prhn

Awesome article.

I switched my daily driver / gaming rig to Fedora a few months back.

Everything seems snappier compared to Windows, but not sure if it’s in my head, and I’ve been very curious about gaming input latency. This helps answer some questions.

I recently switched to hyprland and I’m very interested how that fits in these results. hyprland uses Wayland so I hope the author might revisit now that hyprland is gaining in popularity.

I’ve considered using gamescope to hopefully get in front of some of these concerns, but I’m on nvidia and there is some discussion about it not working well there.

Now the author's got me thinking about gaming-optimized kernels, which I did not realize was a thing.

I play competitive fighting games so input latency is a huge concern. Would love to hear from anyone else who’s been down this path.

I want to buy one just to raise the signal that Linux support is important.

When these machines were announced I switched to Fedora as a daily driver on my high end gaming rig.

It’s been awesome. I still have to go back to Windows for music production unfortunately. I may switch to Mac for that so I can completely abandon Windows.

I run an optical HDMI cable from my office to my TV and get to play games and use Linux in 77”.

Something feels awesome about that.

You probably already know this, but I could not import 10-bit video on Windows which I think would be fairly common among the target audience.

ffmpeg supports decoding 10-bit video.

Closed source is fine, but there are a few other things that are required of LGPL, some of which are

- Provide links to the source of the version of ffmpeg you used in your code

- User should be able to replace the ffmpeg libs with his own compatible builds if you're using dynamically linked libs. For statically linked libs, you need to provide the tools to re-link against a compatible build.

I went through an LGPL review recently so some of this is fresh in my memory, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm just here to share my love for this film. I'm a big movie fan. I've been watching the Fifth Element since high school, and I've only grown to appreciate it more and more as a film as I get older.

It's so full of life, creativity, color, humor, and themes we can all relate to (purpose, love, loss, etc).

This is peek Bruce Willis, and the movie is filled with other exceptional actors including Gary Oldman and Ian Holm. Milla Jovovich is extremely entertaining to watch as a sort fish-out-of-water, and I know Chris Tucker's character here isn't for everyone but in my opinion it's right on-brand for the film. Cracks me up every time for decades.

Mostly the effects have aged really well. That's generally thanks to heavy use of practical effects, as this article highlights.

I often get sad that this is becoming a lost art. Great filmmakers with big budgets are still doing this type of practical effects work (Nolan [Interstellar], Villeneuve [Dune]), but I think eventually it will be lost in time.

I learned this lesson a couple decades ago.

Managing windows with OS idiosyncrasies becomes a task in itself.

However, I've also learned recently it depends what you're doing.

Software development, I just want one single maximized window on a single laptop monitor. If I have a near-retina DPI monitor with 120hz+ (I can't deal with low DPI fuzziness and low refresh all day) I'll usually have a 3-4 window layout on a single monitor with the IDE taking up half the screen.

There is a minor cognitive hit from switching focus between monitors for things like reading documentation, so I don't like doing that.

Music production? Man, I could probably use like 3+ monitors. Main stems view, a separate monitor for open VSTs, a separate monitor for video, a separate one for piano roll maybe. The window juggling gets really cumbersome on a single monitor.

My friend who is a professional musician (makes music for TV shows) uses 3 large TVs for music production.

Even beyond the engineering there are 100 other things to do.

I launched a vibe coded product a few months ago. I spent the majority of my time

- making sure the copy / presentation was effective on product website

- getting signing certificates (this part SUCKS and is expensive)

- managing release version binaries without a CDN (stupid)

- setting up LLC, website, domain, email, google search indexing, etc, etc

At the risk of sounding ignorant, why didn't the various police cruisers and even the ambulance itself just push the damn thing out of the way? That's what the push bars attached to the front of their vehicles are for.

He also played Ronan in Guardians of the Galaxy and King Thranduil in Lord of the Rings!

You can still be a programmer and identify with and participate in that group. AI hasn't eliminated programmers or programming, and it never will.

However, my best advice as someone with many distinct interests is to avoid tying any one of these external things to your identity. Not a Buddhist, but I think that's the correct approach.

He sort of comes to this conclusion in the final "So then, who am I?" section. The answer is you are many things and you are nothing. You can live deeply in many groups and circles without making your identity dependent on them.

If you're a programmer, what happens when programming isn't needed anymore?

If you're a runner, what happens if you get injured?

It's always been helpful personally to remind myself that

I am not a programmer. I am a person who programs.

I am not a runner. I am a person who runs.

I don't dispute the shortening of attentions spans, which seems to be directly related to new forms of entertainment young people consume.

However. Films across the generations are very different in terms of how they lay out a narrative. Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.

Art is highly contextualized by the period it's created in. I don't really think it's fair to expect people to appreciate art when it's taken completely out of its context.

Lawrence of Arabia, for example. What a brilliant, brilliant film. Beautiful, influential, impressively produced. And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.

If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing. I think it's my job as a professor to understand the context of the period, highlight the influential/important scenes, and get students to focus on those instead of having to watch 4 hours of slowly paced film making and possibly miss the important stuff.

What does "the crime is less egregious" even mean?

Morally, you burglarized a home.

Legally, at least in CA, the charge and sentencing are equivalent.

If someone also commits a murder while burglarizing you could argue the crime is more severe, but my response would be that they've committed two crimes, and the severity of the burglary in isolation is equivalent.

Technically, yes it is still burglary.

It's an odd position to take, that a crime was not committed or the offense isn't as bad if the difficulties of committing the crime have been removed or reduced.

This is surprisingly basic knowledge for ending up on the front page.

It’s a good intro, but I’d love to read more about when to know it’s time to replace my synchronous inter service http requests with a queue. What metrics should I consider and what are the trade offs. I’ve learned some answers to this question over time, but these guys are theoretically message queue experts. I’d love to learn about more things to look out for.

There are also different types of queues/exchanges and this is critical depending on the types of consumer or consumers you have. Should I use direct, fan out, etc?

The next interesting question is when should I use a stream instead of a queue, which RabbitMQ also supports.

My advice, having just migrated a set of message queues and streams from AWS(AvtiveMQ) to RabbitMQ is think long and hard before you add one. They become a black box of sorts and are way harder to debug than simple HTTP requests.

Also, as others have pointed out, there are other important use cases for queues which come way before microservice comms. Async processing to free up servers is one. I’m surprised none of these were mentioned.

I only really ever play one game, so that's not a blocker for me.

I would have switched by now but film and audio production software, including VSTs, don't seem to be greatly supported on Linux. I'd love to hear from someone if you are successfully doing this.

I vibe coded a windows shell extension that renders thumbnails for 10-bit videos. Windows does not do this out of the box.

I also built a Preview Pane Handler for 10-bit videos.

The installers (WIX) were vibe coded as well.

So was the product website and stripe integration. I created a bespoke license generation system on checkout.

I don’t think I wrote a single line of C++ code although the WIX installers and website did receive minimal manual adjustments.

Started with Claude but then at some point during development Codex got really good so I used only that.

https://ruptureware.com

Netflix on Apple TV has an issue if "Match Content" is "off" where it will constantly downgrade the video stream to a lower bitrate unnecessarily.

Even fixing that issue the video quality is never great compared to other services.

I just launched a 10-Bit Video Thumbnail Provider for Windows.

Windows does not natively support rendering thumbnails for 10-bit videos, which are commonly produced by cameras like the Sony A7IV.

When I started working on a short film the video clips were piling up on my hard drive. Opening them one by one to find what I was looking for was tedious.

I could not find a reputable solution to this problem, so I started a company and built one. I went through the process of EV Certification to have the installer and executable code signed.

I hope to be in the Microsoft Store soon.

I'm also building other utilities with similar purpose.

https://ruptureware.com/thumbprovider

Let's not conflate the two things that were said.

It is absolutely true that companies were rushing to rewrite their code every few years when the new shiny JS library or framework came out. I was there for it. There was a quick transition from [nothing / mootools?] to jQuery to Backbone to React, with a short Angular detour about 13 years ago. If you had experience with the "new" framework you could pretty much get a front-end gig anywhere with little friction. I rewrote many codebases across multiple companies to Backbone during that time per the request of engineering management.

Now, is React underappreciated? In the past 10 years or so I've started to see a pattern of lack of appreciation for what it brings to the table and the problems it solved. It is used near universally because it was such a drastic improvement over previous options that it was instantly adopted. But as we know, adoption does not mean appreciation.

React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way.

Good example of under-appreciation.

https://archive.is/BBPGY

Any odd blurring, distortion, or vignetting you might find around the edges could be caused by anamorphic lenses. Vignetting is often also added in post.

Is anyone using any of these tools to write non boilerplate code?

I'm very interested.

In my experience ChatGPT and Gemini are absolutely terrible at these types of things. They are constantly wrong. I know I'm not saying anything new, but I'm waiting to personally experience an LLM that does something useful with any of the code I give it.

These tools aren't useless. They're great as search engines and pointing me in the right direction. They write dumb bash scripts that save me time here and there. That's it.

And it's hilarious to me how these people present these tools. It generates a bunch of code, and then you spend all your time auditing and fixing what is expected to be wrong.

That's not the type of code I'm putting in my company's code base, and I could probably write the damn code more correctly in less time than it takes to review for expected errors.

What am I missing?

The future of (public) transportation absolutely is driverless cars.

Every time I'm stuck in traffic on an LA highway with 5+ lanes and I see the horrendously inefficient use of space this future becomes clearer.

Waymos are also really confidence inspiring. They drive more safely and cautiously than any Uber/Lyft driver I've ridden with.

If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.

So I'm happy to see more announcements like this. I hope the Waymo driverless tech becomes ubiquitous.

A price tracker should be more sophisticated than just pulling a single listing from Amazon and dumping whatever price a random 3rd party reseller is listing it for.

The prices here are not indicative of the market at all. They're a single sample from the most egregious offender.

More data points for a 5090 Founders

   - Amazon $4,481

   - StockX $3,447

   - eBay   $3,500-$4,000

I'm not sure what caused this, but I think the expectations of modern friendship have become unrealistic.

Maybe it's movies and TV, where a "close friend" is more or less a non judgemental therapist that will throw down in a fight for you.

What is a close friend? Before we can start asking people if they have any we should probably agree on a definition. If you use the Hollywood standard, then probably none of us have close friends.

In my experience, most friends come and go. That's OK. People change. Circumstances change. One person is always putting in more effort than the other. Some friends will always be aloof. Some friends will pretend they are independent and don't need friendship "like everyone else does," but they're generally full of it. Some friends will seem clingy.

Just roll with it.

The other challenge is finding people, especially as you get older. I've posted this before, but as you get older you really need to seek out established communities. Sports, trivia nights, things of that nature. Something where you can hop in and immediately meet 5+ people. Then you need to show up, over and over. That's how friendships form.

At that point, it's on you. People are out there and in my experience they are excited to meet new folks.

We can write a huge dissertation on why we think The Friendship Recession has happened, but it's quite simple. Inertia is human nature. It takes effort to learn something new and join a community where people are practicing that thing. It takes vulnerability and effort. It's kinda scary.

It's a lot harder than turning on YouTube or flipping through TikTok. And most people understandably don't want to do hard things, especially after the stresses of work and life.

This doesn't sound right.

A 30 year old engineer with 6 years of industry experience should know what XML is.

This isn't a generational gap. I would argue that in a large sample of other 30 year old engineers with 6 years of experience that most of them would know what XML is.

Something else is at play here.

I've really changed my perspective on this type of thing as I approach 50.

Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.

It's always the weaker engineers that are constantly complaining about the things listed in this article. Complaining about all the "stupid code" and "stupid decisions" that were made before they arrived.

There is no realistic scenario where you can spend infinite time developing the perfect solution. And I say infinite because there is no amount of time that will allow you to achieve perfection. Perfection does not exist.

It's true in art, and it's true in engineering.

I've made more friends more easily in my 40s than any other time in my life, and I'm a relatively quiet and disagreeable person.

Making connections with people you're around frequently is easy. The problem is that adult life doesn't throw you into those situations post-college outside of work.

Now it's on you. Find a group. Sports are the easiest. You will absolutely make strong, long lasting friendships if you play sports. It doesn't matter if you're athletic or talented.

You just gotta show up and see the same people every week over and over. If you're a reasonably well adjusted person (and even that sometimes doesn't matter) you will make friends.

Again, making connections and friends is easy. Being around the same people regularly is difficult. Solve that problem and the friendships will come with little effort.

I have found that people generally understand the value of friendship and are welcoming to newcomers. It's been a very refreshing surprise as I've gotten older.

Get out there!

Isn't the ghost spawn at least somewhat predictable?

I think it picks the farthest edge from where you ate it. Also, it only spawns at the edges, so don't eat the ghost near the edge if you're not sure where it will spawn.

Yes the ghost is faster than you, but it can't wrap around the stage like you can.

Wow, that's fun. I wish I could articulate why the music and dying sound effect are both so great. The gameplay has a great rhythmic feeling to it. It's also really tense. I scream every time that damn ghost catches me.

The best part is when I die I feel like I made a dumb mistake, and that if I improved just a few things I could be way better.

Too many games these days give you the allure of depth and complexity by making things difficult in the wrong ways.