realistically quadruple the number of teachers and they should be paid double to attract and keep actual talent. Nobody is spending that much money. Trying to revolutionize it without massive increases in spending is pretty much a cope. You can find lectures from 20-30 years ago saying things like that and yet nothing was achieved at all.

New comment by literallywho in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

literallywho — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:24:20 +0000

I recently spent an equivalent of MacBook Air M4 price + import tax to get a linux laptop called Starlabs Horizon that advertises up to 14 hours of battery life. Maybe in a TTY it could do that, but in practice, I haven't yet seen any x86 laptops from any company, linux or not, to match even 50% of a macbook's battery. Realistically it's 4-5 hours like the rest of them. Not to mention that for that money I got a cpu that is a power equivalent of pre-M1 chip mac. Also they put speaker grills at the bottom (what were they thinking??)

New comment by literallywho in "Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game"

literallywho — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:02:57 +0000

I don't really understand what's he on about. Even the best SC game (Chaos Theory) has tons of places where it's really unclear whether you can be seen or not. You pretty much always have to look at the light indicator. And sometimes it shows you as 0% visible, even though it doesn't look like it. And that, of course, also happens in every single classic SC game (I've not played Blacklist).

New comment by literallywho in "Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam"

literallywho — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:13:08 +0000

IIRCC, Eul, the guy who made Dota originally, also works at Valve.

New comment by literallywho in "Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan"

literallywho — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:44:30 +0000

I don't think it's faster than a windows game running Vulkan, though, is it? Like, if you benchmarked a game that has native DX12 and Vulkan modes (such as Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, I believe), it will probably have higher FPS in Vulkan mode, right?

New comment by literallywho in "The only moat left is money?"

literallywho — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:26:30 +0000

There are so many of them, aren't there? There's Roam Research (might be the OG one), Logseq (FOSS Obsidian basically), Notion, Emacs' Org-Roam, Anytype, etc. Neovim has like 5 extensions implementing the same idea (such as Neorg), Bram's Vim probably has its own plugins in Vim9script.

New comment by literallywho in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

literallywho — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 05:22:57 +0000

Yeah, but... QR codes are annoying. I live in Thailand and I have to scan them every day. Pretty much every time, I wish it was as seamless as Apple Pay.

New comment by literallywho in "Android’s desktop interface leaks"

literallywho — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 04:10:18 +0000

I think only the folder is still named Ubuntu12 or something (like Dota 2's folder is still called Dota 2 Beta), libraries in it surely are more recent than that. And even then, native Linux ports of games don't run that well anyway. Especially older ones, like Tomb Raider 2013, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Alien: Isolaton, those all will run much better over Wine. I kind of expect newer ports to fall apart as well in the future. I was playing Hollow Knight the other day (native port) and it drops FPS quite often on my laptop (hybrid amd+nvidia), while through Wine those drops don't exist almost at all.

New comment by literallywho in "Oneplus phone update introduces hardware anti-rollback"

literallywho — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 04:53:57 +0000

Fascinating. I've had a OnePlus 6 from 2018 until 2023 (all on stock software) and I've not had or noticed any issues like that.

New comment by literallywho in "Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios"

literallywho — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:07:03 +0000

Pretty sure it's been over 20 years. I actually wonder what makes Ubisoft so committed to the project. Even Michel Ancel himself left in 2020. I'd love to see those original 2008 builds of the game, they had to have made TONS of content over the years that just remains locked away on some file server forever.

New comment by literallywho in "Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios"

literallywho — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 03:47:33 +0000

Usually gone or retooled for something else. Even just within the Prince of Persia series, they had a game called Prince of Persia: Assassins that was canceled and turned into Assassin's Creed. There was also a sequel to Prince of Persia 2008 in development that was cancelled and never showed up again. You can even find footage from both of these games online, but they will never see the light of day unless someone leaks them (which does happen sometimes).

New comment by literallywho in "Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?"

literallywho — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 04:32:35 +0000

> You can combine the phone tree with literal runners

And I thought Mirror’s Edge world was too far fetched back in 2008. But, apparently, it’s the reality now or where things are headed after all.

New comment by literallywho in "Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy"

literallywho — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 05:20:55 +0000

I ain't doing a water fast. And most people will not. Again, your argument is essentially "just use your will power". Clearly, people don't have that level of will power.

New comment by literallywho in "Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy"

literallywho — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 03:44:08 +0000

There are plenty of shortcuts. I've fixed my sleeping schedule by taking lorazepam and melatonin every night. I've gotten over many illnesses faster than healing naturally by taking many a pill. Why shouldn't there be medicine for issues with weight, especially for people who haven't been able to beat it themselves in decades? I've been fat most of my life and managed to lose a significant chunk of it by myself and regained it all over the following 5 years. Honestly, at this point, it's not happening without something like Ozempic. And I think it's the same for many people. Also, I don't care for the "not natural" debate, personally. If I wanted everything to be natural, I'd live in the woods and hunt animals.

New comment by literallywho in "Xfce is great"

literallywho — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 07:06:32 +0000

I've tried Cosmic recently and it's glitches galore right now (on nvidia at least). I think safest point is KDE. The most familiar paradigm, mature wayland support with mixed refresh rate displays, HDR and other modern features that XFCE can't do.

New comment by literallywho in "Anti-cheat evolution in Windows 11"

literallywho — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 06:58:18 +0000

Valve let bots infest and ruin TF2 servers for 8 (eight) years straight before doing anything. There's no way they'd add anything like that to TF2 within one year.

New comment by literallywho in "The Post-American Internet"

literallywho — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:44:58 +0000

ECHELON was quite popular in games back then. In the Splinter Cell games from the same era (2002), you're an operative of a US black ops organization called "Third Echelon" (and there's a second Echelon too, I guess).

New comment by literallywho in "Things I learnt about passkeys when building passkeybot"

literallywho — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 07:50:33 +0000

If I lose the device that has all my passkeys, I wouldn't be able to login into my emails either.

New comment by literallywho in "Things I learnt about passkeys when building passkeybot"

literallywho — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 07:49:10 +0000

Not in the western countries yet, I guess. I live in Thailand and have accounts in two banks and both of them only allow usage through an app that's only available through the App/Play store. Android version of Krungthai's bank app freaks out if you have developer settings enabled (even without changing anything, just enabling the access is enough to lock you out). And to use that app in the first place, you have to go to a branch and have staff set the app for, as passing the facial scan checks is impossible for foreigners.

New comment by literallywho in "How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips"

literallywho — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 08:13:21 +0000

I swear I've been reading about overbuilding in China since, like, 2012. And I've definitely used it in arguments myself. Not only China hasn't collapsed, but it has improved massively since then, as far as I can tell.