A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel, and each of them has to deal with all the quirks of the graphics drivers. I think this is a big problem with the architecture of Wayland. There really should be a standard library that all desktops use. Wlroots aims to be one, but I don't see Gnome and KDE moving to it anytime soon.
Readit Newsgsliepen commented on Can I start using Wayland in 2026? michael.stapelberg.ch/pos... · Posted by u/secure
gsliepen commented on Ask HN: How do I bridge the gap between PhD and SWE experiences? · Posted by u/ecophyseis
I did move from physics to becoming a SWE. I could put the knowledge I gained doing 3D rendering and GPU compute used for visualization and simulations in my academic jobs on my CV, and get a job as a SWE that way. Later I moved to another job where I could use my physics background to help develop a new sensor.
As for how to market yourself: first you should convert your academic CV to one that is suited for the type of companies you are applying for. Unless you wrote something that ended up in Nature or some other super high profile journal, companies typically don't care about your publications. What they do care about is things like: can you communicate well? How well can you organize things on your own? Do you handle stress well? You did a PhD, so the answer to those things is yes, you just need to write that in your CV in a way a company recruiter/interviewer understands, even if they themselves are not from academia. So you don't have two halves that belong to different resumes, you are just one person and you just translate your resume to the "language" that your prospective job provider speaks.
Finally, your list of skills does not need to be a perfect match for what a company is looking for. Of course, there needs to be some overlap, but as long as it means you can pick up new things quickly, it will be fine. That and being a good fit for the company's culture are the most important things.
I did not start out with a unicorn role, but in I found ways to apply my physics background in my current job.
I'll die on the proverbial hill that the absolute worst instance of this has always been GIMP, which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.
It was and perhaps still is, a solid competitor to Photoshop, but any unfamiliar grownup is, quite reasonably, going to never ever ever trust anything to do serious work with a name like that.
I used GIMP before I ever used Photoshop. My experience was the opposite. I think that means the UIs are different, but there is no one that is objectively better, it's just a matter of what your expectations are, which are set by whatever you learned first.
As for CMYK support: why do designers even need to use this? Sure, not every RGB is the same, and it took some while before we even got sRGB as some standard, but the same goes for CMYK: every printer has its own profile. I had the displeasure of trying to get the CMYK profile of a "professional" printing company that only accepted files in CMYK, and they didn't even know which profile their printers used. Ideally you would send a RGB file including the display profile your screen uses, and then the printing facility converts that to whatever CMYK they need.
Of course there are also special colors or effects outside of RGB/CMYK that you might want to use when printing something, that's something else.
gsliepen commented on The Lucas-Lehmer Prime Number Test scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/beardyw
The obvious and naive method described above is O(sqrt(N)). For N ~= 2 ^ 127, that is about 2 ^ 64. / The Lucas-Lehmer method described in the article is better (how much better is an exercise for the reader).
You are assuming division itself is an O(1) operation. However, it also scales with the size of the number. So more correct would be to say that this naive method is O(sqrt(N) log(N) log(log(N))).
gsliepen commented on TCP, the workhorse of the internet cefboud.com/posts/tcp-dee... · Posted by u/signa11
If you start with the problem of how to create a reliable stream of data on top of an unreliable datagram layer, then the solution that comes out will look virtually identical to TCP. It just is the right solution for the job.
The three drawbacks of the original TCP algorithm were the window size (the maximum value is just too small for today's speeds), poor handling of missing packets (addressed by extensions such as selective-ACK), and the fact that it only manages one stream at a time, and some applications want multiple streams that don't block each other. You could use multiple TCP connections, but that adds its own overhead, so SCTP and QUIC were designed to address those issues.
The congestion control algorithm is not part of the on-the-wire protocol, it's just some code on each side of the connection that decides when to (re)send packets to make the best use of the available bandwidth. Anything that implements a reliable stream on top of datagrams needs to implement such an algorithm. The original ones (Reno, Vegas, etc) were very simple but already did a good job, although back then network equipment didn't have large buffers. A lot of research is going into making better algorithms that handle large buffers, large roundtrip times, varying bandwidth needs and also being fair when multiple connections share the same bandwidth.
gsliepen commented on TCP, the workhorse of the internet cefboud.com/posts/tcp-dee... · Posted by u/signa11
Wait, can you actually just use IP? Can I just make up a packet and send it to a host across the Internet? I'd think that all the intermediate routers would want to have an opinion about my packet, caring, at the very least, that it's either TCP or UDP.
They shouldn't; the whole point is that the IP header is enough to route packets between endpoints, and only the endpoints should care about any higher layer protocols. But unfortunately some routers do, and if you have NAT then the NAT device needs to examine the TCP or UDP header to know how to forward those packets.
Could be an interesting chip for a future Raspberry Pi model? With Radeon having nice open source drivers, it would be easy to run a vanilla Linux OS on it. The TDP looks compatible as well.
I think his consistent track record of apocalypse failure predictions (and then lack of examining his failure) is made even weirder by how good of a thinker or writer he comes across in some of his fiction.
I started reading the Laundry Files, and was shocked by how diverse his knowledge is, and how well he understands some aspects of the world (bureaucracy, the nature of horror writing, state intelligence apparatuses).
He seems to be far more intelligent and knowledgeable than the average human. So why the incredible lack of self-awareness when it comes to predicting the end of the world?
Predicting the future is very hard (think butterfly effects, Lyapunov exponents and so on). It's also easy to extrapolate what would happen if the current situation continues unchanged, but very hard to predict what will happen in the near future in response to the current situation. People are already reacting to changes in politics and climate, thereby softening the blow, and maybe in some cases averting it.
I'm hoping Charles Stross knows this, and you should take his predictions as "this is what would happen if we did absolutely nothing about it".
gsliepen commented on Benefits of choosing email over messaging spinellis.gr/blog/2025092... · Posted by u/iparaskev
Nice. Note though that you don't necessarily have to limit everyone else to email; some messaging platforms allow one user to post something using a webpage for example, and cause that to send email to another user, and vice versa. One data point: GitHub's issue tracker can forward issues as email, and you can reply to those back via email, and your response will end up as a new comment on the issue.
That's a nice gadget. But now: raspeberry's company has tons of money and demonstrated its ability to deliver good quality, inexpensive computers.
So WHY don't they make a linux mobile PHONE ?
That would change a lot of things
The problem of a Linux phone is not the hardware, it's the software. Are you doing to run a desktop OS on it? No. And if you want something like Android but not Android itself, how are you getting enough quality apps made? What about things like banking apps, who is going to port those?
While I would like a pure Linux phone, I think the only reasonable course of action is Android with something like Samsung's DeX on top. Maybe that is something they could do, but I don't see this happening any time soon.