* An abstraction over second level page tables to map some of a host user process as what the guest thinks of as physical memory.
* An abstraction to jump into the context that uses those page tables, and traps back out in the case of anything that the hardware would normally handle, but the hypervisor wants to handle manually instead.
* A collection of mechanisms to handle some of those traps in kernel space to avoid having to context switch back out to the host user process if the kind of trap is common enough, both in the sense of the trap itself happens often enough to show up on perf graphs, as well as the abstraction being exercised is relatively standard (think interrupt controllers and timers).
Big day for open source Chinese model releases - DeepSeek-v3-0324 came out today too, an updated version of DeepSeek v3 now under an MIT license (previously it was a custom DeepSeek license). https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/24/deepseek/
> I can imagine that we will eventually have major services that are EU centric
I work in a research project in a EU country that looks at how educational certificates (diploma's, degrees, credentials) will be done in the future.
A big part of it, are requirements and frameworks imposed, dictated or assumed by governments, commissions, universities, etc. The most important¹ parts of these requirements are:
- it must be self-sovereign. Not decentralized per-se, but technically often one step further than decentralized. My diploma, in my wallet (mobile?) is mine. I hold it, I am free to share it, delete it, copy it.
- it must be separated from the issuers. A person getting a degree might outlive a university, high school, or their servers/services.
- it must be privacy preserving - GDPR and better.
These constraints tell me that the EU, and EC are serious about decentralization and self-sovereign-identities. Which is very different from what local or current governments like and want - At least one EU government is in conflict with its universities and wants to be the gatekeeper of diploma's - they truly want the ability to deny or retract diploma's from people who they don't like.
Which, ironically, makes these constraints and requirements all the more important and critical in e.g. our projects. It went from a "decentralization is nice because in theory someone could..." to "decentralization is critical to ensure no-one, on any end of any political spectrum can take away diploma's as is currently being attempted".
(And for the curious: I work with W3C, openId, IETF and many more standards and -bodies. Verifiable Credentials, OpenBadges v3, OIDC4VCI, VP, etc)
¹ Edit: well, maybe not "most", as there isn't a clear prioritization. And obvious requirements such as "you cannot just fake a diploma" are probably higher in priority.
Gimp is about as complicated or less than Photoshop which is what it's replacing... as a matter of fact there's even a Photoshop UI interface template that sits on top of gimp that makes it act exactly as Photoshop... so what are you talking about specifically
A night owl who feels pressured to wake at 7 or even 9am is a genuine tragedy.
I am extremely fortunate to have a career where I can sleep my natural hours of somewhere around 4:30 AM until after noon. But I had to fight for it, and set boundaries. I would encourage everyone with a late chronotype to seriously consider spending some time finding such work, as finally getting good sleep will be a major unlock for your life and happiness.
I'm a founder at Yarn (YC W24) – we're building in this space and launching on HN soonish.
We often see teams combining ScreenStudio with products like iMovie, AfterEffects, or Veed. Other products in the space to check out are Tella.tv, Kite, or Descript.
For more advanced motion graphics, you'll often need a freelancer or agency.
Feel free to drop me a message (email in bio) to talk through options!
Im working on a city builder[0] where you can see inside homes. Expanding on point 1...
1. The streets have their own graph, as does each individual building. There's an address book; each building stores the driveway tile connecting to the street graph here.
2. Pathing inside homes uses A*. In order to make this extra fast, I bake the 8-directional egress weights for each tile in the building/yard.
2b. This gets condensed down into a 16-bit bitmask (2 bit chunks, 8 directions) and then stored in a hash table
2c. Each bit-chunk has four possible states:
FULL_BLOCK (e.g. a wall)
HARD_BLOCK (e.g. a large object that prevents walking through the tile from any direction)
SOFT_BLOCK (e.g. a smaller object that prevents passage on one edge)
NO_BLOCK (e.g. an unoccupied tile, or a tile with a tiny object)
This way a unit pathing inside a building does not need to check for obstacles on every tile. This also allows units to pass through tiles with objects provided the object is not huge and is rotated in such a way that the exit and entrance edge is not blocked. Lastly, an agent can still walk through a wall if the player e.g. forgot to place a door, to prevent the simulation from breaking down.
3. I use a waypoint system (stored in a queue) for agents so they can traverse through the different graph hierarchies with ease. This is also used to e.g. tell the unit to walk to their car first if they are driving.
4. Pathing on the street uses a different method (though still utilizes a baked graph) that makes it extra zippy.
I installed the N version once, and the lack of media codecs was infuriating. Most programs assume they are always present, so the error messages they give are cryptic and the average user won't guess the problem lies in their Windows having been N(eutered). What's worse, Microsoft website provides several guides that explain how to install the codecs, and they all contradict each other. I think https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/media-feature-pa... is the correct link, but I might be mistaken.
And of course Microsoft bundles a lot of additional programs like Groove Music and Skype with the codecs in a single pack.
After what.cd died, I used Google Play Music for a long time before Google discontinued the product. I stumbled around a bunch of streaming music services and have been disappointed ever since. Streaming services have a terrible UX. Some artists are completely missing from the services. I often find one of my favourite artists has released a new album, but I end up finding this from third party sources. Scrolling through the library is incredibly slow because of infinite scroll and no concept of a local library. Lyrics don't always work and if they do it's always presented in a big font with no way to change it. I could go on and on.
I'm now transitioning to my own curated music library and I'm currently running Navidrome on my home NAS. It has a Subsonic API that I use with Strawberry, a player which is reminiscent of Amarok - my favourite music player ever. New releases are tracked by Muspy. I subscribe to a bunch of blogs and subreddits to discover new music. Works well for me but I imagine it's not for everyone.
To the computer hackers who read these things: biology is a complex system. So complex that the most complicated system you have ever worked on seems very simple compared to it. WHen you read articles like this, be aware the scientists have extensive training in working with complex systems, and publish exciting sounding coherent narratives that are, at best, incorrect but useful working models (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong).
It's fun to speculate but to prove your case and make a real dent in human health problems is a lot harder than coming in late and saying "But wait, why don't you just..."
I heartily recommend going back to the great textbooks of these fields and reading them, rather than trying to understand things by dropping into the state of the art research (which is usually wrong, and hard to understand in detail).
Some books I recommend:
The Biology of Cancer (Weinberg). After you read this book you'll have a better understanding of why doctors and scientists cringe when people say "cure cancer".
Molecular Biology the Cell (Alberts, etc). After you read this book you'll have a much better understanding of the full complexity that scientists have to deal with in complex cellular systems.
Molecular Biology of the Gene (watson, etc). Can't say much about this book except that's it's a classic reference.
What makes these three books exception is that they support all their factual claims with direct links to the papers that established the facts. And they provide you with the skills to evaluate modern research. But nothing compares to actually going to grad school and participating in the research- once you see how the grants are made, the experiments are, and the papers are written, you'll understand why trying to understand biology by press release is like trying to understand assembly language by watching a Steve Jobs product announcement.
> The reason why those of us on this forum can tell the difference between good and bad information is because we received a good education and learned critical analysis skills.
We really need to stop congratulating ourselves on how smart we are and we would never fall for such blatant lies, because we are such highly-educated critical thinkers. There are a bunch of silly beliefs that we witness even amongst us like Steve Jobs wanting to cure cancer with unorthodox dietary changes, that having no gender parity in tech is both good and natural, or this medical doctor with a respected career who believes the earth is flat:
We're all vulnerable to believe and defend the silliest things and then call ourselves critical thinkers while we do so. We can all be tricked. There are well-documented, effective methods to make us perceive and believe any number of things. Illusionists and magicians make a living out of doing this overtly; journalists and politicians do so less transparently.
Quite frankly, half the time I'm walking around slightly horrified that perhaps I'm believing and defending the stupidest lies and I think everyone else should feel the same way at least part of the time.
The unfiltered results ARE the truth. 4chan is the truth. In the sense that "Someone posted this thing on 4chan." And that's the only truth there is in internet-land: Someone posted something.
Is it real? Is it true, what they posted? Or is it "fake news?" You will never know, and you probably shouldn't try to take it that far. Or if you do, at least be able to handle the cognitive dissonance of believing it and not-believing it at the same time. The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person. Or perhaps what you hear from trusted parties, but even there, your trust may be misplaced, or they may report something false in good faith that was the result of their having been deceived or mistaken. And you can misperceive and twist reality even all by yourself in the presence of supposedly non-subjective and "real" stimuli.
Regardless, from the vantage point of "looking at a computer," all you know about anything you see there, is that someone put it there. And even the "someone" part isn't necessarily true... it could be AI-generated like some sports and financial news is now.
The good news is, that which you can't witness with your own eyes, rarely has any real effect on your life. I'm experimenting with that. The sun still comes up, and it's still time to get some shit done. Sure sure, of course there are myriad ways someone or something far away can have an influence on me. What I'm saying is, what if you ignore that? What if you construct a mental model of the world where it's actually not one big joyous tapestry of unity and interconnectedness, but just a fragmented patchwork and you have your own little square and that's it. Neither view is right per se, but they're both equally valid, which is to say, bullshit, yet incontrovertible to those who believe it. I'll say one thing though, take the fragmented view and suddenly you don't especially find yourself immersed in news of shootings and Google can't "fail you" because you don't rely on it as a window to the world - you only use it for what it's actually good at: looking for shit on the internet.
There's real a higher-order issue, too. Why did anyone want GNU to incorporate an MP3 player in the first place? There is no law of physics that requires songs to be encoded as MP3.
* An abstraction over second level page tables to map some of a host user process as what the guest thinks of as physical memory.
* An abstraction to jump into the context that uses those page tables, and traps back out in the case of anything that the hardware would normally handle, but the hypervisor wants to handle manually instead.
* A collection of mechanisms to handle some of those traps in kernel space to avoid having to context switch back out to the host user process if the kind of trap is common enough, both in the sense of the trap itself happens often enough to show up on perf graphs, as well as the abstraction being exercised is relatively standard (think interrupt controllers and timers).
Let me know if you have any other questions.