The car clearly does not have enough momentum to go on the ramp all the way upside-down, yet it miraculously does not fall.

Not that unique. My grandfather was a forester, his favourite time passing was to whistle back bird's song, changing only a little bit at a time, turning it slowly into something totally different. The changed song was passed to other birds and offsprings no probs.

The result was quite hilarious, you went to the primeval woods and you could hear wild birds singing the Für Elise... I bet it freaked out ornithologists!

(My granddad died about 30 years ago, sadly the bird "dialect" has vanished since, but I still have some old tapes in the attic.)

(ps. There's a new episode of Mini Fantasy Theater I haven't seen yet, hurray! https://www.davidrevoy.com/tag/minifantasytheater)

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/posix-uefi

Its goal is twofold: provides the usual libc API for EFI applications and an SDK on POSIX systems to create such EFI applications with a build system that works with CLang and gcc as well.

Its API is nowhere near complete as GNU-EFI's or EDKII's, so it provides seamless integration with those headers to make the API expandable. It is also not a fully POSIX standard compatible libc, it's just a wrapper around the firmware provided features with some minimal additions, but provides enough for everyday use cases. As being minimal, it's extremely small (~132K of source only) and because it's dependency-free, it's easy to integrate into any project.

The repo contains lots of examples too, from a simple "Hello World" to more complex ones like displaying a PNG splash screen or loading a "kernel" in ELF format.

POSIX-UEFI is 100% AI-free, and has been tested on almost every VMs and on lots of real hardware by volunteers over the years. It is feature complete, stable and considered bug-free by now (big thanks to contributors), although some workarounds for buggy firmware might be added in the future.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996507

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Knowing some bright minds I totally believe it.

Smart people tend to focus (zoom in) on one problem, entirely forgetting about the bigger picture (unless they "take a bath"). I guess von Neumann was likewise. I can totally imagine that he had to do calculations like this on a daily basis when the puzzle was presented to him, so he simply did what he was doing all along without examining the puzzle from another angle.

In this puzzle, two bicycles begin 20 miles apart, and each travels toward the other at 10 miles per hour until they collide; meanwhile, a fly travels continuously back and forth between the bicycles at 15 miles per hour until it is squashed in the collision.

The questioner asks how far the fly traveled in total; the "trick" for a quick answer is to realize that the fly's individual transits do not matter, only that it has been traveling at 15 miles per hour for one hour.

As Eugene Wigner tells it, Max Born posed the riddle to von Neumann. The other scientists to whom he had posed it had laboriously computed the distance, so when von Neumann was immediately ready with the correct answer of 15 miles, Born observed that he must have guessed the trick. "What trick?" von Neumann replied. "All I did was sum the geometric series.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685301

My solution is a single, dependency-free, multiplatform CLI tool, which Just Works (tm). It's like using zip or tar from command line, as simple as possible. 100% AI-free.

It's already overdue.

> it isn't clear to me that Altman et al don't virally weave themselves into the DNA of the state, both in the USA and in its adversaries.

In the USA? Maybe. In its adversaries? Definitely no. Thanks to Trump's "Make America Negligible Again" campaign being extremely successful.

Adversaries and enemies alike, no exception, nobody trusts US any more, so everyone is already building their own stuff to get independent ASAP. Tech-bros have already lost their influence outside of the US.

There are two repositories, depending on the desired use case:

Simpleboot is the little brother, an embeddable boot loader: https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/simpleboot

- multiplatform (BIOS, UEFI, RPi, coreboot)

- very small (less than 64k), single binary

- also flashable into ROM (option ROM, expansion ROM, coreboot payload, etc.)

- easy to configure (single config file, checked for validity by the disk creator utility)

- one backup boot option

- capable to boot Linux and simplified Multiboot2 kernels (see below)

Easyboot is the big brother, an interactive boot manager: https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/easyboot

- multiplatform (BIOS, UEFI, RPi)

- interactive boot menu for dual booting multiple OSes

- easy to configure (similar syntax as GRUB's, but much simpler)

- up to 9 boot options

- transparent payload decompression

- on-the-fly, transparent DSDT and DTB patching

- plugin system to support multiple file systems and boot protocols

- supports FAT12/16/32, exFAT, NTFS (v3, v3.1), ext2/3/4, XFS (SGI), UFS (v2, v4.4), mfs (Minix3), BeFS (Haiku), plus any root file system (zfs, btrfs, etc.) provided the kernel is on the ESP

- supports booting Linux, Windows, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, FreeDOS, ReactOS, MenuetOS, KolibriOS, SerenityOS, Haiku, Multiboot1, Multiboot2 (in PE/COFF, ELF, a.out, etc. formats)

- comes with a (very minimal but useful) kernel debugger that works on real machines too

Full disclosure: forking Simpleboot into Easyboot was sponsored by The Free Software Foundation Hungary (https://fsf.hu/nevjegy), created in appliance of FSF.hu's Free Software Tender 2023.

Their default "simplified Multiboot2 protocol" is an easier to use superset of the GRUB's Multiboot2 protocol. This protocol handles native 64 bit kernels (no 32-bit trampoline code), programming language and ABI agnostic (works with native C, C++, Rust, Go, Ada, Pascal, etc. kernels, no Assembly preambule needed), supports transparent higher-half mapping, not tied to x86, and has SMP support too (running the kernel on all CPU cores), passes EDID and kernel segmentation information (not in GRUB), etc. etc. etc. An example kernel is provided in the repo: https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/simpleboot/-/tree/main/example

If needed, there's an Easyboot plugin to support the old-fashioned, x86-only, GRUB-compatible Multiboot2 protocol (embedded tags, 32-bit entry point, no higher-half, GRUB ABI).

Documentation and detailed specification is available in German, English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese (some machine translated, sorry).

I would really love to hear your opinion and constructive criticism. Simpleboot is feature complete (only bugfix allowed), but Easyboot is expandable with new features via plugins.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685301

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

I wrote an entire https client from ground up in 117 LOC (and in a low level language, not Python): https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/skrellm/-/blob/main/src/https.c

Again, this guy and me disagree on what "not a bloat" means.

"Without the Bloat"

vs.

"litellm routes LLM calls across providers and translates between message formats. That core is buried under 100k+ LOC"

Seriously anybody considering 100k+ LOC not a bloat? You made my day!

Let's just say the author's and my definition of bloat is not the same. Full disclosure, I'm the guy who reimplemented etcher (over 400Mb) in a mere 300Kb, Capstone (over 1Mb) in only 66Kb and who compressed LPC charactersheets (over 700Mb) into 4Mb. That's my interpretation of "non-bloated".

Sometimes there's an offset (like with Latin, +/- 32), sometimes lowercase and uppercase is interleaved (eg. Latin extended), and sometimes they are in totally different blocks simply because they forgot to add both letter cases at once... (the distance of the codepoints affects UTF-8 encoding difference the most).

I've also paid attention to optimize the most common case where both UTF-8 encodings' first bytes are the same (that's 40508 pairs out of 40549). But no escape, it must handle the remaining 41 pairs specially in a slower code path, which would not be needed at all should UNICODE guys did their homework better.

https://gitlab.com/bztsrc/fast_memcasemem

See the performance comparison in the README, it's about 6 times faster than libc.

(*) - full UTF-8 support, but only works for UNICODE codepoints where the UTF-8 encoding lengths are the same for lowercase and uppercase. There are only 27 out of 40576 pairs which aren't handled (listed in the README).

This already happened... It's called subscription or mortgage loan.

Most households don't have that kind of money at once, they are already forced into a loan with regular payments. This means not the buyer but the bank owns the car until the last penny is paid.

And in some cases your car's on-board software needs a constant connection with the vendor's servers (meaning it must be up and you must pay for a license too). https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/what-happens-to-a-car-w...

It's even worse with houses. Most gen Zs will never ever own their homes, they are implicitly forced to rent only (no ownership in sight). https://fortune.com/article/gen-z-giving-up-on-buying-a-home...

Brave new world.

Otherwise you're right, it's absurd that license fee is the same as the price of an owned copy.

That's what lawyers and other corporate drones think, but they are plain wrong.

The only reason why people want to buy a copy from second hand is because they can't afford the price of a new one. In reality these people will never ever buy straight from Sony, simply because it's too expensive for them. Simple as that. They much more likely to turn to free pirate copies instead.

> For calls from kernel-mode drivers, the NtXxx and ZwXxx versions of a Windows Native System Services routine can behave differently in the way that they handle and interpret input parameters.

How "differently" exactly? That's undocumented. And lots of other small (but very important) details are undocumented as well.