The Verdana font that your message is written with - how can you be sure that its TrueType bytecode hasn't escaped the sandbox and snuck into your ring0?
You either put some trust into the systems made by other people, or you don't touch computers at all.
Absolutely, and we can discuss the amounts of this trust. Some people trust the anti-cheat devs. (I do too, on a PC that is used for almost nothing but gaming.)
okay, if you agree with that, i am confused about your initial comment comparing anti-cheat to a font.
it appears like you are saying "if you trust the font to be okay, you should trust anti-cheat". but we've just cleared up that they have wildly different levels of trust, due to their wildly different access, size, purpose, etc.
I mean - trust is subjective, right? Some people just don't care, some people are okay with the risk-reward tradeoff. I agree it's a bit absurd to compare vanguard to a font, but the parent comment was pretty unapologetic too.
Ancient Greeks had a steam engine. They called it a Hero's engine. They used it as a toy.
They couldn't use it as anything else than a toy. The reason they couldn't because they didn't have the metallurgy and the machining to create pistons, valves, etc.
There's an important lesson that can be applied to every technology, I think: technological progress is always iterated, never revolutionized. If your novelty - a programming language, a framework, a methodology, whatever - doesn't stand on the shoulders of the giants, then you have simply nothing to apply this novelty to.
That was a reaction engine, something like a steam rocket confined to rotate in a circle, and not a positive-displacement engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
They couldn't use it as anything else than a toy. The reason they couldn't because they didn't have the metallurgy and the machining to create pistons, valves, etc.
IMHO they definitely had the processes to basically add a PTO to one, but it was probably dismissed as impractical.
> The reason they couldn't because they didn't have the metallurgy and the machining to create pistons, valves, etc.
It was a turbine. You don’t use pistons in a turbine. They lacked knowledge of turbine blades, the metallurgy to make pressure vessels, and the tools to make parts with the tolerances needed to spin at high RPM and withstand high temperatures.
Probably could've connected it to some tiny device, and then someone surely would've thought, what if we made a really big one a d connected it to our Archimedes screws?
The Romans didn't have a need to pump water from coal mines because they hadn't yet cut down all their fuel forests or exhausted all their surface deposits of coal. Newcomen's engine was so inefficient, it needed to be at a coal mine to power it and this jet screw engine would have been even worse. If they wanted to turn an Archimedes screw, it would have taken less labor to just have a person turn it by hand.
That's what id Software did in December 2025. 165 of 185 of the studio's staff at the Dallas, TX office unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).
1) They were in browsers since 2000s. Then Steve Jobs held a grudge with Adobe and Flash took a major blow. Today, we successfuly reinvented the wheel using "open" technologies - on the client side at least, the authoring tools of Flash are still uncomparable.
2) WebAssembly, compiling the leaked HL2 code. The graphics stack is WebGL.
3) Absolutely illegal, it exists until a cease&desist comes from Valve. We may see it taken down even today. They aren't.
Epic's Unreal Engine development is made in Perforce, and then it was mirrored to git/Github. Or that's how it was a couple years ago. That's kind of expected, VCS is one thing, a forge is another thing.
More than half of the ones I have installed have no internet access. Most because they don't have the permission (thanks, F-Droid!) and the rest because I've rejected that permission (thanks, GrapheneOS!)
Not in all app repositories. This isn't so common among open source software as it is in the commercial/adware ones you find very prominently in Google's curated collection
What's funny is from 2023 (I think), macOS just draws the UI unhinted. You have a 1080p display and you don't want to see the letters in the UI blurred to death? Tough luck, 1080p is incompatible with macOS, everybody needs "retina", and nobody cares that Windows and all Linux DEs look on 1080p just fine.
It looks like this hinter will be used only in rendering PDFs, because that's where they test the performance.
While hinting is disabled for most fonts, there are some fonts that require hinting to render correctly. We have to support hinting for those fonts, and it was easier to make it secure by rewriting hinting in Swift than it would have been to comprehensively identify every font created by those foundries.
People also use usable mice instead of touchpads, and they put the "ctrl" key where Apple thinks a useless "fn" should be. All kinds of things happen outside Apple world.
To me, it's more about what I'm used to. I have a perfectly fine several years-old monitor, so why should I throw it away?
Then let me blow your mind:) One of my daily drivers is an ex-Chromebook at 1366x768. Granted, it's also physically smallish so the DPI isn't quite as low as a macbook would be with those pixels, but still. And that's a touch cramped but it's fine.
The problem is, as soon as you are not on a Mac but Linux or Windows, you are in for an awful, truly awful lot of pain. HiDPI support is a mess because even in the rare case applications are made with HiDPI in mind they are not tested on HiDPI machines.
Other way around, most Mac software is not tested how it behaves on inferior external monitors.
What kind of windows programs are these? HiDPI is more than a decade old. A desktop application, no matter what OS it is, should always be tested with different scaling factors.
I’m not your child, and that’s false, it’s literally one key to change in the settings. That allows you to select the exact scaling factor, not macos’s “more text”/“less text”.
Have you ever tried to write HiDPI-aware Win32 code? I suggest enabling HiDPI in Control Panel sometimes and marveling at how many Win32 apps just don’t notice and draw as postage stamps.
Mac OS X 10.4 tried the same thing (Quartz2D scaling) and it was so damn difficult that they threw it out and went for simple 1x/2x/3x auto-scaling. Even 3x was a challenge because of pixel alignment.
Well, you were talking about testing, development of DPI-aware apps is another thing. It requires the developers to be, well, DPI-aware, but I don't think there are particular obstacles to that in winapi itself.
>Have you ever tried to write HiDPI-aware Win32 code?
I haven't. I don't think there's any reason to, I'm more of a wxwidgets fan. I don't think even Microsoft makes applications in raw WinAPI.
>I suggest enabling HiDPI in Control Panel sometimes and marveling at how many Win32 apps just don’t notice and draw as postage stamps.
The default behaviour of a DPI-unaware app in Windows is to scale everything by the scale factor. Which - yes, looks completely awful and blurry, but that's not what you describe.
macOS has been drawing unhinted text for an eternity, and for those who can tolerate it on low-DPI screens, it's a great thing: the letter shapes look the same at all sizes, and the spacing between letters is consistent at all sizes.
I'm a high DPI snob so I haven't used a low res monitor for work in forever, but isn't the entire point of font hinting to make the text more legible at smaller pixel grid sizes? Yes, of course the shapes are more consistent since the hinter isn't touching them, but isn't the end result just less legible text?
Hinting purposefully destroys letter shapes in exchange for crispness. People who like macOS style font rendering prioritize letter shapes faithful to the font designer more than crispness.
Whether good letter shapes is more legible or crisper text is more legible is basically subjective. In the 2000s before HiDPI became popular different people really thought one was more legible than the other and vice versa. HiDPI made this basically moot.
Retina displays were introduced more than a decade ago. Why should Apple still support outdated technology after such a long time?
If you work with text and fine UI elements, do yourself a favour and get proper tools for the job. Get an ergonomic mouse and a good keyboard while you're at it. In every other field professionals use high quality tools to do their jobs, IT shouldn't be any different.
A plumber has equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars, while IT professionals think it's outrageous to pay a few hundred for equipment which is undeniably an improvement.
And I'm happy that they are happy, but Czech keyboards have so many letters they have to use the number row, and Polish words, as beautiful as they are, have a lot of digraphs.
You either put some trust into the systems made by other people, or you don't touch computers at all.