mid-kid

Is the source code published anywhere?

Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.

I don't really need a tag saying how to reach the place, but better public transport support would go a long way. I also have this issue with places marked as parkings, to determine whether they're public, open or even reachable.

Youtube survives on google's massive repertoire of products being vastly more profitable, not because it's the best of its kind.

Tbh, the installer was inevitable after systemd integrated a bootloader, crafted a paritioning scheme for autodiscovery, took over user and home directory management, and topped it off with an updater and "system extensions" layering system that some immutable distros are using.

I'm not saying any of this is particularly bad but it's been very clear fot a while that systemd just wants to be an OS. With immutable systems the "distribution" part of it is reduced to a build system, and everything else can be provided by systemd and flatpak.

For an article written late last year I hoped for a little more awareness of how massive a security hole granting full, unfiltered access to the X11 server is. Granted, any sandboxing is better than none, but firefox is one of the few apps that already sandboxes itself really well, and with a blog title like that it might be good to touch upon things like nested X servers such as Xephyr.

LuaJIT has held back the lua ecosystem for over a decade. There's no reason to not at least try to move the implementation closer to luau or puc lua, not create yet more incompatible syntax

It was just an example of the type of shit they say to sell it, and then walk back from.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/26/sam-altman-dario-amodei-walki...

The snake oil is how the people at the top scream "in x years we won't need programmers" and end up proving themselves wrong time and time again. It's a real technology and it can do a lot, but it's being sold like snake oil while we're still figuring out what it's actually useful for and how to leverage it properly.

I came up with this one on my own many many years ago. Exact order and bs=1M and everything. I taught it that :)

Though I usually do the individual partitions before the main disk, to make sure fdisk doesn't complain about existing signatures as I start making partitions again. These days many disks and SD cards support "blkdiscard" to just wipe the whole thing (and temporarily gain some performance from clearing internal info), and "wipefs" became a thing to wipe the exact sequences fdisk and mkfs look for.

The "dd" method makes most sense on BIOS systems where you want to make sure to wipe the MBR boot code, and know that nothing is accidentally being preserved when you install your preferred bootloader.

This, in part. The swift deprecation of XUL extensions felt like a kick in the gonads and made me switch to Pale Moon for a while, after which I landed on Firefox ESR to avoid the inmediate impact of bad decisions, and accumulated a veritable landslide of user.js and userchrome.css tweaks I keep having to maintain.

On the other hand, part of the struggle was my fight against the web as a """platform""", with its many privacy and security issues that accumulated as W3C APIs were added like hot cakes and websites exploded in complexity. Firefox provided the control necessary through addons, thanks to its vast community of likeminded people. Nowadays, a lot of the privacy controls have landed in firefox proper, in part thanks to the tor browser upstreaming, if you know where to look.

The Game Boy Color/GBA also had a web browser in the form of the Mobile Trainer GB, although it didn't allow inputting arbitrary URLs (although one can modify the DNS, it wasn't documented) and its limited subset of HTML might stretch the definition of "web browser" a little.

In Terry's case, the attention visibly fueled his delusions, providing clamoring approval for many of the self destructive things he did, eventually leading to his death. I don't think Drew means he should've been fully alone, but that he'd have been better off without the kind of attention he got from strangers on the internet who largely fall into two camps: people who are amused by his antics and provoke him, and people who apologize for him because of his impressive feat, both of which validated his behaviour.

They already are in the same position. See: Android, ChromeOS.

It's really jarring to still be pinning this on Microsoft, when Google and Apple have been doing the same for free, for years, in iOS, Android and ChromeOS.

Cronie has a mechanism for this, called "anacron", which is called hourly by cron (on my system, /etc/cron.hourly/0anacron), and performs all the /etc/cron.{daily,weekly,monthly} tasks, no matter if the earliest possible schedule was missed (and with a configurable random delay). You can modify /etc/anacrontab to create custom schedules.

To do this at the user level, you can add something like "@hourly anacron -t /path/to/anacrontab -S /path/to/spooldir" to the user's crontab, though I've never tried this.

Many cron implementations have a similar mechanism.

https://pkgcraft.github.io/

It already is, though? I've been using dash as /bin/sh for years, openrc is using that.

It's a shame that this article focusses on Omarchy being "just some dotfiles" when I feel it's the weakest of the points it makes against Omarchy (there's many valid reasons to have issues with it!).

Omarchy isn't any more "just some dotfiles" (henceforth, "default configurations") than any other derivative distribution seeks to be. Distributions always ship some kind of default configuration, be it embedded in the programs themselves, installed in /etc or otherwise patched in. Of course, some distributions, especially base distributions, focus on just shipping the packages, but more involved ones, for example Ubuntu, tweak the default configurations of many programs to provide a cohesive experience.

I've always found it a shame how difficult it is to reproduce some of the r/unixporn screenshots, to see if they actually function nicely, use for a bit and see what I like and can backport to my own configurations. Even when the author provides some links, it's usually really hard to set up, and you're never quite sure what the author might've glossed over or configured out-of-band. I always wished there were more of these highly opinionated linux respins with heavily tweaked dotfiles, so at some point I also made my own to add to the pile: https://github.com/mid-kid/RocketISO/blob/master/docs/RELEAS...

https://archive.is/sAVRF

Seeing this article, and how much webextensions manage to mess up the browser, I'm wondering how bad this experiment would've been with the legacy XUL extensions. Maybe they had a point in getting rid of them...

I see what happened, I was replying to a different comment, that did mention the GBA audio, when I wrote that, but somehow ended up replying to this one.

This comment explains it better than I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708201

gah, you're right, I was thinking of memory protection (as in, marking the relevant regions as read-write and read-execute) when I wrote MMU.

It's of course optional, and you can ignore it for trivial examples, but most games and SDKs will tweak it all the time when loading additional code modules from the cartridge.

It's just another way in which the DS is more complex to use properly without an SDK to do this for you - there's just more to think about. At least compared to how the GBA lacks all of this and the entire cartridge is mapped into memory at all times.

I've never coded for SNES, but the GBA having access to a mainline, modern C compiler is a massive buff. Also, emulators for it have always been available on practically any computer, console and mobile phone, and there's many so-called "emulation handhelds" that bring its (and similar) form-factor handheld devices to the market. If you really need an upgraded OG experience, many upgrade kits for the handheld exist as well.

None of this fixes the audio, but it sure gets damn close.

I'd say the GBA is the sweet spot for this.

The DS has you dealing with two cores you need to write a firmware for that have to communicate to do anything useful, a cartridge protocol to fetch any extra code or assets that wouldn't all fit into RAM at runtime, instruction and data caches, an MMU, ... And that's without mentioning some of the more complex peripherals like the touch screen and wifi.

All official games used the same firmware for one of the cores, a copy of which is embedded into every single cartridge ROM. There's some homebrew firmwares included in the respective SDKs, but they aren't well documented for standalone use.

Granted, all of the above isn't completely impossible, but if you think of how much code you'd need to get a simple demo (button input, sprite moving across the screen), especially for a beginner, the DS requires a nontrivial amount of code and knowledge to get started without an SDK. Meanwhile, you can do something similar in less than 100 lines of ASM/C for GBA.

Same reason all the other mario flash games haven't, not a critical enough mass.

Not a Go dev, but I typically set up a CI with the oldest toolchains I support (usually a debian release), and only bump those versions when I really need something from the latest versions. Locally I build with the most recent tools. This ensures good enough coverage for very little work, as I notice when I start using something that's newer and can bump the toolchain accordingly.

I could've sworn firefox had an "all tabs" preview button that looked like 4 blocks in a grid, before the Australis era. Can't find any pictures/video footage of it in action however.

Best I could find is: https://www.askvg.com/how-to-enable-ie-like-quick-tabs-featu... But I'm not sure if this landed, or if it ended up functioning differently.

I just think it goes to show how little the window management of desktop OSes has improved over the years that desktop applications have had to up the ante...

I also think the differing behaviour between different apps implementing split panes (e.g. keyboard controls for creating/switching) is very annoying. Somtimes this flies in the face of any desktop's native window splitting or tab support as e.g. an app stops supporting multiple windows. For example, current browsers don't have a good way to configure usage without tabs, and at some point removed support for setting the window icon to the site's favicon.

Yeah. I'm surprised this along with the money thing are listed in the article at all. These are the sort of things you learn within the first month of writing assembly, and were widely used across the industry at the time (and times prior). The bit shifting optimization is performed by GCC even at -O0, and likely already was at the time, as it's one of the simpler optimizations to make. It's like calling "xor eax, eax" a masterful optimization tactic for clearing a register.

Looking at the macro-level optimizations like the rest of the article does is significantly more interesting.