Hacker News: spystath

New comment by spystath in "Tiny QR code achieved using electron microscope technology"

spystath — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:38:58 +0000

Despite the HN title (and while the focusing optics are similar), the structure in the article was directly milled with an ion beam (FIB), not electrons.

New comment by spystath in "Keep Android Open"

spystath — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:49:01 +0000

There is an implicit shame in disgrace but faceless entities have no shame. They'll just put out another press release written in corporate newspeak by an LLM and move on withe the plans anyway. This is standard Google behaviour. They do it with Chrome, they do it with Android, they'll keep doing it with all their captive markets. I fear that in practice even having an "advanced flow" will make little difference as some applications will refuse to work if you have it enabled anyway (in the same vein if debugging is enabled, for example).

Nothing about Android is open except the absolutely minimum amount of linux kernel that's required to boot the thing. Then it's blobs and restrictions all the way to the screen.

New comment by spystath in "How often does Python allocate?"

spystath — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:24:03 +0000

Alternatively: https://xon.sh/

New comment by spystath in ""Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec""

spystath — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:44:37 +0000

Chrome is the dominant browser. Sad as this may be removing it from Blink means de facto removing it from the spec.

That being said, I'm not against removing features but neither this or the original post provide any substantial rationale on why it should be removed. Uses for XSLT do exist and the alternative is "just polyfill it" which is awkward especially for legacy content.

New comment by spystath in "Schrödinger's IPv6 Cat"

spystath — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 10:08:03 +0000

In a lot of cases on a residential line you can't even pay for a public and/or static v4. The option simply doesn't exist. Many ISPs just force you to buy a "business" package for 3x the cost with a bunch of other features you may not need.

New comment by spystath in "Revert "video: Prefer Wayland over X11 (take 2)""

spystath — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 12:36:04 +0000

Issue (1) has been a long-standing issue and a prolonged back and forth [0,1] between NVIDIA and Xorg/Wayland devs about implicit and explicit synchronisation protocols. It looks like the explicit sync protocol is in the process of getting merged upstream and the 555 series driver [1] will take advantage of this so hopefully things are looking better. Problem with wayland is that all of the driver, xwayland and every compositor must support the new protocol but it looks like mutter, kwin and wlr will eventually support it. That being said there are constantly new paper-cuts appearing with the NVIDIA driver and Wayland support so who knows what will break with the new driver. Definitely not a pleasant experience. I'm not saying that AMD is smooth sailing but at least you don't have to fight the driver at every new release.

I'm afraid (2) will probably never work properly :-(

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[2] https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/pull/104#issuecomment-...

New comment by spystath in "CSS for printing to paper"

spystath — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:04:00 +0000

You don't have to use a browser. I had very good results with Weasyprint [0]. And there's also PrinceXML [1] if you're willing to pay.

[0]: https://weasyprint.org/ [1]: https://www.princexml.com/

New comment by spystath in "YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Spurs Record Uninstalls"

spystath — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 17:02:59 +0000

I think that's a relatively simplistic way of viewing this. Although I don't disagree with the core argument, Google will always implement and ship "standards" that fit their business model or their vision of the web. A Chrome API becomes a defacto standard regardless of the state of consensus between engine vendors. Chrome can bulldoze through the standards process because of the massive amount of Chrome installations (and derivatives).

There are standards that have never been fully accepted by Mozilla [0] or WebKit (famously webusb for instance, because of security implications) but they are still in Chrome and now Firefox or Safari are effectively a "worse" browser because they don't support "standard" X that never reached consensus but Chrome implemented anyway. It always starts as an "experimental" feature under a config flag while the supposed discussion is taking place "just to see how it works, promise" before Google decides to remove the experimental flag and ship it. WEI started to play out exactly in the same way but given the massive outrage they decided it was too damaging to keep pursuing it (they still sneakily implemented it in Android WebViews).

So although I don't disagree that, yes Google has certainly improved on some things when it comes to standard processes they have abused their powerful position and continue to do so to push forward whatever they think it benefits them.

[0] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

New comment by spystath in "Samsung Unveils Industry's First 32Gbit DDR5 Memory Die: 1TB Modules Incoming"

spystath — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 14:28:03 +0000

Oh yes, I understand that. I only wish that ECC support in general starts getting more traction in consumer electronics. Nowadays (unless you go to super noisy super expensive server hardware) maybe with an AMD processor maybe a motherboard manufacturer will have a 20-links-deep document that says that these ECC modules may be supported, proceed at your own risk, might set your flat on fire, kill kittens etc. When you had a couple of gigs of ram it was probably irrelevant but if you have multiple TB of RAM caching file access ECC should become normalised.

New comment by spystath in "Samsung Unveils Industry's First 32Gbit DDR5 Memory Die: 1TB Modules Incoming"

spystath — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 13:58:24 +0000

More RAM is always nice but I'm secretly hoping we'll start to see more ECC support in the future. With these humongous modules and even with a teeny tiny bitflip probability corruption chance becomes non insignificant.

New comment by spystath in "Google engineers want to make ad-blocking (near) impossible"

spystath — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:39:46 +0000

The hold-back feature is so extremely out of touch with reality

"There seems to be something wrong with your request, try reloading this page"

Good luck getting this ad infinitum you are on an environment that Google doesn't approve.

New comment by spystath in "Web Environment Integrity API Proposal"

spystath — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 19:26:46 +0000

I was there too, in the 1.0 days, and still am. But these days are gone, Firefox is not coming back. Back then Firefox was immensely better than IE. As long as the other alternatives are just as good, there is no reason for the mythical "average user" to change over. Why bother if you can do everything in Chrome? We may understand the differences, ideological or technical, but good luck explaining that out there. There's a massive disconnect between user and technology and as a result people will live in the perfectly curated technological bubble that's been served to them.

New comment by spystath in "Web Environment Integrity API Proposal"

spystath — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 19:02:20 +0000

> how do we protest this?

You do not and you cannot. It was written in stone once Chrome dominated the browser market. What Chrome (Google) wants, Chrome (Google) gets. Despite all the good engineering Google wants to sell ads, that's all there is to it. And the result is this proposal.

> The saving grace here might be that Firefox won't implement the proposal.

It's irrelevant and we are an irrelevant minority. Unless people switch to FF in droves the web is Chrome. And they won't because at the end of the day people just want to get home from their shitty jobs and stream a show. As long as that works everything else is a non-issue.

New comment by spystath in "Reddit banned Reddiw's (alternative API) subreddit and author's Reddit account"

spystath — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 13:00:59 +0000

They closed the gates when their specific niche has been captured so that they can extract maximum value. As a result interoperability between services is dead. Fediverse is a valiant effort but the barrier to entry is relatively high, even for techies. It's time to accept that people just like the "comfort" of walled gardens.

New comment by spystath in "Why KDE Plasma was chosen as the default desktop environment for Asahi Linux"

spystath — Wed, 17 May 2023 11:38:05 +0000

Regardless of the DE preference I believe the Gtk/GObject/GLib ecosystem is quite well designed and it's relatively easy to reason around and get into developing with even without using C since there's a ton of available bindings. KDE development is tied to the Qt framework which is essentially C++ only (with Python bindings for the Qt libs). The language is based on pragmatic requirements and I can't see any correlation to the quality of the software.

New comment by spystath in "Teams is killing my Mac every day"

spystath — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 16:45:00 +0000

It may happen eventually but they have no incentive to make it so. They've captured a significant part of the corporate market by bundling with O365 for Enterprise. Teams has fulfilled it's purpose just as Office did. At least Office is decent software.

New comment by spystath in "Are We Wayland Yet?"

spystath — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 08:05:21 +0000

I don't think that's true since about a year ago.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

New comment by spystath in "40% of Google users now connect via IPv6"

spystath — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 15:00:45 +0000

I know it's been repeated a million times by now, but NAT is not a replacement for a firewall. Most residential routers are deny in by default so you get zero incoming connections from the internet unless you open the relevant ports, exactly as with NAT.

New comment by spystath in "Text Rendering Hates You (2019)"

spystath — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 12:49:57 +0000

Unfortunately at 4k nothing over 22" is 200+ dpi. It's definitely better than the run of the mill 90-100 dpi monitors but not enough to fully eliminate the need for AA. You need to push around a great amount of pixels to have crisp text with no AA. Presently 5k desktop monitors go for $2.5k+, 8k for $4.5k, which honestly is not terrible but still quite expensive. Even those are at 32"+ which defeats the purpose (stil below 200 dpi). It seems like the desktop display industry is not interested in pursuing this, going instead for faster refresh rates, as such it's unlikely that we will see 250+ dpi displays on anything other than sub-15" laptops and phones.

New comment by spystath in "Alpine Linux 3.15"

spystath — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 15:43:56 +0000

Powers my router, running on an APU2. The run-from-ram-with-overlays configuration makes upgrades relatively painless.