kbolino (u/kbolino) - Readit News

kbolino commented on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux himthe.dev/blog/microsoft... · Posted by u/bobsterlobster

crazygringo · 16 days ago

Huh, very interesting.

OK, I just grabbed my loupe to make sure I'm not missing anything, and pulled up an app in dark mode (so ringing should be more visible) on my MBA M4. I'm using its built-in display. I've cycled through all 4 available resolution settings in Display, and absolutely zero artifacts or ringing. Then tried connecting to my LG UltraFine 4K which connects over Thunderbolt, that gives 5 resolution settings instead of 4, and zero artifacts/ringing on any of those either.

So I have no idea what's going on. I don't doubt that you're seeing it, and it's there in that Reddit photo. But maybe it's something specific to external monitors over a certain connection type or something? Seems very strange that Apple would use a different downsampling algorithm under different circumstances though.

I'd normally assume the most likely culprit would be some kind of sharpening setting on a monitor, as that can absolutely cause the type of ringing seen in that Reddit photo. But on the other hand, if you're testing it right now and not seeing it at native 2x, then that would seem to be ruled out, at least in your case. Maybe it's some kind of resolution negotiation mismatch where it's actually the monitor applying a second scaling that has ringing, since monitors can accept signals that don't match their native hardware resolution?

kbolino · 16 days ago

I can get a mild form of it on my M4 MBP's built-in display at "1800x1125"* but it's not nearly as noticeable as it was on the 4K external display at "2560x1440" and honestly I needed my cell phone camera zoomed in to definitively identify it, so that was more of a fishing expedition than a real problem. However, I have tried 2 different Macs, 2 different 4K monitors (both LG UltraFine also, though they differ in firmware version and color reproduction because of course they do), and 2 different interfaces (HDMI, Thunderbolt), and I can reliably replicate it under all of those combinations. I think that exact scaling factor probably has a bad interaction with the scaling algorithm. I do agree that a lot of other scalings do not produce the ringing/halo/bloom effect.

* = You have to go click "Advanced...", enable "Show resolutions as list", then when back on the main Displays page, enable "Show all resolutions", to get this and many other options -- but this is only necessary on the internal display, the external display offers "2560x1440" as a non-advanced choice

kbolino commented on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux himthe.dev/blog/microsoft... · Posted by u/bobsterlobster

crazygringo · 16 days ago

All of these involve external monitors as far as I can tell, so it seems more likely it's the Display Stream Compression mentioned by the sibling to your comment that is the culprit.

Like I said, absolutely nothing like that happens on my display. I see the ringing in the first link. That doesn't happen to me. Not even a hint of it.

I get you don't like the scaling, but like I said, the very slight blurriness just isn't really noticeable in practice, especially given how Macs antialias text to begin with. Of all my complaints about Macs, this particular one is close to the bottom.

kbolino · 16 days ago

I gotta say, as the guy who brought up DSC, that last Reddit post especially had me doubting. That is not what DSC artifacts look like. DSC subsamples the chroma, which causes distinct color bleeding issues. That is luma bloom, which doesn't happen with DSC.

So I took my Mac Mini, hooked up to a 4K monitor, verified there were no DSC artifacts at native resolution, set it to "2560x1440" and sure enough the same artifacts appeared for me too, but still no telltale signs of DSC. So yeah, I gotta say, this is on Apple. Between this and dropping subpixel antialiasing support for text, it's pretty clear that their only properly supported configuration is 2x scaling on high-DPI displays.

kbolino commented on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux himthe.dev/blog/microsoft... · Posted by u/bobsterlobster

crazygringo · 16 days ago

> then the final result is raster-scaled with some sinc/Lanczos algorithm back down to the physical resolution. This shows up as ringing artifacts, which are very obvious with high-contrast, thin regions like text.

I don't think this is true. I use non-integer scaling on my Mac since I like the UX to be just a little bit bigger, and have never observed any kind of ringing or any specific artifacts at all around text, nor have I ever heard this as a complaint before. I assume it's just bilinear or bicubic unless you have evidence otherwise? The only complaint people tend to make is ever-so-slight additional blurriness, which barely matters at Retina resolution.

kbolino · 16 days ago

Indeed, these artifacts sound like they're coming from Display Stream Compression [1] rather than scaling. I've had Macs occasionally use DSC when it wasn't necessary; power-cycling the display and/or changing the port it's plugged into usually fixed it. If it's consistently happening, though, it's probably because the display, the cable, the port, and/or the GPU can't handle the resolution and refresh rate at full bandwidth.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Stream_Compression

kbolino commented on I made my own Git tonystr.net/blog/git_immi... · Posted by u/TonyStr

pwdisswordfishy · 16 days ago

This:

> don't try to resolve any merge conflicts ... Don't try to "help". Don't fuck with the index or the worktree.

... certainly is "nothing" in the literal sense--that that's what is desired of git-merge to do, but it's not "nothing" in the sense that you're saying.

git reset --hard has nothing to do with merging. Nothing. They're not even in the same class of operations. It's absolutely irrelevant to this use case. And saying so isn't "not an argument" or not communicating anything at all. git reset --hard does not in any sense effect a merge. What more needs to be (or can be) said?

If you want someone to help explain something to you, it's up to you to give them an anchor point that they can use to bridge the gap in understanding. As it stands, it's you who's given nothing at all, so one can only repeat what has already been described--

A resolution strategy for merge conflicts that involves doing nothing: nothing to the files in the current directory, staging nothing to be committed, and in fact not even bothering to check for conflicts in the first place. Just notate that it's going to be a merge between two parents X and Y, and wait for the human so they have an opportunity to resolve the conflicts by hand (if they haven't already), for them to add the changes to the staging area, and for them to issue the git-commit command that completes the merge between X and Y. What's unclear about this?

kbolino · 16 days ago

I think this is what you want:

  git merge -s ours --no-ff --no-commit <branch>

This will initiate a merge, take nothing from the incoming branch, and allow you to decide how to proceed. This leaves git waiting for your next commit, and the two branches will be considered merged when that commit happens. What you may want to do next is:

  git checkout -p <branch>

This will interactively review each incoming change, giving you the power to decide how each one should be handled. Once you've completed that process, commit the result and the merge is done.

kbolino commented on I made my own Git tonystr.net/blog/git_immi... · Posted by u/TonyStr

Brian_K_White · 16 days ago

What does that even mean? There already is reset hard.

kbolino · 16 days ago

The name "null" is confusing; you have to pick something. However, I think what is desired here is the "theirs" strategy, i.e. to replace the current branch's tree entirely with the incoming branch's tree. The end result would be similar to a hard reset onto the incoming branch, except that it would also create a merge commit. Unfortunately, the "theirs" strategy does not exist, even though the "ours" strategy does exist, apparently to avoid confusion with the "theirs" option [1], but it is possible to emulate it with a sequence of commands [2].

[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/merge-strategies#Documentation/merg...

[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4969679/814422

kbolino commented on Can you slim macOS down? eclecticlight.co/2026/01/... · Posted by u/ingve

coleca · 23 days ago

The needless processes / bloat still burn electricity though. I'd have to guess that given the millions of installed macOS machines it's a non-trivial amount of wasted electricity. Long gone are the days of ruthlessly optimizing software for the limited hardware.

kbolino · 23 days ago

Indeed, these processes are not all sitting there doing nothing.

Two processes in particular have been this exact sort of problem for me: mds_stores and mediaanalysisd. On three separate Macs (all Apple Silicon), I've observed the case heating up whenever the computer is plugged in but not actively being used. Assuming Activity Monitor is more or less accurate, the culprit seems to be those two, who always have massive amounts of accumulated CPU time, but never seem to actually be using CPU when watched. I suspect, given what they supposedly do, that they're also needlessly exhausting SSD write cycles, but that's harder to analyze/prove. Naturally, they are also in the untouchable area of the file system. Completely disabling Spotlight, which you can do without disabling SIP, seems to always fix this problem, albeit at the cost of seriously decreased usability. I've also had mixed results with just limiting the categories of Spotlight indexing in System Settings.

kbolino commented on Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations hakibenita.com/postgresql... · Posted by u/haki

da_chicken · 23 days ago

I'm not sure why you'd expect partial updates of a single statement in the first place. I mean, if I run `UPDATE Account SET Status = 'Closed' WHERE LastAccess < NOW() - INTERVAL '90 days';`, I'm not going to be happy if there's 50 records that match, the DB updates 30 successfully, and then error on 20. Atomic isn't just about rows. Do all the work or none of it.

If you're experiencing things that smell like TOCTOU, first you need to be sure you don't have oddball many-to-one issues going on (i.e., a cardinality violation error), and then you're going to have to increase your transaction isolation level to eliminate non-repeatable reads and phantom reads.

Like, the alternative to a MERGE is writing a few UPDATE statements followed by an INSERT and wrapping the entire batch in a transaction. And you should likely still wrap the whole thing in a transaction. If it breaks, you just replay the whole thing. Re-run the whole job.

kbolino · 23 days ago

I don't want partial updates, I want full, conflict-free upserts.

At read committed (default) isolation level, INSERT ... ON CONFLICT handles concurrent, conflicting inserts just fine, while MERGE ... WHEN NOT MATCHED (e.g.) does not. This is surprising behavior from the syntax alone, one would assume the two statements, when written with the same intent, would have the same behavior. Of course, this difference is documented, see the last paragraph of the Notes section on MERGE: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/18/sql-merge.html#id-1.9.3.1...

I don't know this for sure, but I believe that the effect of raising the transaction isolation level will just be to turn the constraint violation into a serialization error. That's not any easier to handle gracefully.

kbolino commented on Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations hakibenita.com/postgresql... · Posted by u/haki

gshulegaard · 24 days ago

IIRC `MERGE` has been part of SQL for a while, but Postgres opted against adding it for many years because it's syntax is inherently non-atomic within Postgres's MVCC model.

https://pganalyze.com/blog/5mins-postgres-15-merge-vs-insert...

This is somewhat a personal preference, but I would just use `INSERT ... ON CONFLICT` and design my data model around it as much as I can. If I absolutely need the more general features of `MERGE` and _can't_ design an alternative using `INSERT ... ON CONLFICT` then I would take a bit of extra time to ensure I handle `MERGE` edge cases (failures) gracefully.

kbolino · 24 days ago

It's kinda hard to handle MERGE failures gracefully. You generally expect the whole thing to succeed, and the syntax deceptively makes it seem like you can handle all the cases. But because of MVCC, you get these TOCTOU-style spurious constraint violations, yet there's no way to address them on a per-row basis, leading to the entire statement rolling back even for the rows that had no issues. If you are designing for concurrent OLTP workloads against the table, you should probably just avoid MERGE altogether. It's more useful for one-off manual fixups.

kbolino commented on You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML blog.novalistic.com/archi... · Posted by u/jen729w

Pxtl · a month ago

> XML has self-closing tag syntax but it wasn't always handled well by browsers.

So we'll add another syntax for browsers to handle.

https://xkcd.com/927/

kbolino · a month ago

I was going to respond that HTML was the original syntax and XML the usurper, but a comment in another thread casts some doubt on that version of events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46576844