Hacker News: qludes

New comment by qludes in "Volkswagen blocks Home Assistant by requiring client assertion"

qludes — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:07:17 +0000

The ability to interface with your car is fundamentally at odds with the regulatory momentum that's going towards encrypted everything.

Take a look what the automotive risc-v people are working on or the requirements of the EU cyber resilience act.

New comment by qludes in "Dead Internet Theory"

qludes — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:45:27 +0000

Because it's the equivalent to running a private irc server plus logging with forum features, voice comms, image hosting, authentication and bouncers for all your users. With a working client on multiple platforms (unlike IRC and jabber that never really took off on mobile).

New comment by qludes in "Pop OS 24.04 LTS Beta"

qludes — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 13:51:41 +0000

Plasma has at least basic tiling support for different workspaces and reasonable default hotkeys to arrange your windows.

https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.4.0/

New comment by qludes in "Pop OS 24.04 LTS Beta"

qludes — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:41:30 +0000

Don't both gnome and kde also have tiling support?

New comment by qludes in "The bloat of edge-case first libraries"

qludes — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 10:45:30 +0000

So someone could reserve all the pronounceable crate names?

New comment by qludes in "Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects"

qludes — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:17:28 +0000

https://pan.baidu.com/s/1qbLD7j1nw3fRlNq09U8l9g?pwd=511c (from orangepi.cn) links to a Ky X1 chip manual.pdf

New comment by qludes in "Bus stops here: Shanghai lets riders design their own routes"

qludes — Wed, 14 May 2025 20:37:13 +0000

If I damage my phone or it gets stolen I have to walk home because the dystopian iOS/Android with SIM that requires ID ecosystem here won't actually allow me to simply use other computers I might still have access to so I'd have to equip my children with 2 devices and 2 SIMs in addition to cash, a debit card and an ID card to show that they're entitled to use their bus ticket.

These are incredibly user unfriendly locked gardens that are often adding gatekeeping to services that used to be ubiquitiously available, even in non-totalitarian systems, because suddenly you might need a bank account, an address, a government issued ID, a SIM card and a $100+ device that runs the approved stack just to take the bus.

New comment by qludes in "The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder"

qludes — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 10:53:08 +0000

As a concept it is pretty useful for me in a handwavy astrophysics math way because I otherwise wouldn't necessarily know how to make my naive solution fit real world constraints.

New comment by qludes in "Intel announces Arc B-series "Battlemage" discrete graphics with Linux support"

qludes — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 06:19:18 +0000

That's more of a function of high end Nvidia gaming card prices and power consumption. PC gaming at large isn't about chasing high end graphics anyway, steam deck falls under that umbrella and so does a vast amount of multiplayer gaming that might have other priorities such as affordability or low latency/very high fps.

New comment by qludes in "How I failed to make a game: Raycasting on the GBA"

qludes — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 10:35:07 +0000

It might look much better if you picked a palette with a mood (https://lospec.com/palette-list). The resolution mismatch between the foreground crossbow and the sprites and background textures could be made less apparent too by reducing the resolution. For the monster sprites there's always scaling and palette flips. But yeah, with those sprites (and sound) defining the game's identity it's a bottomless pit.

New comment by qludes in "Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws"

qludes — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:40:22 +0000

On a tiny scale I store them via humification in the top soil. In agriculture they manage the humus content of their soil anyway, for example in greenhouses they might have 20% instead of 2% in the surrounding fields.

Someone armed with enough VC money could possibly do that on a really large scale and even monetize it via carbon offset certs and then just throw the C rich output of their giant bioreactor into the bottomless pit.

New comment by qludes in "What is an SBAT and why does everyone suddenly care"

qludes — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 12:02:18 +0000

I have a Thinkpad that did something like this, it would try to install updates, fail and eventually boot into some kind of recovery wizard that demanded the bitlocker key. That wizard wasn't able to actually fix anything either but after failing a few times the system finally would uninstall the update. The whole process took over an hour with zero feedback.

I had to switch to Linux just to get a machine I could rely on.

New comment by qludes in "Aeon: OpenSUSE for Lazy Developers"

qludes — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 17:58:43 +0000

An immutable rootfs distro should be a bit more resilient than the average Linux install. Not having to add any random repos to your base system is a great feature. When I run random build scripts I mostly use containers or VMs, that also works for the odd unmaintained but useful software that requires vintage Ubuntu LTS libraries.

New comment by qludes in "Aeon: OpenSUSE for Lazy Developers"

qludes — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 17:49:58 +0000

With Tumbleweed (and probably Aeon) you can use factory/open build service to build your own packages. You could even fork Aeon or MicroOS and turn to that into something like a customized Arch Install that also benefits from whatever automated tests Tumbleweed comes with.

New comment by qludes in "The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding"

qludes — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 21:51:14 +0000

Yeah, you're right. I'm off by a few years. Early 2000s was when these Sharp personal assistants came out. And some students would have been exposed to Windows 98 or XP and sometimes IRC or ICQ but on average they didn't have any actual computing experience apart from maybe playing games or chatting.

That was a bit before my time so they would have had to cope with actual UNIX-like CDE on Solaris until they figured out how to access the nicer Linux servers that had KDE. But in these days thin clients with 24" screens were actually pretty nice compared to what students actually owned. Even on Solaris with Mozilla and CDE.

The actual teaching material didn't change that much though because the university essentially taught the same sh course with here's latex, here's man, here's how you install whatever you need to ~/bin since the late 1980ies. It didn't matter if a professer wanted to use C++ or Modula2 or Pascal or Java because every student got that crash course in how to actually use the faculty provided computung pools.

First semester homework and midterm tests ensured that they were able to start their IDE or interpreter and knew how to compile their homework on the right architecture, how to search for documentation and how to actually use a keyboard to submit their math homework. The beauty of that approach was that it allowed the 10% or so who were really interested in learning more access to university resources while also ensuring that no math-cs double major graduates without at least a modest grasp of tools that were state of the art in Knuth's days.

New comment by qludes in "Things you didn't know about GNU readline (2019)"

qludes — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 21:00:42 +0000

Do they actually use features like ARM trustzone and encrypt the firmware? I'm trying to get my router to do things it should be able to do and it seems like they mostly concentrated on making getting serial accesss more annoying but the rest is just an ancient BSP linux distro with minor changes using none of the actual security features of the SoC.

New comment by qludes in "Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items"

qludes — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:46:01 +0000

If it's something like a blog archive.org works. And if it's a website people care about it's as simple as giving the archiver/internet historian/data hoarder hobbyist niche to back it all up on ipfs.

If they wrote things you can digitize them and turn them into an epub that might last a few hundred years. And you can absolutely donate a website, that's just a matter of picking the right license and hosting the actual data somewhere, not the actual website.

New comment by qludes in "Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items"

qludes — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:40:13 +0000

The sad thing about book collections is that they're not worth buying for book antiquities because chances are that most won't sell at all and the few games might just be worth a few $ so most just end up in the recycling bin once the owner dies. On the other hand that means if you're willing to buy whole shelves filled with books that haven't been preaccessed they can be incredibly cheap.

New comment by qludes in "The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding"

qludes — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 18:53:59 +0000

I was a TA during that time. A part of the students that came in weren't familiar with concepts such as files and directories or desktop UI metaphors because they were used to mobile OS or in rare cases didn't have any actual exposure to computers. But because the last case used to be the rule and traditionally students mostly used the provided thin client labs and Solaris servers the basic intro to actually using a keyboard and the provided hardware to get things done didn't change much, even when they switched from Solaris to Linux on x86.

New comment by qludes in "The number of CS grads who don't even know basic Git commands is astounding"

qludes — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 18:20:22 +0000

Yes, they divided us into teams of 4-5 and told us about valgrind which turned out to invaluable. So if that is done in some black box web interface anti cheat vendor provided CS course module today that abstracts the actual useful irl experience from the student that would be pretty sad.