The_Decryptor

Pretty sure that’s just high-frequency trading.

This behavior is actually in line with what I’d expect, as Unicode support in Windows predates UTF-16, so Windows generally does not handle surrogate pairs and instead operates almost exclusively on WTF-16 code units directly.

So it’s just straight UCS-2, and the software does enforce that, pretty much the opposite of “WTF-16”.

Edit: Pretty sure “modern” (XP+ I think) Windows actually does enforce UTF-16 validity in the system, but there’s always legacy stuff from the NT4/2K era that might turn up.

Webp is a smaller file size than jpeg for the same image quality in almost all circumstances

For lower quality images sure, for high quality ones JPEG will beat it (WebP, being an old video format, only supports a quarter of the colour resolution than JPEG does, etc.) JPEG is actually so good that it still comes out ahead in a bunch of benchmarks, it’s just it’s now starting to show it’s age technology wise (like WebP, it’s limited to 8bpc in most cases)

It also doesn’t hurt that Google ranked sites using WebP/AVIF higher than ones that aren’t (via lighthouse).

Edit: I should clarify, this is the lossy mode. The lossless mode gives better compression than PNG, but is still limited to 8bpc, so can’t store high bit depth, or HDR images, like PNG can.

Edit 2: s/bpp/bpc/

Phones and tablets? They’ve displaced computers for a fair few people, and it’s hard to consistently run a P2P client on those devices (And that’s ignoring metered connection costs)

Well, all websites are written in JS (on the frontend)

Not true anymore unfortunately, some sites are using frameworks compiled to WASM instead.

e.g. X is apparently using Yew now.

Edit: Ok the “apparently” is doing heavy lifting, since now I can’t find the original source I read about it. Turns out “X” is a garbage name with no searchability, only an idiot would use it.

That’d at least make sense, this is a (literal) black box. Seriously, my monitor takes long enough to wake that it’s at the boot loader screen by the time it’s ready.

I found a post on Reddit claiming it’s a RAM thing, and I should enable XMP to avoid it. But I’ve already got XMP enabled so I need to poke around it again.

And also disable the 5 second delay in the bootloader, not like I’m ever using that fallback option.

❯ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 14.565s (firmware) + 5.778s (loader) + 2.920s (kernel) + 3.307s (initrd) + 3.972s (userspace) = 30.544s
graphical.target reached after 3.926s in userspace.

You’re letting me down firmware!

Yeah, the Python equivalent would be something like this.

try:
    config = get_config()
catch:
    sys.exit(1)

It’s possible to handle these things, but if you explicitly don’t then you’ll discover them at runtime.

Maybe he overheard it from somewhere.

I feel like English needs a spelling reform, but that’s never going to happen.

I like what Americans did with -ise/-ize, but they can take the ‘u’ from colour from my cold dead hands.

I’m still annoyed that “OPAQUE” never seemed to catch on. Uses a username/password combo as normal, but never actually sends the password to the server, only a proof of knowledge. Even if the server is hacked and the DB leaked the attackers can’t actually recover anything resembling a password from it, since the server simply never possesses it.

Passkeys are superior (No password at all), if only the UX around them was better.

They’ve released at least one screenshot, but since they mostly use it for internal testing, and they very rarely ever release those builds, there’s not much to go on.

So builds they didn’t intend to release provide the best insight.

Now I’ve only ever used the English releases, but I know before Vista that this simply wasn’t a thing. Each language release was a separate build, handled separately by different teams. So there was never a mixing of languages or loading strings at runtime, they were hardcoded into the binaries that shipped on disk.

The actual term for it is “Pseudolocalization”, might throw up a hit

From the Wikipedia link above

In the United States and Canada, in a nutritional context, the “large” unit is used almost exclusively.

In the European Union, on nutrition facts labels, energy is expressed in both kilojoules and kilocalories, abbreviated as “kJ” and “kcal” respectively.

So yeah, it’s confusing if you’re not American.

Windows doesn’t even have basic package management like every Unix-like OS does so you don’t have to individually update applications and go find them on the Internet

Funny thing is that it does (winget), but it’s a terminal app. Windows users who look down on Linux users for “needing” to use a terminal don’t want to bring it up, so Linux users also aren’t aware of it and never point to it as a counter example.

They already remastered Halo:CE in the Master Chief Collection. I know it was criticized as a bad remaster, but it’s weird to just do it again before…

The CE remaster was done by an outside company, and they based it on the gearbox PC port. So they didn’t realise that all the glitches and bugs in the gearbox version shouldn’t have been there. To 343’s credit, when they “took ownership” of it in the MCC, they did fix a lot of those issues. Turns out having the original devs and artists still hanging around helps.

It is literally just a shiny coat of paint over the old engine though, so things like collisions are using the original map geometry while rendering uses the upgraded ones. There’s a few places (on the level “Halo” iirc) where you can get stuck on invisible things that you can only see by turning off the new graphics.

It was Apple. Or rather, regulators and partnering companies leaning on Apple to manage the content on their app store better, including the content that you could find via those apps.

Could say something about how the app stores are a monopoly power, and the chilling effect these wide ranging and heavy handed content policies have, and why the open web (and web apps) are a better option. But we also handed the web over to Google anyway, so it’s not that much better.

We’re as close to quantum computers as we are to ChatGPT becoming sentient.

My favourite thing about Halo FTL is how it handles causality, basically relying on the universe to act like a sponge and “soak it up” as it reconciles it across spacetime.

Send too much mass (aka the Halo array) and it massively slows down travel galaxy wide, as the spacetime is “sodden” and takes longer to reconcile it. Meanwhile in the days leading up to the firing of the Halo array slipspace travel suddenly became easier and quicker than had ever been experienced, as the Forerunner realise that after the firing of the array the amount of slipspace travel in the entire galaxy will be nil.

The calculator leaked 32GB of RAM, because the system has 32GB of RAM. Memory leaks are uncontrollable and expand to take the space they’re given, if you had 16MB of RAM in the system then that’s all it’d be able to take before crashing.

Abstractions can be super powerful, but you need an understanding of why you’re using the abstraction vs. what it’s abstracting. It feels like a lot of them are being used simply to check off a list of buzzwords.