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chromakode

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:29AM (#50338171)
ZFS.
Re:Saying No on Sunday August 09, 2026 @03:29PM (#49234826)
Saying no without attempting to negotiate first also comes off as childish, and affects the outcome of future negotiations because it demonstrates an unwillingness to compromise.
Code is a fantastic way to capture requirements, particularly iterative product discoveries over time. It's much easier to start with a manifestation of the requirements (and tests of invariants) than starting from base principles.
Re:Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source on Thursday July 16, 2026 @02:23PM (#48938243)
For me it's the gradients and dark gray backgrounds.
Re:JPEG Compression on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @04:43AM (#47423205)
The DCT is a cool primitive. By extracting the low frequency coefficients, you can get a compact blurry representation of an image. This is used by preload thumbnail algorithms like blurhash and thumbhash. It's also used by some image watermarking techniques to target changes to a detail level that will be less affected by scaling or re-encoding.

I made a notebook a few years back which lets you play with / filter the DCT coefficients of an image: https://observablehq.com/d/167d8f3368a6d602

I don't recall any lawsuits, but whytheluckystiff made one 20 years ago. https://ruby-talk.ruby-lang.narkive.com/buiXXTZh/what-is-hoo...
Nature recently posted an interesting video [1] about what causes developing hearts to have their first beat. The gist is that eventually random electrical noise triggers a propagating wave which is then continued and repeated by the cellular automation nature of heart tissue. You don't need as much software if your system is composed of emergent properties.

[1]: https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU

Re:Ton Roosendaal to step down as Blender chairman and CEO on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @02:45PM (#45279781)
Ton is a personal hero of mine. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a 3d animator because of Ton. I discovered Blender in the early 2000s as a kid. It was my first exposure to digital art tools because it was free. When Blender open sourced in 2002 it was a massive gift to kids around the world like me. (Ton was kind enough to reply to an email of mine at the time thanking him!)

Ton and Blender have brought so much value to the world by making world-class creation tools available to everyone. Blender is one of the most successful open source projects of all time -- going from an underdog project notorious for difficult to use UI to a polished, ubiquitous, industry shaping tool. And never losing sight of the art; it still brings a huge smile to my face when Blender ships another Open Movie. Nearly ~25 years later, thank you again Ton.

Re:What to Expect from Debian/Trixie on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @12:27PM (#44661019)
For users with SSDs, saving the write wear seems like a desirable default.
Re:New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes on Monday July 21, 2025 @03:33AM (#44632638)
In my experience these are after exposures from lines of text. They get blurred together into indistinct lines because your eye focus moves between words, superimposing them.
Re:Writing a Gimp 3.0 Plugin – Resources and Notes on Sunday February 16, 2025 @01:47PM (#43070467)
Blender has done this since Dec 2000.
Re:ZFS 2.3.0 released with ZFS raidz expansion on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @04:28AM (#42695375)
I replicate my entire filesystem to a local NAS every 10 minutes using zrepl. This has already saved my bacon once when a WD_BLACK SN850 suddenly died on me [1]. It's also recovered code from some classic git blunders. It shouldn't be possible any more to lose data to user error or single device failure. We have the technology.

[1]: https://chromakode.com/post/zfs-recovery-with-zrepl/

Selkies[1] is another interesting project in this space. It uses webrtc for low latency streaming and remote desktop suitable for gaming in the browser.

[1]: https://selkies-project.github.io/selkies-gstreamer/

Re:I am rich and have no idea what to do on Thursday January 02, 2025 @06:05PM (#42580007)
Sounds like a good time to engage a professional coach or therapist, if you haven't already. Particularly to deep dive on the questions asked at the end of the post. In my experience, I often stalemate these kinds of internal debates on my own, but having a second player in the mix got me out of the gridlock.
Re:It is hard to recommend Google Cloud on Sunday September 22, 2024 @10:02AM (#41617152)
Migrating out of this mess caused me downtime.

Squarespace's domain panel crashed with a nondescript error when I tried to update nameservers prior to transferring out, and they shut off the Google nameservers as soon as the transfer went through on their side. To add insult to injury, Squarespace makes you wait 5 days for a transfer, with no way to expedite -- and in my case, they waited 6 days, taking me offline on a Friday night. This was the worst experience I've ever had using a domain service.

For any serious work I'm using hjkl.
Re:GNU JUSTIFIED PUBLIC LICENSE on Friday June 07, 2024 @04:07AM (#40606400)
My favorite part:

If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the 100% possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this 100% is to make it 1000% free software which everyone can redistribute and 100% change under 100% these terms.

So, what would they have done if she accepted? Claimed that the existing training of the Sky voice was voiced by her?
Re:The Tragic Downfall of the Internet's Art Gallery on Friday May 17, 2024 @01:17PM (#40392133)
Keybase always performed crypto on-device using their open source client written in Go. What not-your-keys not-your-crypto setup are you referring to?
Re:Branded Types for TypeScript on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @08:58AM (#40366317)
Alternatively for the case of id strings with known prefixes, a unique feature of TypeScript is you can use template string literal types:

https://www.kravchyk.com/adding-type-safety-to-object-ids-ty...

Re:Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine" on Thursday May 09, 2024 @01:04PM (#40310307)
April fool's at xkcd is a special occasion where external folks join xkcd to build an experimental interactive comic.

Edit: I've updated the first para of the post to hopefully clarify this better

Re:Disaster Recovery with ZFS and Zrepl on Thursday May 09, 2024 @03:11AM (#40305990)
Residential fiber internet is a lovely thing :D
Re:Disaster Recovery with ZFS and Zrepl on Thursday May 09, 2024 @03:01AM (#40305952)
Funny story -- when I was working on the xkcd Machine comic, I actually used the ZFS snapshots to rescue data. I accidentally blew away some early physics prototype code and fished it out of /.zfs/snapshot.
Re:Disaster Recovery with ZFS and Zrepl on Thursday May 09, 2024 @02:59AM (#40305943)
It's part of the 3-2-1 rule: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/

My mid term goal is to trade offsite replication with a friend for automatically replicating the offsite portion of important things.

Re:Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine" on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @06:42PM (#40303461)
Agreed. DOM started as a prototype and I stayed on it primarily for dev speed due to momentum (and some React DX things -- I checked out the Pixi React binding but decided not to go down that rabbit hole). It's amazing how efficient Pixi is!
Re:Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine" on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @06:41PM (#40303456)
Umwelt! Explain xkcd has a great writeup on it: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1037:_Umwelt
Re:Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine" on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @04:06PM (#40302291)
I saw yours! We do inevitably bias for tiles with some content in them, since otherwise the viewing experience would be quite boring. :)
Re:Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine" on Wednesday May 08, 2024 @04:04PM (#40302271)
We gave each ball different physical properties. Yellow balls are light and have lots of air drag. Green balls are massive. Red balls are very bouncy. This allows physical sorters to be designed.

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