sedawk (u/sedawk) - Readit News

sedawk commented on Windows 11 Insider Preview Build blogs.windows.com/windows... · Posted by u/taubek

out_sider · 6 months ago

Last December I bought a Asus Zenbook S14 with the Core 7 Ultra (lunar lake) and to be honest I'm loving windows + wsl, being able to have a premade ubuntu image configured with my building tools and just import and work on my balcuny for 9h is amazing. On top of that , although it's not the best gaming machine (far from that) I can still run a cs2 and Halo inifinity prety well :).

sedawk · 6 months ago

Really? Are you suggesting you getting solid 9h on full charge, while developing on Windows+wsl?? That's very hard to believe, but if that's true color me impressed. I get no where near that (albeit older hardware).

sedawk commented on F-Droid's Progress and What's Coming in 2025 f-droid.org/2025/01/21/a-... · Posted by u/mappu

mystified5016 · 7 months ago

All I have to do to out-compete your app on f-droid is to update more often than you, even if I make no actual changes. Anytime anyone in your target category updates, you push out a version bump and you're on top of the list. Bonus points if you start your app name with AA0 so it's always at the top of both available sort orders.

"Recently updated" is a bad metric that does not help users. By offering no other sort options, and sufficiently motivated person can trivially dominate any category in the repo.

A recently updated app is not better than a less frequently updated one just by merit of a higher version number.

sedawk · 7 months ago

Pretty sure I'm not touching any app that starts with AA0* (esp. if that name isn't relevant to app's functionality in some way)! But I get the point you are making, on how current system can be gamed with just app-naming and frequent (meaningless) updates to the app :-(

sedawk commented on Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000) · Posted by u/systemkwiat

PotatoPancakes · 10 months ago

I want to second the recommendation of MyNoise.net. It's phenomenal. Especially at work, it's perfect for getting in the zone. I pay for it even though I mostly stick to the free ones.

If you're working at a computer, I recommend opening multiple tabs at the same time. For example, one with some relaxing white noise, one with a music-adjacent one like Mr Rhodes or 88 Keys, and maybe also a crackling fire for cozy vibes.

- https://mynoise.net/noiseMachines.php My favorites are: "Stormy Weather", "Fireplace", "Irish coast", "88 Keys", and "Mr. Rhodes"

You can also find myNoise sounds on YouTube and Spotify:

- https://www.youtube.com/@myNoiseDotNet/videos

- https://open.spotify.com/artist/1gRJBUyCeihBrgcCtDdEfv

sedawk · 10 months ago

I have recently discovered a combo of white-noise + music, but I must tell you crackling fire noise makes me too relaxed, making me feel I need a quick nap! Rainfall sound works better for me :-)

Haven't come across myNosie before, will check it out, thank you for sharing!

sedawk commented on Ask HN: Life-changing purchases since 2020? (Under $100 and under $1000) · Posted by u/systemkwiat

sedawk · 10 months ago

You didn't tell yours yet! :-)

sedawk commented on Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO danluu.com/ballmer/... · Posted by u/greggyb

_heimdall · 10 months ago

Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!"

I was at Microsoft for the last couple years of Ballmer and the first few years of Nadella. He definitely did change the company and I remember at the time feeling that he handled the change really well, but from where I sat he spent the first part of his tenure evolving Ballmer's final push to move focus from Windows to developers. Everything Microsoft did prior to LLMs was to bring developers over, from VS Code to GitHub to WSL.

Now the company seems fully baked I to LLMs with everything they do chasing that. It would even make sense if the developer push was driven in part by the need to build up training sets for the eventual LLM work, though I really have a hard time believing that Microsoft was so well ahead of the game that they started grooming developers to provide data more than a decade ago.

sedawk · 10 months ago

> Lately it has definitely felt as though Microsoft is resurrecting Ballmer's old meme as "AI! AI! AI!"

You nailed it! Having spent significant time (as low-level minion) under both Ballmer and Satya, it certainly feels like the old Ballmer-time meme is coming back with the AI!

Also with it, the forced-curve ranking that Satya disbanded is being re-instituted under a different name.

sedawk commented on Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months theverge.com/2024/7/8/241... · Posted by u/Tomte

lukasgraf · a year ago

The big issue with Affinity Photo is that it doesn't support non-destructive editing / a non-linear workflow like Lightroom does.

It's not exactly a fair comparison, since AP directly competes with Photoshop, not Lightroom, but that was what made it an immediate non-starter for me when it comes to photography.

Affinity Photo starts you in a "Develop Persona" when you open a RAW file, and allows you to develop your RAW file. Before you can use any of the common editing tools, you need to leave that persona by committing your changes. You need to make a choice to bake these RAW adjustments into a "RAW layer (embedded)", "RAW layer (linked)" or a "Pixel layer". It's not very obvious what these are and how they work.

Most of the common editing tools then work destructively. Once you use them, you can't go back and change any of the RAW adjustments. There are some very limited tools available that can work non-destructively, but again, it's not very obvious which ones those are. And use of the wrong tool can immediately turn a "RAW layer" into a "Pixel layer" without warning.

It's all very confusing, to be honest. It may be a case of the RTFM, but I did so when I tried this a couple months ago, and came to the conclusion that AP simply isn't capable of a non-destructive editing workflow yet, except for a few very basic cases.

But the bundle price was worth it for me for Designer and Publisher alone. So I hope in due time they'll launch a fourth product to compete with Lightroom, on photo cataloging, culling and a non-destructive workflow.

The current commercial alternatives for Lightroom unfortunately are still lacking, last time I looked at them (Capture One, DxO Photo Lab). And the open source ones (darktable, digiKam) are ... not good. I'm keeping my eye on "Ansel" though (darktable fork by an ex-dev, anger-driven development), the author's rants sum up very wrong what's wrong with darktable, and why its community is so dysfunctional.

sedawk · a year ago

> The current commercial alternatives for Lightroom unfortunately are still lacking, last time I looked at them (Capture One, DxO Photo Lab)

Genuine question, how do you find DxO PhotoLab lacking when compared to LR?

I'm an old-time LR user and due to Adobe's licensing shenanigans exploring alternatives. I am having a pretty good time with trial version of DxO PhotoLab7. So far I haven't come across something that I could do in LR (as a hobbyist) that I can't achieve in PhotoLab7. And, I'm loving the built-in DeNoising algorithm in PL7.

sedawk commented on Show HN: Crawl a modern website to a zip, serve the website from the zip github.com/potahtml/mpa-a... · Posted by u/unlog

sedawk · a year ago

I used to use MAFF (Mozilla Archive Format)[1] a lot back in the day. I was very upset when they ended the support[2].

I never dug deeper whether I can unzip and decode the packing, but saving as simple ZIP does somewhat guarantee future-proofing.

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

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1180271

sedawk commented on Employees who stay in companies longer than two years get paid 50% less (2014) forbes.com/sites/cameronk... · Posted by u/AlgoRitmo

ukoki · a year ago

Employers don't reward long-term employees because they don't need to. Even though everyone knows you make more by job-hopping, companies are following a rational strategy because too few people "walk the walk" despite wanting more salary. Arguably unethical, but rational.

At the cost of losing a minority of job-hoppers they retain the cheap majority that:

    - finds job interviews exhausting, or is anxious about being rejected

    - dislikes conflict or negotiation

    - has good relationships with colleagues they don't want to lose

    - has a comfortable commute or WFH arrangement they don't want to change

    - is proud of becoming an expert / go-to-person in some part of the business and doesn't want to lose that source of social capital

    - is proud of product or service they have made a big contribution to and wants to "see it through to the end"

    - believes leaving would place an unfair burden on other team-members or would be disloyal to a manager they consider a friend

    - (US only) cannot risk losing healthcare

It's possible that in the future the ratio of job-hoppers to lifers changes and companies find they need to switch strategies. But until that happens the job-hoppers will have the upperhand compared to the lifers.

It's the same reason why your phone/insurance/whatever provider puts up the prices year-after-year: although some people leave, enough people simply put up with it that they make more money this way. "Do nothing" is an easy choice and companies are banking on enough people making that choice.

sedawk · a year ago

In a recent org-wide all-hands a member from senior leadership (C-suite) did explicitly say that they always have a much higher budget for new hires than the budget for rewarding/retaining existing talent; and that this is by-design. This was an eye-opener to me :-|

sedawk commented on Ask HN: What nonfiction books do you keep rereading? · Posted by u/mucle6

sedawk · a year ago

In no particular order...

0. Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony, by Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold, Mitsuko Shimomura

1. The Practice of Programming (TPOP) , by Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike

2. Wings of Fire, by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Arun Tiwari

sedawk commented on I don't want to fill out your contact form adamjones.me/blog/dont-us... · Posted by u/domdomegg

michaelcampbell · a year ago

Who/what is ASML?

sedawk · a year ago

I believe they are talking about ASML fab for semiconductors[1].

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