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lidavidm

Re:A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode on Saturday August 15, 2026 @07:00PM (#49315097)
Isn't that backwards? The nonexistent character is in the -digitized- version so presumably OCR or something got 彊 wrong, that's not saying that 彁 was used in the -print- version.

Indeed, the source link is about exactly this: a crappy scan appears to have 彁 but a better copy reveals it was 彊.

Re:Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe on Sunday June 14, 2026 @08:10PM (#48534668)
AIUI, Kobo devices have a more advanced rendering engine if you name the file with .kepub.epub. (I think it's based on ePub 3?) Not sure if it would fix the problem here. But I personally run ePubs through kepubify (https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/try/) before transferring them to my Kobo.
Re:It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country (1921) on Thursday March 05, 2026 @02:05AM (#47258497)
[Not the overall point of the poem, but] yet for all that, it turns out chemical weapons aren't even that useful: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
Re:Who Invented the Transistor? on Thursday January 01, 2026 @05:38AM (#46452981)
You may like this book called The Origins of Efficiency: https://press.stripe.com/origins-of-efficiency

Or the author's newsletter: https://www.construction-physics.com/

Re:What an unprocessed photo looks like on Sunday December 28, 2025 @07:41PM (#46416082)
Olympus and other cameras can do this with "pixel shift": it uses the stabilization mechanism to quickly move the sensor by 1 pixel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_shift

EDIT: Sigma also has "Foveon" sensors that do not have the filter and instead stacks multiple sensors (for different wavelengths) at each pixel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3_sensor

Re:D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @10:05PM (#44958050)
Oh that is awesome! I would really appreciate it!

Could you also get d2 into GitHub and Notion while you have it here :)

Re:D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders on Tuesday August 19, 2025 @09:49PM (#44957970)
I always liked D2 more than mermaid, except IMO, this makes grid layouts essentially useless: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/issues/1164

Having to figure out the exact pixel widths defeats the point of these tools, at least for me.

Re:# [derive(Clone)] Is Broken on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @03:05AM (#44497766)
Someone on the issue they made explained why Clone is "broken": https://github.com/JelteF/derive_more/issues/490#issuecommen...

Which links to this blog post explaining the choice in more detail: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2022/04/12/imp...

Re:The surreal joy of having an overprovisioned homelab on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @11:54PM (#43478732)
The graphics would be called chibis, IMO (or デフォルメ if you wanna be fancy) and IDK about developers, but perhaps weaboos/weebs would be the general term
Re:Preview: Amazon S3 Tables and Lakehouse in DuckDB on Wednesday March 19, 2025 @12:40AM (#43408311)
Iceberg-go is working on it! (edit: it being write support)
It might be funny to use this as a software versioning scheme. ("What do you mean the next version after v3 is 20A?")
Re:List of DRM-Free Bookshops on Monday February 17, 2025 @07:23PM (#43084609)
At least they appear to be partnering with Kobo "later this year" [1]. I've been a big fan of Kobo's devices so this is a nice plus. (I just wish they could figure out some way to get Kindle exclusives, but well that's a contradiction in terms, so...)

[1]: https://bookshop.org/info/ebooks ("Can I read my ebooks on my Kindle, Kobo, Nook, etc.?")

Re:Rust's worst feature (available in Rust nightly) on Thursday January 30, 2025 @09:08AM (#42877767)
https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2019/07/14/uninit.html perhaps (the OP also talks about this when linking to a talk about jemalloc)
Re:Adding concurrent read/write to DuckDB with Arrow Flight on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @07:46PM (#42873422)
To get a really precise answer you'd have to profile or benchmark. I'd say it's also hard to do an apples to apples comparison (if you only replace the data format in the wire protocol, the database probably still has to transpose the data to ingest it). And it's hard to do a benchmark in the first place since probably your database's wire protocol is not really exposed for you to do a benchmark.

You can sort of see what benefits you might get from a post like this, though: https://willayd.com/leveraging-the-adbc-driver-in-analytics-...

While we're not using Arrow on the wire here, the ADBC driver uses Postgres's binary format (which is still row oriented) + COPY and can get significant speedups compared to other Postgres drivers.

The other thing might be to consider whether you can just dump to Parquet files or something like that and bypass the database entirely (maybe using Iceberg as well).

Re:Adding concurrent read/write to DuckDB with Arrow Flight on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @09:03AM (#42864975)
Arrow has several other related projects in this space:

Arrow Flight SQL defines defines a full protocol designed to support JDBC/ODBC-like APIs but using columnar, Arrow data transfer for performance (why take your data and transpose it twice?)

https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2022/02/16/introducing-arrow-f...

There's an Apache-licensed JDBC driver that talks the Flight SQL protocol (i.e. it's a driver for _any_ server that implements the protocol): https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2022/11/01/arrow-flight-sql-jd...

(There's also an ODBC driver, but at the moment it's GPL - the developers are working on upstreaming it and rewriting the GPL bits. And yes, this means that you're still transposing your data, but it turns out that transferring your data in columnar format can still be faster - see https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol10/p1022-muehleisen.pdf)

There's an experiment to put Flight SQL in front of PostgreSQL: https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2023/09/13/flight-sql-postgres...

There's also ADBC; where Flight SQL is a generic protocol (akin to TDS or how many projects implement the PostgreSQL wire protocol), ADBC is a generic API (akin to JDBC/ODBC in that it abstracts the protocol layer/database, but it again uses Arrow data): https://arrow.apache.org/blog/2023/01/05/introducing-arrow-a...

Re:Apache DataFusion on Thursday January 16, 2025 @01:50AM (#42722162)
Re:Apache DataFusion on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @08:43PM (#42719944)
Can't you use DataFusion single node/without any Apache ecosystem stuff? They have a Python library and DataFusion is "just" a query engine. (If anything, I'd call Pandas the batteries included option...)

I think the difference is more that DataFusion is built as a library so you can plug it into the product you're building (e.g. Comet, which plugs it into Spark, or pg_lakehouse, which plugs it into Postgres). Polars could be used that way, but it's also a functional package you can pip install and use as a Pandas alternative right now.

Re:DoxyPress – Modern Doxygen on Monday January 13, 2025 @02:32AM (#42680995)
I'm also curious why it's a fork (I'm sure there's a good reason?)

Coincidentally I was looking into C++ documentation generators again.

In terms of integration, what I've settled on for apache/arrow-adbc is using Sphinx as the toplevel site generator, then writing a script that generates fake Intersphinx indices for a Doxygen site. That way you can link to Doxygen items from within Sphinx without having to hardcode URLs, instead by referencing a class name or similar, and Sphinx will warn if you reference something nonexistent, without having to use something like breathe that tries to render the Doxygen output within Sphinx. (Same approach with Javadoc -> Sphinx, too.)

Re:VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles on Thursday January 09, 2025 @07:45AM (#42644749)
I suppose this feature should have been termed closed captioning and not subtitling. It seems you're not going to get much sympathy for human translation here.
Re:Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here on Monday January 06, 2025 @06:27PM (#42617334)
Thanks! Frankly so long as I can get a browser and install some reader apps (Kobo, Manga-one, etc.) that would fit my needs fine, and as long as they support older versions of Android for enough years (or I can avoid upgrading the app version) then things should be fine. The 10.3" Boox is 80k JPY which is a bit pricey, though, but I'll consider it vs the Kobo device next time I upgrade e-readers.
Re:Web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here on Monday January 06, 2025 @01:27AM (#42608224)
Which tablet do you use? I've been considering a Boox but the licensing issues and apparent outdated Android give me pause...
Re:Pigment Mixing into Digital Painting on Sunday December 29, 2024 @08:24PM (#42545423)
There's a PR implementing a similar approach. Seems it could use help to work out some kinks in the color mixing.

https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita/-/merge_requests/1783 https://krita-artists.org/t/can-we-get-mixbox-on-krita/64201...

Re:Pagination widows, or, Why I'm embarrassed about my eBook on Monday November 04, 2024 @11:18PM (#42048571)
Neat, I didn't realize Kobo was WebKit-based, but given they offer a full browser (experimentally) on their readers, that makes sense. They also support some 'nice' ePub 3 features: fixed layouts so that comic books and manga work properly; right-to-left pagination for Japanese books, and vertical layout (also for Japanese books). Though, I feel like their page numbering gets mixed up with vertical layout (sometimes opening and reopening the book changes the # of pages, and I lose my spot...)
Re:The all-new Kindle family, including the first color Kindle on Wednesday October 16, 2024 @10:54PM (#41866012)
Kobo has a store. It's decent, it won't have Kindle indies, and IMO it has fewer/worse sales, but it's not a big deal to me. They do have a subscription plan with unlimited access to certain books but it's not clear to me how good the catalog is.

You can also buy from third party stores, e.g. Weightless Books for sci-fi & fantasy, and just drag-and-drop the epub onto the Kobo.

Re:Ten Things to Know about the Great Wave on Sunday September 08, 2024 @01:29AM (#41478373)
Only because Western-centric systems don't handle non-LTR text properly.

https://atadistance.net/2019/10/20/japanese-text-layout-for-...

> Baseline font metrics will never deliver great CJK typography because there are too many limitations. > > This is why InDesign J implements virtual body metrics based on Adobe proprietary table information for true high-end Japanese layout. There is no virtual body standard digital font metric standard so everybody implements the missing stuff on the fly and everybody does it different. Unfortunately the irony of it all is that Adobe played a huge role in how these limitations played out in the evolution of digital fonts, desktop publishing (DTP) and the situation we have today.

I have a Kobo reader which supports both ePub 2 and ePub 3, and IIRC you need ePub 3 in order to get proper RTL/top-to-bottom text and Japanese typesetting, as well as proper comics support (if you buy an ePub 3 manga, it'll properly flip the page turn direction and the progress bar; a CBZ or other format won't). But most other readers I run into don't understand ePub 3 properly.

Re:ReMarkable launch Paper Pro, a colour e-ink tablet on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @10:36AM (#41446331)
That's still quite a bit more than just plug -> drag and drop, also especially because sometimes I had to manually bring up the interface, and remember some IP that I might only use every week or two at most. (I guess I could set up a bookmark, sure.) Also, it chokes on large-ish files (it would just never upload, no indication in the UI), so I had to split up books.

Anyways, I think I could have dealt with it if it handled large books fine.

Re:ReMarkable launch Paper Pro, a colour e-ink tablet on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:38AM (#41445728)
Yeah. Still way more effort than Kobo: plug it in, drag and drop.
Re:ReMarkable launch Paper Pro, a colour e-ink tablet on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:04AM (#41445218)
Could consider a Kobo Elipsa. (I have a different Kobo device.) It runs some sort of Linux and you can install Koreader and a couple of other things. You can tweak a config file and set up the device without an account. Not sure how the writing experience compares to reMarkable, though (probably not favorably).
Re:ReMarkable launch Paper Pro, a colour e-ink tablet on Wednesday September 04, 2024 @09:01AM (#41445166)
I posted some other comments in this thread - unless they've significantly improved the software in the past year I would 100% recommend against it.

(Also, a lot of manga gets distributed through proprietary apps now so an iPad is probably your best bet anyways, at least if you read the serialized version and not the tankoubon releases...)

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