cwizou (u/cwizou) - Readit News

cwizou commented on AMD could enter ARM market with Sound Wave APU built on TSMC 3nm process guru3d.com/story/amd-ente... · Posted by u/walterbell

ahoka · 2 months ago

Are ARM processors inherently power efficient? I doubt.

Performance per watt is increasing due to the lithography.

Also, Devon’s paradox.

cwizou · 2 months ago

According to an AMD engineer I asked at the time, when they evaluated Ryzen/K12, it was "maybe" a 15% advantage for ARM depending on scenarios.

The efficiency came solely from the frontend which is a lot heavier on x86, and stay up longer because decoding is way more complex. The execution units were the same (at least mostly, I think, might be misremembering) so once you are past the frontend there's barely any difference in power efficiency.

cwizou commented on Show HN: MacOS Live Screensaver – A screensaver that plays live video streams github.com/hauxir/macos-l... · Posted by u/hauxir

hauxir · 2 months ago

interesting you pointed that out because i ran into that exact problem!

look at the animateoneframe function, there's the workaround

cwizou · 2 months ago

So fyi, the way you hook it there is what makes the preview flicker in System Settings.

You check if the screen is locked, and if not, kill the host. But screen is not locked in System Settings. So basically, you're killing the host process every 2 seconds (and macOS, at least in Tahoe, restarts it, it doesn't in previous macOS versions).

That's also what causes your issues with "Options" not working (because you killed the instance that was linked to that button). The way we workaround it usually is to hook a system event.

You can check https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/ScreenSaverMinimal

Look for handleWillStopNotification and com.apple.screensaver.willstop

cwizou commented on Show HN: MacOS Live Screensaver – A screensaver that plays live video streams github.com/hauxir/macos-l... · Posted by u/hauxir

hauxir · 2 months ago

interesting you pointed that out because i ran into that exact problem!

look at the animateoneframe function, there's the workaround

cwizou · 2 months ago

Ha, you do the exit trick too then, I just missed it.

FYI that works 99% of the time, but for some people it sometimes crashes (because we exit our host container - legacyScreenSaver.appex - and sometimes if you do it at a wrong time things just hang).

cwizou commented on Show HN: MacOS Live Screensaver – A screensaver that plays live video streams github.com/hauxir/macos-l... · Posted by u/hauxir

cwizou · 2 months ago

That's super cool, congrats on releasing it ! It's a feature that some people periodically ask me to add in Aerial, but I never got to it. Piping from yt-dlp to AVFoundation is definitely the way to go.

I was gonna warn you about a bug in macOS 15+ where your screensaver stays around after you go back to the desktop, but for some reason your code seems to avoid that issue. I'm not quite sure how, as you don't hook stopAnimation or any event apart from the deinit. But it works, so, massive kudos, I'll have to try and understand why !

cwizou commented on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence bbc.com/news/articles/cvg... · Posted by u/begueradj

genezeta · 2 months ago

Apparently, in English, convicted means that someone has been officially declared guilty of some crime. After being convicted comes being sentenced, which is when the punishment is set.

On the other hand, condemned is specifically about being sentenced to death -or sometimes life in prison or some similarly hard punishment-. Which is also why a building is said to be condemned when it is set to be demolished.

cwizou · 2 months ago

Interestingly in french we use "condamné" for sentenced, and for any kind of sentence (even a fine).

We don't ever use "sentence" in a legal context (it still exists but is old fashioned), things diverged quite a bit it seems between those languages.

cwizou commented on Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel dfarq.homeip.net/athlon-6... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

dooglius · 3 months ago

What is/was Yamhill?

cwizou · 3 months ago

It was the name of Intel's x86 64bit flavor : https://www.edn.com/intel-working-on-yamhill-technology-says...

cwizou commented on Show HN: I reverse engineered macOS to allow custom Lock Screen wallpapers cindori.com/backdrop... · Posted by u/cindori

cwizou · 3 months ago

Awesome stuff !

I've been trying to make a library/cli to set the wallpaper/screensaver to use in the next version of Aerial (https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/PaperSaver) on individual screens and been toying around a lot with that whole WallpaperAgent subsystem (and obviously everything Aerial like the manifests, etc, before that), so I may have some insights/questions if you have time ?

From what I've seen there are multiple parts to the way that macOS subsystem works :

- Apple fetches the manifest (json file) with their own videos in (only) 240FPS

- It gets ingested in '/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Aerial.sqlite' for some reason

- Apple pulls the videos in '/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/4KSDR240FPS' but renames them through a UUID (despite them having individual keys in the JSON)

Adding videos and sections in System Settings, you can do by manipulating that sqlite and killing WallpaperAgent (or maybe something else) before doing it, but as far as I remember (I only toyed with that part last year during Sequoia beta, so probably misremembering), macOS will periodically pull the manifest again and (fairly often) erase all your changes.

As far as I know, what you select then gets saved per screen/space in `~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.wallpaper/Store/Index.plist` (with a lovely Base-64 coding thrown in for fun).

The last part to this is a SystemWallpaperURL key stored in `~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.wallpaper.plist` which I believe (not 100% sure), contains the "special" video that gets played on a cold boot login (as far as I know it's a separate state from the "classic" Lock Screen).

So if I may :

- Do your videos show up on a cold boot too (that separate state I mentionned?) or just the "classic" Lock Screen? My rough guess is the cold boot lock screen can only display videos that are on the System Volume that's mounted before the user volume, so that one is probably fully out of reach.

- How hard did you have to workaround working with restricted paths ? Apple (for some good reasons) restricts hard access to files in user folders, and at that point the only safe place I can reasonably find (outside of containers, but that's a whole other story with screensavers) is `/Users/Shared`. Are you using that folder too?

- Are you messing with the sqlite db, or are you injecting via a reversed engineered api?

- Did you try editing `~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.wallpaper/Store/Index.plist` to set your video wallpapers or are you just relying on them being integrated in System Settings?

Since Sequoia, right now Apple broke the way we could set a screensaver via terminal. I got that part working (setting per screen/space) in PaperSaver, but the wallpaper part (basically just switching to another user selected image, not even a video, but this has to be done per space for which we don't have a public api for), I can't seem to get quite right yet, so any insight you have on that would be welcome. Take care and again awesome effort on your launch, this is a non trivial system with so many pitfalls, it takes a bunch of dedication to make it work with so many subtle problems in every corner.

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

chubot · 4 months ago

You could say "Linux was CREATED out of thin air", and I wouldn't argue with you.

But creation only counts for so much -- without support, Linux could still be a hobby project that "won't be big and professional like GNU"

I'm saying Linux didn't APPEAR out of thin air, or at least it's worth looking deeper into the reasons why. "Appearing" to the general public, i.e. making widely useful software, requires a large group of people over a sustained time period, like 10 years.

----

i.e. Right NOW there are probably hundreds of projects like Linux that you haven't heard of, which don't necessarily align with funders

I would actually make the comparison to GNU -- GNU is a successful project, but there are various efforts underneath it that kind of languish.

Look at High Priority Free Software Projects - https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/

- Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting

- Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs

- Real-time voice and video chat

- Internationalization of free software

- Security by and for free software

- Intelligent personal assistant

I'm saying that VIDEO CODECS might be structurally more similar to these projects, than they are to the Linux kernel.

i.e. making a freely-licensed kernel IS aligned with Red Hat, Intel, Google, but making an Intelligent Personal Assistant is probably not.

Somebody probably ALREADY created a good free intelligent personal assistant (or one that COULD BE as great as Linux), but you never heard of them. Because they don't have hundreds of companies and thousands of people aligned with them.

cwizou · 4 months ago

My point was, a lot of the early corporate support were smallish companies built specifically around Linux. RedHat is the perfect example of that, it started as a university project to make a distro.

It took a while (and a lot of pain) to get a lot of driver vendors to come fully into the project, yet Linux was already gaining a bunch of traction at that time (say last half of 90s).

I'll give you that Intel was always more or less a good actor though! But Google didn't exist when Linux already mattered. And when Google was created, they definitely benefited a lot from it, basing much of their infra on it.

Marketing needs (and laywer approval) can bring support faster than most things. Opus for audio is a good example of that too.

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

chubot · 4 months ago

> Who would write a whole operating system to compete with Microsoft when that would take thousands of engineers being paid $100,000s per year?

You might be misunderstanding that almost all of Linux development is funded by the same kind of companies that fund MPEG development.

It's not "engineers in their basement", and never was

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members

e.g. Red Hat, Intel, Oracle, Google, and now MICROSOFT itself (the competitive landscape changed)

This has LONG been the case, e.g. an article from 2008:

https://www.informationweek.com/it-sectors/linux-contributor...

2017 Linux Foundation Report: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/linux-fo...

Roughly 15,600 developers from more than 1,400 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since the adoption of Git made detailed tracking possible

The Top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report include Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD, Renesas and Mellanox

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curl does seem to be an outlier, but you still need to answer the question: "Who would develop video codecs?" You can't just say "Linux appeared out of thin air", because that's not what happened.

Linux has funding because it serves the interests of a large group of companies that themselves have a source of revenue.

(And to be clear, I do not think that is a bad thing! I prefer it when companies write open source software. But it does skew the design of what open source software is available.)

cwizou · 4 months ago

> You can't just say "Linux appeared out of thin air", because that's not what happened.

It kinda did though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Creation !

The corporate support you mentioned arrived years after that.

cwizou commented on Show HN: I made an app that lets you save audio to your Cameral Roll justsendrecord.com... · Posted by u/zahirbmirza

cwizou · 6 months ago

Definitely a cool idea ! Some feedback on your page :

The "See it in action" section doesn't really show it in action ? There's a picture but it's abstract, is it representative ? Are there multiple styles ? Is it just an image or a video ? Just looking at this I don't really know. Consider putting a gif/video preview in there so we get a better idea and/or add multiple examples ?

It got more confusing when I got below and saw the "How to use" > "visualize" section below where you have a mountain picture ? So which is it ?

Also maybe add video somewhere when you mention mp4, for non tech users. Visualization (which you use a lot in your text) doesn't convey that to me, but just my 2 cents!