<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: marmarama</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marmarama</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:00:48 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=marmarama" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sure you can do it technically, but then you have a licensing compliance issue, so no reputable business will do it.<p>You can run x86 macOS VMs in Windows or Linux too with a little bit of technical trickery, but again, you end up with a license issue, so no-one reputable does it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:57:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737832</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737832</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737832</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The problem with this is that "breaking the Nash equilibrium momentarily" is a spherical cow.<p>"Momentarily" can mean years or even decades, and millions of people can suffer or die as a result.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:21:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716417</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716417</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716417</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The problem is those self-same authoritarian strongmen are very successfully using sockpuppeting to change national discourses in ways that benefit them and are detrimental to the targeted countries. Hybrid war is real and has been ongoing for more than a decade. LLMs make it way more cost effective.<p>Being able to limit the influence of external bad actors is the main goal of ID verification. Age verification is a useful side effect that makes it easier to sell to the general public.<p>Big Tech has had at least a decade to fix this, did nothing of note, and is all out of ideas. Privacy advocates had the same time to figure out a "least bad" technical solution, but got so obsessed with railing against it happening at all, that nothing got any traction.<p>So governments are here to legislate, for better or worse. They know it's a trade-off between being undermined by external forces vs. the systems being abused by future governments, but their take is that a future authoritarian government will end up implementing something similar anyway.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:21:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234723</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234723</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47234723</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The point is that if you convert away from COBOL to a more modern language, you can also move away from Z-series hardware to commodity x86 and ARM servers.  That's why this announcement affected IBM's share price.<p>IEEE 754-2008 defines decimal floating point arithmetic that is compatible with COBOL and is usually implemented using the Intel Decimal Floating Point Math Library on commodity hardware.<p>For a typical core banking ledger application, the performance cost of a software implementation of DFP (vs. having DFP hardware instructions) is pretty low, and greatly outweighed by the benefits of being able to use commodity hardware and more maintainable languages.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 10:53:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135510</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135510</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47135510</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Things Unix can do atomically (2010)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not really, because only the OS core is swapped in this way. Apps and data live in their own partitions/subvolumes, which are mutable and shared between OS versions.<p>The OS core is deployed as a single unit and is a few GB in size, pretty small when internal storage is into the hundreds of GB.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:01:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910601</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910601</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910601</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In British English, rather than "very not bad", you might say "not bad at all", which is higher praise than just "not bad".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2025 01:14:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239715</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239715</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239715</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I already run stuff that was very much not made with TBDR in mind, on TBDR GPU architectures, and the performance is perfectly fine.<p>For sure, you can squeeze a few percentage points more out if you optimize for TBDR, and there are some edge cases where it's possible to make TBDR architectures behave pathologically, but it's not that big a deal in the real world.<p>I also disagree that the Steam Frame is for streaming primarily. If it was, why put such a powerful SoC in it or using it as the prototype device for doing x86 emulation with Fex?<p>The Adreno 750 is a 3 TFlops GPU that _should be_ substantially faster than a PS4 or a Steam Deck. It'll play plenty of low-end PCVR games pretty well on its own, if Fex's x86 emulation is performant, which it is.<p>Like the Meta Quest 2, it's a crossover device that a lot of people will just use standalone.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2025 22:02:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167968</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167968</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46167968</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Loads of GPUs with Vulkan support use TBDR. The Adreno GPU in the Steam Frame's SnapDragon SoC, for one.<p>There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already, used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its own reasons, but they're not really technical.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:44:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139870</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139870</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139870</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not just Chrome, it's everything, though apps that have a large number of dependencies (including Chrome and the myriad Electron apps most of us use these days) are for sure more noticeable.<p>My M4 MacBook Pro loads a wide range of apps - including many that have no Chromium code at all in them - noticeably slower than exactly the same app on a 4 year old Ryzen laptop running Linux, despite being approximately twice as fast at running single-threaded code, having a faster SSD, and maybe 5x the memory bandwidth.<p>Once they're loaded they're fine, so it's not a big deal for the day to day, but if you swap between systems regularly it does give macOS the impression of being slow and lumbering.<p>Disabling Gatekeeper helps but even then it's still slower. Is it APFS, the macOS I/O system, the dynamic linker, the virtual memory system, or something else? I dunno. One of these days it'll bother me enough to run some tests.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:46:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090200</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090200</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090200</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Anthropic invests $50B in US AI infrastructure"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's the story the proponents of the AI bubble would have you believe, because they are sucking in all available funding to their enrichment, or because they've been huffing their own hype gas for so long that they have no brain cells of their own left.<p>It is, however, complete nonsense, and the next few years of failed promises on AGI will eventually bring people to their senses, if a market crash and sustained economic depression doesn't do that first. It would be funny if it wasn't going to cause suffering for millions of people, whether we succeed at AGI or not.<p>I _like_ AI, I find LLMs and many other aspects of  useful, and I am optimistic for the long term prospects of AI. But the rush to try and get to AGI is completely out of control at this point, and the fallout from when the bubble pops will set AI, and our societies, back a long time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2025 22:19:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907636</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907636</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907636</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "IKEA launches new smart home range with 21 Matter-compatible products"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Having bought a few Matter devices now, I have discovered that, in practise, Matter is just as full of vendor extensions as ZigBee, and the quirks ecosystem that allows for interoperability despite vendor extensions is far less mature than with ZigBee.<p>Maybe this will get better with time, but we're half a decade into the Matter era and the end-user experience is _worse_ than with ZigBee. In that sense, Matter has failed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2025 12:27:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845704</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845704</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845704</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Developers are choosing older AI models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's really just a performance tradeoff, and where your acceptable performance level is.<p>Ollama, for example, will let you run any available model on just about any hardware. But using the CPU alone is _much_ slower than running it on any reasonable GPU, and obviously CPU performance varies massively too.<p>You can even run models that are bigger than available RAM too, but performance will be terrible.<p>The ideal case is to have a fast GPU and run a model that fits entirely within the GPU's memory. In these cases you might measure the model's processing speed in tens of tokens per second.<p>As the idealness decreases, the processing speed decreases. On a CPU only with a model that fits in RAM, you'd be maxing out in the low single digit tokens per second, and on lower performance hardware, you start talking about seconds over token instead. If the model does not fit in RAM, then the measurement is minutes per token.<p>For most people, their minimum acceptable performance level is in the double digit tokens per second range, which is why people optimize for that with high-end GPUs with as much memory as possible, and choose models that fit inside the GPU's RAM. But in theory you can run large models on a potato, if you're prepared to wait until next week for an answer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2025 10:48:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821522</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821522</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821522</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "OpenGL: Mesh shaders in the current year"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Which is as-designed. Vulkan (and DX12, and Metal) is a much more low-level API, precisely because that's what professional 3D engine developers asked for.<p>Closer to the hardware, more control, fewer workarounds because the driver is doing something "clever" hidden behind the scenes. The tradeoff is greater complexity.<p>Mere mortals are supposed to use a game engine, or a scene graph library (e.g. VulkanSceneGraph), or stick with OpenGL for now.<p>The long-term future for OpenGL is to be implemented on top of Vulkan (specifically the Mesa Zink driver that the blog post author is the main developer of).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Oct 2025 15:38:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540180</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540180</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45540180</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "America is now one big bet on AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> the majority of the population laid off from their office jobs will have plenty of work to do in the fields and food processing plants if they want to eat.<p>Indeed. The destination is agricultural serfdom, with current billionaires or their descendants as Lords of the manor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Oct 2025 10:08:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45514299</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45514299</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45514299</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Qt 6.10 Released"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Use the LGPL licensing option?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 08 Oct 2025 09:31:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45514035</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45514035</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45514035</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Centrino was Intel's brand for their wireless networking and laptops that had their wireless chipsets, the CPUs of which were all P6-derived (Pentium M, Core Duo).<p>Possibly you meant Celeron?<p>Also the Pentium 4 uarch (Netburst) is nothing like any of the Atoms (big for the time out-of-order core vs. a small in-order core).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2025 21:46:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45379547</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45379547</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45379547</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Tough news for our UK users"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's run by a startup incubator, and a pretty large chunk of the user population has the notion that they will eventually end up part of the rarefied population of company founders that hit the jackpot and make their fortune.<p>Of course that affects attitudes here, even if most people on here will never actually be a founder, let alone a highly successful one.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Jul 2025 23:31:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630389</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630389</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44630389</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Infinite Mac OS X"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a website that has compiled existing open source emulators that are capable of running old versions of MacOS and NeXTStep, to WebAssembly so they run inside a modern browser.<p>They have paired that with disk images of these OSes and a lot of tweaking, so that when you go to the website, you select the version of the OS you want to play with, and _it just runs_ in the browser.<p>Instant old Mac/NeXT experience, no separate download or software to install.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Jun 2025 07:54:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44325572</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44325572</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44325572</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "What Killed Innovation?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm not sure you can say that Qt doesn't see much use, when there are hundreds, probably thousands, of well-known commercial apps using it, and it's in millions upon millions of embedded systems. And obviously KDE as well.<p>It's just it's largely invisible. It works, it does exactly the job it's meant to do, and it does it well.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Mar 2025 02:11:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478142</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478142</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478142</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by marmarama in "Triforce – a beamformer for Apple Silicon laptops"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can get surprisingly good results from cheap laptop hardware (as well as fancier hardware like an MBP) using software DSP techniques. One of the things I'm pleased about is that quite a bit of Asahi's audio work is just as applicable to generic laptops as it is to Macs.<p>I already use the Bankstown bass harmonics synthesis plugin developed for Asahi and a convolution EQ on a cheap HP laptop, with startlingly impressive results, using the Pipewire plugin chain autoload feature also developed for Asahi.<p>I suspect there are quite a few use cases for this beamformer outside of the Asahi ecosystem as well.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Mar 2025 16:49:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462996</link><dc:creator>marmarama</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462996</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462996</guid></item></channel></rss>