I think this is a great idea. I wonder if it's technically possible to only unlock the apps when you have a certain other app (i.e. the Quran app) open for a given amount of time. Right now it just starts a 5 minute timer which means I can go and do something else but not actually spend time on the thing I want to practice.
Readit Newsspuz commented on Show HN: I built an app that blocks social media until you read Quran daily · Posted by u/kalyfacloud
spuz commented on Nvidia-smi hangs indefinitely after ~66 days github.com/NVIDIA/open-gp... · Posted by u/tosh
A few years ago, at my company, we would get random TPM crashes every few months on all our machines. You'd be working and the TPM would just disappear and then any apps that rely on it for key retrieval would error out. Even worse, since the TPM chip is always running, neither a reboot nor a shutdown would fix it -- you literally had to pull the plug.
This went on for months. Then one day we had a power outage. Two months later, every single machine failed at the same time. I checked the logs and it was 49 days and few hours since that outage. It didn't take me too long to figure out what the underlying programming error inside the TPM was. At least we could then describe exactly what the problem was to our PC vendor.
So what was the programming error in the TPM?
Not sure if it's just Firefox, but a lot of things seem to be rendering incorrectly and very slowly for me. The text for the descriptions is very small compared to the rest of the text which makes it kind of hard to read. Also, on the Spectrum demo, the prism is displayed up and to the left of the light rays. After a few minutes the pages just grind to a halt so I can't really explore the rest.
This completely killed my OS and nearly took the PC with it. It started running ok but as it filled the screen, the FPS dropped and then my browser stopped responding, then the mouse started moving VERY slowly and then the screen went black and my Bluetooth got disconnected. At that point, even long-pressing the power off button did nothing and I had to switch off the PC at the wall...
I am going to put the blame on Firefox and Linux Mint but it's honestly impressive how a simple animated simulation can do this.
spuz commented on UK consulting on bringing in social media ban for under 16s bbc.com/news/articles/cgm... · Posted by u/1659447091
What is it about this 16 y/o cutoff that seems to be the focus everywhere? Why not 18?
It almost seems like this will make SM attractive by making it a kind of forbidden fruit and/or a social standing status indicator for impressionable, malleable minded, underdeveloped minds of teens seeking to feel like adults.
In other words, if I didn’t know any better, I would have guessed that it might actually be the likes of Facebook pushing these controls internationally (not the least because they seem so coordinated all across the planet) in order to manipulate target users into coveting having a fb/SM account again.
Tell me you think Facebook, the same Facebook that was caught running uncontrolled and illegal psychological manipulation testing on its users, would not do such a thing!
You think Meta secretly wanted to remove 4.7m Australian users while saying:
> "We call on the Australian government to engage with industry constructively to find a better way forward, such as incentivising all of industry to raise the standard in providing safe, privacy-preserving, age-appropriate experiences online, instead of blanket bans,"
because ultimately they think it will attract more users to their platforms?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-15/social-media-ban-data...
https://www.9news.com.au/national/australia-social-media-ban...
Why can't we just call it "play". That is what we used to call doing things without a purpose.
I wish people would disclose when they used an LLM to write for them. This comes across as so clearly written by ChatGPT (I don't know if it is) that it seriously devalues any potential insights contained within. At least if the author was honest, I'd be able to judge their writing accordingly.
spuz commented on ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering alexharri.com/blog/ascii-... · Posted by u/alexharri
It's important to note that the approach described focuses on giving fast results, not the best results.
Simply trying every character and considering their entire bitmap, and keeping the character that reduces the distance to the target gives better results, at the cost of more CPU.
This is a well known problem because early computers with monitors used to only be able to display characters.
At some point we were able to define custom character bitmap, but not enough custom characters to cover the entire screen, so the problem became more complex. Which new character do you create to reproduce an image optimally?
And separately we could choose the foreground/background color of individual characters, which opened up more possibilities.
Thinking more about the "best results". Could this not be done by transforming the ascii glyphs into bitmaps, and then using some kind of matrix multiplication or dot production calculation to calculate the ascii character with the highest similarity to the underlying pixel grid? This would presumably lend itself to SIMD or GPU acceleration. I'm not that familiar with this type of image processing so I'm sure someone with more experience can clarify.
spuz commented on ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering alexharri.com/blog/ascii-... · Posted by u/alexharri
In practice isn’t a large HashMap best for lookup, based on compile-time or static constants describing the character-space?
In the appendix, he talks about reducing the lookup space by quantising the sampled points to just 8 possible values. That allowed him to make a look up table about 2MB in size which were apparently incredibly fast.
spuz commented on Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids blog.smartere.dk/2026/01/... · Posted by u/mchro
I had a 75-inch TV I inherited, it was on the higher end and the TV UI was supper snappy.
Then, I broke it accidentally and got only 1/4 of the money from insurance. Because I barely watch TV, I thought I would just buy a TV of the same size, but on the lower end... both TVs were Samsung anyway.
What a huge difference. The image quality is a little worse, barely noticeable after you get used to it. But the UI is agonizingly slow. Every time I turn the TV on it starts showing some channel fairly quickly, but then after several seconds the image gets black because it's loading the stupid UI... and I can't find a way for it to NOT do that! The higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that.
So now, I know what you're paying for when you get a TV for $4,000 instead of $1,000: slightly better image , but a proper computer to run the stupidly heavy UI (probably made using some heavy JS framework, I suppose).
> The higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that
Actually it is very much needed to say that. Manufacturers get away with crappy unbearably slow UIs even on expensive TVs because it's not something that gets enough consideration by reviewers or indeed buyers.
For others, I highly recommend Git from the Bottom Up[1]. It is a very well-written piece on internal data structures and does a great job of demystifying the opaque git commands that most beginners blindly follow. Best thing you'll learn in 20ish minutes.
1. https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/