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nice_byte

if you talk to your computer in my vicinity, i will politely ask you to shush.
Re:Knuth Reward Check on Saturday October 10, 2026 @03:12PM (#50036116)
i was expecting an article about farming these with claude.

thank god it wasn't that lol

Re:Orkut.com on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:56PM (#50009380)
LJ was huge in the Russian speaking segment of the internet well into the 2010s. Me and my friends started using it around 2007 and I didn't interact with English content on there at all.

The Orkut timeline I might be misremembering but I'm fairly sure I was already at the university back then which would put it 2006 at the earliest.

Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:29PM (#50008900)
Tata and Infosys too apparently, which is actually good. Those were the real abusers of the h1b program.
Re:Type Safe Generic Data Structures in C on Monday October 05, 2026 @10:26AM (#49965338)
I've tried doing this for a few years and it just sucks ass. Just use c++ and templates if you need proper generic data structures. C is a defective language.
Re:Dots: Always-on agents on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @12:14AM (#49904282)
Can you stop shilling your thing in the comments? One mention is enough. It's annoying behavior.
Reading stuff like this and people's reactions to it makes me want to retire from breathing.
Re:If America's So Rich, How'd It Get So Sad? on Thursday April 23, 2026 @12:49PM (#47878045)
Sounds like you have two happy well-adjusted friends?
Not really. Besides the problems with ringing outlined in the post, the number of coefficients required to capture higher frequency detail grows quadratically, requiring not only more storage but also operations to evaluate. Which makes straightforward cubemap replacement impractical.
Author here. Please let me know if the sample code doesn't work for you. It's all single threaded dumb JavaScript which makes it very easy to read, but definitely not performant. I decided to stick with it for didactic reasons, but still worried that it may hang someone's browser.
Re:Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again on Thursday April 09, 2026 @04:49PM (#47709816)
ai slop
Re:Learn Claude Code by doing, not reading on Monday March 30, 2026 @06:51PM (#47580705)
I don't think that is true.
Re:Learn Claude Code by doing, not reading on Monday March 30, 2026 @06:31PM (#47580529)
you literally don't have to. you can literally just keep doing your job the way that you always have.
I don't know, I'm not convinced with this argument.

The "ugly" version with the switch seems much preferable to me. It's simple, works, has way less moving parts and does not require complex machinery to be built into the language. I'm open to being convinced otherwise but as it stands I'm not seeing any horrible problems with it.

Re:Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30) on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @12:52PM (#47505640)
sucks that opera is no longer with us. used to be my go-to browser before Firefox and eventually chrome...
Re:On The Need For Understanding on Monday March 16, 2026 @05:27PM (#47405145)
no. it was the first question I asked and was given a satisfactory explanation (along the lines of, "this adds things to your program that help it write text to the screen.")
this story would make a killer asianometry video
Re:Personal Computer by Perplexity on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @11:30PM (#47346095)
this is such disappointing clickbait. i thought it was a hardware product.
Re:Why does C have the best file API on Sunday March 01, 2026 @06:14PM (#47211824)
mmap is not a language feature. it is also full of its own pitfalls that you need to be aware of. recommended reading: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/mmap-cidr2022/
Re:Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras on Monday February 23, 2026 @08:39PM (#47131768)
Good.
Re:Choosing a Language Based on Its Syntax? on Thursday February 19, 2026 @05:44PM (#47080745)
Yeah I misused the term "token". What I really meant is that they should just be token separator and nothing more (i.e. once we encounter whitespace it means the current token has ended)
Re:Choosing a Language Based on Its Syntax? on Thursday February 19, 2026 @01:53PM (#47077541)
I have really just one wish when it comes to syntax: no syntactically significant whitespace. Space, newline, tab, etc. should ALL map to the same exact token. In practice this also means semicolons or something like them are needed as well, to separate expressions/statements. I dislike langs that try to insert semicolons for you, but at least it's better than the alternative.

the way python treats whitespace is a huge design mistake that has probably wasted like a century (if not more) worth of time across all users, on something really trivial.

Re:MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm on Friday February 13, 2026 @02:54PM (#47006970)
tl;dr yes it is

she did not explicitly consent for that photo to be used in computer graphics research or millions of sample projects. moreover, the whole legality of using that image for those purposes is murky because I doubt anyone ever received proper license from the actual rights-holder (playboy magazine). so the best way to go about this is just common-sense good-faith approach: if the person depicted asks you to please knock it off, you just do it, unless you actively want to be a giant a-hole to them.

Re:MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm on Friday February 13, 2026 @04:03AM (#47000613)
the "porn" angle is very funny to me, since there is nothing pornographic or inapropriate about the image. when I was young, I used to think it was some researcher's wife whom he loved so much he decide to use her picture absolutely everywhere.

it's sufficient to say that the person depicted has withdrawn their consent for that image to be used, and that should put an end to the conversation.

Re:MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm on Friday February 13, 2026 @03:56AM (#47000553)
Everybody knows that. The GP's reaction is what perplexes me. Are they saying the name of the story is inappropriate? I think it's very appropriate.
Re:MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm on Friday February 13, 2026 @02:19AM (#46999875)
when you read this and its follow-up "driver" as a commentary on how capitalism removes persons from their humanity, it's as relevant as it was on day one.

good sci fi is rarely about just the sci part.

Re:MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm on Friday February 13, 2026 @02:18AM (#46999867)
could you be more specific?
Re:Simplifying Vulkan One Subsystem at a Time on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @06:59PM (#46968861)
> I want the simple approach in addition what exists now, so we can both have our cakes.

The simple approach can be implemented on top of what Vulkan exposes currently.

In fact, it takes only a few lines to wrap that VMA snippet above and you never have to stare at those pesky structs again!

But Vulkan the API can't afford to be "like CUDA" because Vulkan is not a compute API for Nvidia GPUs. It has to balance a lot of things, that's the main reason it's so un-ergonomic (that's not to say there were no bad decisions made. Renderpasses were always a bad idea.)

Re:Simplifying Vulkan One Subsystem at a Time on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @06:24PM (#46968505)
> It's explicitly saying you want device memory

You are also explicitly saying that you want device memory by specifying DEVICE_LOCAL_BIT. There's no difference.

> Likewise, your claim about UMA makes zero sense. Device malloc gets you a pointer or handle to device memory,

It makes zero sense to you because we're talking past each other. I am saying that on systems without UMA you _have_ to care where your resources live. You _have_ to be able to allocate both on host and device.

> Like, why is there gpu-only and device-local.

Because there's such a thing as accessing GPU memory from the host. Hence, you _have_ to specify explicitly that no, only the GPU will try to access this GPU-local memory. And if you request host-visible GPU-local memory, you might not get more than around 256 megs unless your target system has ReBAR.

> a theoretical vkMalloc should always give me device memory.

No, because if that's the only way to allocate memory, how are you going to allocate staging buffers for the CPU to write to? In general, you can't give the copy engine a random host pointer and have it go to town. So, okay now we're back to vkDeviceMalloc and vkHostMalloc. But wait, there's this whole thing about device-local and host visible, so should we add another function? What about write-combined memory? Cache coherency? This is how you end up with a zillion flags.

This is the reason I keep bringing UMA up but you keep brushing it off.

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