Hacker News: optionalsquid

New comment by optionalsquid in "Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team"

optionalsquid — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:26:38 +0000

> It would almost be like it wasn't really built with audio books in mind, but was rather designed around music.

If Jellyfin was designed around music, then I would expect it to support gap-less playback out of the box. Albums where each track seamlessly transitions into the next are not that rare

New comment by optionalsquid in "Exapunks (2018)"

optionalsquid — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:40:31 +0000

The rejection of Opus Magnum got a lot of attention at the time, which probably caused GOG to reconsider. But most developers don't get that kind of attention, if a game of theirs is rejected. I've seen multiple developers of games that I like, saying that they've given up on GOG because of the curation

New comment by optionalsquid in "Exapunks (2018)"

optionalsquid — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:14:24 +0000

Well, it has happened before:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/confusion-surrounds-gogs-rejec...

New comment by optionalsquid in "Exapunks (2018)"

optionalsquid — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:49:44 +0000

My understanding is that GOG is not necessarily undesirable, but they are very selective: Unlike Steam or Itch, you have to convince them that it's worth their while to sell your game. And their choices of what (not) to sell are not infrequently baffling. Lots of developers have gotten burned by that, including Zachtronics

New comment by optionalsquid in "Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise "

optionalsquid — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:54:24 +0000

Yes, it's unfortunate that the Lancet is not an Open Access journal. But, as you say, you can just purchase the paper if you wish to read it

New comment by optionalsquid in "Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise "

optionalsquid — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:31:05 +0000

The first link in the article goes straight to the study:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

New comment by optionalsquid in "Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions"

optionalsquid — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:19:58 +0000

From what I recall, based on what a Godot developer wrote at the time, nobody got banned from GitHub for "a reasonable objection". The only people who got banned from GitHub were those who posted abuse there, after a few people had gotten blocked by the Godot Twitter account

New comment by optionalsquid in "Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions"

optionalsquid — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:34:14 +0000

The fork also had its own drama, resulting in one of the more active developers of the fork, plus the guy who helped kick off the original drama, splitting off to create yet another fork. Both forks are still active, I believe. It was all very silly

New comment by optionalsquid in "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

optionalsquid — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 23:14:03 +0000

> Slightly tangential on Swedish society, there are similarities between USA and Sweden. There's a large segment of society that is white and very blond, and there's a largish segment which is not.

Do you have a source for that? I tried searching, but didn't find anything supporting this notion. I can find numerous sources pointing to the high prevalence of blonde hair in Sweden and other Nordic counties, but the US rarely even makes an appearance in those rankings. If anything, it seems like a point of difference rather than a similarity

New comment by optionalsquid in "Honesty gets Emacs patch rejected"

optionalsquid — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:31:53 +0000

Regardless of the LLM policy, I'd be hesitant to apply an optimization the impact of which can't be measured according to the author:

  > If you can provide some metrics that illustrate what the positive
  > performance improvement is, someone might volunteer to write a "clean"
  > implementation (assuming this contribution is contraband) of an NSColor
  > cache.  I haven't looked at the code should it wind up being me.

  I don't believe it's measurable, because it touches glyph rendering and
  framerates. 

 https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-06/msg00527.html

New comment by optionalsquid in "Fable Converted Pylint to Rust"

optionalsquid — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:36:38 +0000

Based on their tracking issue, Ruff is missing 156 out of 397 Pylint checks:

https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/issues/970

Though some of them will presumably be covered by Ty

New comment by optionalsquid in "Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures"

optionalsquid — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:51:12 +0000

Half-Life 2, released back in 2004, required an Internet connection to play. It was a major point of contention, in part due to how unreliable Steam was at the time

New comment by optionalsquid in "'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York"

optionalsquid — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 23:31:40 +0000

I honestly don’t see how the two compare. I’m merely asking for a response to a query that I sent myself.

What you describe is more like SPAM: Unsolicited bulk rejections to applications that were never sent

New comment by optionalsquid in "'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York"

optionalsquid — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 23:23:40 +0000

An automated message would be perfectly fine, since it would still allow me to cross off that application. The people behind the message are of little import. We are unlikely to have any further interactions anyway

New comment by optionalsquid in "'Ghost jobs' could soon be illegal in New York"

optionalsquid — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:00:05 +0000

> Every employer would send "We have decided not to continue with your application".

That would still be a big improvement over just getting ghosted

New comment by optionalsquid in "Mini Shai-Hulud Strikes Again: 314 npm Packages Compromised"

optionalsquid — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:25:20 +0000

> But nowadays prefer pyproject.toml

Couldn't you accomplish the same thing by adding a malicious [build-system] to a pyproject.toml file? You can pull in arbitrary code by providing exact URLs for requirements:

  [build-system]
  requires = ["hatchling @ https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/8f/8a/cc1debe3514da292094f1c3a700e4ca25442489731ef7c0814358816bb03/hatchling-1.27.0.tar.gz"]
  build-backend = "hatchling.build"

New comment by optionalsquid in "We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag"

optionalsquid — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:20:42 +0000

I don't have a better solution, unfortunately, but it doesn't seem seem to like the spam problem has been solved. It has just been moved from pull requests to commits:

Currently, more than 10% of all commits in the archestra repo are essentially noise (369 of 3521 commits), accounting for more than half of all commits in the last month (303 of 578 commits).

But maybe (probably) the amount of such commits will go down over time, compared to the growing amounts of AI slop

New comment by optionalsquid in "You Don't Look Like a Gamer: On Toxicity, Gatekeeping, & Women Who Share Gaming"

optionalsquid — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:15:53 +0000

There is currently a lot noise being generated because people noticed that Anita Sarkeesian consulted on Slay the Spire 2 (an amazing game, by the way). The main subreddit for GamerGate is also still very active. Those people never went away and they never figured out that they were tilting at windmills

New comment by optionalsquid in "For the first time in history, more Americans are moving to EU than vice versa"

optionalsquid — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:57:21 +0000

Danish immigration laws are also very strict. Most of our political parties have been competed to further tighten those rules over the last couple of decades. We literally have people advocating to leave the convention on human rights, since it’s getting in the way of that

New comment by optionalsquid in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"

optionalsquid — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 09:50:03 +0000

But researchers are not necessarily paid by corporations, and governments, foundations, and such are generally more willing to hand out grants that forego short-term profitability for long-term gains. And while a company might not be interested investing in research that could undermine one of their core products, that obviously does not apply to competing companies that do not already have corresponding products. What better way to break into a market, than to render your competitors' products obsolete?