Hacker News: paavohtl

New comment by paavohtl in "WebGL Without a GPU"

paavohtl — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:42:59 +0000

Indeed, the post is rather obviously written by Claude. It's just missing a few "load-bearing"s and a "golden", so that I could have the full picture.

New comment by paavohtl in "Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C"

paavohtl — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:47:10 +0000

> The source code is theirs, binaries mixed with other copyrighted content is not.

Distributing binaries should not matter. If the binary is just compiled from the source code, the binary is just an (non-)infringing as the source code.

> They also allegedly violated a EULA

Meaningless. EULAs are not the law.

New comment by paavohtl in "Show HN: Decomp Academy – Learn to decompile GameCube games into matching C"

paavohtl — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:03:22 +0000

Yes, quite easily. It requires some setup, but the basic idea is that you create a DLL and a simple loader program which injects it into your target process. You can then use a hooking library like MinHook to replace individual functions with your own implementations. If the target application is in C++, you can additionally do vtable hooking and replace functions even easier (though it will always be a combination of the two techniques).

New comment by paavohtl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

paavohtl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 05:53:48 +0000

Rust is a significantly higher level language than C, but it can be used it almost all environments where C is used; provided there's a supported compiler target for it. In (safe) Rust, null is basically a guaranteed compiler optimization. Optional / nullable values are represented via Option, which is a sum type of Some(T) and None. When a reference or other pointer-like value (e.g. Box, an owned heap allocation) is wrapped in Option, the compiler can use the invalid bit patterns of T (such as null) to represent the None variant. This is called niche optimization.

So yes, it's nulls underneath, but the developer never has to think about them.

Bevy 0.19

paavohtl — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 05:39:58 +0000

Article URL: https://bevy.org/news/bevy-0-19/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48606640

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by paavohtl in "Port React Compiler to Rust"

paavohtl — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:15:43 +0000

We have used React Compiler in production for a large ecom / media website for about a year. Performance has been fine overall, and we haven't ran into any major bugs attributable to it in that time.

New comment by paavohtl in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

paavohtl — Thu, 28 May 2026 05:27:33 +0000

I'm the author of said technical analysis! (https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/)

But yes, at launch Cities Skylines 2 was very heavily GPU bound, due to very unoptimized meshes and a poor culling implementation. I haven't profiled it afterwards, but from what I've read they've optimized it enough that on most systems the limiting factor is now the CPU.

New comment by paavohtl in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

paavohtl — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:17:13 +0000

More like 25. C# 1.0 already had capabilities Java developers are still dreaming of, like structs / value types, properties and operator overloading. C# 2.0 in 2005 introduced generics, implemented far more competently than Java ever did.

New comment by paavohtl in "Async Rust never left the MVP state"

paavohtl — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:23:52 +0000

Considering the latest commits and issues in effects-initiative are about 2 years old, the keyword generics initiative seems effectively dead.

New comment by paavohtl in "Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan"

paavohtl — Sun, 03 May 2026 20:47:23 +0000

As it happens I do have the habit of writing very long blog posts - though none on OpenWA so far. The OpenWA readme file serves as a bit of an introduction, though it's already a month old.

New comment by paavohtl in "Metal Gear Solid 2's source code has been leaked on 4chan"

paavohtl — Sun, 03 May 2026 20:15:08 +0000

I don't think it's impossible, but it would take a lot of time and a lot of money; likely more time than good enough models have been commercially available.

I have been working on an incremental decompilation-based reimplementation (basically how OpenRCT2 was done) of Worms Armageddon for the past 2 months with a lot of help from LLM tools; primarily Claude Code and Ghidra MCP. I've worked on it almost every day, reaching Claude Code Max 5x's 5 hour session limit multiple times every day. Suffice to say as a software rendered, sprite-based 90s PC game, Worms Armageddon is several orders of magnitude simpler than MGS2. Despite that, I think it will be 2-3 more months of work before I can compile a fully independent version of the game.

This is despite the game being an almost ideal candidate for automated RE, as it uses deterministic game logic with built-in checksum checks in replays and multiplayer. I've downloaded all the speedruns I could find for the game (as replay files) and I've retrofitted the replay system into a massively parallel test framework, which simulates over 600 games in about 30 seconds. So Claude can port all game logic independently without much need for manual testing; the replay tests can almost guarantee perfect correctness.

MGS2 doesn't have anything like that, so every ported function requires extensive manual testing. Even with LLM tools, an accurate decomp could take years (unless you're willing spend thousands of $currency per month on it).

New comment by paavohtl in "Every GPU That Mattered"

paavohtl — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:15:21 +0000

I think pairing RX 5700 XT with Control as the "defining game" is an interesting choice, considering the facts 1. AMD cards were incapable of RT at the time and 2. Control was basically the first game with a good, comprehensive RT implementation that had a massive positive impact on the graphics.

New comment by paavohtl in "Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild"

paavohtl — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:41:11 +0000

Absolutely nothing in the announcement or other publicly available source implies that, to my knowledge. Might as well speculate if a random passer-by on the street is secretly a martian.

New comment by paavohtl in "Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig"

paavohtl — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:28:54 +0000

For Android specifically, by Q3 of last year more new lines of Rust were being added per week than new lines of C++: https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...

New comment by paavohtl in "Rust's Block Pattern"

paavohtl — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:38:05 +0000

At least in simple cases the compiler will just inline the closure, as if it never existed. There shouldn't be any measurable overhead.

1000 Days in 32:9

paavohtl — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 11:06:00 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.paavo.me/1000-days-in-32-by-9/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253728

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by paavohtl in "'No One Lives Forever' turns 25 and you still can't buy it legitimately"

paavohtl — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 07:10:34 +0000

The source is only partially available; they released the source code of the game logic, but the engine was not included in the source release. You'd need to reverse engineer & remake the engine to make any major improvements to the game, such as porting it to new platforms.

New comment by paavohtl in "XSLT RIP"

paavohtl — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 08:59:20 +0000

And even that isn't enough; no browser supports WebGPU on all platforms out of the box. https://caniuse.com/webgpu

Chrome supports it on Windows and macOS, Linux users need to explicitly enable it. Firefox has only released it for Windows users, support on other platforms is behind a feature flag. And you need iOS 26 / macOS Tahoe for support in Safari. On mobile the situation should be a bit better in theory, though in my experience mobile device GPU drivers are so terrible they can't even handle WebGL2 without huge problems.

New comment by paavohtl in "XSLT RIP"

paavohtl — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 08:05:37 +0000

I know you're being sarcastic, but to be pedantic WebGPU (usually) uses canvas. Canvas is the element, WebGPU is one of the ways of rendering to a canvas, in addition to WebGL and CanvasRenderingContext2D.

New comment by paavohtl in "Affinity Studio now free"

paavohtl — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:42:38 +0000

Photoshop has had smart objects for quite literally 20 years - have they gained some important features recently? Smart filters have also been included since CS3 in 2007.