gldrk

Core fonts absolutely support Unicode. My (non-Xft) xterm windows are full of Unicode characters right now. It is true that anti-aliasing is not supported by the X.Org server, although scalable fonts have been for a while (https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/fonts/fonts.html#AEN49...). But you don't need anti-aliasing on a high-DPI display, and on a low-DPI display you can use any of the many beautiful bitmap fonts, unlike a lot of ‘modern apps’ these days.

It talks about trimming 'legacy' features and specifically says they are omitting 'font-related' operations. That obviously means no useful core X11 application will work (unless you count xlogo and xeyes). Whether the XRender glyph cache mechanism is included is unclear. It also says only DRI is *currently* supported, but maybe that's incidental?

The meaning of 'X server' has been well-established for 30+ years.

If you are not going to implement X11 drawing ops and XRender (which I, and many others, still use heavily), what's even the point? Any 'modern' program that only does client-side rendering already supports Wayland. AFAIK GTK 3 doesn't even support DRI on X11 unless you somehow trick it into using the abandoned OpenGL Cairo backend, but that's not modern enough apparently.

Definiteness has no obvious equivalent in Russian.

If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable

Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.

the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do.

They won't do it willingly. That just means it will happen without their input.

I’m actually happy about DRAM prices and hope more people share your mindset. This is the only thing that can force developers to start optimizing memory usage instead of externalizing the costs onto the poorest users.

It's absolutely possible to be mistaken about this. The placebo effect is very strong. I'm sure there are countless things in my own workflow that feel like a huge boon to me while being a wash at best in reality. The classic keyboard vs. mouse study comes to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657135

This is why it's so important to have data. So far I have not seen any evidence of a 'Cambrian explosion' or 'industrial revolution' in software.

'It's $CURRENTYEAR' is just a cheap FOMO tactic. We've been hearing these anectodes for multiple current years now. Where is this less buggy software? Does it just happen to never reach users?

I am surprised. Does that imply most GNU/Linux users go out of their way to install Chromium actually? Ubuntu and Firefox have a similar market share.

The anti-AI ‘movement’ is a minority like all partisans are a minority. You shouldn’t be comparing them to passive consumers but to enthusiasts who actively demand ‘AI’ in their browser/Paint/Notepad.

It’s easy to bash Mozilla because it is failing. Their usage share is a statistical error, and most of it comes from being shipped with Ubuntu. Firefox badly needs a value proposition beyond not being Chromium-based.

Those are garbage-collected environments. I have some experience with a garbage-collected 'assembly' (.NET CIL). It is a delight to read and write compared to most C code.

High-level languages were absolutely indispensable at a time when every hardware vendor had its own bespoke instruction set.

If you only ever target one platform, you might as well do it in assembly, it's just unfashionable. I don't believe you'd lose any 'productivity' compared to e.g. C, assuming equal amounts of experience.

My evidence is the git commit log: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/84460945/#q84481507

This doesn’t even include the XFree86 CVS commit history and older, which accounts for most of the code in X.org. Some of those people may actually be dead now.

AFAIK xorg always only had low 10s of active developers.

There are 38 people with 100+ commits, which obviously counts as a major contributor.

It's part of XInput 2.0 and works as well as it ever did with upstream X.org. The more popular approach to multiseating these days involves logind, udev and two video cards (or drm-lease-manager). Then the two display servers are completely independent from each other, which may or may not be what you want.

How come 90% of his comments are dead then? This one was too until I vouched for it.

Are you aware you are shadowbanned?

If you decide to move your blog to another platform, are you going to maintain API compatibility?

In practice, you had to pay for everything.

As a private individual, you didn't actually have to pay for anything once you got an Internet connection. Most countries never even tried enforcing copyright laws against small fish. DRM was barely a thing and was easily broken within days by l33t teenagers.

Given how heavily most C programs lean on type erasure vs. monomorphization and how often they reimplement basic data structures, it's kind of a miracle they hold up against Rust/C++.

This uses a static variable to have it persist between both the compare function calls that qsort makes and the main call which (potentially) changes its value to be 1 instead of 0

The only misleading thing here is that ‘static’ is monospaced in the article (this can’t be seen on HN). Other than that, ‘static variable’ can plausibly refer to an object with a static storage duration, which is what the C standard would call it.

moving the variable from the stack to the "global data" which is generally heap-allocated as the program loads

It is not heap-allocated because you can’t free() it. Non-zero static data is not even anonymously mapped, it is file-backed with copy-on-write.

How did people even come to this bizarre conclusion?

The first reason is that it is true. All of the best evidence suggests a minor male advantage on g and a major advantage in more specific abilities, such as mental rotation. See https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/04/the-claim-of-substantia...

It is easy to see why that would be the case from an evolutionary point of view. Ironically, your own post contains a clue: in a male-dominated society where men are far more valued for their intelligence than women, such differences are bound to arise.

The egalitarian bad faith interpretation of this claim is that any man is smarter than Marie Curie. What it actually says is that a hypothetical Mario Curie would almost certainly outshine his real-life counterpart.

The other reason is related to sexual selection. Even if a certain man is less intelligent or physically weaker than most women, it may be adaptive for him to pretend otherwise. What beliefs come to dominate in a given population is determined by reproductive success, not directly by their truth value.

You can pre-share the certificate out of band, or set up your browser to TOFU like SSH does. Then they are not useless and may be superior to PKI for certain threat models.

PKI is basically powerless against nation states executing a targeted MITM attack. It does prevent them from passively snooping everything.

This is very impressive as an art project, but terrible as an actual home page. It’s slow as molasses and difficult to navigate. Microsoft Bob failed for a reason.

Postel’s law allows a degree of forward compatibility. This was important before continuous software updates were practical. User-facing code is the best place to apply it: I want my text editor to highlight invalid source code on a best effort basis, whereas the compiler should promptly bail out.

You can make your HTML as malformed as you like and the web-browser will do its best to display the page for you. I love the todepond website, but the source-code makes me break out in a cold sweat. Yet it renders just fine.

It renders just fine because it is syntactically valid HTML. HTML is not and is not supposed to be XML. It is originally an SGML application described by its Document Type Definition and SGML Declaration (https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/HTML4.decl). HTML uses and has always used many SGML features not found in XML, such as tag inference (<html><title> becomes <html><head><title>, <p><p> becomes <p></p><p>). Some of these, like SHORTTAG, were never even implemented in browsers. These days HTML is defined by the WHATWG ‘living standard’, which largely just restates the SGML DTD rules in plain language.

(Okay, https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.todepond.... shows a few minor errors, bet you couldn’t spot them.)

This is independent of the fact that browsers do try their best to render objectively broken markup, usually by ignoring the broken parts. In principle they could do the same with XHTML, but someone decided it would be ‘helpful’ to show the parser’s diagnostic output instead, and the rest is history.

This pre-packaged talking point is often repeated without evidence. The vast majority of X.org developers, including all of the original ones, simply moved to other venues at one point or another. Only a few, like Daniel Stone, have made contributions to both. And it shows in how many lessons had to be re-learned.