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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Should all be in place. Even nvidia driver support. It’s one of the rare cases where I actually support nvidia on a technical level, that is, having explicit sync is good. I can also understand that they didn’t feel like implementing proper implicit sync (hence all the tearing etc) when it’s a technically inferior solution.

    OTOH, they shouldn’t have bloody waited until now to get this through. Had they not ignored wayland for a literal decade this all could’ve been resolved before it became an issue for end-users.





  • I argue that X11 would have hyperactive development, if we did not have Wayland

    Wayland was started by the X developers because they were sick and tired of hysterical raisins. Noone else volunteered to take over X, either, wayland devs are thus still stuck with maintaining XWayland themselves. I’m sure that at least a portion of the people shouting “but X just needs some work” at least had a look at the codebase, but then noped out of it – and subsequently stopped whining about the switch to Wayland.

    What’s been a bit disappointing is DEs getting on the wayland train so late. A lot of the kinks could have been worked out way earlier if they had given their 2ct of feedback right from the start, instead of waiting 10 years to even start thinking about migrating.



  • That does not seem to be a stray and yes there’s definitely reasons to take potshots at Gnome. They still don’t support server-side decorations. Everyone is absolutely fine with them not wanting to use them in their own apps, have them draw window decorations themselves, and every other DE lets gnome apps do exactly that, but Gnome is steadfastly and pointlessly refusing to draw decorations for apps which don’t want to draw their own decorations. It’d be like a hundred straight-forward lines of code for them.

    And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to breakage you have to expect when running Gnome.


  • Wayland kinda is an x.org project in the first place. AFAIK it’s officially organised under freedesktop but the core devs are x.org people.

    x.org as in the organisation and/or domain might not be needed any more, but the codebase is still maintained by exactly those Wayland devs for the sake of XWayland. Support for X11 clients isn’t going to go away any time soon. XWayland is also capable of running in rootfull mode and use X window managers, if there’s enough interest to continue the X.org distribution I would expect them to completely rip out the driver stack at some point and switch it over to an off the shelf minimum wayland compositor + XWayland. There’s people who are willing to maintain XWayland for compatibility’s sake, but all that old driver cruft, no way.


  • Azov has gotten completely diluted by a gigantic influx of ordinary people, its hardcore Nazi times were over before they were even rolled into Ukraine’s overall command structure which came along with some more denazification. The Wolfsangel isn’t recognised as a far-right symbol in Ukraine by the general public so they kept it. It’s also not a clear-cut Nazi symbol even in Germany, you see it on plenty of coat of arms, it also has plenty of use in forestry which is its original source: You hang it with bait onto a branch to kill wolves in a rather gruesome manner. That’s outlawed nowadays but you still see it on border forestry border stones, to mark wood, etc. The heraldic use derives from that, it symbolises presence or importance of forestry in the area the coat of arm represents. Not much forest around the Azov sea, though.

    Those are not the Nazis you’re looking for. If you want to see, well not exactly nazis but the hot-bed of ultranationalists in the Ukrainian army have a look at the right sector regiment. Dylan Burns did an interview.

    Next up: Someone’s going to claim that the Ukrainian army uses the “Iron Cross”. First off, the Bundeswehr still uses it, secondly, no the Ukrainians don’t use it you’re looking at the Cossack Cross, derived independently from the Templar Cross, unlike the Iron Cross not via the Teutonic Order. They’ve been using that thing for centuries.

    EDIT: Oh wait I just remembered I’m completely banned from lemmygrad they won’t see this. Well, whatever.


  • So then, you think Nazi Swastikas without context should be allowed without any repercussions.

    That’s incoherent. “Nazi swastika” and “without context” doesn’t mesh because “Nazi” is a context for “swastika”.

    That aside, I’m going to take German law as an example: No, non-nazi swastikas are very much not outlawed. You can see them on stray Hindu temples or shrines in the country, for example. “Without” context they’re generally assumed to be Nazi ones over here because historical context, also, only Nazis draw random swastikas over here. You also see ones broken in pieces getting thrown in the trash or in a crossed-out circle, those come from the Antifa side.

    Both the Hindu and Antifa uses are legal, the Nazi ones aren’t. That’s because German law doesn’t outlaw the swastika as such, it outlaws “using symbols of unconstitutional or outlawed organisations in a manner suitable to further their aims”. A Nazi painting a Swastika on a Jewish gravestone is considered furthering the aims of the NSDAP, which had the swastika as their logo. A Hindu chiselling a swastika into their gravestone is a completely different matter. (Do Hindus use gravestones? Anyway doesn’t matter it’s a hypothetical example).

    In another country, where the historical context is different, those “without” context swastikas won’t be interpreted the same as in Germany. So even under German law those would arguably be legal, there.


  • Assembly is a direct mapping to instructions. It just converts the text into machine code directly,

    Kinda… yes and no? At least with x86 there’s still things like encoding selection going on, there’s not a 1:1 mapping between assembly syntax and opcodes.

    Also assemblers, at least those meant for human consumption (mostly nasm nowadays) tend to have powerful macro systems. That’s not assembly as such, of course.

    But I think your “a compiler changes the structure of the code” thing is spot-on, an assembler will not reorder instructions, it won’t do dead code elimination, but I think it’s not really out of scope of an assembler to be able to do those things – compilers weren’t doing them for the longest time, either.

    I think a clearer division would be that compilers deal with two sets of semantics: That of the source language, and that of the CPU. The CPU semantics don’t say things like “result after overflow is undefined”, that’s C speaking, and compilers can use those differences to do all kind of shennanigans. With assemblers there’s no such translation between different language semantics, it’s always the CPU semantics.


  • 32 is ASCII space, the highest number you need is 114 for r (or 122 for z if you want to be generic), that’s a range of 82 or 90 values.

    The target string has 13 characters, a long long has 8 bytes or 16 nibbles – 13 fits into 16 so nibbles (the (x >>= 4) & 15) it is. Also the initial x happens to have 13 nibbles in it so that makes sense. But a nibble only has 16 values, not 82, so you need some kind of compression and that’s the rest of the math, no idea how it was derived.

    If I were to write that thing I’d throw PAQ at it it can probably spit out an arithmetic coding that works, and look even more arcane as you wouldn’t have the obvious nibble steps. Or, wait, throw NEAT at it: Train it to, given a specific initial seed, produce a second seed and a character, score by edit distance. The problem space is small enough for the approach to be feasible even though it’s actually a terrible use of the technique, but using evolution will produce something that’s utterly, utterly inscrutable.



  • One of the issues I have with C++ is the standard library source seems to be completely incomprehensible.

    AAAAAAhhh I once read a Stroustrup quote essentially going “if you understand vectors you understand C++”, thought about that for a second, coming to the conclusion “surely he didn’t mean using them, but implementing them”, then had a quick google, people said llvm’s libc++ was clean, had a look, and noped out of that abomination instantly. For comparison, Rust’s vectors. About the same LOC, yes, but the Rust is like 80% docs and comments.


  • Because allow/blocklist are just as old if not even older and are way clearer terminology.

    “white” and “black” there are metaphors, the “master” in git branches and SCSI isn’t.

    See at some point you have to ask yourself the question whether you’d be opposed to the change if blue-haired college students really into performative politics weren’t a thing. Imagine the idea coming from your slightly computer-illiterate 60yold shop floor boss saying “I don’t want to think about the terms here, I want to do CAD/CAM. Speak English, whippersnapper”.


  • The false positive problem actually works in favour of the dogs, here: Their noses are excellent they know exactly whether there’s drugs there or not. They also know that the humans can’t tell so it’s easy to get a treat regardless. And they also know to not overdo it.

    Even more complicated are cats, figures that they are by and large uninterested in being studied or proving anything to you.




  • I seem to be speaking Klingon. I never told anyone to “un-depress” themselves. Quite the contrary, I’m talking about the necessity to accept that it’ll be the path you’re walking on for, potentially, quite a while. All I’m telling you is that that path doesn’t have to be miserable, or a downward spiral.

    Make a distinction between these two scenarios: One, someone has a fever. They get told “stop having a fever, lower your temperature, then you’ll be fine”. Second, same kind of fever, they get told “Accept that you have a fever. Make sure to drink enough and to make yourself otherwise comfortable in the moment. Ignore the idiot with the ‘un-fever yourself’ talk”.


  • I’m sorry what’s long-term executive function about cancelling your appointments? What’s harsh about it?

    What about “take a bath” and “go outside to breathe” is less protestant-work-ethic than what I was saying?

    The simple, actionable things are, precisely, the simple, actionable things. “Breathe in the fresh air” is not actionable when living in a city. “Sit on a bench and people-watch” is not actionable in the countryside. You know much better where you live, what simple things you could do right now. The point is not about the precise action, it’s about that it’s simple and actionable thus you should do it. Also, to a large degree, that it’s your idea, something you want.