Hacker News: mrec

New comment by mrec in "Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead"

mrec — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:21:27 +0000

Makes perfect sense; old CRT TVs had the same kind of effect in making low resolutions bearable. (If you think DVD is bad, you'd have loved long-play VHS at around 230p...)

New comment by mrec in "Bird brains (2023)"

mrec — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 18:36:08 +0000

Maybe also worth noting some evidence that ants can apparently pass the mirror test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects

When it first came out I don't think anyone quite knew what to make of that, and I'm not sure anything's changed since.

New comment by mrec in "Hardware Image Compression"

mrec — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:45:59 +0000

I don't disagree given your "most" qualifier, but there's a case where every level of hardware would benefit: compression of textures generated at runtime, either via procgen or for e.g. environment maps.

This is in a frustrating state at the moment. CPU compression is way too slow. Some people have demoed on-the-fly GPU compression using a compute shader, but annoyingly there is (or at least was at the time) no way in the GPU APIs to `reinterpret_cast` the compute output as a compressed texture input. Meaning the whole thing had to be dragged down to CPU memory and uploaded again.

New comment by mrec in "Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains"

mrec — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 21:57:00 +0000

"Office ain't done 'til Wine won't run"?

New comment by mrec in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

mrec — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:57:49 +0000

I dunno, misspelling "grammar" as "grammer" isn't a great look in context.

New comment by mrec in ""That Shape Had None" – A Horror of Substrate Independence (Short Fiction)"

mrec — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:35:04 +0000

It's an odd site design. Stories are loaded dynamically by script based on the URL fragment identifier; I'd imagine Reader Mode isn't geared toward that sort of thing.

I also wonder why they decided that hiding the scrollbar was a good idea.

New comment by mrec in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

mrec — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:07:37 +0000

Andor is fantastic, but I think it's important to set expectations before going in. Compared to other SW content it's much slower-paced and more restrained/cerebral.

Mandalorian didn't do much for me; too gamey/Marvel-ey/cartooney.

New comment by mrec in "Writers and Their Day Jobs"

mrec — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:52:38 +0000

> Throughout this period, Glass supported himself as a New York cabbie and as a plumber, occupations that often led to unusual encounters. "I had gone to install a dishwasher in a loft in SoHo," he says. "While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. 'But you're Philip Glass! What are you doing here?' It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. 'But you are an artist,' he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish."

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/nov/24/arts.highe...

New comment by mrec in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

mrec — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:48:29 +0000

I don't have kids myself, but friends have shown Firefly to theirs and I'm happy to report that it still holds up. There's hope for the future yet.

New comment by mrec in "Microspeak: Escrow"

mrec — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:27:32 +0000

Isn't this just "release candidate" by another name?

New comment by mrec in "Do Metaprojects"

mrec — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 22:05:34 +0000

What you're describing reminds me very strongly of Here Dragons Abound's "Forever Project":

https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-forever-p...

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

mrec — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:06:59 +0000

The ECHR isn't actually an EU thing. (It's a Council of Europe thing, which is separate from and predates the ECSC/EEC/EU.)

New comment by mrec in "Brutalist Southbank Centre Listed"

mrec — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:16:42 +0000

I was sorely tempted to downvote this for egregious wrongheadedness, but that last line is pure gold. Kudos.

New comment by mrec in "Where did all the starships go?"

mrec — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 11:58:03 +0000

Yup. One early Arthur C Clarke story had plants growing natively on the Moon.

New comment by mrec in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

mrec — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:07:32 +0000

> take a look at Ian McDonald

+1. I loved Desolation Road in particular; a sort of 100 Years of Solitude but on Mars and with more than 2 names for its 3000 characters.

New comment by mrec in "Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT"

mrec — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 21:32:15 +0000

5.2 in the website. You can see what was used for a specific response by hovering over the refresh icon at the end.

New comment by mrec in "TSMC Risk"

mrec — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:16:01 +0000

Interesting point, although it's clearly not in TSMC's interest to land themselves in a monopsony situation by allowing Apple (e.g.) to squeeze all their competitors out of the market.

New comment by mrec in "Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout"

mrec — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 14:46:38 +0000

> Given that a sentiment for independence of Scotland has only really became an actual topic people discuss semi-seriously after the Brexit

The Scottish independence referendum was in 2014, two years before the Brexit referendum.

New comment by mrec in "Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout"

mrec — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 13:14:47 +0000

I don't think that's a given, or even necessarily a strong likelihood. A majority of Scotland's trade is with the rest of the UK, unlike the Brexit situation where a shrinking minority of the UK's trade was with the rest of the EU, the only EU member for which this was the case. Scotland is accustomed to deficit spending and to large subsidies from the rUK, neither of which would be epecially palatable to EU finances.

And while I certainly think it's fair to describe the UK economy as a sinking ship, I also think that blaming that on Brexit is, to put it politely, "starting with your conclusion". UK growth has been higher than France, Germany or Italy since 2016. Brexit has obviously had impacts, but they haven't all been negative (the City in particular has zero enthusiasm to fall back into any EU alignment) and I think the COVID lockdown shambles and the Homerically inept current government have been bigger factors.

I found this a decent recent overview on the common analytical takes, if you're interested: https://julianhjessop.substack.com/p/what-the-nber-gets-wron...

New comment by mrec in "Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11"

mrec — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 17:28:08 +0000

Re "just another program" - the old Notepad was deliberately designed with minimal dependencies so that even if everything else in the system went to hell you'd still have a working editor to try and fix things.