ack_complete (u/ack_complete)

ack_complete commented on macOS dotfiles should not go in –/Library/Application Support becca.ooo/blog/macos-dotf... · Posted by u/zdw

kbolino · 6 days ago

On the other end, when Windows first started having multiple users and locking down write access to system directories (*), lots of video games (and some other programs besides) decided to just dump their files anywhere. Just looking at my own system, I see all of the following used:

  %userprofile%\Documents (which used to be called "My Documents")
  %userprofile%\Documents\My Games
  %userprofile%\Documents\Saved Games
  %userprofile%\Documents\SavedGames
  %userprofile%\Saved Games
  %appdata%
  %userprofile%\AppData\LocalLow
  %localappdata%

As far as I can tell, there's no rhyme or reason to any of this. I know the three AppData folders have distinct meanings, but I don't think video game developers are using them according to their proper meanings. Also, I'm being generous with my use of variables above. Some programs have hardcoded the drive letters and paths.

* = I'm well aware of the real history of Windows NT but from the consumer perspective it went from 98/Me -> XP

ack_complete · 6 days ago

Unfortunately, there is a reason. During the Vista timeframe, Microsoft published guidance recommending that game developers use the Documents folder for save games, as part of the push to make games compatible with UAC and non-elevated user accounts.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dxtecharts/g...

> What this means is that you should not place save games in \Program Files, instead they should go in a sub-folder in \My Documents.

ack_complete commented on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android 9to5google.com/2025/08/25... · Posted by u/kotaKat

kiicia · 7 days ago

Code signing by pseudonymous key is different that requirement to cede personal data to central registry

ack_complete · 7 days ago

It requires a code signing certificate from one of the trusted central authorities, and generally as an individual you must have your legal name on the code signing certificate. It's not pseudonymous.

ack_complete commented on A visual history of Visual C++ (2017) malsmith.net/blog/visual-... · Posted by u/rayanboulares

zerr · 10 days ago

Afaik Win32 API explicitly states that overlapping sibling windows/controls is not supported.

ack_complete · 9 days ago

No, overlapping sibling controls is absolutely supported in Win32. It has a defined Z-order for child controls along with functions to manage it:

> The system maintains the z-order in a single list. It adds windows to the z-order based on whether they are topmost windows, top-level windows, or child windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winmsg/windo...

The WS_CLIPSIBLINGS window style is also explicitly for controlling cross-clipping of child windows during painting:

> Clips child windows relative to each other; that is, when a particular child window receives a WM_PAINT message, the WS_CLIPSIBLINGS style clips all other overlapping child windows out of the region of the child window to be updated.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winmsg/windo...

Furthermore, group boxes and tab controls require overlapping child windows, because they are designed for the controls that visually appear within them to be sibling controls that are raised in Z-order. This is why the dialog editor's current behavior is broken, because the editor's picking behavior is opposite the drawing behavior and USER32's hit test order.

ack_complete commented on A visual history of Visual C++ (2017) malsmith.net/blog/visual-... · Posted by u/rayanboulares

becurious · 10 days ago

After Visual C++ 6. They broke a lot of the C++ IDE features and they weren’t as good as the prior versions (dialog editor etc) so for a long time we preferred staying on 6. I think if we could have the newer compilers but the snappiness of that UI many developers would be happy.

It’s also a product of the segmentation of the developer tools in Microsoft. The Windows team was responsible for the compiler rather than the Developer Tools team.

ack_complete · 10 days ago

The dialog editor is a good example of the damage that was done with the VS.NET transition. When they rewrote it to use the WinForms-based UI, they introduced a fundamental bug: the Z-order for picking was reversed so that clicking on a stack of controls selected the one on the bottom. Very annoying for controls like group controls intended to be stacked below other controls. Bug filed, WONTFIX'd, and it's still broken to this day.

ack_complete commented on A visual history of Visual C++ (2017) malsmith.net/blog/visual-... · Posted by u/rayanboulares

copper_think · 10 days ago

One thing not mentioned is that Visual C++ and Visual Basic historically were separate IDEs with separate codebases. When the time came to unify them, only one of them could continue on. My understanding is that Visual Basic won, and that today's Visual Studio IDE (devenv.exe, msenv.dll, etc.) is the continuation of that VB codebase.

I don't actually know in which release that transition happened. But since there's a screenshot of each version in the article, presumably that transition is visually documented...

ack_complete · 10 days ago

That might have been the transition from Visual C++/Basic 4 to 6 (I skipped 5), but the cataclysmic one was the switch from Visual Studio 6 to Visual Studio .NET, when large portions of the IDE and build system were rewritten in .NET. Visual Studio .NET (2002) was much slower and much buggier than VS6. The native debugger was glacial at conditional breakpoints and debug output, the build system took an eternity to do a dependency check, its UI visibly redrew more slowly, etc. It was so bad that Microsoft had to create a special offer for the Visual Studio .NET (2003) upgrade for only ~$30.

This transition was not great for Visual Basic developers either since their language was transitioned from generating native code (VB6) to becoming dependent upon the .NET Framework (VB.NET), supported secondarily to C#.

ack_complete commented on Weaponizing image scaling against production AI systems blog.trailofbits.com/2025... · Posted by u/tatersolid

mark-r · 11 days ago

A good scaling algorithm would take Nyquist limits into account. For example if you're using bicubic to resize to 1/3 the original size, you wouldn't use a 4x4 grid but a 12x12 grid. The formula for calculating the weights is easily stretched out. Oh and don't forget to de-gamma your image first. It's too bad that good scaling is so rare.

ack_complete · 11 days ago

Yeah, it seems that a lot of this is due to marginal quality resampling algorithms that allow significant amounts of aliasing. The paper does mention that even a good algorithm with proper kernel sizing can still leak remnants due to quantization, though the effect is greatly diminished.

I'm surprised that such well known libraries are still basically using mipmapping, proper quality resampling filters were doable on real-time video on CPUs more than 15 years ago. Gamma correction arguably takes more performance than a properly sized reduction kernel, and I'd argue that depending on the content you can get away without that more often than skimping on the filter.

ack_complete commented on AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, OpenAI are worst offenders theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/rntn

delfinom · 12 days ago

I run a symbol server, as in, PDB debug symbol server. Amazon's crawler and a few others love requesting the ever loving shit out of it for no obvious reason. Especially since the files are binaries.

I just set a rate-limit in cloudflare because no legitimate symbol server user will ever be excessive.

ack_complete · 11 days ago

I have a simple website consisting solely of static webpages pointing to a bunch of .zip binaries. Nothing dynamic, all highly cacheable. The bots are re-downloading the binaries over and over. I can see Bingbot downloading a .zip file in the logs, and then an hour later another Bingbot instance from a different IP in the same IP range downloading the same .zip file in full. These are files that were uploaded years ago and have never retroactively changed, and don't contain crawlable contents within them (executable code).

Web crawlers have been around for years, but many of the current ones are more indiscriminate and less well behaved.

ack_complete commented on Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis... · Posted by u/taviso

userbinator · 12 days ago

As I've been saying for a while now - if you want to filter for only humans, ask questions only a human can easily answer; counting the number of letters in a word seems to be a good way to filter out LLMs, for example. Yes, that can be relatively easily gotten around, just like Anubis, but with the benefit that it doesn't filter out humans and has absolutely minimal system requirements (a browser that can submit HTML forms), possibly even less than the site itself.

There are forums which ask domain-specific questions as a CAPTCHA upon attempting to register an account, and as someone who has employed such a method, it is very effective. (Example: what nominal diameter is the intake valve stem on a 1954 Buick Nailhead?)

ack_complete · 12 days ago

For smaller forums, any customization to the new account process will work. When I ran a forum that was getting a frustratingly high amount of spammer signups, I modified the login flow to ask the user to add 1 to the 6-digit number in the stock CAPTCHA. Spam signups dropped like a rock.

ack_complete commented on FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons github.com/FFmpeg/asm-les... · Posted by u/flykespice

astrange · 14 days ago

The _emm _epi8 stuff is Hungarian notation, which is from Microsoft.

ack_complete · 14 days ago

Uh, no, that's standard practice for disambiguating the intrinsic operations for different data types without overloading support. ARM does the same thing with their vector intrinsics, such as vaddq_u8(), vaddq_s16(), etc.

ack_complete commented on FFmpeg Assembly Language Lessons github.com/FFmpeg/asm-les... · Posted by u/flykespice

astrange · 14 days ago

So the main issues here are not what people think they are. They generally aren't "suboptimal assembly", at least not what you can reasonably expect out of a C compiler.

The factors are something like:

- specialization: there's already a decent plain-C implementation of the loop, asm/SIMD versions are added on for specific hardware platforms. And different platforms have different SIMD features, so it's hard to generalize them.

- predictability: users have different compiler versions, so even if there is a good one out there not everyone is going to use it.

- optimization difficulties: C's memory model specifically makes optimization difficult here because video is `char *` and `char *` aliases everything. Also, the two kinds of features compilers add for this (intrinsics and autovectorization) can fight each other and make things worse than nothing.

- taste: you could imagine a better portable language for writing SIMD in, but C isn't it. And on Intel C with intrinsics definitely isn't it, because their stuff was invented by Microsoft, who were famous for having absolutely no aesthetic taste in anything. The assembly is /more/ readable than C would be because it'd all be function calls with names like `_mm_movemask_epi8`.

ack_complete · 14 days ago

> And on Intel C with intrinsics definitely isn't it, because their stuff was invented by Microsoft, who were famous for having absolutely no aesthetic taste in anything.

Wouldn't Intel be the one defining the intrinsics? They're referenced from the ISA manuals, and the Intel Intrinsics Guide regularly references intrinsics like _allow_cpu_features() that are only supported by the Intel compiler and aren't implemented in MSVC.