I saw this talk in person. It was delightful. My favorite part was the stories of helping random people who contacted him to help fix things like car electronics. They found his email from the OSS license acknowledgments, which apparently are accessible to ordinary users.
Word of mouth can still help you, but you at least need to find the community where people have the shared problem, so their recommendations have weight
Overcoming the initial "why should I even look at this" to me is the hardest part
There was a bit of PR "war" between curl and wget a long time ago. At some point curl just became everyone's goto and even the reference implementation for http.
Many moons ago, I was in the small ISP business, and I discovered the aftermath of an attempted script kiddie hack on one of our servers. When I examined the logs I realized we were extremely vulnerable to the remote code execution exploit but had been completely saved by two things: they kept trying to use curl to install the payload, but we only had wget installed; and their scripts were extremely Linux-centric but we were using FreeBSD.
Curl's success has more to do with it's quality (and ubiquity) as a C library. I think the curl cli somewhat got "taken along for a ride" with all the improvements that curl lib had by becoming the de-facto standard http library.
Because the library gets ported to every new platform anyways (it's what people use so will be the first to be ported to a new architecture or whatever) so the cli gets support for everything new "for free" so can outcompete wget (because it's always _there_ and works the same).
Now, there's also the fact that the curl cli is a fantastic piece of software, but in terms of features I don't think there's that much between curl and wget for simple cli usecases (but I still use curl).
wget (and htrack) is able to parse downloaded HTML and CSS for scanning additional URLs to fetch recursively and mirror entire sites that way, while curl is "just" a very very complete HTTP client.
Though wget isn't perfect for mirroring, as it will typically download large amounts of resources redundantly only differing in URL query params when those refer to the same content, such as on typical WeirdPress sites with comment links. Ideal would be an HTTP client with http/3, auth token, and keepalive support etc. based on libcurl that can be customized, such as via "href handlers" triggered by event-driven markup parsers for SGML (though CSS and JS imports need special treatment).
> Several people eventually got involved, things were rebooted multiple times, cables were yanked and replugged in again. First after I installed arandr and forced-updated the resolution of my HDMI output to 1920×1080 the projector would suddenly show my presentation. (Later on I was told that people had the same problem in this room the day before…)
That's why it is a good idea if you're a presenter to always have a Decimator [1] or its cheaper and less-capable alternative from BMD [2] in your pocket. No matter what, both of them will make sure you can get at least a signal to any sink with an HDMI or SDI port. Even 20 years after EDID, negotiation issues reign supreme...
Personally, when I'm responsible for inhouse conferences, I always have the venue place a Decimator at the presenter desk and run the cable to the projector using SDI - particularly MacBooks and their USB-C dongles tend to have issues with cable lengths above 5-10 meters, I'd guess too low voltage swing.
I literally never ran into incompatibility issues with this setup, only issue I had was some dumbass thinking they could unplug the Decimator to charge their phone. Additionally, SDI makes it very easy to install a split-off run to a central recording site, even if it's 100 meters of cable run away, or a split screen at the presenter's feet. No negotiation issues, everything Just F...ing Works.
(Side note: I don't think it is a particularly clever idea of Decimator Design to fill their logo and homepage with images of large spiders. They are effectively eliminating around 10% of the population with arachnophobia as customers, and are making the experience of visiting their website slightly uncomfortable for large parts of the remaining population.)
> Interesting, what exactly does the Decimator do?
A multitude of things, depending on how you configure it:
- signal boosting of low-voltage or otherwise problematic HDMI or SDI signals, including reclocking. That's imposing virtually no latency and if you're running in a TV broadcast environment with centralized clocking it makes work easier for the downstream mixer. Primarily, it avoids issues with mis-designed sources such as cheap-ass adapter dongles that have signal integrity issues - as long as it's "good enough" for the Decimator to recognize it will output a clean and high-strength signal.
- format conversion from HDMI/DVI to SDI and vice versa. That imposes a tiny bit of latency and allows the usage of "consumer" equipment with broadcast equipment, or if you use two Decimators linked by SDI, you can "just" go for far longer cable runs than you could ever do with HDMI - up to 100m, in practice way more.
- up and downscaling as well as framerate conversions. This is where things really get interesting - no matter what kind of source and sink you use or what their limitations are, the scaler engine can make them talk. That includes color space conversions and bandwidth as well, and it's particularly useful if you, say, have a 12G SDI link from the source to the sink, and you want to use an older display for additional monitoring. Splice a Decimator in there and it will output the full quality signal on one output while providing a scaled-down signal on the second output.
Yes, SDI was just designed for this kind of thing (moving video long distances between cameras in studios, tape decks and patch bays in technical rooms, vision switches and capture equipment in editing bays, etc.), whereas HDMI was only ever designed for connections of a few metres (and then active optical cables had to be made to try and fix the mess)…
I agree. I personally leave my Decimator MD-HX’s in ‘Free Run’ scaling mode at my preferred resolution. The in-built ‘no signal colour’ of my choosing helps me troubleshoot the problem in a signal chain quickly.
Worth mentioning for the novices that SDI does not do HDCP, so you can’t pass copy-protected content via this setup without workarounds.
Of course, it really should be up to the conference AV suppliers to organise all this, not the presenters themselves.
> Worth mentioning for the novices that SDI does not do HDCP, so you can’t pass copy-protected content via this setup without workarounds.
Well, the workaround is a 10$ HDCP stripper from ebay. Easy enough. (And I think that both Decimators and BMD converters also strip HDCP, but don't quote me on that)
> Of course, it really should be up to the conference AV suppliers to organise all this, not the presenters themselves.
Well, conference setups tend to be a hit and miss IME. Some where the venue and the conference is run by dedicated professionals, you don't even have to tell them to place Decimators and SDI cable runs, they'll come in with these from the start in their offer... but a lot of smaller venues and conferences (especially those ran by volunteers / NGOs) don't have that knowledge and just place some random home cinema projector together with a 20 meter HDMI cable. Corporate offices are just as bad IME, I've never seen a corp conference room with anything but HDMI or, in the worst cases, VGA. Corporate just doesn't give a flying fuck unless they got a dedicated team and a proper budget working on conference room setups...
One the one hand, yes, you can absolutely amuse your life into ruins. 24/7 access to fun is the great affliction of our times. Video games are part of it, but so is netflix and social media. If you're spending 20 hours a week partaking in any of these things, that's 20 hours you aren't spending building stuff or honing your skills. It really does add up over time.
On the other hand, you do not need to join the desert fathers to be productive, in fact, taking a moment every now and then to unwind and do something mindless and enjoyable instead helps you last the course, and a break from work can be very helpful in allowing your brain to process what you're working on, often with new inspiration and ideas as a result.
The best approach is to structure your life a bit, instead of having this all-or-nothing mentality where you either always work or constantly binge on amusements, I have a particular day of the week I play video games and do stuff like that. Works great.
I’ve found that the periodic passive money-making activities in Grand Theft Auto Online are the perfect thing while I’m coding; every hour or so I’m reminded to empty various safes and acquire various items that are on cooldowns, which usually takes around 5 minutes and is a perfect little break to ponder whatever I’m working on.
For some of us, it's no-gaming or way-too-much-gaming!
It's also possible that the author might be employing a bit of the (deprecated) rhetorical device "irony".
I don't think computer games are bad. In fact, I would say most of the people who grew up playing games wondered, at some point, on how to make those games which eventually helped them discover different computer topics
I remember when I was in high school when World of Warcraft dropped, like half the guys in my class got super hooked and would stay up late every night and phone in the school work every day. Their grades just never recovered from WoW, even some of the really bright ones graduated with barely passing grades.
Though admittedly WoW was a bit of a killer cocktail, because of the social pressure to partake in raids. That kind of game was also so new, like yeah there had been MMOs before, but nothing like that, so the "WoW effect" may admittedly be a relatively unique event in gaming history.
This is also the reason why game industry is very evil. That steady supply of youngsters trying to prove themselves on their teenage profession choice are taken advantage of. If they pivoted to other software domains, I can understand.
Not GP, but it seems like you are assuming the worst in the author simply because they are outspoken about not playing video games. That's what eliciting these reactions.
It seems like getting projectors to run is really the hardest problem in computer science.
Meanwhile, "this scratchy audio is fine!".
I guess it's something one can throw AI at. It probably doesn't need GPUs, just some audio filters.
Harder than getting printers to print?
Typically, you aren't trying to print in front of a large audience
It is unreal how tech as mature as printers is so fucking unreliable
Hey that's what we get CUPS auto-discovery for.
Good one!
At least printers give you some sort of error message.
EDID negotiation or signal integrity issues in HDMI, good luck diagnosing actual causes without highly specialized (and expensive...) equipment.
I saw this talk in person. It was delightful. My favorite part was the stories of helping random people who contacted him to help fix things like car electronics. They found his email from the OSS license acknowledgments, which apparently are accessible to ordinary users.
(As they should be.)
Well he also got "I will slaughter you" through the exposure of his email in OSS license acknowledgements, so it's not always fun after all.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/
The problem is not to make a tool like curl.
The problem is the marketing and getting people to use it.
You can easily make the best product and still not being able to get the word out there.
Word of mouth can still help you, but you at least need to find the community where people have the shared problem, so their recommendations have weight
Overcoming the initial "why should I even look at this" to me is the hardest part
Amen. Marketing is so important for software, even for OS software.
There was a bit of PR "war" between curl and wget a long time ago. At some point curl just became everyone's goto and even the reference implementation for http.
Many moons ago, I was in the small ISP business, and I discovered the aftermath of an attempted script kiddie hack on one of our servers. When I examined the logs I realized we were extremely vulnerable to the remote code execution exploit but had been completely saved by two things: they kept trying to use curl to install the payload, but we only had wget installed; and their scripts were extremely Linux-centric but we were using FreeBSD.
Curl's success has more to do with it's quality (and ubiquity) as a C library. I think the curl cli somewhat got "taken along for a ride" with all the improvements that curl lib had by becoming the de-facto standard http library.
Because the library gets ported to every new platform anyways (it's what people use so will be the first to be ported to a new architecture or whatever) so the cli gets support for everything new "for free" so can outcompete wget (because it's always _there_ and works the same).
Now, there's also the fact that the curl cli is a fantastic piece of software, but in terms of features I don't think there's that much between curl and wget for simple cli usecases (but I still use curl).
wget (and htrack) is able to parse downloaded HTML and CSS for scanning additional URLs to fetch recursively and mirror entire sites that way, while curl is "just" a very very complete HTTP client.
Though wget isn't perfect for mirroring, as it will typically download large amounts of resources redundantly only differing in URL query params when those refer to the same content, such as on typical WeirdPress sites with comment links. Ideal would be an HTTP client with http/3, auth token, and keepalive support etc. based on libcurl that can be customized, such as via "href handlers" triggered by event-driven markup parsers for SGML (though CSS and JS imports need special treatment).
I never did really figure out why curl became a thing when we’d been wget to do that since 2001.
Because you could use curl as a library in PHP and some other languages.
Because MacOS included curl because wget is GPL: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/09/25/curls-first-twenty-ye...
> Several people eventually got involved, things were rebooted multiple times, cables were yanked and replugged in again. First after I installed arandr and forced-updated the resolution of my HDMI output to 1920×1080 the projector would suddenly show my presentation. (Later on I was told that people had the same problem in this room the day before…)
That's why it is a good idea if you're a presenter to always have a Decimator [1] or its cheaper and less-capable alternative from BMD [2] in your pocket. No matter what, both of them will make sure you can get at least a signal to any sink with an HDMI or SDI port. Even 20 years after EDID, negotiation issues reign supreme...
Personally, when I'm responsible for inhouse conferences, I always have the venue place a Decimator at the presenter desk and run the cable to the projector using SDI - particularly MacBooks and their USB-C dongles tend to have issues with cable lengths above 5-10 meters, I'd guess too low voltage swing.
I literally never ran into incompatibility issues with this setup, only issue I had was some dumbass thinking they could unplug the Decimator to charge their phone. Additionally, SDI makes it very easy to install a split-off run to a central recording site, even if it's 100 meters of cable run away, or a split screen at the presenter's feet. No negotiation issues, everything Just F...ing Works.
[1] https://decimator.com/Products/MiniConverters/12G-CROSS/12G-...
[2] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/de/products/miniconverters/...
Interesting, what exactly does the Decimator do?
(Side note: I don't think it is a particularly clever idea of Decimator Design to fill their logo and homepage with images of large spiders. They are effectively eliminating around 10% of the population with arachnophobia as customers, and are making the experience of visiting their website slightly uncomfortable for large parts of the remaining population.)
> Interesting, what exactly does the Decimator do?
A multitude of things, depending on how you configure it:
- signal boosting of low-voltage or otherwise problematic HDMI or SDI signals, including reclocking. That's imposing virtually no latency and if you're running in a TV broadcast environment with centralized clocking it makes work easier for the downstream mixer. Primarily, it avoids issues with mis-designed sources such as cheap-ass adapter dongles that have signal integrity issues - as long as it's "good enough" for the Decimator to recognize it will output a clean and high-strength signal.
- format conversion from HDMI/DVI to SDI and vice versa. That imposes a tiny bit of latency and allows the usage of "consumer" equipment with broadcast equipment, or if you use two Decimators linked by SDI, you can "just" go for far longer cable runs than you could ever do with HDMI - up to 100m, in practice way more.
- up and downscaling as well as framerate conversions. This is where things really get interesting - no matter what kind of source and sink you use or what their limitations are, the scaler engine can make them talk. That includes color space conversions and bandwidth as well, and it's particularly useful if you, say, have a 12G SDI link from the source to the sink, and you want to use an older display for additional monitoring. Splice a Decimator in there and it will output the full quality signal on one output while providing a scaled-down signal on the second output.
Yeah, that’s the perfect case of a good product overrun by a questionable design idea. And its name sounds 13yo too, tbh.
[dead]
Yes, SDI was just designed for this kind of thing (moving video long distances between cameras in studios, tape decks and patch bays in technical rooms, vision switches and capture equipment in editing bays, etc.), whereas HDMI was only ever designed for connections of a few metres (and then active optical cables had to be made to try and fix the mess)…
I agree. I personally leave my Decimator MD-HX’s in ‘Free Run’ scaling mode at my preferred resolution. The in-built ‘no signal colour’ of my choosing helps me troubleshoot the problem in a signal chain quickly.
Worth mentioning for the novices that SDI does not do HDCP, so you can’t pass copy-protected content via this setup without workarounds.
Of course, it really should be up to the conference AV suppliers to organise all this, not the presenters themselves.
> Worth mentioning for the novices that SDI does not do HDCP, so you can’t pass copy-protected content via this setup without workarounds.
Well, the workaround is a 10$ HDCP stripper from ebay. Easy enough. (And I think that both Decimators and BMD converters also strip HDCP, but don't quote me on that)
> Of course, it really should be up to the conference AV suppliers to organise all this, not the presenters themselves.
Well, conference setups tend to be a hit and miss IME. Some where the venue and the conference is run by dedicated professionals, you don't even have to tell them to place Decimators and SDI cable runs, they'll come in with these from the start in their offer... but a lot of smaller venues and conferences (especially those ran by volunteers / NGOs) don't have that knowledge and just place some random home cinema projector together with a 20 meter HDMI cable. Corporate offices are just as bad IME, I've never seen a corp conference room with anything but HDMI or, in the worst cases, VGA. Corporate just doesn't give a flying fuck unless they got a dedicated team and a proper budget working on conference room setups...
arandr mentioned! I use it all the time. Never had an issue.
TIL: ARandR is a tool to control output positioning and properties of multiple monitors using XRandR.
https://christian.amsuess.com/tools/arandr/
Recently set up something similar for Windows as a win in the battle against time wasted thanks to auto-logout.
https://github.com/caoyue/WindowResizer
Great that he underlines he "never ever plays computer games". This is repeated not too often
I think this is too an extreme a take.
One the one hand, yes, you can absolutely amuse your life into ruins. 24/7 access to fun is the great affliction of our times. Video games are part of it, but so is netflix and social media. If you're spending 20 hours a week partaking in any of these things, that's 20 hours you aren't spending building stuff or honing your skills. It really does add up over time.
On the other hand, you do not need to join the desert fathers to be productive, in fact, taking a moment every now and then to unwind and do something mindless and enjoyable instead helps you last the course, and a break from work can be very helpful in allowing your brain to process what you're working on, often with new inspiration and ideas as a result.
The best approach is to structure your life a bit, instead of having this all-or-nothing mentality where you either always work or constantly binge on amusements, I have a particular day of the week I play video games and do stuff like that. Works great.
I’ve found that the periodic passive money-making activities in Grand Theft Auto Online are the perfect thing while I’m coding; every hour or so I’m reminded to empty various safes and acquire various items that are on cooldowns, which usually takes around 5 minutes and is a perfect little break to ponder whatever I’m working on.
For some of us, it's no-gaming or way-too-much-gaming! It's also possible that the author might be employing a bit of the (deprecated) rhetorical device "irony".
Why? Is the entire gaming industry just a big waste of time?
It feels a bit like saying "I never watch TV", "I never listen to music", or "I never read fiction" - "I only ever code, I am purely productive."
I don't think computer games are bad. In fact, I would say most of the people who grew up playing games wondered, at some point, on how to make those games which eventually helped them discover different computer topics
It's probably quite complex.
I remember when I was in high school when World of Warcraft dropped, like half the guys in my class got super hooked and would stay up late every night and phone in the school work every day. Their grades just never recovered from WoW, even some of the really bright ones graduated with barely passing grades.
Though admittedly WoW was a bit of a killer cocktail, because of the social pressure to partake in raids. That kind of game was also so new, like yeah there had been MMOs before, but nothing like that, so the "WoW effect" may admittedly be a relatively unique event in gaming history.
This is also the reason why game industry is very evil. That steady supply of youngsters trying to prove themselves on their teenage profession choice are taken advantage of. If they pivoted to other software domains, I can understand.
What does it matter?
Probably a part of I-never-play-games cult. Seems to mean something for them.
> Probably ... cult
You simply have a different perspective, and are overinflating their position.
[flagged]
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I’m not triggered at all. I don’t even understand what that means for them cause every interaction ended in no explanation besides some weird remarks.
Not GP, but it seems like you are assuming the worst in the author simply because they are outspoken about not playing video games. That's what eliciting these reactions.