grishka

With calls, it's easier: if you get an incoming call with someone is asking you for money, you hang up and call back using the number for that organization that you've found yourself from official sources. Never trust incoming calls when it comes to money.

And, unlike discs, they play straight off the cartridge, without installation. What a concept!

TIL that there are countries where the building code doesn't enforce the minimum number of elevators. In Russia it's one for buildings taller than 5 floors, two for taller than 9, and I believe three for taller than 16 (every 20-something-floor building I've ever been to had at least three). But we don't have many skyscrapers so I'm not sure how it works for those.

How often do people travel between non-ground floors though? In my own experience, whether it's a residential or an office building, 99% of elevator usage is a) someone going down to the ground floor, and b) someone going up from the ground floor. There are some exceptions like hotels that have amenities on different floors though.

The first elevator "algorithm", if you can even call it that, that I've ever encountered and that seems intuitive to me, is what Soviet relay logic elevators did. If it's not in use and someone calls it, it goes there. If it's in use, it will collect the calls on its way down (and ignore them on the way up, these had no up/down call buttons). It's surprisingly effective for apartment buildings.

JavaScript still doesn't have proper integers.

So the world is slightly better right now.

The apps that are the reason some people use smartphones at all — bank apps — require Google services and remote attestation that runs in an environment with more privileges than the OS kernel. Otherwise everyone interested would just unlock their bootloader and use a ROM with all the asinine restrictions removed.

Pixels do have unlockable bootloaders, but they also have a non-unlockable hypervisor that would snitch on you and make some apps refuse to work.

In 2021, I upgraded to the 2021 MBP from the 2012 first-gen retina. So I also skipped the bad models. The difference is night and day. You don't really notice the notch, especially if you view it as giving you extra space for the menu bar instead of eating into your screen.

I know at least one person who still uses an Intel one and doesn't like it

I half-jokingly thought to myself, "of course it's all software rendering, Haiku doesn't have GPU drivers", so imagine my amazement when I saw that this thread is about porting an NVidia GPU driver from Linux, and HL2 does, in fact, run with hardware acceleration.

> OpenGL never was a big thing on game consoles.

I've never tried developing anything for a 3D-capable console, but I've always had the feeling that their graphics APIs are bespoke, thin abstraction layers on top of the raw graphics hardware just so you don't have to poke the GPU registers directly.

OpenGL is the only truly cross-platform graphics API out there. Vulkan isn't on Apple platforms, unless you use MoltenVK which implements it on top of Metal. Also I don't know why, but Windows games tend to use Direct3D even though afaik GPU drivers do implement Vulkan on Windows, so there must be a good reason for that.

It's also much easier to grasp than Vulkan, Metal, or Direct3D.

Also don't CD-Rs need a more sensitive detector in the drive to read? I remember seeing somewhere that early drives have trouble with them

Fun fact: Rutracker is one of the few remaining places on the internet where random Russians and Ukrainians talk respectfully to each other, and do so in Russian.

Related: different people think of time different ways. I myself have never liked analog clocks because they require a conversion to make sense. Technology Connections made a video about this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NeopkvAP-ag

And another thing: I considered trying 28-hour days because my sleeping schedule always drifts. A 28-hour clock that's in sync with me sleeping would be nice if I ever do try that.

Afaik they aren't manufactured any more

Getting someone else's preexisting code to meaningfully run on a thing you made from scratch is quite rewarding. I haven't made an OS but I did make a Game Boy emulator. It runs most of my childhood games just fine, which made it totally worth it for me.

The use of AI is still optional.

Can't Chromium-based browser developers work together to fork the entire thing? Ideally becoming independent of Google altogether.

I wonder what will Vivaldi do. They say that their built-in content blocker is "good enough" that you supposedly don't need uBO (I very much disagree) but they also keep MV2 extensions working to this day.

TSPU isn't for spying, it's for censorship enforcement and everything else that makes the experience of using the internet here miserable without a VPN. It's SORM that's for spying. And Roskomnadzor is very much part of the government.

Yes, that's another law they have. Can't access the internet anonymously, basically. And yes, foreign phone numbers do work.

Though I've seen, plenty of times, smaller places have a "public" wifi with a password, and the password is just written on a piece of paper somewhere. That must technically violate that law. But you know, laws in Russia...

> Chile, you virtually needed to be a citizen, as I recall.

I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).

As a Russian: huh, you guys could still just buy a sim card without any kind of identification? Impressive. We had that ID requirement introduced way back in the 00s.

Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.

There's this: https://codeberg.org/fsphil/hacktv

It's not "VHS footage" though, but it can generate all kinds of analog video signals, some of which my decoder can decode.

Well I made this: https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/tree/master/AVDecod...

Relatedly, I recently made a software decoder for SECAM and PAL: https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/tree/master/AVDecod...

Though in my case the purpose was to digitize my video tapes and teach myself about DSP.

> USB-C port to receive firmware updates.

So do you mean that even camera lenses now ship unfinished?

So weird to me to realize that for some people, email providers have a UX, and enough of it that they could consider switching.

I've been using email through a client for decades. My primary email is Gmail, but I have no idea what Gmail is like on the web these days. Save for providers like hey.com, whose entire selling point is their unique web UX, I never understood why would someone use email in their web browser.