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paol

2,977 karma · joined August 10, 2010

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paol··on RTX 5090 Street Prices Top $9k as Nvidia GPU Costs Climb
That comparison is nonsensical, it exploits a vulnerability in the retail system in order to not pay for the hardware at all.

On the other hand, if you do include the cost of the hardware it doesn't seem change the overall conclusion.

paol··on Is your Postgres migration safe or not safe?
This looks extremely useful.

If you continue working on this a good direction to go in would be to package it as a command line tool, so it can be integrated into testing and release processes.

paol··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
Superhot VR and Half-Life Alix, in that order. Sprinkle in some Beatsaber to taste.

Playing Superhot VR for the first time made me experience actual physical euphoria. I hadn't had that reaction to a new tech thing since I first got a ZX Spectrum as a little kid.

The only downside of starting with these is that it sets the bar incredibly high. But I still recommend it - it's hell of an introduction to a new medium.

paol··on Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public
How meaningful is that in a society where political dissidence is suppressed?
paol··on Ad Blocker Test – Check If Your Ad Blocker Works
This is clearly broken, it shows "3 blocked" even as uBO is reporting 89 requests to 34 different domains blocked.

EDIT it's below the fold: "Some browser/blocker combinations may affect results. If uBlock Origin breaks the test, allow adblock.turtlecute.org."

paol··on Peter Neumann has died
Sometime in the 2000s I started reading the RISKS Digest mailing list[1] from the beginning. I did it for fun - it's an interesting mix of fun anecdotes and lessons learned, and the 80's and early 90's were before my time which I found interesting too.

A side effect of reading the mailing list in bulk is that a set of common "stereotypes" of failure (for lack of a better word) start to emerge clearly from the stream of anecdotes. These really influenced my mental model of technology risks. I would still recommend the exercise for anyone interested in the subject.

[1] https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/

paol··on HDMI 2.1 Display Stream Compression (DSC) Ready for Amdgpu Linux Driver
It was blocked from inclusion in the AMD GPU drivers, it's nothing specific to Steam or the Steam Machine.

The HDMI Forum apparently forbids any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. Although I don't know if they ever offered an official justification, for a group that exists to promote HDMI adoption, they're clearly morons.

paol··on Motorola GrapheneOS devices will be bootloader unlockable/relockable
I was in the same boat and literally this week bought a Pixel 8. It's a 2 year old phone but with the extended support period that's no longer a problem, and being old means you can get it new for about €300 or refurbished for even less.

The other option is the Samsung S2x line, which you can apply the same strategy to.

paol··on VW is bringing physical buttons back to the dashboard with the ID. Polo EV
> I'd love to know what the justification for replacing them in the first place was.

There were two converging factors: number one is that there was a time where it was considered a sign of sophistication / progress. Definitely a case of form over function, but remember this was the era when everything Tesla did was cool and everyone was chasing them.

The second factor is cost. Physical buttons are expensive to design, certify and manufacture (most people don't have a notion of how high the durability bar is for everything that goes into a car interior). Once you have to have a touchscreen anyway you can (theoretically) remove almost all physical controls.

paol··on Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months
They don't need to expand capacity to fulfill this contract.

They would want to expand capacity if they believed this increase in demand is long lasting - the implication is therefore that they don't believe it, or not enough to risk major capital expenditures.

You saw the same with GPU makers not wanting to expand capacity during the Cryptocurrency boom. They don't want to be left holding the bag when the bubble pops.

paol··on Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
Truly, the writers of Yes Minister were documentarians. That line could have been straight out of the show.
paol··on Lessons from Growing a Piracy Streaming Site
They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't.

"Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell

paol··on Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering?
I've had something similar happen starting maybe a year ago, and varying in intensity from "no problem" up to "pegged CPU in the youtube tab and UI actions can lag up to several seconds". It doesn't affect video playback though.

This behavior comes and goes over time, for example it's been fine for several weeks in a row now. I assume it's punishment for running an ad-blocker.

paol··on YouTube addresses lower view counts which seem to be caused by ad blockers
I use uBo which uses easylist, and when I watch youtube videos they are marked as viewed, so this explanation does not seem likely?
paol··on A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
I would like this too. This approach would also fix the most common failure mode of spelling checkers: typos that are accidentally valid words.

I constantly type "form" instead of "from" for example and spelling checkers don't help at all. Even a simple LLM could easily notice out of place words like that. And LLMs also could easily go further and do grammar and style checking.

paol··on Documenting what you're willing to support (and not)
> a giant social network. You know, the one with all of the cat pictures

This really doesn't narrow it down.

> and later the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism.

Still not helping.

paol··on Lenovo Legion Go S: Windows 11 vs. SteamOS Performance, and General Availability
That would be plausible if the effect was only seen in one game, or a small handful. Instead it's happening across the board, with almost all games tested showing at least some gain, and many showing gains comparable to CP2077.

At that point it has to be a platform/stack difference.

paol··on ZX Spectrum graphics magic
The hacks paid off though. The cheapness made the Spectrum ubiquitous across whole swaths of europe. Not only was it the first computer of an entire generation, it was the first generation where many people had a computer.
paol··on Zero-Downtime Kubernetes Deployments on AWS with EKS
You mean the problem you describe in "Part 3" of the article?

Damn it, now you've made me paranoid. I'll have to check the ELB logs for 502 errors during our deployment windows.

paol··on Zero-Downtime Kubernetes Deployments on AWS with EKS
I'm not sure why they state "although the AWS Load Balancer Controller is a fantastic piece of software, it is surprisingly tricky to roll out releases without downtime."

The AWS Load Balancer Controller uses readiness gates by default, exactly as described in the article. Am I missing something?

Edit: Ah, it's not by default, it requires a label in the namespace. I'd forgotten about this. To be fair though, the AWS docs tell you to add this label.

paol··on Passing the Buck: The story of the 2022 Wings Over Dallas air show collision
And yet the quality of that channel is absolutely excellent, and the polar opposite of what the thumbnail clickbait suggests. I'd say it's on the same level of the Admiral Cloudberg blog actually.

And to be clear I completely agree with your reaction to the clickbait. If I didn't already know the channel I would probably avoid the videos too. And I've seen this happen with other channels. It seems to be an unfortunate effect of the current youtube "meta".

paol··on Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam
Agree. Over-balancing everything in single player games sucks out the fun.

"Single-player" here is key - minutely perfect balancing is often a necessity in multiplayer games, and I suspect sometimes that mentality is carried over to single-player experiences without stopping to question it.

paol··on Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why
I consider them noticeably above average. The problem is with the average.
paol··on Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why
What a terrible article. When you have a section titled "The Problem With Hardcoded Filters", it's entire contents should be about how the only way they have to prevent their bot from emitting outrageously libelous claims about people is to shut it down completely. So the other 8 billion people on earth who are not in that 6 name blacklist will continue to be defamed without consequence.
paol··on Supreme Court wants US input on whether ISPs should be liable for users' piracy
From the arguments I've read against this, I think not enough emphasis is being placed on the strongest one:

In the modern world online access is as necessary as water, power and phone service. No one would suggest forcing the power company to cut service to a customer over trivial civil law matters (which is what copyright is) that are completely unrelated to the company or the service it provides. No one should suggest cutting internet access either.

I guess ISPs in the US don't want to use that argument due to the regulatory implications (the common carrier classification thing)? But someone should be making that argument to the court.

paol··on Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify
I got stuck in the spiral slide on the same level. I got the impression framerate glitches are affecting the collision detection (common physics implementation pitfall). I could be wrong though.

Still, very cool. Too cool to waste on marketing in fact :)

paol··on Handling cookies is a minefield
Cookie header parsing is a shitshow. The "standards" don't represent what actually exists in the wild, each back-end server and/or library and/or framework accepts something different, and browsers do something else yet.

If you are in complete control of front-end and back-end it's not a big problem, but as soon as you have to get different stuff to interoperate it gets very stupid very fast.

paol··on Unreal 5.5 is a big deal [video]
5090 is rumored to draw 600W. I'm afraid reality has overtaken your satire.
paol··on Show HN: IMDb SQL Best Movie Finder
Since you're denormalizing to a single table, I think the correct way to handle this would be to aggregate all the titles into the title column.

Although "Untitled Pixar Animation Project" is basically garbage data, but that's a harder problem to solve...

paol··on Show HN: IMDb SQL Best Movie Finder
Seems to be some normalization problem with the data, right in the 1st page of the default query there's a duplicate entry.
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