Josh Simmons

living life a quarter cycle at a time

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Last Notes

2026-05-18 14:02:46 GMT

man it's one (terrible) thing to post trash blog articles that are llm generated but holy shit posting *comments* from an llm is absolutely fucking unhinged

2026-05-09 07:33:38 GMT

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@nprofile…5x8e @nprofile…hm63 I'm guessing from this one? (There's an older paper https://www.geometry.caltech.edu/pubs/UD12.pdf linked which makes a stronger claim about infinite far plane being useful, but which Nathan Reed disputes as being not very impactful in practice after simulating for the f32 range) https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/visualizing-depth-precision/

2026-04-29 08:31:33 GMT

Lots of games have complex mission systems but idk why they don't just embed a web view and open a Jira account for each player. Then the player's quest progression can be properly managed in epics and tracked by production.

2026-04-17 03:04:37 GMT

@nprofile…v2v2 since nobody has replied to your lobsters post: the answer to "which consoles ban JIT" is "all of them". the threat model you describe (compromising the console OS) is only one of the concerns of console manufacturers, the other major one is compromising the game itself, which then becomes a lever for cheating and for homebrew. plus it's all defense in depth etc etc.

2026-04-06 21:06:41 GMT

It's odd to me, the way people speak about drive-by comments on social media. So often people hand-wring about "the community", rather than talking about design changes which might compromise the scale of the website. This makes sense to me on commerical platforms. But it's a bit of an odd focus for something like mastodon which doesn't have a stock price riding on growth. I don't think it's realistic to expect to change a large population's value system and actions by debating it out lol

2026-03-24 00:04:28 GMT

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@nprofile…valu Also you can actually fix it without selling a kidney for a source license.

2026-03-20 04:27:29 GMT

i wonder how accurate the barometer is on smart watches (and phones i suppose, though my phone doesn't seem to expose the barometer)
also makes me wonder whether google collects barometer data from the fleet of android devices, in the same way that they collect traffic data.

2026-03-10 06:21:36 GMT

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@nprofile…mv7s the install tool is called archinstall, you can run it from the live image https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall (not sure how the output of said tool goes for a vm configuration really, but i'd guess it has profiles for that kind of thing)

2026-03-10 05:38:05 GMT

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@nprofile…d6ud @nprofile…hm63 thankfully there's an easy answer for good avx512 support now - buy amd. :')

2026-03-03 05:34:52 GMT

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@nprofile…3q9y this is always kinda the joy of modding I suppose, but I can't really get myself too excited about doing work in somebody else's playpit these days.

2026-02-26 19:06:05 GMT

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@nprofile…valu left hand :P but no actually that part is fine. It's just stomping on the brake that I do...

2026-02-26 00:03:21 GMT

They should put a fake clutch in automatic cars that doesn't do anything. Tried to hit the clutch for the third time in two days...

2026-02-22 08:27:11 GMT

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@nprofile…5x8e omg they renamed it again !?!?! Somebody give the marketing department at into something to do!

2026-01-29 09:04:08 GMT

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@nprofile…hm63 is it just so people don't have to divide sizeof() by 4, which was probably a pretty common oopsie?

2026-01-29 08:55:59 GMT

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@nprofile…3q9y @nprofile…elz9 sometimes u gotta choose war! if they don't like it they can delete the vendored libraries and break your app!

2026-01-29 08:27:01 GMT

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@nprofile…3q9y @nprofile…elz9 vendor all the things, same as it works on Windows. A glu library that sits next to your binary is pretty likely to still work. Any dependency on a system library that ain't vendored is probably going to break.

2026-01-28 09:16:15 GMT

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@nprofile…3q9y opengl just got mesh shading last year! What now haters??

2026-01-26 22:07:42 GMT

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@nprofile…xuzd the only real point of difference i have there, is that i don't think the technology *can* exist outside the hype cycle. it only even vaguely functions when it's backed by truly colossal hardware resourcing, and only with the tremendous, constant human effort applied running & tuning it. i don't believe it can actually get much better in the current framework, and i don't think the small local models will be able to catch up either.

2026-01-26 13:52:57 GMT

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@nprofile…re2d I like lots of stuff about gnome, the design work is broadly very clean and nice in particular. And it has a pretty good degree of consistency across the whole ecosystem. There are things which annoy me, and then there's things like this which are pretty bad. Wcyd it's software.

2026-01-26 13:50:25 GMT

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@nprofile…re2d is it possible to be normal about software for five minutes without accusing everyone of having some nefarious alterior motive...

2026-01-26 13:45:57 GMT

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@nprofile…re2d it's not specifically a gnome issue, though gnome's phrasing is slightly worse than upstream flatpak.

2026-01-26 07:56:45 GMT

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@nprofile…sut4 ah the gnome software special
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/960/329/268/106/688/original/b28d99d36fa5886b.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/960/371/342/374/761/original/a8b27bff00cd3915.png

2026-01-23 19:24:28 GMT

i feel like there's a lot more cat posters than dog posters on this website. y is that

2026-01-21 17:17:28 GMT

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@nprofile…re2d It's important to focus on outcomes not justifications, especially when doing communication with users, or you end up in these pointless cycles that nobody enjoys.

2026-01-21 17:15:48 GMT

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@nprofile…re2d I think you're overly focusing on some notion that there's a deep technical justification that needs to be considered, that forces gnome into this position. But the reality is that it's not really working, and if you consider pointing that out as harassment idk what to say.

2026-01-21 17:09:06 GMT

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@nprofile…re2d also they did bring up the technical problem - apps don't support CSD universally, and libdecor isn't fixing it in practice. What more do you want really?

2026-01-21 17:08:04 GMT

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@nprofile…re2d but they didn't bring it up in any kind of questionable way, it's a pretty straightforward article with a pretty straightforward request. The fact that many other people have also made the same request in the past doesn't make it harassment.

2026-01-21 17:05:22 GMT

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@nprofile…re2d it's not harassment to bring up an ecosystem problem... wot

2026-01-09 08:43:39 GMT

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@nprofile…3q9y better luck next time

2026-01-09 08:29:54 GMT

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@nprofile…3q9y did you get to see The Boot at least???

2026-01-08 09:03:34 GMT

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@nprofile…xuzd the bet hedging cowardice is out of control

2026-01-08 08:25:30 GMT

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@nprofile…xuzd I'm just saying it's going to be a very niche product if you're selling a phone which doesn't have good battery life, performance, ui, camera, size, *and* doesn't work with electronic id or internet banking. :')

2026-01-08 08:03:13 GMT

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@nprofile…xuzd it's also hard because things you want a phone to do, like internet banking, really throw a spanner in all the alternatives (even excluding their normal jank and issues)

2026-01-07 10:36:50 GMT

Do CEOs Dream Of Electric Cocaine

2026-01-07 07:24:40 GMT

one neat thing about mastodon is that it's privacy preserving if you visit the US. for every other social media account they need to go through your post history, but with mastodon they can just automatically deport you without needing to check the contents.

2026-01-03 10:29:40 GMT

The odin post https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/01/02/was-it-really-a-billion-dollar-mistake/ claims that null reference errors are "the least common kind of invalid memory addresses that happen in memory unsafe languages", without any support. Are they though..? Personally I'd say they're the most common, especially during development, in a similar ballpark to out-of-bounds accesses. The problem usually being that in a large codebase the flow from creation of an object, to usage of that object becomes opaque.

2025-12-27 18:30:14 GMT

If your language has block expressions, why not use block expressions for all grouping! be free, parentheses! `{ x + 10 } * y`. parens can be unambiguously tuples, just like they always wanted.

2025-12-25 10:11:50 GMT

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@nprofile…f4xf so I got a noisy mechanical keyboard so I could practice my Mavis Beacon

2025-12-25 10:10:02 GMT

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@nprofile…f4xf I used to live with a jazz pianist, and I thought going in, damn that's cool it'll be great! But then it's 2 hours of practicing scales every day. :')

2025-12-24 00:05:28 GMT

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@nprofile…lzyq "growth mindset" being repeated twice is a call for help

2025-12-23 09:07:17 GMT

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@nprofile…fnpd @nprofile…wvm8 the return of Windows DirectX 11 feature level 9. Rendering glass has never been easier.

2025-12-17 19:29:36 GMT

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@nprofile…9vka this is talking about *SATA* SSDs, not SSDs in general. (also it's just a leak)

2025-12-08 09:31:15 GMT

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@nprofile…f4xf @nprofile…cpuy it's kinda a weird issue since other clients work fine lol, why does the official web client just give up half way

2025-11-30 11:30:28 GMT

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@nprofile…4zgr @nprofile…nn7e fossil fuels don't heat the atmosphere by the release of heat, they heat the atmosphere by changing how much heat is retained in equilibrium with how much heat is radiated into space. the planet is both constantly creating heat (radioactive decay), and being bombarded with it (sun), these numbers are not impacted by human scale heat generation.

2025-11-30 11:24:28 GMT

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@nprofile…4zgr @nprofile…nn7e resource exploitation is its own concern, but if you say something like "nuclear power's thermal output will itself cause global warming" then that is trivially false.

2025-11-30 11:17:39 GMT

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@nprofile…4zgr @nprofile…nn7e errrrrrrrrrrrr that's dramatically misunderstanding the impacts of thermal output *and* the causes of global warming.

2025-11-27 18:23:20 GMT

excuse me, do you have a moment for our lord and savior, reading the disassembly?

2025-11-25 10:58:01 GMT

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@nprofile…f4xf okay, from now on I won't say

2025-11-24 12:52:37 GMT

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@nprofile…4zgr I mean project is a lot better than maintainer, but my core thing here is that it's just unnecessary to be us-vs-them here. by all means close tickets that are not actionable, or nonsense. but i think any time you close something without a reason, or just because you don't like it, as a project, that's a bad outcome for your community.

2025-11-24 12:47:39 GMT

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@nprofile…4zgr in most large projects where this is even a problem, it is not in fact "their project", it's a project built over many years through the contributions of many people. I think that's the core tricky part.

2025-11-24 12:45:11 GMT

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@nprofile…4zgr maintainers are not some kind of magical being, able to trivially determine the right course of action at a glance. i don't think encouraging people to think in such adversarial ways really helps anyone. by all means close issues that nobody's going to work on, but you gotta accept that maintainers are not the only humans in the story. this is why projects have governance mechanisms, to avoid the kinds of failures that arbitrary one-guy decision making leads to.

2025-11-24 12:39:32 GMT

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@nprofile…4zgr in my experience i absolutely do not trust maintainers to be particularly good at this. sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. "sorry we won't have bandwidth to do this, but we'd be happy to accept contributions" is like trivial to say and covers the same. there's no reason to make things adversarial at every possible junction.

2025-11-24 12:34:08 GMT

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@nprofile…4zgr that's not actually reasonable if you're part of a project, just unnecessarily hostile to somebody who's contributing.

2025-11-22 11:27:33 GMT

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@nprofile…2glr @nprofile…xlvy "checking in" the toolchain is pretty normal in games, it should be the norm for any large development effort honestly. you want hermetic, ideally reproducible, builds. you want to be able to roll out toolchain changes at your own cadence (unless you enjoy dealing with a bunch of new toolchain induced issues in the middle of stabilizing for a milestone). and you also just want the code to be easy to build, without developers needing to correctly install and update 10 sdks.

2025-11-19 18:35:32 GMT

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@nprofile…e330 it's even more fun when you have multiple displays with different scale factors. personally though the core problem with gnome is that they don't accept that "no two people will want the same", and refuse to support a setting to switch between modes. aiming for "one true way, without configuration" is noble, but tremendously unrealistic.

2025-11-19 18:32:04 GMT

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@nprofile…e330 Yeah for sure, I think one thing is that the developer demographic for Linux tends towards potato machines, and low complexity applications. And also people are often very unobservant about issues like blurryness or performance, it's why we have entire QA departments dedicated to finding weird things that One Guy might notice. But that doesn't really exist in Linux, pretty much everything is full yolo all the time, and any problem is developers own for holding the API wrong.

2025-11-19 18:13:11 GMT

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@nprofile…e330 @nprofile…04cx @nprofile…aels Yeah I mean idk, i sure wish it worked out of the box! Until recently I'd forgotten that even fractional scaling support in Firefox requires you to go into the secret config and enable it! Otherwise everything is blurry. The downside of nobody except valve shipping "desktop" linux as an actual product...

2025-11-19 17:55:25 GMT

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@nprofile…e330 @nprofile…04cx @nprofile…aels it doesn't actually work out of the box btw, even on bleeding edge. xwayland apps are completely broken - always. and you need to manually enable the fractional scaling experimental features to get it at all. it's very much a "works if you don't run into the 3-4 common cases under which it's totally broken", which I guess is pretty common xd

2025-11-14 11:57:20 GMT

Aaaaah how can I stop people from boosting llm generated nonsense into my feed. It's insufferable, and you can't filter it.

2025-11-14 07:37:47 GMT

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@nprofile…syqt @nprofile…47z8 i think probably the worst part of the idea is just that, if you wanted that, why not put the panels on your roof and do the same thing without adding mass to the car.

2025-11-12 20:13:50 GMT

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@nprofile…f4xf can the mascot be one of those terrible singing bass things boomers have?

2025-11-11 19:38:14 GMT

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@nprofile…cpuy @nprofile…xlvy @nprofile…f4xf blocks can be registers, then you just point it to a literal 3d coordinate and interpret the blocks at that location.

2025-11-10 18:17:59 GMT

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@nprofile…d23k @nprofile…e330 @nprofile…xlvy 20ns seems quite high for a modern machine I think, but i guess it depends how naive a naive brute force solution is expected to be. :')

2025-11-10 15:17:14 GMT

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@nprofile…e330 @nprofile…d23k @nprofile…xlvy hmm all to all isn't quite the same as collision (only need to check each pair once) (but other than that I agree you can go pretty far with brute force)

2025-11-09 19:48:10 GMT

whenever i see "there's room for nuance", i know im about to read the world's most vapid linkedin post (on any platform). this is curiously despite the fact that there is in fact room for nuance a lot of the time.

2025-11-06 08:37:23 GMT

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446
Mozilla Staff:
> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
LOL fuck off

2025-11-03 13:11:53 GMT

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@nprofile…fnpd 😎
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/485/934/349/657/603/original/3c19e0ec5386d487.png

2025-11-03 07:55:51 GMT

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@nprofile…fnpd one thing that comes to mind is that something is subtly broken with fractional scaling, might be worth checking whether it's the same with that on or off. there were issues not too long ago which caused the font rendering to be completely busted in that case. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479891

2025-10-31 06:05:21 GMT

Locking issues whenever you get criticised is such a good lifehack

2025-10-27 18:14:20 GMT

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@nprofile…fnpd i suppose so, to be fair i didn't look too closely either, i didn't want to spoil my dinner. maybe there's some gems in between the three years of reposts of how genai is going to completely revolutionize video games any second now.

2025-10-27 18:08:51 GMT

Is google winding down their latest foray into actual games tech on GCP? Just looking at the "gaming" category on their blog thing, it's 100% ai trash now.

2025-10-26 09:28:27 GMT

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@nprofile…rdan @nprofile…l9pr @nprofile…c6t2 i think it's worth noting that making the output deterministic would break the gacha, and it would also mean they'd lose the ability to update models on-the-fly without any notion of backwards compatibility. not technically difficult, but committing to hosting every model you've ever shipped (including the racist ones) would be a cost that even an ai meme company would probably balk at. so while it's probably incompetence too, operationally it's not happening either.

2025-10-23 17:02:10 GMT

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@nprofile…f4xf I do flitter between "arch should add a gui installer" and "typing in some commands isn't actually that difficult, and the skill will be useful later" myself.

2025-10-21 12:04:47 GMT

it's honestly pretty wild to me watching slang development. they're doing a bit of the ol copilot razzle dazzle, but it's like, 2-3 presumably highly paid programmers repeating basic instructions to a bot in order to generate a 10 line PR which would have taken conservatively 5 minutes to write. idk how people can look at this and be impressed, or think that its improving productivity.
https://github.com/shader-slang/slang/pull/7921
https://github.com/shader-slang/slang/pull/7868

2025-10-20 10:41:50 GMT

maybe i should write a flow chart for "how do i get a working linux" based on some simple questions like "what is ur gpu", "what is your monitor configuration" and "do you want to play newly released aaa games"

2025-10-19 10:34:13 GMT

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@nprofile…9rel @nprofile…5l4m fwiw the best 'documentation' is that all the vulkan samples have slang versions. https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/pull/1186/files?file-filters%5B%5D=.slang so far my feeling is that it's better than glsl (which is an extremely low bar) but if you're already writing hlsl, perhaps less so.

2025-10-17 22:02:27 GMT

Is there a way to calculate / approximate 'extinction' from alpha. e.g. if i have 100 contributing fragments for a particular pixel with some alpha value, and i walk from the front to the back through each fragment, can i figure out when it's no longer useful to keep traversing, because no matter what, the tile will be fully opaque from what I've already seen.

2025-10-17 13:05:45 GMT

how long until github adds a 'posts' feature so you can post your hot takes directly into their 'social feed' of project updates. all websites must become the same

2025-10-17 06:28:32 GMT

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@nprofile…fnpd @nprofile…n4pf @nprofile…k0x5 "unfortunately, a single lone contractor has been caught not following our strict guidelines for ethical sourcing of data, we are very upset this happened and will put all our contractors through a rigorous 30 minute training webinar in response"

2025-10-16 09:37:51 GMT

good news everyone, i've been promoted to "Expert Programmer" at work. this means my posts are all made by an Expert and thus can no longer be challenged by those who are not at least Expert Level. unfortunately one of my colleagues also pointed out that there exists Senior Experts, which I am not. However soon, with one more title, i will be
enough

2025-10-15 08:27:27 GMT

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@nprofile…9rel @nprofile…cpuy @nprofile…wvm8 what's the quote from @nprofile…8z3d's old talk... Something something just use a two level structure (smol dense blocks at the bottom, arranged into a sparse structure up top) for all computer science problems. :')

2025-10-14 20:13:09 GMT

I wish there were a way to just annotate your loop with "please specialize the entire loop for this interior condition", instead of writing out two versions or doing some cursed generics thing.

2025-10-11 05:34:18 GMT

I feel like red hat needs to hire somebody to do basic pr and project management training for their developers. Maybe they can hire the audacity youtuber guy for a few months. (Yes indeed, another red hat employee jumped into a random critical thread to say actually everyone is a volunteer and that instead of criticising they should shut the fuck up)

2025-10-10 10:40:32 GMT

"GPU programming enjoys enormous performance benefits, and yet as the shader programmer, it feels that there are few costs to pay for it."
Not going to lie this one feels a bit of a stretch...
(Vis-a-vis https://www.rfleury.com/p/multi-core-by-default)

2025-10-10 07:20:05 GMT

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@nprofile…d23x edit: oh i read through the issues and posts and now i see... it's just that their fixes only works if you use the default themes and default cursor sizes (and a relatively recent gnome, and a relatively recent kde). otherwise it's back to the wild west. xd hurray

2025-10-10 06:58:17 GMT

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@nprofile…d23x i think this sometimes too, but then you end up with three incompatible apis to target as an application developer :(

2025-10-07 14:20:01 GMT

"Joining forces with Qualcomm Technologies allows us to supercharge our commitment to accessibility and innovation,"
why hasn't anybody started ultracharging their commitment to innovation yet

2025-10-05 22:42:05 GMT

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@nprofile…3yc4 put another way, what people usually identify as efficiency in small scale organizations is actually the result of a dramatically narrower scope. smaller scope allows you to build small things faster, more efficiently, and probably at a higher quality; but it has nothing to do with the mechanics of building something gigantic. a small team fundamentally cannot build a large scale thing.

2025-10-05 22:30:18 GMT

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@nprofile…3yc4 efficiency is also never a goal really, it's just something people handwave about. the thing large companies can do is invest dramatically more resources into a problem, whether or not they do it efficiently doesn't actually matter as much as people might think.

2025-10-05 15:51:11 GMT

About Audacity 4 Redesign
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38 enjoyed the rage youtuber shade at the beginning / PR hot tips. also this mysterious thing unknown to many projects - user testing and user surveys, with actual people!

2025-10-04 18:20:45 GMT

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@nprofile…d23x @nprofile…w9qq padme.gif they're all solvable, right?

2025-10-04 18:12:42 GMT

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@nprofile…k0gr no, it's a huge over-reaction, this cannot be used as an attack vector for anything. treating "security" as an absolute, without considering the actual attacks it makes possible nor how much access you'd need to "exploit" them, is a tremendous blight on the industry. in this case you'd need greater access to the PC to exploit, than you'd gain by exploiting.

2025-10-04 18:04:56 GMT

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@nprofile…k0gr the latter

2025-10-04 17:59:50 GMT

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@nprofile…k0gr seems totally ridiculous lol

2025-10-03 04:47:40 GMT

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@nprofile…u7qg you know you can just disable clippy warnings? :) personally I don't mind too much about this one. I do have a few disabled though.

2025-10-02 21:09:34 GMT

go home clippy you're drunk
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/306/618/680/299/534/original/da844a4bacd66ded.png

2025-09-30 11:06:46 GMT

i have to admit i didn't really see rust becoming some weird fixture in an "anti-woke" war. real men don't need a borrow checker. what a world

2025-09-09 20:58:06 GMT

It's impressive watching Firefox speedrun the Linux Desktop trick of chasing imaginary users so hard that all their regular users quit.

2025-09-08 08:31:25 GMT

Does anyone know if there's a paper / pdf of ADAPTIVE VOXEL-BASED ORDER-INDEPENDENT TRANSPARENCY from Drobot in this year's SIGGRAPH Advances? I'm guessing it'll show up there eventually anyway, but maybe it was posted elsewhere and I just missed it.

2025-09-07 17:08:08 GMT

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@nprofile…u7qg it's actually not, the rust thread id isn't related to the os thread id, and it has some nice properties in comparison (unique forever , can't be recycled in a process's runtime)