“start menus made with React Native, control-alt-delete menus that are actually just webviews”
Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.
Also, don't forget to set up an RSS or Atom feed for your website. Contrary to the recurring claim that RSS is dead, most of the traffic to my website still comes from RSS feeds, even in 2̶0̶2̶5̶ 2026! In fact, one of my silly little games became moderately popular because someone found it in my RSS feed and shared it on HN. [1]
From the referer (sic) data in my web server logs (which is not completely reliable but still offers some insight), the three largest sources of traffic to my website are:
1. RSS feeds - People using RSS aggregator services as well as local RSS reader tools.
2. Newsletters - I was surprised to discover just how many tech newsletters there are on the Web and how active their user bases are. Once in a while, a newsletter picks up one of my silly or quirky posts, which then brings a large number of visits from its followers.
3. Search engines - Traffic from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and similar search engines. This is usually for specific tools, games and HOWTO posts available on my website that some visitors tend to return to repeatedly.
In this song, which is also chapter four of the movie Interstella 5000 movie (spoilers from here!), the knocked-out singers are scanned, parameterized, brainwashed, uploaded into The Matrix, and then used in the following songs of the movie-album to robotically mass produce music.
It makes perfect sense that the BPM is 123.45 because that’s exactly the sort of thing you get when a manager (who’s shown at the end!) just enters some numbers on the keyboard into the bpm field. They don’t keysmash the numpad; they just hit 123456789 until the field is full!
So not only does the song itself convey what some boss thinks is music, robotically beating at 123.45 bpm, but it is itself about being endlessly-rotating brainwashed-boring cogs in a pop music production industrial machine. I’m pretty sure the movie scene cuts and animations are timed specifically to the beats of the song, but knowing that they’re timed to a machine-specific bpm that a human would never select at random with a metronome?
Absolute genius.
I had no idea. Thanks for posting this.
EDIT: At 123.4567bpm, I think the track has precisely 0.2345 seconds of silence before the first 'beat' of the song and actually has 456 beats total, which is either numerological nonsense or pure genius by Daft Punk. Math elsethread :)
Nearly this entire HN comment section is upset about VLC being mentioned once and not recommended. If you can not understand why this very minor (but loud?) note was made, then you probably do not do any serious video encoding or you would know why it sucks today and is well past its prime. VLC is glorified because it was a video player that used to be amazing back in the day, but hasn't been for several years now. It is the Firefox of media players.
There is a reason why the Anime community has collectively has ditched VLC in favor of MPV and MPC-HC. Color reproduction, modern codec support, ASS subtitle rendering, and even audio codecs are janky or even broken on VLC. 98% of all Anime encode release playback problems are caused by the user using VLC.
And this pastebin doesn't even have all the issues. VLC has a long standing issue of not playing back 5.1 Surround sound Opus correctly or at all. VLC is still using FFmpeg 4.x. We're on FFmpeg 8.x these days
I can not even use VLC to take screenshots of videos I encode because the color rendering on everything is wrong. BT.709 is very much NOT new and predates VLC itself.
And you can say "VLC is easy to install and the UI is easy." Yeah so is IINA for macOS, Celluloid for Linux, and MPV.net for Windows which all use MPV underneath. Other better and easy video players exist today.
We are not in 2012 anymore. We are no longer just using AVC/H264 + AAC or AC-3 (Dolby Audio) MP4s for every video. We are playing back HEVC, VP9, and AV1 with HDR metadata in MKV/webm cnotainers with audio codecs like Opus or HE-AACv3 or TrueHD in surround channels, BT.2020 colorspaces. VLC's current release is made of libraries and FFmpeg versions that predate some of these codecs/formats/metadata types. Even the VLC 4.0 nightly alpha is not keeping up. 4.0 is several years late to releasing and when it does, it may not even matter.
I don't use IPv6 because it solves a problem that I don't have and it provides functionality that I don't want. And also because I don't understand it very well.
My points :
- I don't have a shortage of IPv4. Maybe my ISP or my VPN host do, I don't know. I have a roomy 10.0.0.0/8 to work with.
- Every host routable from anywhere on the Internet? No thanks. Maybe I've been irreparably corrupted by being behind NAT for too long but I like the idea of a gateway between my well kept garden and the jungle and my network topology being hidden.
- Stateless auto configuration. What ? No, no, I want my ducks neatly in a row, not wandering about. Again maybe my brain is rotten from years of DHCP usage but yes, I want stateful configuration and I want all devices on my network to automatically use my internal DNS server thank you very much.
- It's hard to remember IPv6 addresses. The prospect of reconfiguring all my router and firewall rules looks rather painful.
- My ISP gives me a /64, what am I supposed to do with that anyways?
- What happens if my ISP decides to change my prefix ? How do my routing rules need to change? I have no idea.
- HPVs are extremely common: 80% of men and 90% of women will have at least one strain in their lives. Unless you plan to remain completely celibate, you are likely to contract a strain.
- Sooner is better, but vaccination can be done at any age. Guidelines often lag behind, but vaccination makes sense even if you are currently HPV-positive. While it won't clear an existing infection, it protects against different strains and reinfection (typically body removed HPV in 1-2 years). See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38137661/
- HPV16 is responsible for a large number of throat cancers (around 50% in smokers and 80% in non-smokers!). This affects both men and women. Vaccinating men is important for their own safety and to reduce transmission to their partners.
It's hard to adopt something that schools don't teach. I know someone who graduated from UCI with a CompSci degree with a specialization in networking, just before the COVID19 pandemic began. He recalled that the networking courses he took did not cover IPv6 at all, except to describe the address format (i.e. 128 bits, written as hexadecimal, colon-separated). Everything he learned about IPv6, he had to learn on his own or on the job. A standard that has been published for over two decades, heavily used for over a decade, and critical in the worldwide growth of the Internet, was treated as an afterthought by one of the premier universities in the US.
Obvious disclaimer: This is a sample size of 1, and an anecdote is not data, yada yada. I'm not involved in academia, and have no insight into the adoption of IPv6 in CompSci networking curricula on a broader level.
+1 to OP's book, which is the best beginner guide I've found for understanding Beancount / plaintext accounting.
I was also confused about double-entry accounting for most of my life until I read the article, "Accounting for Computer Scientists"[0] by Martin Kleppman (author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications). It explains double entry accounting in a surprisingly accessible way by putting it in terms of graph theory. I don't even like graph theory that much or consider myself competent in it, but Kleppman's explanation was extremely effective.
If this wasn’t HN, I would swear that my personal recommendation algorithm has gotten Linux desktop-pilled and that’s why I’m seeing so many posts like these every day. But in reality I think there is a groundswell of momentum happening here, and with component prices rising, I only see this continuing as more people look to breathe new life into older hardware.
I don't like to admit this, but at this point honestly I think ipv6 is largely a failure, and I say this as someone that wrote a blog post for APNIC on how to turn on ipv6.
I'll get endless pushback for this, but the reality is that adoption isn't at 100%, it very closely needs to be, and there are still entire ISPs that only assign ipv4, to say nothing of routers people are buying and installing that don't have ipv6 enabled out of the box.
A much better solution here would have been an incredibly conservative "written on a napkin" change to ipv4 to expand the number of available address space. It still would have been difficult to adopt, but it would have the benefit of being a simple change to a system everyone already understands and on top of a stack that largely already exists.
I'm not proposing to abandon ipv6, but at this point I'm really not sure how we proceed here. The status quo is maintaining two separate competing protocols forever, which was not the ultimate intention.
> We surveyed students before releasing grades to capture their experience. [...] Only 13% preferred the AI oral format. 57% wanted traditional written exams. [...] 83% of students found the oral exam framework more stressful than a written exam.
[...]
> Take-home exams are dead. Reverting to pen-and-paper exams in the classroom feels like a regression.
Yeah, not sure the conclusion of the article really matches the data.
Students were invited to talk to an AI. They did so, and having done so they expressed a clear preference for written exams - which can be taken under exam conditions to prevent cheating, something universities have hundreds of years of experience doing.
I know some universities started using the square wheel of online assessment during covid and I can see how this octagonal wheel seems good if you've only ever seen a square wheel. But they'd be even better off with a circular wheel, which really doesn't need re-inventing.
It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents.
If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
I cannot prevent the kid from seeing the marketplace.
I cannot prevent the kid from seeing installed games that are rated Mature. It won't let them play it, but it lists all the games installed in the XBox.
I cannot prevent them from downloading free stuff.
It was frustrating and clear to me that this wasn't designed for the benefits of parents.
I just want it to act like a console with a fixed set of games installed and no marketplace access.
As a westerner, who believes in the rules based order, I would give anything for our leadership which is launching this illegal war to be sent to the Hague.
Our leadership are war criminals, and should be treated as such.
Some, specifically, are war criminals who have committed crimes that carry the death penalty, and should be arrested, tried, and (if found guilty) executed.
I guess when your CEO has a highly publicised pivot to a position that’s the antithesis of your customers views it doesn’t help. What’s that saying — “Go Fash Lose Cash”?
There's an older pure Python version but it's no longer maintained - the author of that recently replaced it with a Python library wrapping the C# code.
This looks to me like the perfect opportunity for a language-independent conformance suite - a set of tests defined as data files that can be shared across multiple implementations.
This would not only guarantee that the existing C# and TypeScript implementations behaved exactly the same way, but would also make it much easier to build and then maintain more implementations across other languages.
That new Python library is https://pypi.org/project/fractured-json/ but it's a wrapper around the C# library and says "You must install a valid .NET runtime" - that makes it mostly a non-starter as a dependency for other Python projects because it breaks the ability to "pip install" them without a significant extra step.
Maybe not in the strict sense, but it kind of has.
In the enterprises I've worked in the past decade with IPv6 running, at least 75% of the Internet traffic is IPv6. In my discussions with other engineers managing large networks, they seem to be seeing more or less that same figure.
The problem is that virtually nobody knows IPv6. I regularly bring up IPv6 in engineers' circles and I'm often the only one who knows much about it. And so, I have doubts about it's long-term future, except for edge cases. I figure some clever scheme utilizing IPv4 and probably NAT will come around at some point.
Meanwhile, I was taught and practiced IPv6 in 2003-5 in engineering school (France).
As of 2024, IPv6 deployment in France was >97% mobile and >98% residential due to not being required for obtaining a 5G radio license (and then v6 simply carried downward to being available on 4G) + every ISP that provides FTTH also providing v6.
That's what so surprising to me - they data clearly shows the experiment had terrible results. And the write up is nothing but the author stating: "glowing success!".
And they didn't even bother to test the most important thing. Were the LLM evaluations even accurate! Have graders manually evaluate them and see if the LLMs were even close or were wildly off.
This is clearly someone who had a conclusion to promote regardless of what the data was going to show.
Surprised they missed follow! It’s a bit odd to use, but once you get used to it it’s better than tail in many circumstances IMO. `less +F` starts less following stdin or whatever file argument you’ve provided. <C-c> breaks following, allowing you to search around a business-as-usual `less` session. Hitting `F` (that’s uppercase) starts following again. Yes, you can just start following within a session with `F` too if you forgot to add +F to the `less` invocation.
> - I don't have a shortage of IPv4. Maybe my ISP or my VPN host do, I don't know. I have a roomy 10.0.0.0/8 to work with.
What happens when multiple devices in your /8 want to listen on port 80 and 443 on the public address? Only one of them can. Now you're running a proxy.
> - Every host routable from anywhere on the Internet? No thanks. Maybe I've been irreparably corrupted by being behind NAT for too long but I like the idea of a gateway between my well kept garden and the jungle and my network topology being hidden.
It's called a firewall. You want a firewall. IPv6 also has a firewall. NAT is not a firewall. NAT is usually configured as part of your firewall, but is not a firewall.
> - Stateless auto configuration. What ? No, no, I want my ducks neatly in a row, not wandering about. Again maybe my brain is rotten from years of DHCP usage but yes, I want stateful configuration and I want all devices on my network to automatically use my internal DNS server thank you very much.
DHCPv6
> - My ISP gives me a /64, what am I supposed to do with that anyways?
What are you supposed to do with a /8? Do you have several million computers?
> - What happens if my ISP decides to change my prefix ? How do my routing rules need to change? I have no idea.
What happens if your ISP changes your IPv4 address?
I think people understand the odds are small. However, perhaps they perceive their chances of meaningfully turn around their life in other ways have even smaller odds. i.e. improbable vs actually impossible. At least the lottery doesn't care about your current circumstance and everyone has an equal (equally small) chance.
Secondly, because everyone realizes the chances are small, the real product being sold is Hope. Even the advertisements for the lotteries address this. The thing you're buying is 30 seconds of daydreaming so you can comfortably tackle the rest of the day.
Just tried this in Reaper. It's actually much closer to 123.47
Anyway that album, Discovery, is full of funny bits. Track #11 Veridis Quo sounds like "very disco". Turn those two words around, and you got the album's title.
We're going to build a massive data center in your town. In one day, it will use as much electricity as you use in 10 years, and will produce more written words than you could write in 10 lifetimes. Its main purpose will be to eliminate your job, but it will have other uses, like generating images of your daughter in a bikini.
We do this in the hopes that it makes me (not you) very rich. Sounds good? Just kidding, we're not asking you!
As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing.
There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old.
Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online.
Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, cheating, and doing less legal stuff … nothing like getting level 99 equipment to incentivize learning how to read/edit a hex dump. Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.
Having been involved with a reasonable number of problems, I’d say in the teen years negotiating and enforcing some kind of no-device sleep schedule is the most critical.
If I had an answer to the rest of the addictive behavior, I wouldn’t be here making this post.
Microsoft is making Windows into the Nigerian Prince of operating systems. Classically, Nigerian Prince scams are so obvious that they weed out all the people smart enough to avoid being swindled, leaving the easy pickings to be plucked without much effort.
Windows is the same. By Microsoft removing all bypass measures that make it tolerable, their remaining user base will just end up being people who don't care about security and privacy, people who won't complain about being inundated with ads, AI, and bingware, people who have no idea that a modern operating system should be fast, customizable, and open. That 90% customer base is easy to fleece with 10% effort, so why bother with the 10% base that will require 90% effort?
I really loved the previous design with the physical numpad and it seems they've opened up the platform to support more applications beyond a few blessed ones (like Signal in the past).
Really put off by this though:
> If you don’t pay for a product, you are the product. With MC03, you pay to retain your data rather than paying with it.
So you have to pay >$100/year to maintain access to your device? Why do I need to pay to retain data that is on my own device?
Haven’t used windows in five years or so but I’ve kept hearing bad things. This really is the icing on the cake though. Yea the AI stuff is dumb but if a OS manufacturer can’t be bothered to interact with their own UI libraries to build native UIs something has gone horribly wrong.