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larschdk

725 karma · joined September 3, 2011

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larschdk··on Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)
And sadly it still has some unfixed bugs since 2015 where people don't consider the up/down indicators correctly, and will not enter the elevator even though the lights are on in the direction they want to go.
larschdk··on Elevator Saga: An elevator programming game (2015)
I think the reason for this could be to prevent you cancelling other people's destinations. I can only imagine the public freakout that could unfold, even if it was accidental.
larschdk··on Inkscape 1.1
I feel like the main mistake here is that Inkscape uses the .svg extension for what it basically it's own format. While it is essentially .svg compatible, it includes many extensions and metadata necessary for Inkscape to function. You should really save as optimized or plain .svg before publishing anything made in Inkscape.
larschdk··on Systemd: The Good Parts
DNS + NTP are completely optional, but you get really good integration with systemd-networkd's DHCP client if you use them. Switching network is completely seamless, and the resolver updates fully automatically (direct DNS and NTP are blocked in many networks, sadly). Also, you get something that works out of the box, with essentially 0 configuration. You can't even install a system today over the internet without setting the time, and systemd-timesyncd does it with 0 configuration.
larschdk··on Rust Weird Expressions
I often feel the same, and there is certainly a bit of learning curve, but in my experience, all the time you spend battling the compiler in Rust is time saved from debugging in C++, several times over. I'm repeatedly surprised by how my code just works when it finally compiles. It's like the compiler is telling you, "you just made a bug".
larschdk··on Managing Dotfiles with GNU Stow (2016)
Yes it does. I do the same, with an alias and have .git somewhere else not directly in $HOME, but pointing to it with --git-dir. If you run git in ~, it will not recognize it as a git repository or worktree. You can only modify the repo with the alias or by specifying --git-dir explicitly.

These setup also prevents zsh/bash git prompt extensions from detecting git the the home folder repo, which can be confusing, I think.

larschdk··on Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement
Looking like a photo is quite distinguishable from human vision.
larschdk··on Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement
Impressive, but I think that photorealism is not necessarily what you would want to strive for in games, as it is not true realism. It emulates the deficiencies of the camera that we perceive it as realistic, because we are trained on thousands of photo images and video footage. I prefer visionrealism instead of photorealism in my games and don't really find that lens effects like flares, chromatic aberration, and depth of field enhances the experience of realism. It feels like I'm looking through a camera rather than being there myself. For me it breaks immersion instead of enhancing it.
larschdk··on Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace
HMD was established, by Nokia, to produce phones, since Nokia wasn't allow to under the agreement with Microsoft, and is run by ex-Nokia executives. HMD bought "back" the Nokia Mobile division from Microsoft. Nokia holds shares in HMD. nokia.com sells the HMD phones. It is a bit more Nokia than just by name.
larschdk··on A QR code built from Emoji
qrencode (https://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/) already does. It even does half-height squares (2 bits per character).
larschdk··on A QR code built from Emoji
qrencode[1] has been doing this for a long time in the terminal. It even supports half-block UTF-8 character (two bits per character, which makes them more square).

[1]: https://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/

larschdk··on Linus Torvalds' good taste argument for linked lists, explained
How I wish more programmers would understand this. It's like learning to eat broccoli. At first, its bitter and unfamiliar, but if you are exposed to it, you learn to recognize it and like it, and it's actually good for you despite the initial unpleasant taste.
larschdk··on The Raspberry Pi 4 has a fan now – the Case Fan
I got one of those all metal passive cooling cases for the Raspberry Pi 4 off Ali Express and it keeps it at below 50°C idle and maxes out at 65°C with all cores running. No fans necessary.
larschdk··on Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC
I boot my RPi 4 entirely from USB with the Sep-3-2020 bootloader. No sd-card inserted. The Sandisk Extreme Pro benchmarks at 230 MB/s on USB 3.0.
larschdk··on Building Containers Without Docker
systemd also has container support baked it. It's actually as simple as 'pacstrap/debootstrap' followed by 'machinectl start'.
larschdk··on Modern C
He makes a point of including all the newer features of C, including fixed-size integers, thread API, restrict qualifiers, and atomics, and dedicate a very significant part of the book to them. On top of that he gives many best-practice advice, that you could call "modern", as they are often violated in 20+ year old C code (and often by people who learned C in the 80's, in my experience).
larschdk··on DNA revealed the woolly mammoth's fate, and what it teaches us today
kya?
larschdk··on Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead
Is there a note taking tool that fully separates taking the note from the organizing (filing) and auto-archives everything? After using any tool, e.g. OneNote or even just a text file for a while, I get overwhelmed every time I open it to take a note as it is littered with stuff that I no longer need. I want a tool that only shows me what I'm working on. I don't want to build a collection of notes. I want to record my thoughts and be able to retrieve them later, optionally organize some things for easier access. The rest should be auto-archived by default. I use a college notepad this way, but found no tool that lets me just start on a blank page and ignore the history.
larschdk··on So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)
Just today I needed to write a .csv file in Python on Windows and got a file with CR CR LF line endings by default (\r\r\n). That was using the standard 'import csv' in Python 3.
larschdk··on Safe: Set maximum capacity for any room, floor, or building
The stylized design makes my brain recognize is as just another random inspirational poster or an add, not something I should pay attention to. We have standard and widespread symbols already for stop/go which should be applied here in some form.
larschdk··on ISS Docking Simulation
I made a working autopilot in a userscript: https://youtu.be/JbWJ6EDodqc (Luckily, RCS fuel is unlimited).
larschdk··on ISS Docking Simulation
The pitch/yaw/roll rates have opposite sign to what I would expect (at least as a layman). Positive rate means decreasing angle.
larschdk··on Take care editing bash scripts (2019)
Using rename() does this for you. It's actually guaranteed to preserve the contents of the old file for any process still having it open while atomically letting any future process only see the new file.
larschdk··on WinUI – The modern native UI platform of Windows
Sorry, but it already is. No-one write layout engines or canvas rasterizers any more. They just use chromium. Spotify, Teams, Slack... I expect even Word + Excel to eventually transition.
larschdk··on 0.999...= 1
I don't mean to troll you, but if you were doubtful that 0.999... = 1, then you should also be doubtful that 0.333.. = 1/3. Any argument that 0.999... is not quite 1 can also be used to argue that 0.333... is not quite 1/3.

I think it's mostly a matter of definition, since mathematicians consider sums of infinite series equal to their limit (if it's finite), i guess for many practical reasons. If you accept this, then 0.999... = 1. If you don't, then 0.999... can't be assigned a value (but converges to 1), which may be the intuitive understanding of infinite series for some.

larschdk··on 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
The widgets look spot on, but the text has atrocious kerning. 'ti', 'll', 'd!' are squashed together. Windows 95++ had extremely good small size font rendering and did pixel perfect alignment and kerning of pretty much any font (However, the UI font was probably bitmapped). Remove the 'letter-spacing' styling - it breaks kerning.
larschdk··on Log-log plot of new vs. total Covid-19 cases by country
You can't easily compare countries if you plot against time. China's outbreak was in February, USA's is now. As pointed out in the video (https://invidio.us/watch?v=54XLXg4fYsc), viruses don't care if it's March 29th or February 2nd. They are a "function" of the number of infected (and other parameters, but not time).
larschdk··on Why Not WireGuard
Static IP addressing inside the tunnel is still a major pain point for significant use-cases, e.g. company-wide VPN access for all employees. How do you do static addressing for 200+ people with their own devices?
larschdk··on Why not to use (f)lex, yacc or bison
I don't think you are particularly restricted to doing this, but lex/yacc was conceived and designed at a time (1970s) when memory was limited, and speed and size of code that could be parsed was valued much higher than structured code and being able to provide good error messages. You simply can't do a recursive descent parser with an in memory AST in 64KiB of RAM while being able to parse any meaningful size source file. You had to serialize the problem and output a sequential AST/intermediate opcodes on the fly. FSA based lexers and parsers are beautiful in how little RAM they actually require and how fast they are, albeit clunky and very low level by modern standards.
larschdk··on DuckDuckGo Traffic
For me, the killer feature is DDG's solid keyboard navigation of search results. Google's never worked properly and they eventually removed it.
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