xioxox (u/xioxox) - Readit News

xioxox commented on Ancient X11 scaling technology flak.tedunangst.com/post/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

kunzhi · 2 months ago

Interesting article, I'll admit when I first saw the title I was thinking of a different kind of "scaling" - namely the client/server decoupling in X11.

I still think X11 forwarding over SSH is a super cool and unsung/undersung feature. I know there are plenty of good reasons we don't really "do it these days" but I have had some good experiences where running the UI of a server app locally was useful. (Okay, it was more fun than useful, but it was useful.)

xioxox · 2 months ago

It's certainly very useful. I do half my work using X11 over ssh and it works reasonably well over a LAN (at least using emacs, plotting, etc).

xioxox commented on Are the Colors in Astronomical Images 'Real'? scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/bryanrasmussen

DiogenesKynikos · 3 months ago

Most astronomers look at the red sequence on a scatterplot, with each point being based on the measured fluxes of one galaxy. Very few astronomers are literally looking at color images to eyeball these measurements.

There are edge cases in which astronomers will load up images at multiple wavelengths and overlay them, but this is not the normal case. By and large, they're looking at a single channel at a time. Even more commonly than that, they're working with catalogs automatically generated from images.

xioxox · 3 months ago

You are plainly wrong. I know several astronomers who look at colour images to check that the software is working properly.

xioxox commented on The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice politiken.dk/viden/tech/a... · Posted by u/nogajun

adrian_b · 3 months ago

I do not care whether LibreOffice looks ugly or not.

What I care is that the documents that I generate with LibreOffice look beautiful and that depends on me choosing beautiful high-quality typefaces (not the default ugly typefaces of LibreOffice) and on choosing adequate formatting of the documents.

All that LibreOffice has to do is provide adequate support for all OpenType features and for all formatting options that one might want. LibreOffice does this and at least LibreOffice Writer does it better than MS Word.

In LibreOffice one can still discover quickly in which menu or dialog box the desired option can be found. I have been using MS Office for decades, but in recent versions I can spend many minutes searching for some option that has been moved into some random menu/toolbar that has no obvious logical relationship with it.

While MS Excel remains much better than LibreOffice Calc (but the latter is adequate for most simple tasks), I would consider as a cruel and unusual punishment to be forced to use MS Word instead of LibreOffice Writer.

xioxox · 3 months ago

Unfortunately the LibreOffice Impress is pretty bad. PowerPoint is what keeps me using Office. LibreOffice formatting looks bad on the screen (it resizes bitmaps to make the fuzzy) and the user interface for constructing slides is both clunky, slow and buggy. I don't understand how the UI can be this slow in 2025 on a fast PC. Basic functionality, like resizing an equation, just doesn't work.

xioxox commented on Are the Colors in Astronomical Images 'Real'? scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/bryanrasmussen

DiogenesKynikos · 3 months ago

Astronomers rarely look at color images. These color images are produced by press offices for the public.

That being said, the complaint that the images are "unrealistic" are off-base. The images accurately portray the information that was captured by the telescope. Your eyes often can't even see the wavelengths imaged by space telescopes (like the James Webb Space Telescope), so how you map those wavelengths to RGB is largely arbitrary. As long as you map them in the same order (shorter wavelengths appear bluer, longer wavelengths appear redder), I would consider the images accurate.

xioxox · 3 months ago

That's not right. I'm an astronomer, and I often look at colour images and colleagues do, too. For example, the galaxies in a cluster of galaxies follow a relation of colours - brightness (the "red sequence"), which can be used to detect the cluster. The eye is also quite good at helping confirm a cluster by spotting the galaxies following this sequence. I also use colour images to help identify spectral changes that change across an image, in my case in the X-ray waveband.

xioxox commented on Show HN: A5 github.com/felixpalmer/a5... · Posted by u/pheelicks

xioxox · 3 months ago

What's the advantage of this over HEALPix projection? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEALPix

xioxox commented on Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found downtowndougbrown.com/202... · Posted by u/chmaynard

LeoPanthera · 5 months ago

> How many personal computers in 1994 still had the ability to boot after the OS was trashed?

Every Acorn Archimedes computer, since the entire OS (not just a rescue system, a full, graphical OS) booted in a couple of seconds entirely from ROM. It's the only computer I know of with a fully featured graphical OS that was fully functional without any kind of disk.

xioxox · 5 months ago

I believe many Atari ST models had their graphical OS (TOS/GEM) on ROM. The Archimedes with RISC OS felt revolutionary at the time, however. Several of the graphical desktop programs were written in BBC Basic and you could look at the source.

xioxox commented on Microsoft is killing Skype windowscentral.com/micros... · Posted by u/thund

high_na_euv · 6 months ago

Missed?

They grew Teams, lol.

Zoom - wtf, who the hell uses it after.

Discord would be better example since it is huge, even LLVM community uses it

xioxox · 6 months ago

It's entirely Zoom for my branch of academia.

xioxox commented on X partners with Visa to enable money transfers on the platform washingtonpost.com/busine... · Posted by u/macleginn

lm28469 · 7 months ago

Especially now that instant and free bank transfer are mandatory in the EU

xioxox · 7 months ago

Free bank transfers are not mandatory in the EU. The bank just has to charge the same for a national transfer as an EU transfer: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...

xioxox commented on The Practical Guide to Scaling Django slimsaas.com/blog/django-... · Posted by u/rbanffy

megaman821 · 9 months ago

I have had to combine files into a zipped file on demand before. It is hard to avoid the inherent slowness of that.

xioxox · 9 months ago

I have Django code which creates a tar file on the fly from a list of requested files and works well. It doesn't use intermediate storage. The tar format can be pretty simple. I got most of the way into implementing a uncompressed zip version, but then I realised that tar was good enough for my site.

xioxox commented on How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me ft.com/content/b9e419c6-a... · Posted by u/005vc16607

pjerem · 10 months ago

That’s why I prefer Satisfactory : it’s the same principle but it also allows you to build gigantic great and beautiful things. For me it’s the perfect mix between Factorio (for building factories) and Minecraft (for allowing you to create your environment) and, contrary to those two, it’s also aesthetically beautiful. In fact building production lines is not even what I prefer, what I prefer is organizing them in chaotically beautiful buildings.

(Don’t think I want to start a debate, I loved the 3 games and played them a lot, it’s just that Satisfactory won my heart… even the name is great).

xioxox · 10 months ago

I've never tried Factorio, but I found Satisfactory very boring after a few hours. It was initially fun to do some exploring and make some initial manufacturing lines. However, when I realised that to scale up the manufacturing, then I would have to place all these components by hand hundreds of times, it just felt like boring make-work, and I never turned it on again. Maybe I would have continued if there was some way of automating the building, such as some sort of 2D viewer.