Hacker News: stebalien

New comment by stebalien in "I built a GPU back end for Emacs"

stebalien — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:52:21 +0000

In case anyone is curious, ezemtsov (EWM author) has a Skai port of Emacs [1] built for Wayland (only).

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ezemtsov/emacs

New comment by stebalien in "I built a GPU back end for Emacs"

stebalien — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:01:57 +0000

https://github.com/tanrax/emacs-gpu/tree/wayland-pgtk-backen...

The main emacs-gpu branch doesn't have wayland support.

New comment by stebalien in "Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses"

stebalien — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:47:21 +0000

I expect cameras will start to come with built-in IR filters in that case.

New comment by stebalien in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

stebalien — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:39:20 +0000

Sup b5! I always look forward to new work by expede (and n0).

New comment by stebalien in "Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding"

stebalien — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:50:17 +0000

I've used LEB128 (with canonicalisation) extensively and... this looks so much nicer for most use-cases (length prefixed, supports the full uint64 range without that extra 10th byte).

The downside is the encoding size. LEB128 quickly grows to 2 bytes, but stays at 2 bytes all the way to 2^14. This is important if you're using these numbers as tags/identifiers as we were in the multicodec [1] project, or for network message lengths. bijou64 only gives you 500 <= 2 byte numbers.

[1]: https://github.com/multiformats/multicodec

New comment by stebalien in "My I3-Emacs Integration"

stebalien — Sun, 24 May 2026 03:56:50 +0000

I keep trying it (coming from EXWM) but I get lots of lag, stutters, and poor fractional scaling. I'm not sure how much of that is "GTK under wayland", Emacs's PGTK build (known to have lag/rendering issues), AMD kernel drivers (?), or EWM itself; but it's not yet a replacement for EXWM in my experience.

New comment by stebalien in "Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier"

stebalien — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:05:40 +0000

Have you tried enabling MTP? Those numbers are similar to what I was getting on my Strix Halo box, but configuring/enabling MTP doubled the TG speed of the 27B model (18-20 t/s now).

New comment by stebalien in "Googlebook"

stebalien — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:01:51 +0000

Features like the magic cursor look cool: an infinitely flexible context menu. However, context menus make it clear what you can and cannot do. If the magic cursor can't "do everything reasonable", it'll be just as usable as Siri.

I'd be more likely to believe them if they had already implemented this feature on their Pixel phones, but they haven't so I expect it probably isn't "done".

New comment by stebalien in "Local privilege escalation in Lix and Nix"

stebalien — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:58:50 +0000

Nix and Lix daemon implementations are affected by buffer overflows vulnerabilities that allow a local attacker to gain arbitrary code execution as the daemon user (root in multi-user installations).

Local privilege escalation in Lix and Nix

stebalien — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:58:50 +0000

Article URL: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/security-advisory-local-privilege-escalation-in-lix-and-nix/77407

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48014131

Points: 19

# Comments: 1

New comment by stebalien in "Roblox shares plummet 18% as child safety measures weigh on bookings"

stebalien — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:07:49 +0000

They aren't:

> Users only speak to other players ±1 age group

I.e., 18-20 can speak to 16-17 AND 21+, but 21+ can only speak to 18+

New comment by stebalien in "Box to save memory in Rust"

stebalien — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:33:02 +0000

Box is still two words (length and pointer). That's better than the 3 words (length, pointer, capacity) for strings, but Box is one word (not including the heap allocation).

New comment by stebalien in "My first impressions on ROCm and Strix Halo"

stebalien — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 15:34:04 +0000

At least for qwen3.5, it looks like unsloth has updated their quantization algorithms to avoid bf16. See the march 5th update:

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF/discussi...

I assume they're applying the same technique going forward, but I have no idea how to determine if this is the case.

New comment by stebalien in "Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others"

stebalien — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:39:21 +0000

I've actually spent some time debugging why git causes so many issues with the backup software I use (restic).

Ironically, I believe you have it backwards: pack files, git's solution to the "too many tiny files" problem, are the issue here; not the tiny files themselves.

In my experience, incremental backup software works best with many small files that never change. Scanning is usually just a matter of checking modification times and moving on. This isn't fast, but it's fast enough for backups and can be optimized by monitoring for file changes in a long-running daemon.

However, lots of mostly identical files ARE an issue for filesystems as they tend to waste a lot of space. Git solves this issue by packing these small objects into larger pack files, then compressing them.

Unfortunately, it's those pack files that cause issues for backup software: any time git "garbage collects" and creates new pack files, it ends up deleting and creating a bunch of large files filled with what looks like random data (due to compression). Constantly creating/deleting large files filled with random data wreaks havoc on incremental/deduplicating backup systems.

New comment by stebalien in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

stebalien — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:25:45 +0000

My experience is that Emacs wants to be your everything, and works best if you let it. Have you tried putting your terminals inside of Emacs instead of the other way around?

* If you need a "real" terminal emulator, you can use something like vterm (https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm/).

* If you need to be able to attach/detach Emacs sessions on remote machines, you can use something like dtach or abducto (https://www.brain-dump.org/projects/abduco/).

New comment by stebalien in "Waymo Safety Impact"

stebalien — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:07:53 +0000

I live in LA and Waymos are the only cars I don't have to play chicken with when crossing the street. Even the drivers that see you will just give you a "sorry, I'm in a rush" wave as they nearly run you over.

New comment by stebalien in "Kagi Small Web"

stebalien — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:18:25 +0000

I've been using it for 2.5 years at this point, and have the same experience. I don't think it's hopeless, but Kagi will need to step up their methods. IMO, there's actually a lot they can do here.

New comment by stebalien in "Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft"

stebalien — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:02:25 +0000

Copyleft is a mirror of copyright, not a way to fight copyright. It grants rights to the consumer where copyright grants rights to the creator. Importantly, it gives the end-user the right to modify the software running on their devices.

Unfortunately, there are cases where you simply can't just "re-implement" something. E.g., because doing so requires access to restricted tools, keys, or proprietary specifications.

New comment by stebalien in "Court finds Fourth Amendment doesn’t support broad search of protesters’ devices"

stebalien — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:43:44 +0000

The case was filed in 2023.

New comment by stebalien in "AirSnitch: Demystifying and breaking client isolation in Wi-Fi networks [pdf]"

stebalien — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:48:10 +0000

Maybe I've just lost all patience for fluff, but I gave up trying to figure out what the attack was from the article pretty quickly where the abstract answered all my questions immediately.