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jamesfmilne

853 karma · joined November 4, 2011

Baselight developer

http://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/

submissionscomments
jamesfmilne··on We Replaced MMAP with Io_uring in Our Rust Query Engine. It Got Slower
Second System Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Coined by Fred Brooks in "The Mythical Man-Month" in 1975.

jamesfmilne··on Afterglow: Run classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS
You need to enable the Screen Saver module in the Afterglow settings first. Works great.
jamesfmilne··on Afterglow: Run classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS
Yes it works, but you need to enable it in the Afterglow settings first.
jamesfmilne··on Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise
Yeah, I worked in Soho for about 14 years and most Thursdays were out at the Pillars of Hercules or Dog & Duck. Fridays are for the out-of-towners.

The company has moved to Bermondsey now, and to be fair the drinks-after-work culture seems to still going fairly strong around this part of town.

The biggest spanner in the works has been my cohort all having kids and not having the spare time to socialise after work.

Definitely miss all that. My liver & pancreas don't miss it though, so it's probably for the best.

jamesfmilne··on Fully Featured Audio DSP Firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico
That's the maximum delay when adding a delay for synchronising with other sources.

The end-to-end delay is about 10ms, according to this comment:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/i...

jamesfmilne··on FFmpeg 8.1
I've had great results using JPEG-XS to transport video for colour grading in feature film & TV post production. At 3:1 or 4:1 compression ratio is effectively lossless.

It is patent-encumbered though, you have to pay license fees to deploy it.

jamesfmilne··on FFmpeg 8.1
Yeah, we've been deploying JPEG-XS for high bitrate streaming for a while.

A lot of our customers are moving their grading systems into data centres and streaming the images over IP back to their grading suites.

I've got it down to less than 1 frame for encode-transport-decode, but you've still got to copy the image to an SDI card and wait for that to clock out.

jamesfmilne··on Mountain home near Aspen, built for monks, sold to Palantir CEO for $120M
Life imitates art

The Mountainhead https://www.imdb.com/title/tt35396529/

jamesfmilne··on 1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio – RDMA over Thunderbolt 5
macOS ships with drivers for Mellanox ConnectX cards, but I have no idea if they will show up in `ibv_devices` or `ibv_devinfo`.
jamesfmilne··on macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt
I found some useful clues here. Looks like it uses the regular InfiniBand RDMA APIs.

https://github.com/Anemll/mlx-rdma/commit/a901dbd3f9eeefc628...

jamesfmilne··on macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt
Anyone found any APIs related to this?

I'd have some other uses for RDMA between Macs.

jamesfmilne··on Learning music with Strudel
Bravo!
jamesfmilne··on Hyperoptic: IPv6 and Out-of-Order Packets
Same, haven't had any problems with IPv6 via Hyperoptic. He might just be unlucky having some defective equipment upstream.
jamesfmilne··on Hyperoptic: IPv6 and Out-of-Order Packets
I'm on Hyperoptic and use IPv6 regularly. Pretty sure it was enabled by default.

I haven't had the same problems this guy has, although I do believe his issues are real.

jamesfmilne··on Microsoft to force install the Microsoft 365 Copilot app in October
If you find yourself needing to install Windows 11 for some reason (I'm doing my best to avoid it), you can try this to create a stripped-down Windows 11 installer with most of the crap removed:

https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2025/09/06/tiny11-builder-sep...

jamesfmilne··on I designed my own fast game streaming video codec – PyroWave
JPEG-XS is great for low latency, but it uses more bandwidth. We're using it for low-latency image streaming for film/TV post production:

https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/store/press_releases/filmlight-...

We currently use the IntoPIX CUDA encoder/decoder implementation, and SRT for the low-level transport.

You can definitely achieve end-to-end latencies <16ms over decent networks.

We have customers deploying their machines in data centres and using them in their post-production facilities in the centre of town, usually over a 10GbE link. But I've had others using 1GbE links between countries, running at higher compression ratios.

jamesfmilne··on Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update
I've been paying for YouTube premium for probably 2 years now. Never had any inserted ads. Only the "this video is sponsored by" stuff, which you can just skip over.

I can't possibly go back to non-Premium YouTube, and if they mess around with Premium I'll probably be moving on from YouTube.

jamesfmilne··on Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
Yeah DAT was big in electronic music.

Everyone in DnB documentaries talks about going to Music House with DATs to get dubplates cut to play in the clubs later on that evening.

This would have been before CD-Rs were commonplace, early 90s.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnB/s/hl1MiCvzqD

jamesfmilne··on Show HN: I built a hardware processor that runs Python
Could be a candidate for Tiny Tapeout in the future.

https://tinytapeout.com

jamesfmilne··on The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst
And unfortunately they have had to lay off half their studio:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/half-of-myst-developer-cyan-wo...

The news from a lot of games studios has been pretty brutal over the last couple of years.

jamesfmilne··on Hyperspace
Would be nice if git could make use of this on macOS.

Each worktree I usually work on is several gigs of (mostly) identical files.

Unfortunately the source files are often deep in a compressed git pack file, so you can't de-duplicate that.

(Of course, the bigger problem is the build artefacts on each branch, which are like 12G per debug/release per product, but they often diverge for boring reasons.)

jamesfmilne··on 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly penalised
As a North London resident, the parking app situation is just as farcical for me.

There are at least three different apps for parking around me: RingGo, PayByPhone and JustPark.

I went to East London recently to visit the Velodrome, and discovered yet another one: Evology.

It's always great fun, standing around in the car park trying to wrangle your cards whilst creating yet another account to pay for 30 minutes of parking.

Then, of course, there's the 50/50 chance that my iPhone has decided to offload the parking app you need because you haven't used it in the last month or so.

And occasionally RingGo will decide to log me out, and when I go to log back in for some reason the last password I have in my password manager doesn't work, so now I also have to reset my password.

Agreed, paying for parking has turned into a total farce.

jamesfmilne··on Saying goodbye to FFmpegKit
I was under the impression you can't ship FFMPEG in an app on iOS/tvOS/iPadOS anyway given FFMPEG is licensed as LGPL.
jamesfmilne··on Ask HN: Is onboard audio still good enough compared to dedicated Sound Cards?
If you are experiencing digital noise in the output, like buzzing or clicking that correlates either activity on your computer, try installing a ground loop isolator in between your computer and speakers.

This is essentially a mini transformer that physically isolates speaker/amp from the computer to isolate any power related noise.

They are dead cheap on Amazon these days.

Other than that, a USB DAC might help. You don't need an expensive one, which are mainly expensive due to inputs & microphone preamps. The main benefit will be a reduced noise floor/less background hiss, although that can also come from the amp driving your speakers.

jamesfmilne··on David Lynch has died
Also on The Grauniad

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/16/david-lynch-twi...

jamesfmilne··on Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
https://www.xojo.com/
jamesfmilne··on New Mac Mini with M4
Yes, Apple Screen Sharing is built in. It's based on VNC. You can definitely run it from another Mac, although it's not a great experience with other VNC clients on Windows or Linux. They appear to have their own encoding via VNC, based on H264 or HEVC, and falling back to the encodings supported by other clients is pretty laggy.

NoMachine runs alright on macOS.

jamesfmilne··on Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past (2023)
My colleague in Tokyo has 10Gb internet in his apartment.

The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed

jamesfmilne··on Kioxia Demonstrates Raid Offload Scheme for NVMe Drives
HW RAID is dead, they need to get over it.

We've had good experience with Xinnor, but it's a shame it's proprietary.

I'd love to see a high-performance open-source erasure coding solution for NVMe. The built in offerings in Linux are not cutting it.

jamesfmilne··on A Better Light Source for Scanning Color Negative Film
We offered an LED light source for both Northlight 1 and 2 as an upgrade over the previous metal halide bulb light source.

https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/pdf/datasheets/FL-NL-DS-0566-NL...

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