dunham (u/dunham) - Readit News

dunham commented on Officials Claim Drone Incursion Led to Shutdown of El Paso Airport nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us... · Posted by u/edward

ssl-3 · 18 hours ago

Indeed.

So with this lack of information: Why 10 days? Why not 3, or 12, or some other number instead?

Or: Why must there be a number?

Is the officious equivalent of "We've got some shit to deal with, so El Paso's airspace is closed for now" insufficient?

dunham · 10 hours ago

CNN is now reporting that the FAA had a meeting scheduled with the DoD on the 20th to discuss use of the system, but someone decided to use the system earlier. (The 20th is one day short of 10 days.) They also report that CBP was operating it.

https://lite.cnn.com/2026/02/11/us/faa-el-paso-texas-flight-...

dunham commented on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle dmitrybrant.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/zdw

dunham · 11 days ago

Back when I was a kid in the 80's. I cracked one of the Ultima games. I had it on my hard drive and didn't want to stick a floppy in every time I ran it.

The code decrypted itself, which confused debuggers, and then loaded a special sector from disk. It was a small sector buried in the payload of a larger sector, so the track was too big to copy with standard tools. The data in the sector was just the start address of the program. My fix was to change executable header to point to the correct start address.

dunham commented on Film students who can no longer sit through films theatlantic.com/ideas/202... · Posted by u/haunter

ksymph · 12 days ago

Why would someone study film if they're not interested in it? People have been bored by movies nearly as long as movies have existed; but historically I don't think those people would go into college to study it.

What changed? It's not like there's a lot of money in film, so I struggle to understand the motivations there.

dunham · 12 days ago

When I was in school a lot of the CS students would take a telecommunications minor because they needed a minor and it was "easy". It included a film class.

dunham commented on ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss pdfa.org/want-to-make-you... · Posted by u/whizzx

eru · 21 days ago

Well, if sanity had prevailed, we would have likely stuck to .ps.gz (or you favourite compression format), instead of ending up with PDF.

Though we might still want to restrict the subset of PostScript that we allow. The full language might be a bit too general to take from untrusted third parties.

dunham · 21 days ago

Don't you end up with PDF if you start with PS and restrict it to a subset? And maybe normalize the structure of the file a little. The structure is nice when you want to take the content and draw a bit more on the page. Or when subsetting/combining files.

I suspect PDF was fairly sane in the initial incarnation, and it's the extra garbage that they've added since then that is a source of pain.

I'm not a big fan of this additional change (nor any of the javascript/etc), but I would be fine with people leaving content streams uncompressed and running the whole file through brotli or something.

dunham commented on The WebRacket language is a subset of Racket that compiles to WebAssembly github.com/soegaard/webra... · Posted by u/mfru

neilv · 22 days ago

Speaking of prolific Racketeers... Noel! Just an hour ago, on a walk, I was thinking, "I should work through that one LLM book, and implement it in Racket." (But have started job-hunting, so will probably be Python.)

dunham · 22 days ago

Which one LLM book?

I've got so much other stuff I'd rather learn and code I'd rather write (C/wasm backend for my language), but I've also started job hunting and probably should understand how this latest fad works. Neural networks have long been on my todo list anyway.

dunham commented on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe noheger.at/blog/2026/01/1... · Posted by u/happosai

ramijames · a month ago

The worst part is the audiocore substack that is glitching. I waited to major subversions to upgrade and still got bit. I hate this.

dunham · a month ago

Yeah, for me with a USB headset, the audio will go noisy about two minutes into a video / podcast. It clears up if I restart and doesn't happen when playing to the internal speakers.

dunham commented on I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great theverge.com/tech/858910/... · Posted by u/rorylawless

josephg · a month ago

The new glass look is just so bad. It feels cheap, like a child’s toy. And performance is worse as a result.

I’ve turned it off on my phone, via the accessibility settings. But it’s clear Apple doesn’t test the UI layout much with the new glass look turned off. Lots of controls are subtly misaligned now. I regret updating.

I have a Linux workstation. On Linux, nobody has the power to foist new ideas - good or bad - onto all users. All the arguing and bike shedding is one of Linux’s big weaknesses. But it’s also a huge strength. The desktop experience hasn’t gotten worse over the last 20 years like it has on windows and macOS. Programs start more or less instantly, as they should on modern hardware.

dunham · a month ago

> But it’s clear Apple doesn’t test the UI layout much with the new glass look turned off

I turned it off and the keypad buttons for screen time passcode became white on white.

dunham commented on Lego announces Smart Brick, the 'most significant evolution' in 50 years, no AI theverge.com/tech/854556/... · Posted by u/satvikpendem

Aurornis · a month ago

My kids will build a set according to the instructions and then a day or two later it's disassembled for parts so they can build something else.

The reason they sell sets is because the people who buy these are parents, uncles, grandmas, and other people. The sets make it easy for them to identify something that seems like kids would love it and possibly intersects with some brand the kids like, such as the Marvel crossover sets.

Once the bricks get in the kids' hands, they can do whatever they want with them.

dunham · a month ago

Yeah, I was concerned about the creativity thing early one, but both of my kids build random stuff from a sea of parts. Occasionally my older kid would decide to build a set again and be frustrated when they couldn't find the part they needed.

As a family, we have a couple of the ninjago city sets, those are largely intact, but the kids play with them.

The minifigures can be a little bit of a problem, they seem to trigger an instinct to collect unique items. My kid will ask for a set so they can get one (or more) of the minifigures in it.

dunham commented on “Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016) lbstanza.org/purpose_of_p... · Posted by u/teleforce

bwestergard · a month ago

Are there any particularly excellent examples of prolog implemented as a library you could point us to?

dunham · a month ago

As an example of a use case, "Gerrit Code Review"[1] is written in Java and uses prolog for the submit rules.[2]

I haven't looked into the implementation. But taking a brief glance now, it looks interesting. They appear to be translating Prolog to Java via a WAM representation[3]. The compiler (prolog-cafe) is written in prolog and bootstrapped into Java via swi-prolog.

I don't know why compilation is necessary, it seems like an interpreter would be fast enough for that use case, but I'd love to take it apart and see how it works.

[1]: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/ [2]: https://gerrit-documentation.storage.googleapis.com/Document... [3]: https://gerrit.googlesource.com/prolog-cafe/+/refs/heads/mas...

dunham commented on The Fisher-Yates shuffle is backward possiblywrong.wordpress.c... · Posted by u/possiblywrong

amluto · 2 months ago

I find the backward version slightly more intuitive. Here’s why:

Suppose I want to uniformly randomly shuffle a deck of cards in a single pass. I stick the deck on the table and call it the non-shuffled pile. My goal is to move the deck, one card at a time, into the shuffled pile. First I need to select a card, uniformly at random, to be the bottom card of the new pile, and I move it over. Then I select another card, uniformly at random from the still non-shuffled cards, and put it on top of the bottom shuffled card. I repeat this until I’ve moved all the cards, so that each card in the shuffled pile is a uniform random selection from all of the cards it could have been. And that’s it.

One can think of this as random selection, whereas the “forward” version is like random insertion of a not-random card into a shuffled pile. And for whatever reason I tend to think of the selection version first.

dunham · 2 months ago

For what it's worth, I think of the forward version as randomly selecting a card and putting it at the bottom of the new pile (0..i in the array).