badsectoracula (u/badsectoracula)

badsectoracula commented on What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes? seangoedecke.com/model-on... · Posted by u/ingve

grim_io · 10 days ago

It doesn't feel like that the gap is closing at all.

The local models can get 10x as good next year, it won't matter to me if the frontier models are still better.

And just because we can run those models (heavily quantized, and thus less capable), they are unusably slow on that 10k dead weight hardware.

badsectoracula · 10 days ago

El Capitan being much faster than my desktop doesn't mean that my desktop is useless. Same with LLMs.

I've been using Mistral Small 3.x for a bunch of tasks on my own PC and it has been very useful, especially after i wrote a few custom tools with llama.cpp to make it more "scriptable".

badsectoracula commented on Debian 13 “Trixie” debian.org/News/2025/2025... · Posted by u/ducktective

accrual · 15 days ago

> i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU. Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.

Impressive that i386 support made it all the way to August 2025. I have Debian 10 Buster running on a Pentium 3 which only EOL'd last year in June 2024. It's still useful on that hardware and I'm grateful support continued as long as it did!

OpenBSD still supports i386 for those looking for a modern OS on old 32-bit hardware.

badsectoracula · 15 days ago

AFAICT this refers to Debian support, the Linux kernel does support 32bit CPUs though only since the original Pentium (excluding some clones).

badsectoracula commented on Leonardo Chiariglione – Co-founder of MPEG leonardo.chiariglione.org... · Posted by u/eggspurt

mike_hearn · 17 days ago

IP law and the need for extremely smart people with a rare set of narrow skills. It's not like codec development magically happens for free if you ignore patents.

The point is, if there had been no incentives to develop codecs, there would have been no MPEG. Other people would have stepped into the void and sometimes did, e.g. RealVideo, but without legal IP protection the codecs would just have been entirely undocumented and heavily obfuscated, relying on tamper-proofed ASICs much faster.

badsectoracula · 17 days ago

That sounds like the 90s argument against FLOSS: without the incentive for people to sell software, nobody would write it.

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

deaddodo · 22 days ago

QT uses native controls/widgets, it just polyfills when there is no good native option or if you use custom styling.

badsectoracula · 22 days ago

No, it implements its own functionality. As an example consider one of the most basic controls which is available pretty much everywhere (i.e. no need for polyfill), the push button: the source code[0] for QPushButton clearly implements the behavior itself, it does not rely on any native button.

Compare with wxWidgets' equivalent to QPushButton, wxButton, where there is a backend-specific header[1] and implementation[2] where 99% of the wxButton functionality is there (there is a `btncmn.cpp` under `common` that is shared across backends but that has very little code itself).

[0] https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/src/widgets/widgets/qp...

[1] https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/master/include/w...

[2] https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/master/src/msw/b...

badsectoracula commented on Anandtech.com now redirects to its forums forums.anandtech.com/... · Posted by u/kmfrk

formerly_proven · 22 days ago

> Kiwix

... I haven't heard this name in 15 years probably. Back then you could bring Wikipedia offline on a laptop, it was only around 20-25 GB.

badsectoracula · 22 days ago

You can still bring Wikipedia offline on a laptop (and mobile phone, for some of the larger ones), it is just that you'd need around 100GB instead. There is even a library[0] you can use to do your own wikipedia viewer.

[0] https://github.com/openzim/libzim

badsectoracula commented on This Month in Ladybird ladybird.org/newsletter/2... · Posted by u/net01

kloop · 22 days ago

> Who would have thought someday a new engine rises in this climate, and then who would have thought it would be a small team, without a trillion dollar giant behind them pouring hundreds of millions into its production?

Anybody who has ever worked on a large enterprise software team. Anybody who has ever worked in this scenario will believe this. Computing history is full of 2-10 people teams beating giant well funded teams to the punch.

This mostly occurs because work expands to fill the time and resources allowed for the project (Parkinson's Law), and large companies have almost unlimited amounts of both.

badsectoracula · 22 days ago

Exactly, and to add to that: people who work on the stuff they personally like tend to do thing faster than people who work on stuff because they have to (like it is often the case in large enterprises).

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

madduci · 22 days ago

Just go for MFC FTW, it is in feature freeze but I will last probably for the next 20 years yet.

badsectoracula · 22 days ago

You could also go for wxWidgets as it is kinda MFC-y but better and cross-platform, though like MFC you can combine it with Win32 API code (almost) seamlessly.

Or go with Qt, though that doesn't use native controls.

badsectoracula commented on Ollama's new app ollama.com/blog/new-app... · Posted by u/BUFU

kergonath · 25 days ago

I have other things to do with my day than vibe-coding yet another stupid chat app with fewer features than one I can just download and get running in minutes. It’s not helplessness or misery, it’s just the finite number of hours I have in a day and the fact that other things are more interesting than that. I don’t grow my own wheat or maintain my own OS, either.

badsectoracula · 24 days ago

Yeah, ok, don't do it then. That doesn't mean because you do not want to bother, the suggestion is invalid for everyone here. There are a lot of people who just love to do their own thing, tinker with whatever they have on hand and then use the stuff they have created themselves.

badsectoracula commented on I tried Servo spacebar.news/servo-under... · Posted by u/robtherobber

YmiYugy · 24 days ago

I just don't get the point of ladybird. They have full time engineers and are soliciting donations, so it's clearly more than a hobby project. Maybe my assumptions are off, but I just can't imagine they could ever become competitive in terms of features, security and performance with the big engines. Blink is setting the pace, Webkit is barely able to keep up and Gecko is slowly falling behind. All of these teams are orders of magnitudes larger than the Ladybird team. If you think that Blinks dominance is a thread to the web it's not enough to have an alternative engine you need enough adoption of that engine so web devs make sure their site is compatible with that engine. Most of this also applies to Servo, but at least their technical project goals (embeddable, modular, parallel, memory safe) sound at least moderately compelling. Maybe Ladybird has similar goals, but at least their website doesn't really state any technical goals.

badsectoracula · 24 days ago

Larger teams do not necessarily mean you get stuff faster. If anything after some point, a large team can be hard to get things moving and have tons of issues with communication.

badsectoracula commented on I tried Servo spacebar.news/servo-under... · Posted by u/robtherobber

bobajeff · 24 days ago

I think without Mitchell Baker there would probably not have been a Mozilla. I'm fuzzy on the history but I believe she was the lawyer who originally set up the organization.

badsectoracula · 24 days ago

AFAIK she also wrote the MPL, but the thing is, people change and doing good stuff 30 years ago doesn't mean they'd keep doing good stuff decades later.

In any case it doesn't really matter much anymore since apparently she left Mozilla around February.