vvanders (u/vvanders)

vvanders commented on Samsung taking market share from Apple in U.S. as foldable phones gain momentum cnbc.com/2025/08/16/samsu... · Posted by u/mgh2

dkobia · 6 months ago

I thought the idea of a folding phone was just a cash grab until I saw someone on the plane across the aisle from me interacting with one. It has been a while since I saw someone get so much enjoyment out of a device. The back and forth between folded and unfolded to read messages and watch movies/read a book was mesmerizing. It made me realize that this form factor could actually enhance the user experience in a meaningful way.

vvanders · 6 months ago

Multi app works pretty well too, when I need to cross reference between apps throwing them each up on the split halves is way better than swapping back and forth.

vvanders commented on Parsing Protobuf like never before mcyoung.xyz/2025/07/16/hy... · Posted by u/ibobev

crabbone · 8 months ago

Neither of them are well-designed or well thought-through. They address some cosmetic issues of Protobuf, but don't really deal with the major issues. So, you could say they are slightly better, but the original was bad enough to completely disqualify it either.

vvanders · 8 months ago

Flatbuffers lets you directly mmap from disk, that trick alone makes it really good for use cases that can take advantage of it(fast access of read-only data). If you're clever enough to tune the ordering of fields you can give it good cache locality and really make it fly.

We used to store animation data in mmaped flatbuffers at a previous gig and it worked really well. Kernel would happily prefetch on access and page out under pressure, we could have 10s of MBs of animation data and only pay a couple hundred kb based on access patterns.

vvanders commented on Why not object capability languages? blog.plan99.net/why-not-c... · Posted by u/mike_hearn

vvanders · 10 months ago

One capability mechanism that's in wide use but not really well known or touched on in the article is Androids RPC mechanism, Binder(and a lot of the history predates Android from what I recall).

Binder handles work just like object capabilities, you can only use what's sent to you and process can delegate out other binder handles.

Android hides most of this behind their permission model but the capability still exist and can be implemented by anyone in the system.

vvanders commented on Rust’s dependencies are starting to worry me vincents.dev/blog/rust-de... · Posted by u/chaosprint

poincaredisk · 10 months ago

"completely solves" is a bit of an overstatement. Imagine a curl-like library that allows you to make requests by URL. You may only ever use HTTP urls, but code for all the other schemas (like HTTPS, FTP, Gopher) needs to be compiled in as well.

This is an extreme example, but the same thing happens very often at a smaller scale. Optional functionality can't always be removed statically.

vvanders · 10 months ago

That only applies when dynamic dispatch is involved and the linker can't trace the calls. For direct calls and generics(which idiomatic Rust code tends to prefer over dyn traits) LTO will prune extensively.

vvanders commented on Lego says it wants to start to bring video game development in-house videogameschronicle.com/n... · Posted by u/namanyayg

Danieru · a year ago

I remember we got a "devkit" into the studio before public release: it was an entire 1u server.

How are we supposed to use a 1u devkit!? Had no one on their team ever do console work!?

Console devkits fit on a desk because that is where a console devkit needs to go. On the porting engineer's desk, so they can do the work.

In the end Google announced the non-sense business model and we saw the writing on the wall. I do not think that devkit ever got setup.

vvanders · a year ago

From what I recall the PS3 devkit was significantly larger than 1U so it's not that uncommon.

vvanders commented on It is time to standardize principles and practices for software memory safety cacm.acm.org/opinion/it-i... · Posted by u/mepian

Tanjreeve · a year ago

Is there a name for a fallacy like "appeal to stupidity" or something where the argument against using a tool that's fit for the job boils down to "All developers are too dumb to use this/you need to read a manual/it's hard" etc etc?

vvanders · a year ago

I think there is something to be said about having good defaults and tools that don't force you to be on every last detail 100% lest they get out of control.

It also depends on the team, some teams have a high density of seasoned experts who've made the mistakes and know what to avoid but I think the history on mem vulns show that it's very hard to keep that bar consistently across large codebases or disperse teams.

vvanders commented on It is time to standardize principles and practices for software memory safety cacm.acm.org/opinion/it-i... · Posted by u/mepian

RossBencina · a year ago

I'm not sure what you're definition of performance parity is. Are you claiming that the existence of rust proves that there is no performance penalty for memory safety? The penalty may be relatively small, but I am not aware of any proof that the penalty is non-existent. I am not even sure how you could prove such a thing. I could imagine that C and C++ implementations of exactly the same algorithms and data structures as are implemented in safe rust might perform similarly, but what about all of the C and C++ implementations that are both correct and not implementable in safe rust? do they all perform only as well or worse than rust?

vvanders · a year ago

That assumes that people know what they're doing in C/C++, I've seen just as many bloated codebases in C++ if not more because the defaults for most compilers are not great and it's very easy for things to get out of hand with templates, excessive use of dynamic libraries(which inhibit LTO) or using shared_ptr for everything.

My experience is that Rust guides you towards defaults that tend to not hit those things and for the cases where you really do need that fine grained control unsafe blocks with direct pointer access are available(and I've used them when needed).

vvanders commented on Great Watchdog Timers For Embedded Systems (2016) ganssle.com/watchdogs.htm... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

vvanders · a year ago

WDT patterns are highly underrated, even in pure software there's value in degrading/recovering gracefully vs systems that have to be "perfect" 100% of the time and then force user intervention when they go wrong.

One of my favorite blogs on the topic https://ferd.ca/the-zen-of-erlang.html that does a great job of covering how Erlang approached the topic, lots of learnings that can be applied more broadly.

vvanders commented on Life lessons from the first half-century of my career cacm.acm.org/opinion/life... · Posted by u/zdw

remoquete · a year ago

I often wonder why it's so hard for some managers to provide praise. It's almost as if they didn't want to feed egos out of fear.

vvanders · a year ago

Fear and a scarcity mindset, many people treat things as a zero-sum game when in practice the sum is usually greater than the individual parts.

The advice in the article is great, and much of it resonates with what I have seen over my career as well.

vvanders commented on Bambu Lab - Setting the Record Straight About Our Security Update blog.bambulab.com/updates... · Posted by u/reimertz

the_mitsuhiko · a year ago

That is obviously correct, but this is a meaningful improvement over what their initial plan was.

vvanders · a year ago

I don't really see what having a "developer mode" offers here beyond the existing solution. The current mqtt is already locked down with a unique password and AFAIK the endpoint was read-only anyway.

Don't get me wrong I'm glad they're responding to feedback but the feedback shouldn't have been required in the first place.

I'm all for better security on products(esp ones that heat up to 300C!) but interoperability with open standards makes it a better product overall and given the direction we've seen in the IoT space I think they've done quite a bit of damage(even if not intentionally) by not taking more care in this area.