Hacker News: pathartl

New comment by pathartl in "New iMac with M6"

pathartl — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:41:07 +0000

Bingo, desktops are still king for actual raw processing. Apple laptops are great, but they're still just computers, given proper cooling and power they can perform even better.

New comment by pathartl in "$2599 Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra"

pathartl — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:11:46 +0000

You bought a Microsoft computer expecting a first class Linux experience?

Sir.

New comment by pathartl in "Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer"

pathartl — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:57:03 +0000

I grew up with two photographer parents that built a house around photographic printing. I was looking through their exposure notes a bit ago and as long as you can get sub second you should be able to get some pretty consistent results.

They did color, so when printing there was no such thing as a safelite. I can still vividly remember being that "can I help?" age and setting the timers for each color, loading in the paper in complete darkness, firing up the enlarger, and then feeding it to the auto processor. It was certainly an interesting way to grow up.

New comment by pathartl in "Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer"

pathartl — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:46:22 +0000

If you buy something like the Sonoff S31 they have an 8266 in them that can be easily flashed

New comment by pathartl in "What happens to TLDs when their country stops existing?"

pathartl — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 23:49:38 +0000

The keyword being speculation. That's making some incredible guesses at the future.

New comment by pathartl in "Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster"

pathartl — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:05:07 +0000

WP is GPL, just fork it.

New comment by pathartl in "Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence"

pathartl — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 03:04:43 +0000

They do not. It's GPL

New comment by pathartl in "Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence"

pathartl — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 03:02:59 +0000

I'm not convinced that sort of legacy lock in exists in the web space. It moves fast and its value is in the content. In the age of AI, migrating that data makes it trivial to move away from a risky platform. I cut my development teeth on WP and managed some fairly large sites. There are far more interesting and well developed alternatives out there.

New comment by pathartl in "SteamdDB Joins Nexus Mods"

pathartl — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:04:03 +0000

The value is in the contributed art.

New comment by pathartl in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

pathartl — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 02:55:54 +0000

Tons of built in winui3 stuff is still very accessible by the keyboard, metro era though what pretty rough.

New comment by pathartl in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

pathartl — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:32:35 +0000

Funny that you bring macOS, because for _decades_ I've struggled with navigating it without a keyboard. Windows components however, especially old ones, are incredibly accessible

New comment by pathartl in "Best Buy 'Repaired' a 64GB Laptop by Making It 32GB"

pathartl — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:35:59 +0000

Clickbait title. They removed a faulty 32GB module from a 2x32GB machine and shipped the laptop back with the removed module.

New comment by pathartl in "R/Gamedev Policy on AI Use"

pathartl — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:29:10 +0000

/r/selfhosted enacted a policy where any post gets auto deleted by a bot and an automated comment is generated. You must reply to that comment disclosing how you use AI. Then the post will be made public.

What ends up happening is anyone that has any positive sentiment towards AI gets downvote bombed and their post never gets attention. Of course this ends up breeding posters that claim they have made absolutely 100% no use of AI, and then their repo README is full of emojis and emdashes.

New comment by pathartl in "As a Windows user, it's a surreal way to install a program"

pathartl — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:22:03 +0000

In Windows this is currently being transformed with MSIX... Whenever that gets a foothold that is. But this is also why it was expected that you were to bundle an uninstaller with your application. It was expected that the developer was to handle cleanup. Obviously too many developers cut corners. The only way around this really is to have a system-wide hook that tracks what files an executable touches, and then have that executable registered to an overall application definition.

It's never going to be perfect. You can be really anal about it where you end up with iOS where, yes, you can sleep pretty well knowing that when you delete an app it has cleaned up after itself. The obvious tradeoff being that it's inherently limiting the scope of what you can do with the app.

I think it's gotten much better in recent years for the Windows crowd. I've been running the same install of 11 for about two years now. Back in the XP days I'd be lucky to be able to make it 6 months without feeling like everything was incredibly bogged down with no way out.

New comment by pathartl in "Desktop Linux just cracked 10% market share – and Windows 11 is mostly to blame"

pathartl — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:36:32 +0000

The numbers were from Cloudflare when you filter out "non-human users"

New comment by pathartl in "Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM"

pathartl — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 07:46:00 +0000

"basically NT 3.1" is an incredible over exaggeration. Total RAM capacity has stagnated over the years and subsequent generations of DDR have backed speed instead.

8GB in a computer was considered good in a consumer performance machine in 2010. 16 years before that was 6-8MB.

New comment by pathartl in "Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable"

pathartl — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 01:43:04 +0000

I have a port of BuildGDX in the project backlog that was basically just throwing Claude at it to go from Java to .NET. The only thing it really got hung up on was Java's byte being signed.

What I ended up with was a port of Duke 3D that uses half the allocated RAM as DukeGDX.

New comment by pathartl in "Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later"

pathartl — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:35:17 +0000

We regularly play Dark Messiah at our LAN, and I got that working straight off the disc. The only issue I've had with Source is SDK 2007 mods, but only because it's _extremely_ hard coded to have the SDK in a specific location.

But yeah, games that do outright crash are pretty easily patchable and most likely already have been.

New comment by pathartl in "Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later"

pathartl — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:33:37 +0000

I'd like to know which ones you've had issues with. I've compiled a collection of hundreds of Windows games from ~96-2006 and I've only run into one that's required an appcompat flag (carmageddon 2).

New comment by pathartl in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

pathartl — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:28:34 +0000

It's also worth noting that semantic markup is not a feature of CSS, it is a feature of HTML. CSS has almost no power if something like a scraper or a reader mode chooses to ignore it. Of course that would be pandemonium and we would never get good results.

I feel like something in the CSS camp that could be highlighted in a "great idea, okay implementation, poor reception" that the OP is going for is print stylesheets. Those are incredibly underused.