kevingadd · HackerTrans

el año pasadodiscuss

Interop with a WASM-compiled Go binary from JS will be slower but the WASM binary itself might be a lot faster than a JS implementation, if that makes sense. So it depends on how chatty your interop is. The main place you get bogged down is typically exchanging strings across the boundary between WASM and JS. Exchanging buffers (file data, etc) can also be a source of slowdown.

kevingadd

el año pasadodiscuss

Kick has successfully lured some big Twitch streamers away with incentives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kick_(service)#Streaming_deals

And they seem to be trying to lure more people away by offering more favorable revenue splits than YT/Twitch.

Of course this is all funded by online casino revenue, I don't know if it would "work" without being able to light money on fire. There are credible people out there insisting that Kick is losing money and only exists to funnel new customers to Stake's online gambling services.

kevingadd

hace 2 añosdiscuss

The default shell on debian autocompletes git commands and things like branch names pretty robustly for me, so somebody figured it out.

kevingadd

hace 2 añosdiscuss

The way they disambiguate between the two options feels like it would have been a ton of work to figure out and implement... and for what purpose? I don't understand the user story here. How hard is it to type the long version?

kevingadd

hace 4 añosdiscuss

It's certainly a way to waste time, but social media is also where I've found a lot of creative partners to work on side projects with, and it's where I've found a lot of inspiration too when looking at people's art, microfiction, etc. So I feel like for me it's probably at least net neutral when I use it properly instead of just doomscrolling.

kevingadd

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Just this morning I was walking down the street on a sidewalk and as I crossed in front of a driveway - having checked first - a car pulled out of the garage right up against my leg and stopped, and when I stepped away they started moving again to get close. The stuff people do in cars when they don't have right of way is absolutely deranged sometimes.

kevingadd

hace 4 añosdiscuss

https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-defense-production-act grants the US government significant control over the US economy and businesses. As it turns out, we're still at war :-)

kevingadd

hace 4 añosdiscuss

They could probably compel you to continue, or forcibly take over the node. Once you're in NSL "we can do anything we want and you can't tell anyone about it" land, being prevented from shutting down your own business or service isn't terribly far-fetched.

kevingadd

hace 5 añosdiscuss

Lower taxes and fewer regulations

kevingadd

hace 5 añosdiscuss

Yes, and for a terminal like discussed in the article, 4ms is considered unacceptably slow

kevingadd

hace 5 añosdiscuss

fwiw, file system access is kind of a bad example - it's slow because the design allows people to hook into it. once you've made promises to end users that limits the kinds of optimizations you can do and how far you can go with those optimizations.

For one example, if you were to make file I/O bypass antivirus software in 'performance sensitive cases', few enterprise admins would accept that. That performance optimization would be disabled in a millisecond. You can do directory exclusions, but some of the I/O still has to go through the filter to be checked against the exclusion list.

kevingadd

hace 5 añosdiscuss

Simply shaping text using state of the art libraries (like harfbuzz) can take an INCREDIBLE amount of time in some cases. If you're used to rendering text in western character sets you may think it can always be fast, but there are cases where it's actually quite slow! You get a sense for this if you try to write something like a web browser or a word processor and have to support people other than github posters.

Of course in this case it seems like it was possible to make it very fast, but people who think proper text rendering is naturally going to be somewhat slow aren't always wrong.

Saying that text rendering is "largely solved" is also incorrect. There are still changes and improvements being made to the state of the art and there are still unhappy users who don't get good text rendering and layout in their favorite applications when using a language other than English.

kevingadd

hace 5 añosdiscuss

I think while performance is not a proper justification, if you get other stuff in the bargain it can be really worth it. Rust, for example - the justification to switch is usually not just speed but safety and the safety enabling more optimizations, parallelism etc. If all you care about is speed you stay in C/C++.

Sometimes the choice is also made when you already have to pay a transitional cost - at a previous employer we had to rewrite a bunch of code to move from an old version of PHP to a newer one, and a strong argument was made that at that point we should just adopt a better language since we already had to pay that cost. I think eventually a lot of stuff transitioned to Haskell as part of that process, even if other stuff stayed in PHP.

kevingadd

hace 6 añosdiscuss

Videos have been used frequently for all sorts of other stuff in games since the playstation, if not earlier. In StarCraft the portrait of your selected unit was a movie file (RAD smacker, I think? But I don't have a copy of starcraft lying around to double check).

Supergiant Games' titles since Bastion all use RAD's Bink codec to store offline renders of their character models (as movies) instead of traditional sprite sheets or realtime rendered 3d models, so they're playing back dozens of movies at all times.

As another reply mentioned, it's also standard at this point for loading screens to be movies.

kevingadd

hace 6 añosdiscuss

1200 employees going on strike will literally have no negative impact on Google's bottom line, at least not unless they do it for a long time period. A lot of the money that comes in is basically automatic, it's being produced by ad sells and stuff like that. You'd need a massive subset of the company's staff to go on strike (not just 1200) before that would have any impact on whether the money-making machine continues to function. In a case like this walkouts or strikes by the tech workers have more of a symbolic purpose + impact on future deadlines/releases than a direct impact on revenue.

Maybe if the entire SRE department went on strike and stopped maintaining the datacenters that would put a dent in the numbers due to degraded service, but something like that would probably just doom the company entirely even if they went back to work after a bit.

kevingadd

hace 6 añosdiscuss

If you look at modern unionization efforts, new unions tend to align with existing larger unions to leverage their legal representation, experience with unionization efforts, and general resources

kevingadd

hace 7 añosdiscuss

Most of the performance issues are not NTFS so much as the prevalence of file-system filter drivers. This is why WSL had so many file-system performance issues despite the fact that it was using a custom FS. IIRC this also motivated the move to WSL2 from what I read, since a virtual machine can use a small set of files to store a whole FS.

EDIT: See here - https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...

kevingadd

hace 7 añosdiscuss

For video memory/tile memory usage, avoid anything fancy that's hard to rasterize, for starters: Think things like rounded borders, drop shadows, opacity, transparent background images, etc. The more complex it is to draw your page the more likely that it will end up being cached into temporary surfaces and composited and stuff. For a while for some absurd reason Twitter's main layout had a bunch of rectangles with opacities of like 0.95 or 0.99, so all the layers had to get cached into separate surfaces even though you could barely tell it was happening. Getting them to fix that made the site faster for basically every Firefox and Chrome user. They hadn't noticed.

For JS and DOM memory usage you can use the browser's built in profiler to get a pretty good estimate of where things are going and what you've done wrong.

kevingadd

hace 7 añosdiscuss

Yes, but will it detect the claims and allow you to fix them without stealing all your revenue?

kevingadd

hace 9 añosdiscuss

Patent-encumbered media codecs are available in most Windows and Mac browsers thanks to the OS shipping codecs. On Linux?

On Windows you have a battle-tested Direct3D 9/11 backend for WebGL (ANGLE) used by Chrome and Firefox, while on other platforms you're subject to the whims of the GL implementation (and on Linux there are multiple drivers to choose from in some cases). Direct3D graphics are also thread-safe in a way that is not consistently true for OpenGL (just ask a driver developer) which means that certain operations could block the UI thread (or in the case of Chrome, GPU process) that can be performed asynchronously on Windows, resulting in a difference in application behavior.

On Windows there is one common software audio stack (they dropped hardware audio acceleration ages ago because it was a compatibility nightmare). On Linux in some circumstances there are multiple audio stacks which can produce differences in user experience and behavior. Recently Firefox has switched over to pulseaudio, which has caused some grief.

Windows and Mac and Linux all have different networking stacks that can result in behavioral differences between OSes if you're using WebSockets or WebRTC.

The GamePad API is also subject to OS differences depending on whether your gamepad has drivers and which underlying system API the browser uses. This even varies between browsers on the same machine.

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