CrimsonCape (u/CrimsonCape)

CrimsonCape commented on The issue of anti-cheat on Linux (2024) tulach.cc/the-issue-of-an... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

CrimsonCape · 2 days ago

Is cheating possible because games are written in low level languages which have to have precise tracked positions of elements in memory?

If your garbage collector is grabbing an entire arena of memory and moving it constantly, doesn't that limit a cheat to asking an API to retrieve an object because only the managed memory knows where objects reside at any given moment?

CrimsonCape commented on Do You Need to Own a House? Many Older Americans Decide They Don't wsj.com/real-estate/luxur... · Posted by u/lxm

ecshafer · 10 days ago

This is basically the concept of being "house poor" right? You have a house, you make payments on it, but you are poor and have no extra money after expenses. Maintaining a house costs money, and it should be accounted for. A Real Estate agent will at best take the inspection and suggest knocking a few thousand off the price for these new things. But their job is over once you buy it. The bank just wants you to make payments and doesn't really care if you put the house in disrepair.

Personally I think people should consider having a house repair savings account (or Money Market Fund or CD Account or whatever).

CrimsonCape · 6 days ago

When I was doing napkin math it seemed pretty surprising to me that, for example, a 30 year roof replacement at an estimated $30,000 amortized over 30 years yields 1000/year, or $83 per month.

Now consider a set of tires for a car, replaced every 6 years, at $1200. That amortizes to $16 per month.

The replacement tires is only 4% of the cost of a roof replacement (1200/30000) but the amortized monthly cost of the tires is nearly 20% of the monthly cost of the roof replacement (16/83).

Long story short, I got increasing anxiety doing this math and watching my expected savings income evaporate over the long term as these amounts added up.

CrimsonCape commented on Do You Need to Own a House? Many Older Americans Decide They Don't wsj.com/real-estate/luxur... · Posted by u/lxm

ecshafer · 11 days ago

Home ownership costs are pretty low if you understand that everything is amortized. You buy a new roof every ~25 years, then you think of it as putting $50 a month into savings so you buy that roof when it comes up. Furnace in 20 years, hot water heater in 10. But instead people seem to want to wait until things blow up then treat it as a sudden large expense.

CrimsonCape · 11 days ago

I'm trying to understand your point of view. Where is the extra money coming from to amortize the costs of major repair items? I think you are correct. It's just that nobody actually considers the amortization costs when calculating what they can afford.

The example of a 30 year roof replacement is great because it nicely aligns with a 30 year mortgage. So in reality, the cost of homeownership should be the monthly cost of servicing the mortgage payments PLUS the amortized cost of roof replacement. Your real estate agent has no reason to tell you that a 200k house is actually 240k. Because by the time you "own" the house, it is due for a 40k roof replacement. With the amortized cost maybe you can't actually afford the house.

- Mortgage monthly payment - Amortized: -- cost of roof replacement -- cost of at least 2 refrigerators, more likely 4 refrigerators -- cost of at least 1 new air conditioning system + at least 100% of the cost of a new system over the lifespan of repairs of the current system -- Cost of at least 1 new garage door system -- Cost of at least 4-5 toilet replacements by a plumber over 30 years -- Cost of at least 1 whole home repainting, more likely 2 occurrences -- Cost of wear and tear; hard to quantify but Likely very significant.

This is not even considering the amortized costs of personal time. The time spent servicing chores like grasscutting, pruning, weed pulling, touchup painting, repairs caused by wear and tear.

CrimsonCape commented on Study: Social media probably can't be fixed arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

KaiserPro · 12 days ago

> But here's the thing ... people CHOOSE to engage

Kinda, but they also don't really realise that they have much more control over the feed than they expect (in certain areas)

For the reel/tiktok/foryou-instagram feeds, it shows you subjects that you engage with. It will a/b other subjects that similar people engage with. Thats all its doing. continual a/b to see if you like what ever flavour of bullshit is popular.

Most people don't realise that you can banish posts from your feeds by doing a long press "I don't like this" equivalent. It takes a few times for the machine to work out if its an account, groups of accounts of theme that you don't like, and it'll stop showing it to you. (threads for example took a very long time to stop showing me fucking sports.)

Why don't more people know this? because it hurts short term metrics for what ever bollocks the devs are working on. so its not that well advertised. just think how unsuccessful the experiments in the facebook app would have been if you were able to block the "other posts we think you might like" experiments. How sad Zuckerberg would be that his assertion was actually bollocks?

CrimsonCape · 12 days ago

Transparency would prove or disprove this. Release the algorithm and let us decide for ourselves. In my experience, Instagram made an algorithm change 3-4 years ago. It used to be that my feed was exactly my interests. Then overnight my feed changed. It became a mix of 1. interracial relationship success stories 2. scantily clad women clickbait, 3. east asian "craft project" clickbait, and just general clickbait. It felt as if "here's what other people like you are clicking on" became part of the algorithm.

CrimsonCape commented on The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report issues.chromium.org/issue... · Posted by u/alexcos

saagarjha · 14 days ago

Programming is the consideration of implementation details. When you manipulate strings in C you consider the terminating nul byte just like when you manipulate strings in Python you consider how its stores codepoints or when you manipulate strings in Swift you think about grapheme clusters. There is no free lunch. (Though, of course, you can get reduced price lunches based on the choices you make!)

CrimsonCape · 12 days ago

Pardon my ignorance, since I don't know C, but is it true to say that the length of string "Foo" is greater than 4 because of the null terminating byte? Or maybe there is no concept of string length? I could see this getting annoying since Foo is three chars long, you would assume it's length is 3, but we could be speaking of the actual length of bytes, in which i assume it is sizeof(char)*3+1 i.e. the sizeof(char F, char o, char o)+1nullbyte

CrimsonCape commented on GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?" bsky.app/profile/kjhealy.... · Posted by u/minimaxir

smsm42 · 15 days ago

A lot of people confuse access to information with being smart. Because for humans it correlates well - usually the smart people are those that know a lot of facts and can easily manipulate them on demand, and the dumb people are those that can not. LLMs have unique capability of being both very knowledgeable (as in, able to easily access vast quantities of information, way beyond the capabilities of any human, PhD or not) and very dumb, they way a kindergarten kid wouldn't be. It totally confuses all our heuristics.

CrimsonCape · 14 days ago

The most reasonable assumption is that the CEO is using dishonest rhetoric to upsell the LLM, instead of taking your approach and assuming the CEO is confused about the LLM's capability.

There are savvy people who know when to say "don't tell me that information" because then it is never a lie, simply "I was not aware"

CrimsonCape commented on Why F# could be the next mainstream programming language (2024) blog.snork.dev/posts/why-... · Posted by u/smoothdeveloper

jakebasile · 16 days ago

Could be! Depends if MS starts putting some more money behind it, including marketing. They're pretty deep in an AI-everything spiral right now though.

I'm a Clojure guy, but the ML family (specifically OCaml and F#) have always interested me as another branch of functional programming. I started out in the before times as a .NET Programmer (VB6 -> VB.NET -> C#) and have toyed with F# a little since then. It's cool, but the tooling leaves a lot to be desired compared to what's available for OCaml unless you decide to use full fat Visual Studio.

What I particularly like about them is the middle ground of inferred types. I don't need types since maps, lists, and value types are enough for me in almost all cases, but if I must use a strongly typed system why not let the compiler figure it out for me? I always thought that was a neat idea.

CrimsonCape · 16 days ago

I had a thought today, "when is Microsoft and/or Apple going to earnestly search out their next Steve Jobs?"

And I think the answer is that guys like Bill Gates and Tim Cook are too proud, too prideful to admit they are not kickass rockstars of tech, too jealous to find and cultivate their next super-figurehead. Instead they are safe and lame.

Microsoft needs a non-lame, non-MBA, engineer to take control and inject some younger mindset into making themselves cool again, focused back on tech, UI, user experience, and passion. Engineer tooling would be a great approach.

CrimsonCape commented on Windows XP Professional win32.run/... · Posted by u/pentagrama

wibbily · 18 days ago

Man nothing drives me further up the wall than when a nice progress indicator with discrete segments gets animated with a lazy `to { rotate(360deg); }` etc[1]. It is my molehill to die on

[1] https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/41647820/file/original-8...

CrimsonCape · 18 days ago

You know talking about progress bars, it takes a lot of confidence to program a linear progress bar. You think you know when loading will be complete and think you know can break down the incremental progress made during loading.

Instead we get these spinning wheels that are like "maybe in the future this wheel will stop and we will have a return value." No confidence whatsoever.

I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads. But their progress bars are just fake. They are a cheap animation all the way up to 90% and just stop moving until the progress is actually complete which could be 5 seconds of 90% and 40 seconds of the last 10%. So they think they are chad but lie.

CrimsonCape commented on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn? · Posted by u/unsupp0rted

theshrike79 · 20 days ago

In Finland we have flex hours or "working hours bank", basically you can do extra work now and get free time later. You can also go into negatives.

Usually the recommended range is -20 to +40

Some People(tm) go into the negatives and think it's easy to "just" do an extra few hours every day. It's not.

What I do is work ~15 minutes more every day so I bank about a hour a week, sometimes a bit more. It's a LOT easier and more manageable. Just sit on my computer 15 minutes earlier or if I'm at the office I take the later train back home.

This way I tend to have a day or two of flex hours banked if I need to take some quick time off.

CrimsonCape · 20 days ago

Finland is a "high trust" country, isn't it? I can't see this concept working working when > 10% of the population would game the system to get more "off-the-record" free time.

CrimsonCape commented on Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework neowin.net/news/microsoft... · Posted by u/bundie

bob1029 · 23 days ago

For Windows UIs I've been getting into Win32/GDI/DirectDraw/etc.

Tools like CsWin32 and modern C# (ref returns) make working with these APIs a lot more approachable today. It used to be the case that you had to create a nasty C++ project to do any of this. Now you can just list the methods you need access to in your nativemethods.txt file and the codegen takes care of the rest.

Win32 is a lot lower level than other things you'd typically consider to be a "UI framework", but the important tradeoff is that it is also a lot harder for Microsoft to remove or screw with in any meaningful way. I cannot come up with something that has been more stable than these APIs. The web doesn't even come close if we are looking at the same timescales.

CrimsonCape · 20 days ago

Yeah this entire discussion about these high level framework would be cooler to discuss the lower level APIs. As far as I know, the entirety of Windows rendering stack is built on either GDI or DirectX? With Win32 even being built on GDI?

It would be much cooler to discuss building a ground-up Windows UI stack as close to metal as possible which I guess would necessarily be using DirectX...