The_Decryptor

If everyone has moved on from 32bit, and the old stuff doesn’t change, where is the maintenance requirement?

The problem is that it’s not old unchanging code, people want the latest supported version so they can still run their 32-bit binaries with the latest supporting libraries.

And if the upstream developers don’t consider 32-bit support important, then it falls on the distro maintainers to patch the code to keep it running in these situations.

I always thought it was purely a hardware limitation, but reading up on it I found it’s actually just “virtual 8086 mode” that was dropped, 16-bit protected mode is still available even when running the CPU in “long mode”.

So it rules out DOS apps, but 16bit Win 3.x apps should still run. But it’s probably a compatibility minefield, and even MS decided it wasn’t important (iirc the only thing they kept around was support for 16-bit app installers, but by internally swapping them out with 32-bit versions when run, since it was apparently common for 32-bit 9x apps to still use 16-bit installers so they could show a proper error message when run under Win 3.x)

It seems to me that 16-bit applications are already basically broken with 32-bit wine if you’re running a 64-bit kernel, by default it places extra restrictions over what the hardware already does to prevent apps from loading 16-bit code entirely.

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/FAQ#16-bit-applications-fail-to-start

Guessing that’s why they don’t feel it’s that important to continue supporting, seems a VM is the future for these apps.

WINE’s WoW64, does not work for all games.

Ok but is that because of fundamental limitations, or just because of bugs?

One’s easier to fix than the other.

So how the OS already catches links to e.g. YouTube and offers to open it directly in the app, it could also do that for apps that weren’t installed and it’d just download and run them automatically. One of the examples was Vimeo, instead of loading the website it’d download a cut down variant of the normal app and load the video in that instead.

The idea was to push people towards using apps instead, but now Google control the web they can just make that their app store instead, so native apps aren’t as relevant anymore.

Also, compared to something like the Switch? I don’t see MS remotely bricking these devices if you run “homebrew” on them.

If these AI researchers really have no idea how these things work, then how can they possibly improve the models or techniques?

Like how they now claim all that after upgrades that now these LLMs can “reason” about problems, how did they actually go and add that if it’s a black box?

Yeah, there’s a mysticism that’s sprung up around LLMs as if they’re some magic blackbox, rather than a well understood construct to the point where you can buy books from Amazon on how to write one from scratch.

It’s not like ChatGPT or Claude appeared from nowhere, the people who built them do talks about them all the time.

(and why isn’t spell check core Windows functionality?)

It actually is, introduced in Windows 8, it’s just taken devs ages to actually start using it (Notepad only got it last year, 12 years after it was introduced)

I can’t imagine the shame I’d feel if there was a legal finding stating that I was a fan of the minions.

It is all generic layers, the base USB stuff is called a “Human Interface Device”, controllers/keyboards/mice/etc. all show up as a HID to the OS. But you need some way to standardise the input and map the device side events to the host side, so the OS will have a mapping layer above the base USB layer that turns a generic HID into a “controller device” that an app can use.

As you can see from the patch, that’s all they’re doing. They’re adding the USB IDs of these controllers to the mapping layer so instead of being shown as a “Generic HID”, they’re shown as “Generic Xbox Controller”. Doing so also means the controller layer can drive the devices specifically, e.g. xbox controllers need a special handshake to enable the xbox button, the base generic input layer doesn’t need to know that stuff.

TypeScript is actually pretty nice, it’d be JScript instead.

That’s “Extended ASCII”, basic ASCII only has upper and lowercase latin characters and things like <, =, >, and ?

And probably half of the control codes are still used, mostly in their original form too, teletype systems. They’re just virtual these days.

They’d run afoul of the whole “editing your own article” restrictions.

They really want to promote their AVIF format, and supporting JXL would hinder that (Since JXL is a much nicer upgrade path from JPEG/PNG than AVIF is)

Like you can transparently go from JPEG to JXL and back with no loss, which isn’t possible with AVIF. And PNG to JXL gives you a smaller file, while it’s usually the opposite with AVIF (Unless you get lucky, as lossless AVIF can be beaten by a BMP in a ZIP file). There’s also the issue of speed, AVIF is slow to encode compared to other formats (And while hardware decoding is possible, it’s also geared towards video, so the quality is often lacking, and can sometimes be slower than plain software encoding)

It’s unclear why Google stuck with PNG for HDR screenshots instead of a format supported by Ultra HDR such as JPEG.

Because for good lossless HDR you’ve got a grand total of 2 options, PNG and JPEG XL. And Google don’t want people to know of yet another use case for JXL.

NTFS was designed back in the mid 90s, when the plan was to have the single NT kernel with different subsystems on top of it, some of those layers (i.e. POSIX) needed case sensitivity while others (Win32 and OS/2) didn’t.

It only looks odd because the sole remaining subsystem in use (Win32) barely makes use of any of the kernel features, like they’re only just now enabling long file paths.

That’s because those adapters aren’t DACs, they’re straight electrical passthrough adapters.

I’ve got an actual USB DAC, a relatively cheap one, and it was still close to $50.

Edit: Doubled the price in my memory.

Qt is overkill if all you’re using it for is to create a window you render into, something like SDL would be better.

Jack Dorsey may have had lofty goals for Bluesky, but he doesn’t even work there anymore.

Which is a point in Bluesky’s favour.