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rft

508 karma · joined December 29, 2017

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rft··on Steam Machine
I want to echo a previous comment of mine on this topic:

With the rise of mainstream-compatible, as in a standard gamer can get them running and use them with a similar frustration level as Win11, Linux first systems like steam deck, steam machine and even steam frame, there is a real, even if currently low, pressure for big publisher to support Linux/SteamOS. I somewhat hope/fear there will be a blessed SteamOS version that supports anticheats enough for publishers like EA, Epic and Riot to accept the risk.

rft··on Steam Controller
Yepp, saw that number and I am very hopeful about it. But numbers are not everything and can be gamed (heh), the "feel" during gameplay is most important. I hope to try it out "early 2026" :).

I get very annoyed by the atrocious audio delay of Bluetooth, so I'll keep my long USB cable ready.

P.S. I am aware of USB also not being zero latency, but it is the lower bound, the dongle is USB as well.

rft··on Steam Frame
I have seen different options of "HUDs" in VR games, not all are actually "heads up". Adding them to the proper context sometimes makes more sense than having them floating in mid air like in pancake view. Examples I have seen are 1) ammo count on the weapon directly, 2) score and score board to the side or projected onto the "floor", 3) attached to cockpit elements in space/flight sims and 4) somewhat affected by physics so they rubber band a bit with movements. I can't come up with an example of fully static HUD elements, but I am sure I have seen some.

And even if fully static contents were a problem, I guess the foveated streaming would introduce enough noise to counter burn-in.

rft··on Steam Controller
I have to say, I am nearly as hyped about this controller as I am about the frame. I can hook up my gaming PC to my living room TV to play on the couch and a decent controller is all I was missing. I always thought a steamdeck just as a controller would be great, especially the touch pads. I hope the latency feels great over wireless, but I don't mind the USB-C connection if needed.

Valve really did great here with providing all three connection options (BT, dedicated wireless, USB-C).

rft··on My friends and I accidentally faked the Ryzen 7 9700X3D leaks
Where do you think this stuff [1] is cooked up? To be fair, we mostly use Signal though.

[1] https://github.com/AngryUEFI/ZenUtils

rft··on Valetudo: Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation
I don't have any links for assembled boards, but there seem to be some available [1]. You can find the PCB files here [2] including more documentation. The same page also has a Telegram group link to find people near you who might be able to help out.

I got my PCBs made via JLCPCB, but there are other options as well. Pay attention to select the correct PCB thickness, noted in the Readme. I fell into that trap and had to order again. Sourcing the USB port with the correct footprint was a bit annoying, I just ended up ordering a selection of kits with multiple variants from Aliexpress.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45699184

[2] https://github.com/Hypfer/valetudo-dreameadapter

rft··on Valetudo: Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation
Adding to the praise of "it just works". My Dreame L10S Ultra was straightforward to root after getting the breakout PCBs required. Now it only talks to NTP and the update server when I remember to check for updates every few months.
rft··on Die shots of as many CPUs and other interesting chips as possible
Another great resource is this site: https://misdake.github.io/ChipAnnotationViewer/?map=Zeppelin... It has a Google Maps like interface for exploring die shots and even some annotated versions of chips.
rft··on Paper2video: Automatic video generation from scientific papers
A VR interactive thesis defense/sword fighting crossover game sounds just weird enough to work. Maybe base it on the fight mechanics of Until You Fall [1], we could call it "Until You Graduate" (I will see myself out for that one) or "Thesis Offense" [2].

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/858260/Until_You_Fall/

[2] https://xkcd.com/1403/

rft··on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account
Same, but I mostly play indie, older and/or singleplayer games. I now often don't even check ProtonDB when buying games, it has gotten that good. Anything AAA, multiplayer and new tends to cause problems due to anti cheats though.
rft··on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account
IMO the rise of handhelds like the Steam Deck has a decent chance of pushing big publishers to consider releasing for Linux/Proton. These handhelds fit the niche between smart phone and console gamers [1] that might have some potential growth left in it. Even the availability of Windows first handhelds was not as bad for Linux gaming as SteamOS and other gaming handheld focused Linux distros have been ported to them.

On the other hand the anti cheat side has been really ratcheting up with newer releases requiring Win 11 and Secure Boot. I somewhat hope and fear we might get a blessed version of SteamOS for the Deck that is heavily locked down and has kernel/hypervisor level anti cheat functions added to it. Essentially allowing for a boot mode similar to current consoles. While it goes against the open spirit of SteamOS, it might serve as an argument to invest a bit more into the Linux side, potentially improving the ecosystem as a whole.

Or all of it might be the usual "year of the Linux desktop" pipe dream.

[1] leaving out the Switch which is heavily focused on Nintendo IP and has comparatively weak hardware

rft··on Test Results for AMD Zen 5
The linked PDF in the post contains a section on how the values are measured and a link to the test suite. Search in [1] for "How the values were measured". For another project that measures the same/very similar values you can check out [2]. They have a paper about the tool they are using [3].

There is also AMD's "Software Optimization Guide" that might contain some background information. [4] has many direct attachments, AMD tends to break direct links. Intel should have similar docs, but I am currently more focused on AMD, so I only have those links at hand.

[1] https://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf

[2] https://www.uops.info/background.html

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03282

[4] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206537

rft··on The Minecraft game score unexpectedly became big business for its composer
Just throwing https://www.frankklepacki.com/listen/soundtracks out there. This is the composer of the C&C, and many more, soundtracks.
rft··on Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)
You managed to put some of my previous experiences into far better words than I ever could. Especially the part of my "solutions" that come with tons of "this works for now, but it will break here, here and here". I never worked at a megacorp though, mostly by choice, so it was less getting airdropped from up high and more accidentally being volunteered for a project. Somehow diving deep into an unknown code base and making either surgical changes or nuking good chunks of it, is something I enjoy and have become quite good at.

Interestingly enough, I share the same hybrid of self-taught with some formal education. And after checking your blog, we also share interests in some fairly low level, niche fields, even if we choose totally different things to focus on.

rft··on Myanmar’s proliferating scam centers
There was a talk on the last CCC that covered romance scams from "call centers" in similar conditions in Myanmar. It gives some insights into the daily life from the perspective of someone who managed to flee the compound and take some documents with him. I was very surprised at the level of sophistication and organization that went into this scam. I knew about the tech support scam centers, but I still saw romance scam as something done on the individual level, not fully organized.

Talk is in German, but dubbed into English by the community. https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-erpressung-aus-dem-internet-auf-...

rft··on Let me pay for Firefox
Not trying to single you out here, I want to argue against how standard it has become to require a license server. A license server puts an expiry date on the software at an unknown point in the future. At some point the binary you downloaded after you paid for the software will stop working because the server got turned off, changed API, your internet connection is down, your local CA store got corrupted or any other kind of problem in the huge list of dependencies that goes into making a secure API call over the internet. Sure, you can put in safeguards against all kinds of issues, but that also comes at a development cost and you can never reach a point where the software will just continue to work, no matter what.

Even if you, as the company selling the software, can accept all of the above, a license server still is a liability. You sold someone a product and now you need to keep a public API running "forever" (as defined in your legalese). If something goes wrong on your end you are now denying the product you already sold to your customers who already paid for it. I know this is in the end all mitigated by some legalese, which is a whole different can of worms. You also need to make sure your license API is secure and can not leak user data or be twisted into exploiting your software during license checking. There is an ongoing cost to keep the infrastructure running.

As a sibling comment pointed out you can use local only license management like license keys or just nothing like WinRAR or FUTO Keyboard[1]. Yes, you will get users not paying for your software, there will be keygens out there. But even if you use a remote license check, there will be cracks on day 1, if your software is popular enough. I know this is an old and flawed argument, but if someone is willing to navigate a website full of malware infested, blinking ads to avoid paying for your software, they probably would not pay for it anyway.

As an example of what the end stage of hooking up every software to a remote API looks like, Stop Killing Games [2] has done a great job of highlighting just how bad it has gotten in the gaming market. I know there have been some heated discussions around the movement, but the core idea of being able to keep using the software you paid for, is something I absolutely support.

[1] https://keyboard.futo.org/

[2] https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&query=stop%20kill...

rft··on I Ported SAP to a 1976 CPU. It Wasn't That Slow
A few more links for low level CPU benchmarking

1 - https://www.uops.info/index.html similar content to Anger's tables

2 - https://reflexive.space/zen2-ibs/ how to capture per micro op data on AMD >= Zen 1 CPUs

I agree on "it depends". And usually not only on your actual code and data, but also how you arrange it over cache lines, what other code on the same core/complex/system is doing to your view of the cache and some other internal CPU features like prefetchers or branch predictors.

rft··on Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?
There also is the (somewhat) famous caps lock gamble in XCOM 2 [1].

Quote: "Hitting the key, through a rube-goldberg-esque series of events, forces all outstanding load requests to be filled immediately in a single frame. This causes a massive hitch, and potentially could crash the game. If you don't care about those adverse effects the synchronous load is faster."

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/a-single-button-press-skips-loadin...

rft··on Faulty 120W charger analysis (Anker GAN Prime) [video]
DiodeGoneWild also has quite some of those: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfUGOPyKWwiriWhjmdtvj...

The worst has to be the charger without any isolation between mains and output: https://youtu.be/qTpVhNCot3Y?t=81

Edit: just to make it obvious, check the upload date for the second link

rft··on Audiobookshelf: Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server
I run this on my home server and use it to download and listen to podcasts that don't have a video component. It struggled a bit while downloading podcasts with hundreds of existing episodes, no idea if this was fixed since I tried it.

Also want to mention that Music Assistant has an integration for it as a media source, so you can listen to podcasts/audiobooks on any speaker connected to your Home Assistant. https://www.music-assistant.io/music-providers/audiobookshel...

rft··on Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?
I find Geizhals' filtering options reasonably compact and information dense. https://geizhals.de/?cat=gra16_512&xf=132_16384&pg=1&view=li...

I like the simple table view of RPiLocator. Only a few columns, but lots of rows, no unneeded clutter. https://rpilocator.com/

Not as compact as possible, but at least shows quite some information: GSMArena. It could fit more phones into the comparison table with less whitespace/greyspace though. https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=10386&idPhone...

All sites as viewed on desktop, on mobile this would likely not work out.

I also want to echo the command line tools mention in another comment. GDB's TUI is reasonable for my use, but after some experience this recently posted terminal debugger might be better: https://github.com/al13n321/nnd via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43905185

Also the hex editor I am currently using, despite some problems: https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

An example of an information dense GUI that might be a bit overwhelming is Ghidra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghidra (page includes a basic screenshot, you can fill your screen(s) with as many sub windows and information panes as you want)

As a side note, while trying to find examples I realized just how few websites there are (any more?) that show a lot of information at the same time. Worst recent offender is YouTube's redesign with only 3 video tiles in a row on a 1440p screen, luckily easily fixed via a ublock rule.

rft··on Zentool – AMD Zen Microcode Manipulation Utility
As others have pointed out the short answer is no. The longer answer is still no if you value execution performance at least a little bit.

However, maybe, there is a way. Back when we were researching microcode we found a talk [1] that ran multiple ISAs in parallel on the same processor using microcode. We never figured out how this worked, our best guess is either swapping microcode from RAM as needed or branching to an emulator in x86 code. If this was a K10 cpu, which might be a bit old at the time of the talk, then there is no way you could fit an ARM interpreter into the update. You had, iirc, 32 triads of 3 operations each. Maybe, just maybe, you could fit a bytecode interpreter that then executes the actual ISA emulator. However you would need to hook every instruction, or at least trap on each instruction fetch and hook the appropriate handling routine and both sound very complicated.

If your infinite resources include manufacturing new silicon with the proper fast path and microcode decoder, then yes, but note that x86 and ARM have different memory models. Also at that point you just have a very expensive, very inefficient ARM processor.

[1] https://troopers.de/events/troopers16/655_the_chimaera_proce...

rft··on Zentool – AMD Zen Microcode Manipulation Utility
I have not looked at the format of the microcode yet, so this is only based on the blog post and discussions. K8 and K10 were based on Risc86 just like Zen seems to be. There also are some parallels, especially when it comes to sequence words and branch delay slots. There are also major differences like moving from triads to quads. I assume there are quite some similarities, but the current authors are better qualified to answer this at this point.
rft··on Zentool – AMD Zen Microcode Manipulation Utility
We broke the "encryption" (more like scrambling) of the AMD K8 and K10 CPU microcode updates. We released tooling to write and apply your own microcode updates. AMD did not take any actions against us. Granted, this was a university project so we clearly were within the academic context, but we were in no way affiliated with a too big to sue company.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

https://informatik.rub.de/veroeffentlichungenbkp/syssec/vero...

https://github.com/RUB-SysSec/Microcode

rft··on Bad Smart Watch Authentication
Garmin watches are partially supported by Gadgetbridge [1]. I have not used it, but it seems to at least support basic data for many Garmin watches.

[1] https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/wearables/garmin/

rft··on Every board game rulebook is awful [pdf]
Summary: For me learning by doing with good callouts and short, high point briefing before worked great. I also usually use a similar style of prompting people to do things when I am teaching people IT stuff instead of doing it for them or only talking about it (family tech support, might be a chaotic raid, but usually less twitchy /s).

As a datapoint in a similar situation, I played in a guild in Lost Ark that was quite competitive (more than I was). This game has mechanic heavy raids, but I do not know how they compare to Destiny 2. I went into early raids essentially blind and learned mostly by doing and listening to good calls during it.

A few minutes before we went in, and during the straightforward way to the bosses, someone familiar with the mechanics explained the general idea, e.g. "there is an instant kill in all phases, in the first 2 you need to stand on the whitish spots, in the 3rd phase on the reddish spots". During the actual encounters, and before the switch of mechanics, they would call out in short what to do, e.g. "stand in red" or just "red".

I personally liked this way. It gave me a rough idea what to expect and refreshed my memory enough to not screw up in the heat of the moment. The explanation itself was also quite short, because we didn't go through the play by play, only covering the important stuff and relying on in the moment callouts. Plus, some briefing happened during the run to the boss. This method might only work with a somewhat competent/disciplined group. We played like this as a guild with good raid leaders and during crunch time we had good comms discipline. In addition we went into training raids with inexperienced players, with the expectation that we might not make it, but still try our best, and usually won. There also were more or less fixed raid teams that grinded these bosses without any explanation, because everyone had done it multiple times already.

I played another game with lightly mechanics based bosses and I, or someone else, explained in about 3 chat messages what to do when we went in with randoms. It was simple enough "I do X, shoot adds when I do X, if I die, do Y". The experienced players took care of the harder/mechanics parts, everyone else covered the easy parts. If you have a semi-fixed group for this, everyone learns all mechanics at some point by observing.

Edit: Typo

rft··on Ask HN: Would you recommend a framework laptop?
I have a Framework 13 with an i7-1260p from work. Overall it is a solid laptop, I did not run into any major problems with it. My personal choice is still likely a ThinkPad due to my long, good history with them. I won't give a strong recommendation for either as I am not current on the state of the art.

My major complaint is the heat and noise it creates when in a Google Meet (in Firefox though) and that I can not rely on the standby mode not draining the battery when I need the laptop. I also have problems with docked operation (TB4 dock), but I think these are likely Linux problems, so I won't hold it against the hardware.

I like the idea and philosophy of Frameworks being easy to service/disassemble and can attest to that fact. The exchangeable ports are great for in-office work (keep an HDMI for the meeting room, an USB-A port for your colleague's thumb drive in there), but for my work from home they are essentially useless. I just keep 2x USB-C and 2x USB-A, usually only one USB-C is used for the dock connector. Build quality and overall look and feel are decent as well, but of course this is personal preference.

I have a long history with ThinkPads and never ran into problems with them. I know that some of the laptops from the same batch as my most recent one have swollen batteries by now, but they could be swapped out, acceptable after about 5 years of daily use. If I had to chose a personal laptop now, I would very likely check in on Thinkpads again, I liked the T440p and T480 series. I also have a Legion model that is holding up fine. The Framework 16 looks interesting, so I would need to check that out as well.

P.S. I know there are tweaks and fixes for most of the problems above, some I have applied, some I haven't. I am ok with the current state.

rft··on Show HN: Pumpkin – A Modern Minecraft server written in Rust
One bug abuse that blew my mind recently is the ability to have wireless redstone in vanilla [1]. I fell deep into that rabbit hole after a previous post on here about Bad Apple in Minecraft [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLynwXDnETI [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41798369

rft··on Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency
My guess is they focus on Proton for Steam Deck, which can not run VR comfortably (but, it can run it via USB-C docks/dongles, the power of a full Linux PC!). So we get constantly better Proton compatibility, including work on anti cheats, but VR is low to no priority. The market is pretty small, especially if you mostly worry about Index and related PC-tethered headsets. Also developing VR for Linux can't be an easy task.

I am especially annoyed that they more or less dropped the ball when it comes to Beat Saber via Proton. Beat Saber was an official launch title for Proton, but was unplayable for months [1].

[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/6638

rft··on Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency
Well, I got Monado and libsurvive running some time ago (Valve Index, X11, Nvidia), even for Beat Saber. It sadly was unplayable, because reflections were wrong in VR apps, it felt like both eyes using the same reflection angle instead of adjusting it to each eye. For close objects this was bearable, anything further away would look "wrong" and cause VR sickness. Also the FoV was wrong, it felt like a vignette around the screen edges, a good bit narrower than in SteamVR. Oh yeah, and the latest version did not build for me, used a previous one.

Performance, especially in Beat Saber, was great and better than SteamVR!

I would expect SteamVR to at least work enough for calibration. You could try switching to beta or other versions.

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