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ratatoskrt

118 karma · joined February 21, 2025

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ratatoskrt··on Classical statues were not painted horribly
I disagree.
ratatoskrt··on Rust cross-platform GPUI components
No mobile support. I get that a desktop UI framework doesn't want to target smartphones, but I think iPads (and bigger Android tablets) can cope well with more traditional desktop paradigms.
ratatoskrt··on ThorVG: Super Lightweight Vector Graphics Engine
Interested in this as well. I'm currenlty using Skia (through skia-safe) but I'd be quite open to try another renderer if there are performance improvments.
ratatoskrt··on German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal
Many countries do not legally permit the extradition of their own citizens. In Germany, extradition is generally only allowed to other EU countries, which meant the German government’s options were quite limited.
ratatoskrt··on How to Build a Smartwatch: Picking a Chip
I don't know, I don't think there are many open-source third-party firmware implementations for these kinds of chipsets out there, so it seems pretty well obscured.
ratatoskrt··on How to Build a Smartwatch: Picking a Chip
I think often it's also a combination of what you described and big companies being super risk-averse. Why risk breaking regulations if you can just say no?

Then again, lots of Wi-Fi-enabled devices support simply changing their region setting and will happily let you use different Wi-Fi bands or increase signal power.

ratatoskrt··on Odin: A programming language made for me
> why not compile-time error for reading memory that hasn't been written?

so... like Rust?

ratatoskrt··on Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo
To be fair, Git itself is a bit of a pain, and GitHub's main achievement is/was to make it somewhat bearable.
ratatoskrt··on A community-led fork of Organic Maps
The changes have been committed and pushed to a branch of the main (Apache-licensed) repo, with the clear intention of eventually being merged into the main branch. So it’s hard to argue the code isn’t published under the same licence as everything else. Still, I think they should have created their own website.
ratatoskrt··on A community-led fork of Organic Maps
Ugh... I guess legally it's okay (as the whole code including the website seems to be Apache-licensed) but the optics are not great...
ratatoskrt··on Just use HTML
Why does this feel like an LLM's attempt at satire?
ratatoskrt··on Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war
...why? Seems pretty sensible to me?
ratatoskrt··on DNS piracy blocking orders: Google, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS respond differently
If I set up my own authoritative DNS servers, can I still use DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS?
ratatoskrt··on Show HN: Aberdeen – An elegant approach to reactive UIs
As someone who moved to the UK from abroad, it was crazy for me to see how unequal the UK is geographically. The main one is obviously the divide between London/everywhere else, but the general lack of infrastructure between places is wild.

On the other hand, the whole HS2 debacle is a great way to explain this to my friends outside the UK. Bizarre to think it was promised as a way to connect the north of England (and Scotland) to London and the SE...

ratatoskrt··on Show HN: Aberdeen – An elegant approach to reactive UIs
At least Edinburgh is brown.

But seriously, my main problem with Aberdeen is psychological. It feels so far from everywhere else. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, you're much closer to the rest of the UK and even the population centres in Scotland.

ratatoskrt··on Show HN: Aberdeen – An elegant approach to reactive UIs
There are certainly worse places, and the Shire is gorgeous. But it really doesn't help that it's so far from everwhere else (and I don't just mean London).
ratatoskrt··on NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
There is so much wrong with this statement (which you disguised as a question), but let's start with the fact that the government does not want different research, but mainly less research.
ratatoskrt··on Show HN: Aberdeen – An elegant approach to reactive UIs
Even worse, I live much further south :)

I will say that Aberdeenshire is absolutely beautiful though.

ratatoskrt··on Show HN: Plexe – ML Models from a Prompt
Yeah, I don't mean to indicate that the model is bad. It's just that statistics are notoriously complicated (both in terms of the mathematics involved but also intuitively understanding the impact of non-perfect data and potential interactions is really hard), and most people really, really suck at it. Once you move from the maths to actually modelling data, you have to rely a lot on (niche) domain knowledge and experience.

I'm a bit biased because I work in a space with actual statisticians, but I'd wager that it's almost impossible for current LLMs to distinguish between good and bad examples in their training data. After all, even very smart humans fail to do that.

ratatoskrt··on 6502 Illegal Opcodes in the Siemens PC 100 Assembly Manual (1980)
The German-language Wikipedia article on Stapelspeicher [1] points to a a patent registration [2].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stapelspeicher [2] https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/0069672...

ratatoskrt··on Starlink User Terminal Teardown
This is not at all how laws actually work. If you sell a product to customers in a specific country, you generally have to comply with local laws. You might be able to avoid this if you're very small and your service is entirely virtual. However, as long as Starlink needs to provide their customers with physical hardware, there are numerous ways to enforce regulations.

And you can always go after people - and I mean both Starlink executives and customers.

ratatoskrt··on Using NASA’s SMAP satellite to detect L-band interference
There is no absorption peak of water at 2.4GHz. Even worse, the absorption spectrum will change when it heats up.
ratatoskrt··on Show HN: Plexe – ML Models from a Prompt
In my experience, humans are really bad at statistics and LLMs are even worse because they basically just mimic all the typical mistakes people make.
ratatoskrt··on Starting July 1, academic publishers can't paywall NIH-funded research
Just to be clear, this is a Biden era policy.
ratatoskrt··on Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)
Not just you. Why is on the front page?
ratatoskrt··on OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience
I see a great future for Firefox.
ratatoskrt··on Which year: guess which year each photo was taken
Very clever idea! This was fun!
ratatoskrt··on Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale
It's just a typical response. What he means (in an admittedly unnecessary, snarky way) is that this is not going to revolutionise perceptual colour science. It's not going to be an out-of-this-world experience, nor will it change our understanding of how humans perceive colour. I personally think it's pretty cool, though.
ratatoskrt··on Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale
The Guardian's article on this[1] includes a quote from an eminent colour expert at City:

> The claim left one expert bemused. “It is not a new colour,” said John Barbur, a vision scientist at City St George’s, University of London. “It’s a more saturated green that can only be produced in a subject with normal red-green chromatic mechanism when the only input comes from M cones.” The work, he said, had “limited value”.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/apr/18/scientists-c...

ratatoskrt··on Kermit: A typeface for kids
Came here to say this. I don't get why this is necessary at all - it's literaly just bog-standard scrolling content?
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