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dblohm7

4,280 karma · joined December 1, 2011

Member of Technical Staff, Tailscale Inc. Ex-Mozilla, 2012-2021
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dblohm7··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
> It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.

They never should have been trusted in the first place.

dblohm7··on Thoroughly Understanding C++ ABI (2024)
I agree!

(Though you cannot call just any method asynchronously; the interface's IDL needs specific annotations and the underlying object needs to implement ICallFactory.)

dblohm7··on Why DNA damage from smoking and UV rays cause cancer in some but not others
Cancer is not the only complication...
dblohm7··on Memory safety absolutists
There are projects such as Halide[1] that actually allow you to achieve performance without needing to resort to asm.

[1] https://halide-lang.org/

dblohm7··on Firefox Containers Preview
They've been available natively on Nightly with some basic UI support since they were first implemented a decade ago. Some other pre-release builds have them too but it's been too long and I cannot remember which ones did or didn't.
dblohm7··on PowerFox Browser
Ah, that explains why there is still NPAPI plugin support.
dblohm7··on Windows 11 New Media Player Uses 3.5x More RAM, Charges for Popular Video Codecs
The modern native frontend APIs aren’t exactly lightweight themselves…
dblohm7··on But yak shaving is fun (2019)
Yak shaving is only fun when you don't have managers who don't care about the circumstances breathing down your neck.
dblohm7··on Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL
> Plus privacy.resistfingerprinting isn't enabled even when selecting "Strict" "Enhanced Privacy Protection" in the settings, great job there Mozilla.

That pref is there for the Tor Browser.

dblohm7··on Saying Goodbye to Asm.js
The SpiderMonkey team always had t-shirts made up of these.
dblohm7··on Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster
Respectfully to the American "this isn't that big a deal crowd": you're looking at it from the perspective that this is a commonplace occurrence in your country.

IANAL but I have filed privacy complaints in the past at both the federal and provincial level. For the last 26 years in Canada it has been illegal for personal information to be bought and sold on a whim; the person to whom the information applies is considered to be the owner and is entitled to be in control of how their information is used, and may revoke consent.

You have an entire country where institutions operate under the expectation that personally identifiable information isn't easily available like this (sans the usual data breaches). Those institutions are probably less prepared to deal with this data floating around everywhere than in a society where it is essentially a free-for-all.

dblohm7··on Alberta voter list leak is a potential public safety disaster
I mean, it's not really optional for Canadians _not_ to sign up for the list. It's the official list of electors. If you're a citizen, you're going to end up on the voter list one way or another.
dblohm7··on Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed
I don't know whether is still does this, but 8-9 years ago I discovered that Acrobat overwrites the COM registry entries for Microsoft Active Accessibility (oleacc.dll) such that any application attempting to instantiate MSAA gets the Adobe DLL instead of the system DLL. This actually broke the stuff I was working on and had to override it in my app manifest to forcibly use the system version.

I inquired about it and got some BS about how they absolutely _had_ to do this to intercept MSAA instantiations across the system, when in reality they were using a global solution to solve a local problem.

dblohm7··on Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
And if I may add a corollary: Measurement doesn't need to be held off until the end of the project! Start doing it as soon as you can!
dblohm7··on Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
I too learned this the hard way, via a supposedly concurrent priority queue that did quadratic-time work while holding a lock over the entire thing. I was told that "premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Sorry, folks, but that's just an excuse to make dumb choices. Premature _micro_optimization is the root of all evil.

EDIT: It was great training for when I started working on browser performance, though!

dblohm7··on The Cost of Indirection in Rust
Agreed. Nitpicking about indirection is definitely a "premature micro-optimization is the root of all evil" moment.

When I worked on Firefox, we eventually had to remove a bunch of indirection (the interested can actually search bugzilla.mozilla.org for deCOMtamination for some instances of this), but that project wasn't a thing until there was clear evidence that there were problems with virtual function calls on hot paths.

dblohm7··on Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available
Essentially, yeah, but of course you wouldn't want to use any Tailscale trademarks.

Tailscale is engineered under the assumption that any client connected to our control plane could potentially differ from our canonical OSS codebase.

dblohm7··on Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)
I really love VFX in the period between Star Wars and Jurassic Park. To me it will always be the "golden age" of VFX.
dblohm7··on Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available
Essentially this: OSS operating systems get OSS GUIs.
dblohm7··on Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available
(Tailscalar here) To be clear: it's only the GUIs that are closed source on selected platforms.
dblohm7··on Windows: Prefer the Native API over Win32
This is a terrible idea! _Maybe_, _maybe_ using only the documented APIs with only the documented parameters.

Unfortunately it makes too many false assumptions about interoperability between Win32 and the underlying native API that aren't true.

For example (and the Go runtime does this, much to my chagrin), querying the OS version via the native API always gives you "accurate" version information without needing to link a manifest into your application. Unfortunately that lack of manifest will still cause many Win32 APIs above the native layer to drop into a compatibility mode, creating a fundamental inconsistency between what the application thinks the OS capabilities are versus which Win32 subsystem behaviours the OS thinks it should be offering.

dblohm7··on Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
I'm not trying to troll here, asking seriously: are there any immediate-mode GUI APIs with good a11y?
dblohm7··on Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?
> Well, it's not. It's barbaric and primitive. A warning is no justification.

It's actually Singapore that turned me against the death penalty. I saw a photo on a news site one day showing a casket in Singapore, with some kind of placard showing the decedent's name, DOB, and then the date that they "died."

They didn't die due to illness or injury; they died because Singapore executed them. That was it for me.

dblohm7··on Product and design are the new bottlenecks
Citation needed.
dblohm7··on Company as Code
Similarly, I've seen this in enterprise IAM software, but again as data, not as code.

Imagine a very large company that has a heterogeneous setup: say it has plain LDAP for *nix machines and AD for Windows. The IAM stuff has connectors for both, and encoding the org chart into that product enables it to synchronize that structure into both systems.

dblohm7··on Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results
> For the desktop Mac, the base OS is essentially UNIX. It is much more secure by default than Microsoft Windows

Citation needed.

dblohm7··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://dblohm7.ca
dblohm7··on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
> If it gets taken seriously it would ship with an enable-AI button, not the other way round.

Like the one described in the subsequent toot?

> All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?)...

https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500918701463

dblohm7··on Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
They do that for Thunderbird now.
dblohm7··on Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo
> There is a market share costs that pocket had on Firefox.

I don’t think you have any evidence of this.

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