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chippiewill

1,710 karma · joined June 24, 2016

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chippiewill··on Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
I'd definitely recommend popping to an Apple store at some point and looking at a nano display in person. It's really kind of freaky, it has a paper-like quality to it that I've not seen with any other laptop display. I'm not sure a picture or a description is ever going to cut it.
chippiewill··on Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage
I thought Intel was too far behind on their process nodes?
chippiewill··on UK offshore wind prices come in 40% cheaper than gas in record auction
This line of chatter has been going around UK-centric online discussions and it's such a braindead line of thinking. Marginal pricing is used in a gazillion countries and is tried and tested.

You do marginal pricing because otherwise providers will simply bid what they think the crossover price will be - marginal prices lower prices in the long run because providers try to improve their margins and lower their bids.

Also renewables bid on the spot and day ahead markets really low because their cost is almost entirely capex (and also most are under CfD anyway so may as well bid 0) - the spread isn't nearly as good as the data would imply. If you didn't use marginal pricing you'd have them bidding higher to cover their capex.

chippiewill··on Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK
Yeah, it's not as crazy as they make it sound. They're also technically a Commonwealth citizen and previously an EU citizen.

Not exactly two citizenships of the same country.

chippiewill··on Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK
Wrong way round. She was born in the UK and was a British Citizen at birth and had a British passport

She is (maybe) entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship which is why the UK government was allowed under UK law to remove her British citizenship because British courts didn't consider her to be stateless.

The only people who can't have British citizenship removed are British citizens with no other citizenship or entitlement to a citizenship. I think in theory that means the British government is legally allowed to remove citizenship from any person from Northern Ireland if they justify it (since they're allowed to claim Irish citizenship under the Good Friday agreement).

chippiewill··on The C3 Programming Language
It's to remove a syntax ambiguity with c-style function declarations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_vexing_parse

The syntax ambiguity adds a lot of complexity to the grammar that makes parsing a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

Sticking `fn` in front fixes a lot of problems.

chippiewill··on IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world
> beside that my internal ip's are changing every day to bring more confusion into my internal net. nice!

You can set it up so your devices can have two IPv6 addresses. The shifting address for external traffic, and a static one for local traffic. I think this is the default in many linux distros now.

chippiewill··on 'Three norths' alignment about to end
In the UK there's a standard grid used for local-only mapping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey_National_Grid

It's a transverse mercator projection rather than a mercator as you might often see because it minimises distortion over the UK as a whole which means that the distortion is as you move away from the meridian, rather than as you move away from the equator (with a regular mercator I think all points have the grid aligned with true North)

This grid is setup such that it's origin is not on the prime meridian (at Greenwich), but 2deg west so only points on the line 2deg west are aligned with true north.

chippiewill··on Making Google Sans Flex
Browsers made a fundamental change a while back to not share caches between origins because caching it became a side-channel to detecting if someone had visited it before.

So now if two different websites embed the same remote font then visitors will have to download it separately for both sites.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/http-cache-partitioning

chippiewill··on Making Google Sans Flex
Use it on an Air and there aren't even fans to be spun up
chippiewill··on GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions
per-minute isn't a crazy unreasonable proxy for it though:

- logs are generally proportional to the length of the job

- other artifacts also usually correlate to an extent

- some of the cost for Github will be for the entire time the job is active: e.g. active connections for log streaming etc. - it's largely correlated to the value the end-user gets out of it

- it's easy to bill for because they can already do billing that way on the hosted runners

- the costs are easy to predict for end-users

It's not like the rest of the Github platform is a per-user cost to run, but that's how Github charge for most features.

chippiewill··on UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16
There are the parliament acts which restrict the length of the delay the HoL can inflict (including to just 1 month for money bills). They also cannot amend money bills.

There is however the Salisbury convention which is that the HoL shouldn't block legislation that was a manifesto commitment of the governing party. That doesn't meant they can't amend it at all, but they can't substantively change it. It's also just a convention, not a rule.

chippiewill··on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
I believe the removal of the "experimental" nomenclature is just an indication that Rust is "here to stay" in the kernel (which essentially means that developers can have confidence investing in writing Rust based drivers).

The overall rules haven't changed.

Strictly speaking they've always been obligated to not break the Rust code, but the R4L developers have agreed to fix it on some subsystems behalf IIRC so Rust can be broken in the individual subsystem trees. But I think it's been the case all along that you can't send it to Linus if it breaks the Rust build, and you probably shouldn't send it to linux-next either.

chippiewill··on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
They probably get a few for "free" from LLVM supporting them
chippiewill··on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental
That was a single message in a very large thread. It absolutely was not just about code quality.
chippiewill··on 10 Years of Let's Encrypt
Lets Encrypt are doing is because of the decision that CAs and browser makers made that it needs to be reduced (browsers have been reducing the length of certs that they trust).

The why is because it's safer: it reduces the validity period of private keys that could be used in a MITM attack if they're leaked. It also encourages automation of cert renewal which is also more secure. It also makes responding to incidents at certificate authorities more practical.

chippiewill··on Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
Capex vs Opex and scale-out.

For a start-up it's much easier to just pay the Cloud tax than it is to hire people with the appropriate skill sets to manage hardware or to front the cost.

Larger companies on the other hand? Yeah, I don't see the reason to not self host.

chippiewill··on Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025
The problem is that Cloudflare do incremental rollouts and loads of testing for _code_. But they don't do the same thing for configuration - they globally push out changes because they want rapid response.

It's still a bit silly though, their claimed reasoning probably doesn't really stack up for most of their config changes - I don't see it to be that likely that a 0.1->1->10->100 rollout over the period of 10 minutes would be a catastrophically bad idea for them for _most_ changes.

And to their credit, it does seem they want to change that.

chippiewill··on WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
Well, agreed, I just didn't want to completely shit on it.
chippiewill··on WordPress plugin quirk resulted in UK Gov OBR Budget leak [pdf]
> WordPress is a nice piece of software, but the plugin situation is getting worse and worse

The plugin situation is a mess largely because Wordpress isn't a nice piece of software.

It's popular, and functionally it's great, but the codebase is really showing its age. Wordpress has never properly rearchitected because it would break plugins on a scale that would endanger its dominance.

chippiewill··on Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem
No, the "if it compiles, it works" is genuinely about the program being correct rather than just free of memory errors, but it's more of a hyperbolic statement than a statement of fact.

It's a common thing I've experienced and seen a lot of others say that the stricter the language is in what it accepts the more likely it is to be correct by the time you get it to run. It's not just a Rust thing (although I think Rust is _stricter_ and therefore this does hold true more of the time), it's something I've also experienced with C++ and Haskell.

So no, it's not a guarantee, but that quote was never about Rust's guarantees.

chippiewill··on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission
If that happens then Trump doesn't get to stay president, the 20th amendment means his term ends regardless.
chippiewill··on Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development
The point of the project is not meant to be an experiment in "programming language co-development", the point of the project is to use Rust in Linux kernel development. The project was started by Linux kernel developers who want to use Rust. It's been a slow start, but as you say, it's the world's most important piece of software so progress has been careful and trying to get the foundations right before going crazy with it.

The fact that Rust gets to benefit from the project too is just an added bonus.

chippiewill··on How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs
I think that's close to the truth. IIRC it's something like a massive cluster of machines that are effectively powered off 99% of the time with a careful sharding scheme where they're turned on and off in batches over a long period of time for periodic backup or restore of blobs.
chippiewill··on Show HN: C++ library for reading MacBook lid angle sensor data
It's a low level library, it's probably just the register on the sensor itself is 16bit so that's what gets propagated up to the OS.

The most I can reach on mine is 132deg

chippiewill··on Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy
As someone who worked in this space, you are absolutely right, but also kind of wrong - at least in my opinion.

The cold hard truth is that LIDARs are a crutch, they're not strictly necessary. We know this because humans can drive without a LIDAR, however they are a super useful crutch. They give you super high positional accuracy (something that's not always easy to estimate in a vision-only system). Radars are also a super useful crutch because they give really good radial velocity. (Little anecdote, when we finally got the Radars working properly at work it made a massive difference to the ability for our car to follow other cars, ACC, in a comfortable way).

Yes machine learning vision systems hallucinate, but so do humans. The trick for Tesla would be to get it good enough to where it hallucinates less than humans do (they're nowhere near yet - human's don't hallucinate very often).

It's also worth adding that last I checked the state of the art for object detection is early fusion where you chuck the LIDAR and Radar point clouds into a neural net with the camera input so it's not like you'd necessarily have the classical methods guardrails with the Lidar anyway.

Anyway, I don't think Tesla were wrong to not use LIDAR - they had good reasons to not go down that route. They were excessively expensive and the old style spinning LIDARs were not robust. You could not have sold them on a production car in 2018. Vision systems were improving a lot back then so the idea you could have a FSD on vision alone was plausible.

chippiewill··on U.S. Emissions Rise 4.2%, China's Fall 2.7%
Comparing to the UK probably isn't the best though since the UK latitude makes it not super favourable to Solar. It would be better to compare it to Southern Europe.

Spain has 40GW and GDP that's about 1/10th of China. Still, dividing China's capacity of 90GW by 10 still means they built a quarter of Spain's capacity in a month. Crazy.

chippiewill··on Nintendo Switch 2 Dock USB-C Compatibility
That's always been the case though, even when labs started.

The reason labs was started was to be able to produce different kinds of content, and to have a moat on technical data and quality of reviews that no one else can pull off.

chippiewill··on UK's largest battery storage facility at Tilbury substation
I agree, although I think one of the disadvantages in the UK is that the suppliers aren't paying the cost for their own volatility. A renewable supplier can add 1GW supply to the grid, but 1GW of natural gas generation capacity is still required.

Fixed costs and capital costs end up being shouldered by the consumer which ironically ends up pushing overall costs up.

chippiewill··on UK's largest battery storage facility at Tilbury substation
Why would they charge up with natural gas?

The UK often has excess wind energy, and for Tilbury in particular that problem is set to grow as National Grid are building out massive grid capacity from the North Sea wind farms through Tilsbury

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