voldacar (u/voldacar)

voldacar commented on Winapp, the Windows App Development CLI blogs.windows.com/windows... · Posted by u/MaysonL

pjmlp · 15 days ago

Same as always, get one of the old books, the good ones back in the day.

Programming Windows, by Charles Petzold

Programming Windows with MFC, by Jeff Prosise

COM / DCOM Primer Plus, by Chris Corry Vincent Mayfield John Cadman

voldacar · 15 days ago

Thank you! Despite being older than me, those books look really thorough and well written. It's sort of crazy that these APIs are still as usable today as they were in 1998

voldacar commented on Winapp, the Windows App Development CLI blogs.windows.com/windows... · Posted by u/MaysonL

pjmlp · 15 days ago

I already mentioned in a few places, this is useless, probably a team having to meet some KPIs, OKRs, or whatever to show their impact value on the next evaluation cycle.

Anything related to WinUI, WinAppSDK, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT is a sea of bugs, broken tooling, and unfulfilled promises, that no one should bother with.

Easily confirmed by going into their public repositories over at Github, or community session recordings over at YouTube.

For those using .NET, keep using Windows Forms or WPF, or reach out to Avalonia and Uno.

For those using C++, the aging MFC has much better tooling as incredible as it sounds, or use instead VCL/Firemonkey (C++ Builder), Qt, wxWidgets,....

For anything else, whatever bindings are available on top of plain Win32.

voldacar · 15 days ago

What's the best way to get into MFC or Win32 in current year? Is there a canonically best book or tutorial for those wanting to learn?

voldacar commented on Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game? alexene.dev/2025/12/03/Wh... · Posted by u/pacificat0r

Night_Thastus · 2 months ago

I run into a similar problem. I have a power-hungry GPU (3080) and CPU (9800X3D).

All my audio equipment was on the same UPS (and therefore outlet) as my gaming PC.

The result is that any time a particularly stressful game would be open, I'd get buzzing in the speakers. (Especially if the framerate was at 360) If you ask audiophiles online they will swear up and down that a cheater plug, balanced cables, or optical isolation will fix it - that will not fix it. It's not a ground problem. It's not coming from the connection from the PC to the DAC - it's a power issue.

It seemed almost inconceivable to them that the problem was EMI from the computer making it into the equipment.

I temporarily got a double-conversion UPS (converts AC to DC to AC again) and housed the audio equipment on that instead (separate from PC) Lo-and-behold the noise was completely gone.

However, those UPS are extremely expensive, and far worse they're very loud because the fans run constantly.

So, I went with a simpler alternative. Just get a power strip and plug all the audio equipment into that on a different outlet. That reduces it massively. You can also get some strips that are designed to reduce EMI, but I haven't felt the need as of yet.

voldacar · 2 months ago

You could also chuck a bunch of ferrites on your PC power cord

voldacar commented on Antislop: A framework for eliminating repetitive patterns in language models arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061... · Posted by u/Der_Einzige

voldacar · 4 months ago

Instead of "surgically adjusting" logits within an existing model, couldn't you just build the slop detector into the loss function during the initial training stage?

voldacar commented on German government comes out against Chat Control xcancel.com/paddi_hansen/... · Posted by u/SolonIslandus

voldacar · 4 months ago

The EU tries something like this every few years. If you don't want this to happen, you have to win every time, while they only have to win once.

It's an unsustainable situation.

voldacar commented on People Who Hunt Down Old TVs bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/tmendez

WalterBright · 5 months ago

Those aren't old TVs.

When I was a kid, I'd go to the TV repair shops and take old "unrepairable" vacuum tube TVs (no transistors!) off their hands. At home I tried to fix them. I had no idea how to fix them. But I had a lot of fun trying.

One of the fun things was to randomly swap around the vacuum tubes and see what would happen. Very entertaining! I used to have a box full of scavenged tubes. Sadly, I eventually tossed them out, never realizing how valuable they'd be in a few years.

My mom was convinced I was going to electrocute myself, and finally made me get rid of the sets.

voldacar · 5 months ago

Most TV tubes aren't too valuable. Now if your TV was made by telefunken, that might be a different story

voldacar commented on Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves laist.com/news/transporta... · Posted by u/jaredwiener

hunter2_ · 5 months ago

Would we be able to insulate sufficiently for a new generation of DC fast charging where voltage is so much higher that current is so much lower that the cable isn't thick enough to be worth stealing? Could eliminate active cable cooling, as well.

I guess the problem would be stepping it back down inside the car to match the battery voltage, which is an AC endeavor, at which point it might as well just be AC grid power delivered to the car (albeit high/primary voltage, not residential/secondary voltage), and we're back to the car having enormous equipment on board that ought to be stationed, so no.

voldacar · 5 months ago

Instead of re-engineering complicated systems to be resilient to thieves, what if we just got rid of the thieves?

voldacar commented on Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks theverge.com/cs/features/... · Posted by u/leotravis10

tim333 · 5 months ago

>If you ask it about anything political it's going to be from a certain slant

I'm not sure if there's anything else out there that's better at giving a fairly neutral summary of political controversies?

It reminds me of the Churchill quote "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

voldacar · 5 months ago

A quantitative look which might interest you:

https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-...

voldacar commented on Zenobia Pay – A mission to build an alternative to high-fee card networks zenobiapay.com/blog/open-... · Posted by u/pranay01

FabHK · 6 months ago

Seems misleading or at the very least incomplete not to mention that basically only the US has these high credit card interchange fees of 2-3%.

EU & UK cap it at 0.3% (0.2% for debit cards), and the rest of the world are closer to EU than US fees, if I understand correctly.

The power of the free market.

voldacar · 6 months ago

Seems misleading or at the very least incomplete to blame these fees on "the power of the free market" when the visa / mastercard duopoly exists due to regulations making the entry barrier to creating a new card network essentially infinite

voldacar commented on US national debt reaches a record $37T, the Treasury Department reports apnews.com/article/treasu... · Posted by u/atombender

tencentshill · 6 months ago

Current treasury head is Scott Bessent, previously of Soros Fund Management and Key Square Group. He's far too qualified to be part of this administration. Expect him gone soon.

voldacar · 6 months ago

Taking bets?