andrewmcwatters

I maintain Half-Life 2: Sandbox and lclass, and authored some other projects on the web that use Lua.

There's really PUC-Rio Lua 5.1.5/LuaJIT and PUC-Rio Lua latest. If you use LuaJIT, you're building it against a drop-in replacement for Lua 5.1.5, and that's been the case for the longest time.

However, if there's anything the Lua community needs to learn to move on from, it's maybe the language itself depending on how you're using it.

We later built https://github.com/Planimeter/game-engine-2d, but in reality, the programming language is too slow or too limited (this goes for JavaScript, too) in either implementation to do more sophisticated things that engineers should really just use C or C++ for and consider moving wholesale to WebAssembly.

You'll end up training a better future generation of engineers by doing this, too. Lua has been great for us, really instrumental in accomplishing some cool stuff, but we've been eyeballing WebAssembly for the future.

Microsoft refuses to deliver legitimate emails to hotmail.com addresses so I tell clients how it is.

I’m not jumping through hoops when I’m not doing anything wrong. SPF, DMARC, DKIM, IP address not on a blacklist, and I send zero spam. Only human-written client communications 1:1.

So, my clients with hotmail.com addresses don’t get emails from me. I can call them, they can call me.

I suspect they strip the SynthID for these specific cases to prevent exfiltration of the steganography.

I appreciate you pointing it out, but this account is banned. Thank you for vouching though!

> We're actively collecting pure black and pure white images generated by Nano Banana Pro to improve multi-resolution watermark extraction.

Oh hey, neat. I mentioned this specific method of extracting SynthID a while back.[1]

Glad to see someone take it up.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169146#47169767

They already refuse to comply with CPRA, instead electing to replace your username with a random 6(?) character string, prefixed with `_`, if I remember correctly.

I know, because I've been here since maybe 2015 or so, but this account was created in 2019.

So any PII you have mentioned in your comments is permanent on Hacker News.

I would appreciate it if they gave users the ability to remove all of their personal data, but in correspondence and in writing here on Hacker News itself, Dan has suggested that they value the posterity of conversations over the law.

One that people don't seem to mention enough to me is that neither macOS nor Windows have ANY feature remotely close to the magic SysRq key.[1][2]

Not even Control-Alt-Delete is remotely the same.

ALT-SysRq-f, which will "call the oom killer to kill a memory hog process, but ... not panic if nothing can be killed," should truly be available on every modern operating system, but nope, only Linux has it.

[1]: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/sysrq.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

International Business Machines…

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company

General Mills

General Motors

American Telephone and Telegraph Company…

You seem to have it backwards. Companies being called Poopity Scoop is a modern phenomenon.

Companies have otherwise been named like this for centuries.

I’ve always been curious what the ramifications are for security researchers who openly have accounts on such forums in order to track the dissemination of leaks.

You’re not buying anything. You’re just watching.

Because everyone and their mother sends spam. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why. No, I don't want emails about the new product you're releasing. No I don't want your newsletter.

I have to actively fight to keep my inbox empty, and free of crap. And while I'm ranting, notifications I actually want on my phone are co-opted by advertisements, which Apple and Google should actively prevent, but they won't because they use push notifications to commingle advertising to you with important, sometimes time-sensitive notifications.

Everyone thinks they have something worth sharing. Over three nines of the time, people don't. I will happily be apart of the 0.1% who sends your crap straight to the spam filter for Gmail to train.

It's spam. It's almost all spam. Even the transactional stuff for logging in, I don't want. Just use an email, password, and TOTP. Stop sending me emails.

Stop it.

Sharing my 5 cents on the matter: in another world, gaming, where embedding scripting languages is done for modding, I hope to see WASM take off as a way for modern modders to get into game development.

I've seen smaller developers experimenting with this, but haven't heard of larger orgs doing it, possibly because UGC took the place of modders as well, and I come from an older world where what developers of my time 20 years ago would have had their hands on was an actual SDK that wasn't a part of a long microtransaction pipeline.

In my org's case, where we built an entire game engine off Lua, and previously had done Lua integration in the Source Engine, I would have loved to have had sandboxing from the start rather than trying to think about security after the fact.

To the article's point: even if you were to sandboxing today in those environments, I suspect you'd be faster than some of the fastest embedded scripting languages because they're just that slow.

I wonder how it stands up to feature analysis.

"Generate a pure white image." "Generate a pure black image." Channel diff, extract steganographic signature for analysis.

I got downvoted heavily about a year ago saying we need to abandon Android and the industry needs to pivot back to just putting GNU/Linux on a phone already.

Of course, now Google is doing what Google was always going to do.

It seems like it's the cheapest way to access Claude Sonnet 4.5, but the model distribution is clearly throttled compared to Claude Sonnet 4.5 on claude.ai.

That being said, I don't know why anyone would want to pay for LLM access anywhere else.

ChatGPT and claude.ai (free) and GitHub Copilot Pro ($100/yr) seem to be the best combination to me at the moment.

There's a lot of hate in this thread, but there are plenty of engineers chomping at the bit for autonomous workflows, because browser-use isn't there yet, and cloud expenses from major providers are also unappealing with so much relatively powerful local compute.

You're absolutely joking if you don't think when this goes to crap Microsoft won't hoover up more share of OpenAI.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're banking long-term on its failure and got in early so they had equity preference.

It feels intellectually negligent to me that models like those used by Openpilot have no auditable concept of what a car, or a sign, or a person is.

Just where lines are and when a car should accelerate or break. The rest of the latent state is "based on pixels."

Your back-seat moderation is annoying and contributes to the wank of the site, too.

I wonder if legislation like this will bisect 3D printers before and after in the same way that ink printers use printer tracking dot steganography.

Or maybe 3D printers already do this in a way we don't see.

Apple has broken Time Machine enough times that I would never consider using it at all anymore. Once upon a time, it was really neat, had great integration with Mac OS X, and an amazing user interface and experience, but it's now clearly technology that Apple will probably eventually drop entirely in favor of something less impressive all together, like telling you to buy more iCloud Storage.

There is an inverse relationship with respect to the size of an organization or project and its authors or maintainers willingness to review and merge pull requests.

The smaller a project, the more willing an author is to write the entire feature for you based on a plain request.

Go help smaller projects, the big ones don't care that you've submitted any work at all.

Linux is definitely not a "full operating system."

Here's Linux built on GitHub Actions, with Grub[1], and you can't do anything with it. I include a reference init that does nothing, per kernel.org. 17.8 MB image.

GNU is by every practical measure, everything else. People memed on Stallman for the whole GNU/Linux naming, but he's basically right. There's also Android/Linux, that another user mentioned, and some distributions which don't use a GNU userland at all.

But the wide majority of people are using GNU/Linux, or some ecosystem derivative of it, like people using GNOME, which was formerly a part of the GNU project.

[1]: https://github.com/andrewmcwatters/linux-workflow

That's crazy that Chrome, which basically owns the web standards, does not have a compliant implementation to run Netflix, which leads streaming market share.

I think Apple’s chip prowess is completely hampered by the fact that I’m buying hardware that is measurably less mine than the lesser x86 chips on the market that I can actually do whatever I want with.

I don’t really care how many hours their laptops last compared to Windows and Linux machines anymore.

I can’t put a price on user freedom. Even if I could, it’s far from negligible.

Apple has chipped away for years at user freedom. It’s an entire tooling and infrastructural development built from intentional strategy. Not a marginal price difference.

Billions of dollars were invested in removing our ability to do common tasks.

All people unfamiliar with Linux at a documentation level assume that because Linux is Linux it must be pretty well documented, but in reality, just building the thing and creating an init is extremely poorly documented process for such mature software.

You’re not missing anything. It’s amazing Linux makes any progress at all, because the most high touch points about the damn thing are basically completely undocumented.

And if they are, the documentation is out of date, and written by some random maintainer and describes a process no longer used or it’s by a third-party and obviously wrong or superfluous and they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Edit: Oh it’s a cultural issue, too. Almost everything revolving around Linux documentation is also an amateur shitshow. Systemd, that init system and so much more that everyone uses? How do you build it and integrate it into a new image?

I don’t know. They don’t either. It’s assumed you’re already using it from a major distribution. There’s no documentation for it.

A small but big detail that irritates me is one used to be able to search Applications faster through the dedicated Applications overlay, but now this behavior appears to just be a shortcut to Spotlight, which suffers from incredibly poor index planning.

In the past, when Spotlight was too slow to show me my most used applications by the first few letters, I'd bail and use Applications.

Now I'd have to use Finder, but opening that up would be slow enough that I'd almost need a desktop shortcut.

So, in essence, I have to hack around the most common functionality of using an application on an operating system, which is finding the damn thing. And this is supposed to be the most polished operating system on the market?

Apple frequently appears to be asleep at the wheel.

I already do this professionally, and when something is broken, we collectively as an industry have no idea why except for rolling back to a previous deployment because we have no time for system introspection, nor do we really want to spend engineering hours figuring it out. Just nuke it.

The bigger joke is everyone behaves like they have a ranch for all this cattle infrastructure.

In reality, the largest clients by revenue in the world have PetSmart. And frankly many of them, a fish bowl.

I concede that this is the state of the art in secure deployments, but I’m from a different age where people remoted into colocated hardware, or at least managed their VPSs without destroying them every update.

As a result, I think developers are forgetting filesystem cleanliness because if you end up destroying an entire instance, well it’s clean isn’t it?

It also results in people not knowing how to do basic sysadmin work, because everything becomes devops.

The bigger problem I have with this, is the logical conclusion is to use “distroless” operating system images with vmlinuz, an init, and the minimal set of binaries and filesystem structure you need for your specific deployment, and rarely do I see anyone actually doing this.

Instead, people are using a hodgepodge of containers with significant management overhead, that actually just sit on like Ubuntu or something. Maybe alpine. Or whatever Amazon distribution is used on ec2 now. Or of course, like in this article, Fedora CoreOS.

One day, I will work with people who have a network issue and don’t know how to look up ports in use. Maybe that’s already the case, and I don’t know it.

Flashbacks of gaming on an XP-era HP Pavilion with graphics so bad water didn’t even render in Halo 1 PC flood my mind.

Countless kids played Morrowind below par spec on family computers all across America.

That sucks. I’m not a big fan of Tailwind, but at least it helps non-designers make somewhat decent user-interfaces.

It’s hard to run a software business.