jude-

47 ms·

361.
by jude- 6y ago
> That still requires maintaining an extra code path for old X servers that don't support the new extensions, and creates additional risk of breaking things and causing regressions in the X server because of all the new code you&#x2
362.
by jude- 6y ago
> The main problems with X11 are within the core X11 protocol itself, things that are long considered deprecated/obsolete and can't be fixed or removed without doing a protocol break. Which problems, exactly, would these be? W
363.
by jude- 6y ago
Ah, I didn't know that. Kudos to them!
364.
by jude- 6y ago
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest that the X devs are ignorant of this. I too have both deep respect and gratitude for the work they have done and continue to do. I'm only frustrated that I can't get a strai
365.
by jude- 6y ago
I don't care if X sees everything (hell, even if X didn't, the kernel certainly still would). I only care that I can control which programs see which X11 events. Like, my hotkey program can see everything, but my Web browser c
366.
by jude- 6y ago
What do you think is more of an uphill battle, in terms of time and energy sunk? Adding another X extension that can be incrementally deployed, or trying to phase X out by maintaining both an X11 and Wayland back-end for all apps trying to
367.
by jude- 6y ago
That doesn't make them infallible. If anything, Wayland smells like yet another instance of CADT [1]. Like, why can no one explain why a world-breaking change like Wayland is justified, when the problems Wayland solves seem like they
368.
by jude- 6y ago
In Wayland, a fail-stop bug in the window management logic will now bring down your compositor and every program that was connected to it. In X11, a fail-stop bug in the window management logic only crashes your window manager -- everythin
369.
by jude- 6y ago
> In practice, placing everything in one process seems to reduce the total attack surface. Surely you're joking. Privilege separation [1] is a thing for a reason. If we believed that putting different things into the same address s
370.
by jude- 6y ago
Would addressing the "firewalling" issue be more disruptive than throwing out X11? Because, Wayland definitely firewalls programs (among many other things) -- surely just implementing firewalling in X11 is not nearly as difficu
371.
by jude- 6y ago
The other two concerns in GP are no screen tearing, and better hidpi / multi-monitor support. Is it truly less work and less disruptive to address these to concerns within X11 than it is to throw X11 out (and also leave all nvidia use
372.
by jude- 6y ago
I'd say it's a very practical problem. Why put N different things that used to run in separate protection domains into the same protection domain? Have we gotten N times better at writing code that doesn't crash? Do we bel
373.
by jude- 6y ago
Seems to me that firewalling X11 programs from one another would take a lot less work and be a lot less disruptive than requiring users to run multiple VMs with multiple X11 servers and/or replace the whole graphics stack.
374.
by jude- 6y ago
Yes. That's the problem. Not only is the resulting stack less resilient to crashes, but also it takes away flexibility by needlessly welding together two orthogonal design concerns (window management vs rendering). Sway is like puttin
375.
by jude- 6y ago
What happens to your graphical programs when your compositor crashes? At least with X11, if your window manager crashes, your programs keep running (you'd just fire up the WM again).
376.
by jude- 6y ago
He once tried to sell investors on using a classical computer to simulate a quantum computer to mine Bitcoin faster [1]. Granted, this was before Ethereum. > He comments on technical issues and engineering problems, things he knows a th
377.
by jude- 6y ago
Yes -- the network could soft-fork to require post-quantum transaction signatures. Naively, you could make it so that each transaction would put the hash of its parties' post-quantum signatures in an OP_RETURN output, and distribute b
378.
by jude- 6y ago
Banning CFCs globally via the Montreal Protocol.
379.
by jude- 6y ago
> What use-case does mining solve? It's a view-change operation. If Bitcoin were a conventional replicated database, mining would be Paxos. > There is no point in it without transactions As I said above, a distributed system wit
380.
by jude- 6y ago
I love this book! It's a great read for anyone who wants to build networked computer systems. I like how it focuses on network design and implementation in terms of the practical problems it solves, which helped me understand why the
381.
by jude- 6y ago
Miners are selling you space in the block they're building, which you pay for with a transaction fee. But that block is getting built either way as long as it is profitable. Putting this in terms of distributed systems, we would say t
382.
by jude- 6y ago
It's now an odd thing to recommend reading the source code to a skeptic on a tech site that focuses on software development? You've come to the wrong place if you believe that reading the comments section will be more informative
383.
by jude- 6y ago
OP was arguing that transactions in Bitcoin take a lot of energy. I'm pointing out that this simply isn't true -- all the energy use in Bitcoin is in solving the PoW puzzle, which is unrelated to transactions. It's not like
384.
by jude- 6y ago
> You said "It makes no sense to talk about how much electricity a Bitcoin transaction consumes, as if that meant anything". Yes, but that's not saying that energy is free. I was saying that the energy used to create a Bi
385.
by jude- 6y ago
> Even "clean" energy isn't free energy. No one said it was. But some energy sources produce far less pollution than others, and are far safer. Also, everything I'm saying about regulating and taxing pollution from
386.
by jude- 6y ago
I'm not hyping BTC, btw. I'm correcting misconceptions about it, so we can fix the very real problems with PoW causing pollution. I personally have zero exposure to BTC. Regardless of how we both feel about BTC, it's here t
387.
by jude- 6y ago
If there were _zero_ transactions, Bitcoin would take the same amount of energy. The proof-of-work calculation is _completely decoupled_ from how many transactions there are.
388.
by jude- 6y ago
> It is impossible to regulate and tax miners; they live in various countries and in some it is impossible to apply such regulations, if some countries will do it then minim will move to other places. Other countries can sanction them un
389.
by jude- 6y ago
> Even if every major country on earth requires PoW systems to use renewable electricity (which won't happen any time soon in the first place) and can't run on the regular mixed grid, then after switching to countries without s
390.
by jude- 6y ago
I've written code to sign and validate Bitcoin transactions (see my profile). Believe me, they're cheap -- loading this site and rendering it in your browser probably takes an order of magnitude more watts. It's really not

More ›