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thaeli commented on People Who Hunt Down Old TVs   bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/tmendez
majormajor · 6 months ago
Blowing things up to that size is not representative.

Back when I first started playing things on emulators we were using 12" to 20" CRTs or LCDs with much higher resolution than a TV, so whether CRT or LCD the pixels were chunkier.

None of the nostalgia is how I remember it at all.

The average CRT TV had crap color and poor brightness and going from that and the flicker of 1-to-1 size NTSC on a 20-something TV to an emulated "chunkier pixel" rendition on a progressize-scan 72+hz 1024x768-or-higher CRT or an LCD looked way better.

Take the side by side pictures and zoom WAY out on a high-res screen or go stand several feet away from your monitor so that they're the size they were designed and expected to be seen at, and the vast majority of the perceived improvement from making the CRT subpixels visible goes away. And then put them into motion - especially vertical motion - and those lines in between, and losing half on each frame becomes more noticable and distracting.

The 4th image there of the yellow monster is a good example. Even zooming to 50% on my high-res display makes the "bad" version suddenly look way sharper and detailed as the size starts to show how frequently "rounded dots with gaps between it" just looks like fuzziness instead of "better".

And these comparisons tend to cherry-pick and not show examples of things that lose clarity as a result of the subpixels and scanlines instead of gain clarity.

thaeli · 6 months ago
I'm the same way. The scanlined, subpixeled versions just look terrible to me.
thaeli commented on People Who Hunt Down Old TVs   bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/tmendez
EvanAnderson · 6 months ago
I regret taking all my old tube monitors to Goodwill back in the mid-2000s. I saved a Commodore 1942, at least, but I sent all the rest away to die.

I appreciate the CRT modeling in emulators, but a hardware device that passes thru a display signal and provided sub-frame CRT artifacting and phosphor modeling (particularly if it supported 240P) would be bitchin'.

thaeli · 6 months ago
FPGA based devices that can do this, and quite well, do exist, they're just expensive. The RetroTINK-4k Pro is the top of the line as of this writing but it's a $750 converter.
thaeli commented on Ask HN: Do custom ROMs exist for electric cars, for example Teslas?    · Posted by u/j1000
HeyLaughingBoy · 6 months ago
This seems similar to what we do in medical devices.

The manufacturer creates a set of procedures covering the design process that meets, at a minimum, the stages set out in 21CFR, often following the industry standard for software: IEC-62304. Then mfr documents that those procedures were followed and at the end submits a set of documents about the test results and development process for agency approval.

Sound similar? One difference I can see is that if you replace the software in a released medical device with your own, it's no longer considered to be Approved and using it opens you up to Federal liability.

thaeli · 6 months ago
Emissions related components work very similarly, replace the software and it’s presumed to be a defeat device unless proved otherwise.
thaeli commented on Ask HN: Do custom ROMs exist for electric cars, for example Teslas?    · Posted by u/j1000
AlotOfReading · 6 months ago
The only parts where that's true are for things like FCC certification. The US does not have an affirmative certification process for automotive software, including safety critical systems. NHTSA instead puts out a set of rules called FMVSS that manufacturers and aftermarket parts must comply with. Manufacturers then self-certify that they meet FMVSS and produce a bunch of documentation demonstrating that if NHTSA asks.

Note that FMVSS has almost nothing to say on the topic of software. The industry broadly follows industry standards like ISO 26262 and the less universal 21448, but these don't have firm legal weight outside their status as standards of practice, nor do they preclude installing your own software.

The situation in Europe is different and an affirmative certification process does exist there.

thaeli · 6 months ago
For emissions related components, EPA rules do kick in though. While the current administration appears to have paused enforcement, their position for many years has been that running anything except factory approved firmware on an ECU or other emissions related computer constitutes a “defeat device” and is illegal for an on road vehicle subject to emissions controls. (Granted, in practice 99% of the reason anyone installs new firmware on their ECU, or switches to an aftermarket ECU, is for a “tune” that does affect emissions. I’m sure there is some edge case exception, but it’s very rare in on road engines.)

The alternative, and there are a very few tunes that have done this, is to prove to regulators that the tune does not negatively affect emissions in any way. In practice this is done by getting a CARB exception since they’re the ones actually checking for tunes.

thaeli commented on We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own   hugotunius.se/2025/08/31/... · Posted by u/K0nserv
rhines · 6 months ago
We've reached the point where people without devices or common online services are so rare that society no longer accommodates them. It's similar to how we need legislation to ensure that disabled people have accessible infrastructure, except I doubt there will ever be legislation mandating offline/off-app accessibility.
thaeli · 6 months ago
Well, many areas have banned app-only payment requirements (along with card-only) so it’s possible we’ll get some mandated alternatives.
thaeli commented on LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't   cloudsquid.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/universesquid
OtherShrezzing · 7 months ago
The first thing I do on HN posts with lots of upvotes and few comments is scroll to the bottom and check if the closing paragraph has a link to some saas product. If it does, I close the tab.
thaeli · 7 months ago
Ironically, this check would be a pretty good use for a LLM.
thaeli commented on Ghrc.io appears to be malicious   bmitch.net/blog/2025-08-2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
nicce · 7 months ago
GitHub Container registry does not even support fine-grained tokens, instead it uses classic ones [1], which makes this even more dangerous.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/packages/working-with-a-github-pa...

Edit: most relevant issues?

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/38467

https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/558

thaeli · 7 months ago
Are there any additional mitigations folks are using for this? This issue is the only reason we can’t turn classic PATs off entirely.

Short lifetime mandatory reauth to enterprise SSO seems to be the best available, but it’s inconvenient for the single Classic PAT we actually need.

thaeli commented on Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds   warpbuild.com/... · Posted by u/suryao
rbultje · 2 years ago
I've been using github actions cache to store build artifacts (object files) between builds. It takes a bit of fiddling but it's possible.
thaeli · 2 years ago
Yeah, interested to compare this with optimized and properly cached GitHub Hosted Runner builds.
thaeli commented on Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange   thediff.co/archive/inside... · Posted by u/gadders
anigbrowl · 3 years ago
high-rep users sneer at it

That sneering and the general idea that some questions are worthy and others not is one of the most offputting things about SE, followed by duplicative and unhelpful me-too answers that are very obvious reputation farming. When I took up programming again after a long hiatus I found SE very helpful at first but got sick of it within a matter of months because the meta game/* is horrible.

* the social dynamics in a community driven website that are wholly orthogonal to and often end up subverting the site's stated purpose by leveraging the stated ethos and decision infrastructure in pursuit of selfish ends. Other examples include Wikipedia edit wars or abusive forms of legalism and political brinksmanship.

thaeli · 3 years ago
The biggest problem with SE for me, and this is related to the culture issues you're talking about, is that the site has no good way of deprecating "formerly correct" answers. Even if a better, more correct answer is posted later, the reputation system has a huge incumbency bias in favor of older answers that have accumulated upvotes by being the best available answer at the time.

Their knowledge repository is slowly rotting under the weight of having to ask every time "okay, is this correct-sounding, highly upvoted answer actually (still) correct, or is it 10 years out of date?"

thaeli commented on B.C. woman buried in Amazon packages she did not ask for and does not want   cbc.ca/news/canada/britis... · Posted by u/hnuser0000
Brian_K_White · 3 years ago
I remember TV ads in the 70's or maybe 80's that were PSA from the US government, where the entire message was "if you receive something unsolicited in the mail, you own it and do not owe anyone anything" They featured an Eskimo in the middle of a frozen nowhere opening a package that turns out to be an electric fan. He says "gee. Thanks!"

Like what happened to that?

I also don't know why they ran those ads. They must have been expensive (or maybe not, maybe the government back then could just commandeer them), so presumably there must have been some kind of popular scam they were trying to fight.

thaeli · 3 years ago
There was a common scam back then of sending cheap goods to someone, then billing them a high price, when they didn't order anything to begin with.

u/thaeli

KarmaCake day952November 1, 2015View Original