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jculon The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation

I've seen a lot of code that just assumes fread / fwrite succeeded without bothering to check the return value...

But in this case if the code was calling fread 65536 times in a loop and getting 64KiB each time it wouldn't be good either!

Sounds like the parent comment had to fix this with the internal cache thing to speed up the small freads. I think they meant the easy fix would have been swapping the args in the original / caller code.

jculon A PDF that changes based on how its read

Yeah it's quite strange. I was tapping trying to expand it. Tried landscape but it truncates at the same point (Firefox android).

jculon Branchless Quicksort faster than std:sort and pdqsort with C and C++ API

First version has a side effect of writing to small_numbers[0] always.

The compiler probability can't optimize that in the second version.

If it wrote unconditionally and incremented only in the if then I'd guess they would compile to the same thing.

jculon Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: study

Magnesium has a crazy effect on my sleep, very very noticeably deeper.

Not necessarily more restful, but deep and I don't remember anything. With B6 it's deep but more interspersed with vivid dreams.

I take zinc with them too, my own zma stack basically. I'm not sure the zinc has a direct effect on sleep, I take it for testosterone benefits.

These made me realize that legal vitamins and supplements can have much more than a subtle effect.

jculon Zig: Build System Reworked

It made me laugh to think of C implementers being adversarial! It can feel that way.

I haven't really used modern C, not sure if it's evolved as much as modern C++, which I feel is a joy to use, and a lot safer. But then I've been writing C++ for decades.

I feel like C evolved from basically syntax sugar for assembly, so that's where all the footguns come from, rather than being actually adversarial.

jculon Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)

Reminds me of that guy who started drinking water upside down to train his swallow muscles and cure his chronic heartburn.

jculon Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)

If you've ever done the wim hof breathing method, it is a very intense experience.

Basically hyperventilation + long breath holds. Probably similar to what free divers do without the mammalian dive reflex due to the cold water. Or like a dangerous game kids used to do when I was in school where you hyperventilate and then have someone press on your chest until you pass out.

But anyway, I'm not sure if the science would back it up, but Wim Hof describes it as over oxygenating the blood and then stopping and letting CO2 ramp up or something. Whether it is significantly dropping the CO2 or increasing oxygen during the hyperventilation phase, isn't it kind of the same thing? Adjusting the ratio.

Anecdotally, when I was doing it regularly I seemed to not get sick at all.

jculon Scrcpy v4.0

Or like me you disabled the usb port entirely before first unlock on grapheneos, and then break your screen :(

jculon Kraftwerk's radical 1976 track

I think Chernobyl was a big factor in European sentiment towards nuclear power too, in the 80s / 90s.

I grew up in the 90s and didn't even fully understand what it was, but I remember the fear around it. I remember people in Ireland worrying about Sellafield nuclear power plant in the UK and talking about things like wind direction if there was an incident. And the government posting out iodine tablets to homes.

jculon Talking to strangers at the gym

It's a very good book, I haven't read it since I was a kid.

The title is unfortunate, and doesn't really reflect the book IMO.

It sounds like a seedy way to manipulate people and get what you want.

I think a more appropriate title would be "Treat people with kindness and decency and your life will probably be better as a result." Or "A manual for interacting with fellow humans".

I need to reread it actually.

Edit: It has been decades since I read it, but that is my recollection of it at least.

jculon NetHack 5.0.0

"pink" h? There's a way to enable colours?

jculon For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions

There was some discussion on the GitHub issues about workarounds to disable it, even though it is baked in.

https://github.com/theori-io/copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431/issues...

jculon Copy Fail

Yes, strongly agree.

This is HUGE news, I would have skimmed over "Copy Fail".

The blog post might be a better place to link to also, it has more details on the exploit.

https://xint.io/blog/copy-fail-linux-distributions

There are also some good threads on which distros are vulnerable and mitigations on the github page.

https://github.com/theori-io/copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431/issues

jculon Men who stare at walls

Reminds me of the Beatles lyric:

> I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in

> And stops my mind from wandering

> Where it will go

jculon Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen

I would say 16 tablets would be closer to 6, or even 8 euro here.

jculon Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen

Yeah, I lived in the UK before and it's a bit mad.

You can't buy antihistamines either, only in pharmacies and they are quite expensive. I remember you could get them in Tesco or Asda for like £2.

jculon Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen

In Ireland you can buy acetaminophen in stores, gas stations etc.

For ibuprofen you need to go to a pharmacy.

jculon 10 years ago, someone wrote a test for Servo that included an expiry in 2026

libfaketime is cool for testing this kind of thing too.

Not as convenient for unit tests cause you have to run the test with LD_PRELOAD.

jculon Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)

Story of your life is one of my favorite short stories.

jculon NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

The whole idea of colour and light frequency is fascinating.

These are just frequencies of light, but the subjective experience of them is so much more.

And the whole thing of my perception of "red" or what I call "red" could be very different to someone else's subjective perception. But we would both call it red and associate it with the same thing, fire, love, heat, danger etc.

jculon Significant Raise of Reports

Maybe just not the very latest.

https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using...

jculon I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

You know you can just paste mermaid into excalidraw?

It has a mermaid WYSIWYG editor and once the diagram is inserted you can edit it, move objects, add text just like you had drawn it directly in excalidraw.

I usually enter mermaid and then move things around to my liking rather than drawing from scratch.

You can also paste csv in, it's been a while since I've done it but I think it even generates a chart.

jculon I turned my Kindle into my own personal newspaper

It's such a great piece of software IMHO.

Calibre web support, opds catalogue, wallabag, ssh. And it supports so many file formats.

I'd imagine the built in reader has improved a lot over the years, but at the time reading technical pdfs on it was not feasible. KOReader allowed me to rotate to landscape and reflow the pdf text.

I almost got the Clara BW for Christmas, I thought my Clara HD was dead, wasn't sure if it was the battery or screen but it was failing to properly clear and update the screen. Someone actually bought the BW for me but I ended up returning it after I managed to recover the Clara HD.

I was kind of looking forward to the waterproofing, but seems my old one is not yet ready to give up.

jculon I turned my Kindle into my own personal newspaper

+1 for Kobo.

I've had my Kobo Clara HD for almost 8 years and I still use it daily with KOReader. It's so easy to install KOReader and it's really repairable. I replaced the SD card at one point, and another time I thought it was broken or needed a new battery but came back to life after reseating cables.

Before that I had a kindle and you had to jump through a lot of hoops to install KOreader, and I remember you had to be careful not to upgrade the firmware so it could be jailbroken.

Like I said I've had the Kobo for 8 years, so I hope this is still the case.

jculon Linux is an interpreter

That four part blog was one of the most entertaining things I've read this year, thanks.

Really in the spirit of "hacker" news IMO.

I get the motivation, it's less avoiding the 1.50 per month and more like a challenge to work around it!

jculon Missile defense is NP-complete

Interesting stuff, thanks for the long and detailed response.

jculon Missile defense is NP-complete

Really interesting.

Forgive my ignorance, but I thought Israel's "iron dome" offered a very effective defense.

Is this just from short distance missiles from neighbouring countries?

This article seems to indicate it's very difficult to achieve a high success rate against multiple missiles.

Admittedly I probably need to read up on this more.

jculon Is it a pint?

Do they actually call it a pint or just a half litre / large beer?

That's seems to be the norm in a lot of mainland Europe.

jculon Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition

jculon Your phone is an entire computer

Thanks, that sounds really good.

Yeah it just wasn't possible to get the text sharp enough to be usable with the vitures.

It is a while back so my memory is hazy. But I feel like the edges in particular were bad or you could focus one part of the screen but others would be distorted.

For coding, reading docs, etc you kind of need the whole screen to be in sharp focus. For watching a movie it's probably less important.