netruk44

This looks like an individual developer. The EU has trader laws that require app storefronts to collect, and developers to provide, a physical address to display for the app developer. Both the Apple App Store and Google Play store do this.

As an individual developer who qualifies as a trader, you would have to publish your home address in public to release your app in the EU. This is a common reason why indie app devs don’t make their apps available there.

For the App Store specifically (Google Play doesn’t let you do this, afaik), you can claim to not be a trader so that your address isn’t published. But if you’re lying, then that opens you up to legal troubles. It’s easier for someone who isn’t sure to just say “No EU”.

Every time I’ve ever brought up the fact that Cities Skylines isn’t really much of a game as much as it’s a city painting/traffic management sandbox with very little chance of ever failing, people would inevitably come and hit me with a “That sounds like an amazing game!” Or a “And that’s why it’s better than SimCity!”

For everything else that SimCity 2013 had going against it (and there was a lot), its gameplay actually had challenges to overcome with real decisions to make that had gameplay consequences as you were building out your city.

In C:S, it felt like the only consequence your decisions ever had was that you made more traffic jams to handle. And that’s not even really an obstacle because you could literally raze your entire city and rebuild it with your many millions accrued over in-game years of time.

Valve owns s.team now, as well. That’ll bring you to the store page

It also acts as a url shortener for their hardware support pages.

s.team/deck, and s.team/machine take you to the appropriate support pages.

The creatively-named https://github.com/Netruk44/wolverine-v3-pro-linux

The "linux" support is pretty narrow (because I made this for myself). It's restricted to SteamOS. But I'm sure it could be ported easily, the repository contains documentation about the important parts from reverse engineering the firmware.

I have another controller-related anecdote.

I have a Razer Wolverine Xbox controller that has extra back paddle buttons. The controller doesn't expose the paddles directly to PC's over USB. You have to use button remapping on the controller to map them to 'real' Xbox buttons for the PC to see them. But I wanted to use the back paddle buttons on Steam as separate controls.

So I downloaded the latest firmware update off the internet (because what device doesn't have firmware updates these days), installed Ghidra and an MCP server for it, and told Sol to look for how I can expose these extra buttons to a PC host. Maybe we could write a firmware patch?

Turns out the controller already has a special mode to expose those buttons, possibly as a hardware test. But it was enough to write a Linux driver to put the controller into that mode, and a little bit of extra driver code to map the paddles to a Linux controller button, and voila. Paddles working in Steam.

And it only took a few hours to do, too. I spent more time making an open source repository out of the concept than I spent making it work.

TIL that as well, it certainly makes the name make more sense!

TIL that PopCap’s engine was called SexyAppFramework and it’s open source.

And everything inside it is prefixed with “Sexy”. SexyString, SEXY_ALLOC_MAP, SexyTrace...

It’s certainly of an era, haha.

Many people start learning blender with the donut tutorial. It’s pretty famous.

It’s a general beginner tutorial, but blender can be so weird that many skills don’t transfer (like how you move the camera in the viewport).

The tutorial takes you through pretty much everything you need to know to get started with blender. Modeling, texturing, painting, modifiers, compositing, geometry nodes, and rendering. You can skip the parts that seem familiar, since you already know 3DS Max.

It’s a security feature, Apple does the same when you register a security key. You must register two.

If you’re using real yubikeys, it’s protection against losing one. If you had two from the start, you’re not at risk of losing your only way into your account when one goes missing or is stolen.

And also the weights for GLM 5.2 are 1.5 TB. The only Studios Apple sells today are hard-capped to 64 GB (M4 Max) or 96 GB (M3 Ultra) only.

You'd need at least 24 new M4 Max Studios, or 16 new M3 Ultra Studios, or 3 used 512 GB M3 Ultra Studios just to power one GLM 5.2 instance. And even then, you're probably looking at < 5 tokens per second.

Personally, I think it makes way more sense to pay a model provider $3/1M tokens.

You can select a different test instead of scanning the QR code.

There's a button under the QR code for a "visual test" which is just the usual "pick pictures containing a bicycle" thing.

I am not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure you can’t just slap an MIT or whatever else license on public code with an intentional trojan hidden in it and expect to not be held accountable for the damages caused by the trojan running.

If the damage resulted from an unexpected problem like a bug, then you’re probably fine. But this phrase was intentionally placed by the author and intended to inflict at least a little damage (destroy code) onto specific users.

Whether some words are legally equivalent to an actual virus, I couldn’t say.

With all this discussion about Notepad++ finally being ported to Mac, I thought I’d drop a link to a previous attempt at a “port” that I’d heard of.

Notepad Next: https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext

It’s a (still work in progress) cross platform re-implementation of Notepad++.

It also predates agentic coding, if that’s something that concerns you.

The argument is "there is no significant evidence to support the claim that Apple has given up on the Vision Pro".

I don't think anybody is arguing that it's selling amazingly well or is a growing market.

And I agree with the argument. It seems a little premature to make this claim now, so close to WWDC.

If WWDC comes and goes with no major announcement for the future of visionOS or the Vision Pro, that would be a significant indicator of Apple having given up.

[delayed]

Maybe the posters might have deleted the comments themselves?

I often post comments on HN, just to delete them 5 minutes later when I realize I don’t care to deal with the replies I’ll eventually get.

You have to be quick because if someone does reply, you can no longer delete your message.

> Why do you speak about yourself in the third person?

When you submit a link to HN, there is an entry field for a comment.

It does not really describe what the comment is used for. For links, it simply gets added as the first comment.

Someone who is unfamiliar with the submission process may assume this comment should describe what they are submitting, and not format it like a regular user comment.

Then it gets posted as the first comment and tons of people downvote it, jumping to the conclusion that the weird summary comment is from an AI, and not the submitter describing their own submission.

Anybody who has spent a day in school as a student knows that students can’t be trusted to follow the rules.

I think super cores are a new type/tier of core, not a rename of performance.

The base M5 has super/efficiency cores.

The Pro and Max have super/performance cores.

The people with green names almost certainly have alternate, primary accounts with that capability.

I can't speak for this developer, but as someone who dabbles in App Store applications, EU trader laws require that the App Store publicly displays an address for the app developer if they want to make their apps available in the EU.

It's possible this developer didn't want to do that, so they chose to not publish in the EU.

I wonder if the reason why the screensaver process doesn’t exit has something to do with the live wallpapers they added to macOS a few versions ago.

The live wallpapers become your screensaver, playing the video. Then when you move your mouse, the video continues until it finds a “good” stopping point.

Might explain why the screensaver process lives on forever for seemingly no reason.

I used to work at Microsoft and I can tell you this was absolutely not true during my time there.

As an engineer, you needed to have an answer to that question or else you could not be promoted (at least in some parts of the org chart).

It was a box that your skip levels needed to see checked in order to approve promotions. My lead told me as much in exactly those words.

They laid off SDETs circa 2014 (I was one). I don’t think Windows ever had QA people, but it did have automated testing and dedicated people to write and monitor those tests, then file bugs if something broke. But not anymore since 2014.

These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.

They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.

You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.

(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)

Years ago I lived in an apartment with intermittent connection issues.

I phoned xfinity support who said they’d send a tech out at no cost to me.

The tech comes, finds bad connections in the shared external apartment box, fixes them, leaves without entering my apartment.

Xfinity sends me a support bill for the tech.

I call xfinity support to complain saying they said the tech would be free. The support agent says there’s nothing they can do and also that I should sign up for their support plan to get a 50% discount on the fee.

I tell them to cancel my internet subscription because I won’t support a company with deceptive billing practices. They give me 3 retention offers (the last one being an additional 25% discount on the tech fee). I decline because they told me it would be free. My internet is scheduled to be cancelled.

I go to twitter (as it was called at the time), and @ xfinity support with this same story.

Someone from that Twitter account DMs me and I told them that if they cancel the technician fee, they can leave my internet subscription active.

They do so with exactly no fuss.

I don’t know why, but apparently publicly @‘ing xfinity on Twitter gets you better support than calling them and actually cancelling your internet.

If you’re a software engineer who is comfortable doing your own taxes, I highly recommend this approach as well.

However, errors found in your return by this service are VERY opaque, so I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone.

As an example from my return last year:

Issue : Business Rule SD-F1040-001 - Schedule D (Form 1040), `NetSTAndLTCapitalGainOrLossAmt` or `AllowableLossAmt` must be equal to `CapitalGainLossAmt` in the return unless Form 8958 is present in the return.

Indecipherable? No. But good luck getting my mom to read and understand any of that.

I also recommend using something like [0] to help you fill those forms out. It’s an excel spreadsheet which will automatically fill out (most of) your tax forms, given the documents that you receive.

[0]: https://sites.google.com/view/incometaxspreadsheet/home

TikTok’s recommendations are based off as much info as it can get, really.

Approximate location, age, mobile OS/browser, your contacts, which TikTok links you open, who generated the links you open, TikTok search history, how long it takes you to swipe to the next video on the for you page, etc.

I don’t think it's really possible to say what TikTok’s algorithm does “naturally”. There’s so many influencing factors to it. (Beyond the promoted posts and ads which people pay TikTok to put in your face)

If you sign up to TikTok with an Android and tell it you’re 16, you’re gonna get recommended what the other 16 year olds with Androids in your nearby area (based on IP address) are watching.

I have some friends in game dev who have shipped some pretty big titles (and still do). They have very similar sentiments with regards to constant self-inflicted breakages and (lack of) testing and code reviews as well.

It’s given me an appreciation for the kind of code quality everybody just naturally agreed on and did back when I worked at a FAANG. Nobody needed to be convinced to write/maintain tests for their change, or be told to keep the mainline branch building cleanly.

I wonder if any of the large studios out there today have a culture of testing and reviews?

I wanted the same, so I hacked/bolted on an LLM to Morrowind (the open source recreation OpenMW).

The biggest problem I faced at the time (during ChatGPT 3 era) was that, without a good context, LLMs are the most vanilla roleplayers you’ve ever seen. By themselves, LLMs are just not interesting enough for a player to choose to talk to in-game.

If you want them to be “interesting” to talk to, you must provide (or generate and keep track of): a backstory, chat history, the scene, NPC inventory, the NPC’s current emotional state, the weather, literally everything needs to be given to the model before it generates messages for the player.

At which point you’ve got a big task. You need a way to automatically get the relevant data to the model for the specific conversation you’re having. There might be tools to pick appropriate text documents from a db given a conversation topic, but I didn’t/don’t know how to make that work for games.

I’m sure there’s a way to accomplish this with more modern tools and models. (Maybe instead of providing all that data up front, you would now give the model tools to call to retrieve that data on-demand?) But that’s what made me give up in 2022.

They don’t have great North American peering. If you happen to be there and are unlucky, you won’t be able to get a very reliable/fast connection to the server.

I tried to use one for Borg backups a few years ago and just ran into endless transient connection issues.