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TazeTSchnitzelon The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021

FrontPage didn't generate your content for you! So there was no reason to assume a FrontPage page might be meaningless just from how it looked. For AI-generated sites, though, if the page looks like slop, is it worth bothering to figure out if it actually is slop? It's not like they're uncorrelated variables. Sure, occasionally it won't be. But I'm drowning here. I must simply assume that if someone is serious about conveying a message, they won't package it in this form.

I don't think it's even gatekeeping. You could copy-paste two tables and write two sentences into a Word document and export to HTML, one of the laziest possible ways to produce a website, and it'd still be less off-putting because it doesn't have the association with slop content.

TazeTSchnitzelon The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021

You could be presenting the most carefully-researched information in the world, but with such an obviously vibecoded site I'm not going to attempt to read it.

TazeTSchnitzelon What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?

The account named "Administrator" that Windows created for you always had the chess piece.

TazeTSchnitzelon What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?

The "Windows Classic" look on XP is exceptionally ugly, because those 3D-rendered icons just do not belong on a Windows 2000-style grey background for menus or buttons. (I have recently had to test both these OSes in VMs…)

TazeTSchnitzelon AI Cold Showers

There's such an avalanche of blogposts on HN constantly saying relatively similar things about AI, that it would be really nice if they were all just filtered down into lists like this occasionally.

TazeTSchnitzelon Visualizing Rust's Vtables: How dyn Trait Works In Memory

I'm not sure if this quite answers your question, but the difference in philosophy here is that C++ objects with pointers always have identity, whereas a Rust object only has identity if it has a non-zero size. It's an application of the zero-overhead principle, "you only pay for what you use".

TazeTSchnitzelon Gmail to end support for "Send as" for third-party addresses, such as @yahoo.com

…but make sure you keep on top of your domain renewals, make sure they can renew automatically, and make sure there is a backup email address that isn't on your domain that can be used to get into your domain registrar account.

(You probably don't need to ask how I know. I am very lucky that there was a grace period after my domain expired, where I spent a few days not realising why I wasn't receiving any email any more.)

TazeTSchnitzelon Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business

https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/searc...

GNIS, Geographic Names Information System

(Which still shows Lake Ontario for me as I write this. The body of water along the US's southern coast is Gulf of America however.)

TazeTSchnitzelon Euphemisation of Taboo Areas (2023) [pdf]

This is fun to read, but there are some odd quirks to the text that I would hope wouldn't slip past an editor, and the way some of the Christian aspects are talked about feels bizarrely partisan for an academic text (it gives the impression the author might be Catholic). I wonder if it is just clumsiness.

TazeTSchnitzelon Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat

The EU is responsible for a lot more than that once you factor in emissions in other countries producing goods bought by people and businesses in EU countries.

TazeTSchnitzelon Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal

The person I'm replying to doesn't seem to think so. I'm imagining this concept of addiction requires some level of craving, which I don't believe you get with SSRIs.

TazeTSchnitzelon Get your Windows license refund

Because the quoted price for their laptops always includes Windows, the option to configure and remove the Windows license is effectively a discount for alternative OS users. :)

TazeTSchnitzelon Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal

> It's not right to call it withdrawal. These drugs are not addictive like benzos or alcohol are.

What does “not addictive” matter? Clearly, SSRIs are something that induce a dependency, because the withdrawal symptoms are horrific. A drug doesn't need to give you a high to create a dependency problem.

> If any symptom reappears it's just that the mental disease most usually changed form after so long time.

How do you know that? This is a problem with some other kinds of psychiatric medications too (certain antipsychotics for example), the reckless assumption that anything that happens after cessation of the drug was just an underlying symptom that the drug had suppressed. That could be the case, but you mustn't just take it for granted.

I think most worrying is the cases where a drug has only a placebo effect until the point of withdrawal. If your underlying bias is towards assuming the drug is effective, then the disaster following withdrawal might make you think the drug was holding it back this whole time. But in fact, the drug may have caused the entire harm.

TazeTSchnitzelon U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications

That's not a renewal. It's fairly standard for EU countries to require being outside the country to apply for a visa or residence permit when it is your first one, or (in some cases) when changing the type of visa or permit. But renewals never need you to leave.

TazeTSchnitzelon Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

I know those from growing up with QBASIC and EDIT.COM, but I think the only software I've used that actually supports them is the Windows conhost (the default UI for command-line apps).

TazeTSchnitzelon Windows 95 released August 24, 1995

The way Windows 95 could use DOS device drivers despite being 32-bit was fairly incredible. I think that fooled a lot of people into thinking it really was running on top of DOS, when in reality, once it has booted, the reverse is the case. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...

TazeTSchnitzelon Show HN: Built my 15-year-old game idea

Speculative comment about the subject from user who has not clicked the link

TazeTSchnitzelon Frustrated GP patients hang up as Yorkshire accent baffles AI receptionist

GP surgeries in the UK are privately owned, their relationship with the NHS is contractual. It would not be surprising if they can buy whatever B2B SaaS they feel like.

TazeTSchnitzelon Incident with Github.com

Twitter is a shadow of what it once was. The design of the site has shifted very very hard in favour of being an algorithmic content soup rather than a social network in the traditional sense. This has juiced the engagement numbers but there's a lot less meaning to them now. (I can say all this because I am a bitter holdout who still tries to use the site to have conversations with people and form personal connections. Tragically it still offers something that Bluesky and the Fediverse do not, even if that thing is slowly but surely being smothered out.)

TazeTSchnitzelon I built a browser-native SysEx librarian for 80s/90s synthesizers

So have many other people. What makes yours special? The vibecoding? The sloppy marketing site is really off-putting.

I'd honestly be curious what those “83+ vintage & modern synths” are but you don't even provide a list…

Also, what the hell is a “Hex-to-ASCII Parser”…

TazeTSchnitzelon Why MySpace fans want it back as relaunch hinted

They can try to bring back something resembling the MySpace experience, but they can't bring back the millions of songs they deleted in 2018 with no backup. That was a great crime against modern music history.

TazeTSchnitzelon Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

NO$GBA is written in assembly language?! I can't believe it.

TazeTSchnitzelon How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

…only if you actually force the LLM not to use `unsafe` somehow! And one must remember that `unsafe` can have all sorts of non-local effects. One way to be maliciously compliant (or in the LLM's case, I guess it's more incompetence than malice) is to make a “safe” function that does an `unsafe` operation for you, and then replace every usage of that unsafe operation with your “safe” function. You can remove hundreds of unsafe blocks that way without any improvement in safety.

TazeTSchnitzelon How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

An LLM definitely can do that work, but LLMs have a tendency to follow the path of least resistance unless you force them to do things properly and carefully supervise them.

TazeTSchnitzelon How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?

Rust contains the ability to do everything that C can, if you use `unsafe`. And a file-by-file rewrite in Rust from another language usually involves keeping the ABI and API between files very C-like (and unsafe). In practice this means that the result of a first pass this way has all the memory safety of C code, but with worse readability because Rust makes unsafe things less ergonomic.

To actually get the safety benefits of Rust in a real way you have to rework those files to not treat eachother as C code. This is the interesting and the difficult part of a rewrite in Rust, and one that an unsupervised LLM rewrite is probably not even going to attempt.

I don't think this latter stage has actually happened with Bun's codebase. The result of the Rust rewrite in Bun's case is actually less safe than the Zig it is replacing, especially because (I am told) a lot of the new Rust code is unsound (introducing UB).

TazeTSchnitzelon Git rebase -I is not that scary

I wish there were a shorthand for

  x git commit --amend --reset-author --no-edit

I use that one very frequently (after a fixup, of course) because I want the author date on amended commits to reflect the last time I edited them, not the first time I committed them.

TazeTSchnitzelon The Fedora 45 Sausage Factory

Techrights are hard to take seriously, the site's author has such a bad case of that polemic tendency that he lost a libel case because he wouldn't stop harassing someone (https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2025/3063).

TazeTSchnitzelon Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld

If my eyes don't deceive me, the upscaling is happening post-dithering, which I think is a shame.

TazeTSchnitzelon Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife on the other hand is the full Half-Life (GoldSrc) engine, but it's not quite an open license.

TazeTSchnitzelon OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court

OpenAI would probably still have some kind of claim against a company that did that.