Just_Harry

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

And the historical reason why the allocation-granularity is 64 KB instead of 4 KB (or the page-size) is that it made DLL relocation very slightly faster on Alpha AXP processors. No, really! https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031008-00/?p=42...

Just_Harry

hace 5 mesesdiscuss

For the United Kingdom specifically, I've suffered the misfortune of reading the Online Safety Act, and this kind of age estimation is both mentioned and permitted by the Act. (Not a lawyer blah blah blah)

Part 3, Chapter 2, Section 12(4) specifies that user-to-user service providers are required to use either age verification or age estimation (or both!) to prevent children from accessing content that is harmful to children. Section 12(6) goes on to state that "the age verification or age estimation must be of such a kind, and used in such a way, that it is highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child."

Part 12, Section 230(4) rules out self-declaration of age as being a form of age verification/estimation.

So I suppose it'll come down to whether or not Ofcom deems Discord's age estimation as "highly effective".

[Part 3, Chapter 2, Section 12(4)]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/part/3/chapter/...

This is unrelated, but something I find interesting is that Category 1 user-to-user services (of which Discord is one, as per The Online Safety Act 2023 (Category 1, Category 2A and Category 2B Threshold Conditions) Regulations 2025) are required by Part 4, Chapter 1, Section 64(1) to "offer all adult users of the service the option to verify their identity (if identity verification is not required for access to the service).".

Just_Harry

hace 8 mesesdiscuss

Your memory is intact :) Those were/are a thing.

The Xenia emulator handles them with symbolic links in its virtual-file-system: https://github.com/xenia-canary/xenia-canary/blob/70e44ab6ec...

Just_Harry

hace 11 mesesdiscuss

It's freely available at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10826467/

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

> I don’t understand why these extra paddings are present and why one is gone. Even with pragma pack 8, should not it be only one padding?

If you're referring to `__pad2` in the example, that trailing padding is there to ensure that the size of the struct is a multiple of its alignment, which is 8, so that if there's a contiguous span of those structures, each instance after the first one will remained properly aligned. Without `__pad2`, that struct would be 36-bytes, which would cause every other instance in an array/contiguous-span to be aligned on 4 bytes instead of 8.

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

In my later school years, when I had semi-regular need for printing things in colour, I took to drilling holes in the inkjet cartridges and refilling them with cheap ink using syringes.

Which worked out to about £5 for the syringes, £5 for 400 ml of CMYK ink, and my dad already had a power drill—which was equivalent to about £104-worth of black ink cartridges, and about £312-worth of colour ink cartridges. (Now it would be about £160 of black and £480 of colour). It only took 15-to-30-minutes to refill both cartridges, including drilling the holes.

Some printer manufacturers have implemented DRM for ink to prevent this kind of thing.

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Unfortunately not, I just tried running the copy included with Windows XP SP1 on Windows 11—it relies on SheRemoveQuotesW which was removed from Shell32 in Windows Vista. (It doesn't seem to be able to use a copy of a Windows-XP-sourced shell32.dll from the working directory, either).

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

All type 1 diabetics are being conned?

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

My favourite is MapViewOfFile3FromApp [0], which is one of the seven variants of MapViewOfFile.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/api/memoryapi/nf-m...

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Not initiating conversation could be down to disinterest, yes.

But I think consistently refusing eye contact does constitute a lack of respect, if the person refusing to return eye contact has no problem returning it to the upper echelons of staff. And, having attended one of those grammar schools, I know that some of the teachers who refused to return eye contact had no issue with faux friendliness.

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

My mother cleans schools for a living, and she once remarked to me that most of the teaching staff in the grammar schools[1] she cleaned would avoid making conversation with the cleaners, and some would even avoid making eye contact, which was contrary to non-selective schools, where most of the teaching staff would make conversation with the cleaners.

[1] Grammar schools are academically-selective, state-funded schools in the UK and elsewhere—staff and students alike are generally of a higher socioeconomic milieu than in non-selective, state-funded schools.

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

PowerShell yet again proves itself to be an enlightened language:

    PS> ${Valid characters for an identifier? Eh, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whatever (`}) you want.} = $True
    PS> ${Valid characters for an identifier? Eh, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whatever (`}) you want.}
    True

Jesting aside, I have actually used that syntax before to prefix variable names with '&' and '@' to differentiate between virtual and physical addresses in some code for patching a binary.

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Whether there's a performance detriment from borderless-fullscreen vs exclusive-fullscreen depends on how a program presents its frames (and on the OS, of course).

On Windows, under ideal circumstances borderless-fullscreen performs identically to exclusive-fullscreen as Windows will let the program skip the compositor and present its frames more-or-less directly to the display. (Under really ideal circumstances the same applies to bordered non-fullscreen windows.)

If the compositor can't be skipped, borderless-fullscreen can be a bit brutal on performance: on a 4K 160Hz screen I've experienced an additional 40-milliseconds+ of frame-latency purely from borderless-fullscreen being used.

The Special K wiki has some pages that go into more detail about the situation on Windows: https://wiki.special-k.info/SwapChain, https://wiki.special-k.info/Presentation_Model

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

This is something I _really_ like about D. Unit-tests are built into the language, as is comment-based documentation—put those two together and you get unit-tests as documentation examples built into the language; all it takes is to put a documentation comment (which can be blank) right before a `unittest` block after a declaration.

E.g. the examples for the D standard-library's `curry` function are just unit-tests: the docs: <https://dlang.org/phobos/std_functional.html#quickindex.curr...>; the code: <https://github.com/dlang/phobos/blob/42b8c65ccfd35c863f7cedf...>

Just_Harry

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I've been using a Matias Ergo Pro Programmable for the past three-or-so years and it's been excellent; all the wrist pain I had been experiencing after typing ceased once I started using it, and that's held true since. The switches are tactile but quiet. The keycaps are well-sized with a pleasant texture. It's very weighty, and never moves. It has arrow-keys and Home/End/PgUp/PgDn. The cable that joins the two halves is just a standard 3.5mm TRRS audio cable. The USB cable is detachable. It does have a few flaws: the Escape key's awkwardly out-of-the-way, the same goes for the Delete key; the fabric used for the palm-rests is sort of difficult to clean; very rarely, a pressed key will get stuck and will repeat after it's been depressed.

I've also tried the Kinesis Freestyle 2... I'm much less of fond it, it might just be the worst keyboard I've used (especially relative to its price). Its switches are bad, even by the standards of membrane switches—to get keypresses to reliably register I have mash the keys so forcefully that it ends up being louder than the mechanical Ergo Pro. The keycaps are small, with a texture that's unpleasant to the touch. The cable that joins the two halves is proprietary, and the cable that comes out of the box is too short at 9", the 20" cable costs 20% of what the keyboard does and is still too short to fully utilise the split. The USB cable isn't detachable. Something about the way the right half is laid out makes it difficult to get your hand in position to use it. The Escape key's really out-of-the-way, as is the Fn key. Though, it does have a lot of macro keys.

Just_Harry

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