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wang_li

2,140 karma · joined March 17, 2015

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wang_li··on 1.38 Millimeter Microcontroller
What even are these things?
wang_li··on John Carmack on the mistakes around Quake that ruined id software
I believe id paid him to port ctf to Quake 2 and Quake 3.
wang_li··on 8086 Segmented Memory was a good idea
Paging is not part of the CPU architecture. On CPUs of the time the MMU that brought paging to the party often was a completely separate peripheral that the CPU interacted with to gate access to RAM. By contrast segments are an integral part of the CPU instruction set and your code either has to limit itself to 64KB or your application had to be aware of and include logic to manage segments.

As an aside, the memory model is flat, it's just not physically linear when implementing virtual memory addressing.

wang_li··on AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
In a previous administration they apparently concluded that while the government can't violate your first amendment free speech rights, they can ask a third party to do so. So what makes you think that the CIA won't hire blackwater or the crips to hit your toes with a ball peen hammer until you tell them what you want to know, and then walk away having not violated your constitutional right to privacy and not incriminate yourself?
wang_li··on Want your images back? That'll be $5
I, too, miss the time when I was a kid and people would give me free cookies. Now as an adult I have to buy my own cookies.
wang_li··on RFC 10008: The new HTTP Query Method
If you control the full stack then the functionality described here can be implemented with POST. The only way this comes into play is if some second party client of your service is trying to impose rules on how your backend works. My answer to that is no. I will be defining the contract by which my services operate.
wang_li··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
Self help is just education from a book rather than from an in person instructor.
wang_li··on I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
The way to criticize that comment is to point out that all the major and most important codecs that are most commonly used with ffmpeg, do not come from the ffmpeg project. H.264, H.265, libmp3lame, speex, libfdkaac, etc. all come from other projects. What ffmpeg does is provide libraries for transforming decoded data between formats and calling to and from encoders and decoders and multiplexers and bitstream formats.

It may also be worth pointing out, in terms of apportioning credit fairly, that ffmpeg has not been Bellard's project since 2004. The thing we see today is no more his project than GCC or Emacs are Stallman's projects.

wang_li··on I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer
I am of an age with Carmack and wanted to be a game developer when i was young. I very much elevated him very high. In terms of computer graphics he is very informed and talented. But I have watched him do interviews that largely focused on other areas and I find him to be pretty average or even below average. His thoughts on BJJ and AI are quite immature and don't express any special insight.
wang_li··on What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara, and flatten chicken rice
You are silly. In the US, if you choose to do so, you can get the same ingredient or higher quality ingredient or food stuff that you can get anywhere else in the world, barring a few banned items like the various European maggot cheeses.
wang_li··on A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime
Cancel your phone service and then no one can call you or interrupt you. Set it to Do Not Disturb. You got multiple choices.
wang_li··on A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime
You can trivially accomplish this under the current system. There is no need for a change that imposes your preferences on everyone.
wang_li··on Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration
As a person who drives on a daily basis, I want to know why we don't have AI controlled stop lights and overall traffic control.
wang_li··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
I'm 55 and likely have been using computers longer than that poster has been alive. Regardless of the fact that I started young, by the time I was in college the PC revolution was in full swing and everyone had and worked with computers.

My mother, born in 1934, had no problem using computers. She didn't internalize how they work, but she learned the workflows she needed. How to launch applications and so on.

The situation described in that comment is just a broken app, it has nothing to do with the age or the understanding of the user.

wang_li··on Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses
Until 2025 Carmel-by-the-Sea in California had no street addresses. The houses have names or you just have to know who lives in which building. They also didn't have postal delivery, they all had to go to the town post office and pick up their mail.
wang_li··on Life is too short for a slow terminal
If what a person does during the day is mainly interacting with text then they need a tool for working well with text. Possibly this is an editor window inside an IDE. Possibly this is a shell in a terminal emulator. However, dismissing GUIs out of hand and asserting superiority of CLI is wrong. Far more disciplines need a GUI to get maximum utility from their computers than can get by with a CLI. Designers, architects, actual engineers, artists, lawyers, etc.
wang_li··on Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?
A license is not a contract. It's a grant of permissions from an owner to a recipient that details what they can and cannot do. A license can be part of a transaction, but it does not constitute a contract. Especially in the case of free software where there is no exchange of considerations.

Regardless, contracts are not required for reliance interest to apply.

wang_li··on Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?
If you induce someone to expend resources you can have liability even if those resources are not a payment to you. You can’t license your way out liability if you advertised, formally or informally, certain features and functionality that cause people to act on that advertisement. It’s called reliance interest. It’s an actual legal principle with case law supporting it.
wang_li··on The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography
Unless you are in a vacuum, a laser that can reach a useful distance can be observed due to atmospheric scattering.
wang_li··on I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab
They aren't a hard problem to solve. In the server market it's completely solved with a BMC. The problem being solved here is someone wants to make a product using some commodity product like a raspberry pi, perform video capture on a VGA/HMDI/DP port. This is not actually a problem end users have.

If you want to plug into a system that isn't server class, then they should be producing a video card that hooks into the USB bus, the always on rail of the power supply, the power switch pin of the power supply, and has an RJ45 jack. The contents of the card should be an off the shelf BMC chip.

But realistically if you want this kind of functionality, just buy server class systems that come with it.

wang_li··on Take Action: LAPD Removed Crime Location Data. Here's Why It Matters
No. You are trying to change the rules to a different game and then use those rules to invalidate a completely unrelated point. Having bad information doesn't make the fact that partial information is better than no information. It just means you were deceived by the information and your attempt at making decisions was sabotaged. If you are so wound up in "everything and everyone is against me" you have a mental disorder. If you are just picking and choosing who you define as adversarial based on which information disagrees with your priors you are just close-minded.
wang_li··on Take Action: LAPD Removed Crime Location Data. Here's Why It Matters
Having partial knowledge is good, even in your YOU'RE RACCIIISSTTTT!!!! example. Let's explain.

Consider you have to perform a task that in some way can interact with something in the environment. You have two choices of where to perform this task. In the first location there are 20 red things in the environment. In the second location there are 20 red things and 10 blue things. You know that 1 in 10 of the blue things have a negative interaction with your task. You know nothing about the red interactions with your task. You obviously choose the location with no blue things.

wang_li··on Use your Nvidia GPU's VRAM as swap space on Linux
It’s deterministic. But as the user you don’t know enough to know what was determined.
wang_li··on HP re-releases classic computer science calculator: The HP-16C
‘dc’ has been a thing on Unix forever. It uses RPN, provides arbitrary precision arithmetic, and is programmable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dc_%28computer_program%29

wang_li··on NPM packages from Red Hat have been compromised
It's not the package manager, it's the repo and the cryptographic signatures that are trusted by the package manager and the users who choose to point their pacakge managers at those repos. The fundamental problem here is that people's risk assessment is treating a user named devioustiger12345 as having the same situation and story as Microsoft/Apple/Red Hat.
wang_li··on When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident
This is “the gun killed the victim, not the person who aimed it and pulled the trigger” argument and we shouldn’t even entertain it for one second. This was 100% done by a person.
wang_li··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
>The facts and the law here are quite simple. Man consigns LEGO collection to the store. He has a contract. The new store owner still has that liability.

That would only be true if a new owner purchased the business. In bankruptcy consigned goods become property of the consignee's bankruptcy estate and cannot be returned to the original owners. The original owners have a cause of action against the estate, but they are not guaranteed the return of the consigned goods or full recompense for the value of the goods. It largely depends on how corporate took over the franchise.

    Generally, if the consignee under such a consignment arrangement files for bankruptcy relief, the consigned goods are property of the consignee's bankruptcy estate. Accordingly, 11 U.S.C. §362(a)(3) prohibits the consignor from picking up the consigned goods after the filing of the bankruptcy. Additionally, if the consignor picks up the goods, (1) the consignor may be subject to a turnover action under 11 U.S.C §§542 or 543 for their return and/or (2) within 90 days prior to the bankruptcy filing, the consignor may be subject to a preference action under 11 U.S.C. §547(b) for their return.
From https://www.abi.org/abi-journal/navigating-the-consignment-r...
wang_li··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
He kind of is. The right thing to do here is go straight to court. All this drama, grandstanding, conspiracist thinking, and stunts are bullshit. Sue. Get the judgment. Collect.
wang_li··on Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
You're not my tech support person so I'm not going to get into it deeply, but I don't mean the phone option of "Calls on Other Devices" (which is off on my phone) or the Messages option of "Text Message Forwarding" (which only has my Macs listed.) I mean that whenever I get a voice mail on a call it shows up as an alert on my iPad and Messages receives copies of various text messages, I think via iCloud as this happens when my iPad is at home and I am miles away with my phone at the office.
wang_li··on Magnifica Humanitas
Speed limits, safety features, fuel efficiency for cars. Every government regulation is to moderate some human behavior and when that behavior is related to technology it is "taming" that technology.

We also restrict making changes to the environment, resource extraction, waste disposal, building permits, etc.

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