Matthijs De Smedt

Computer graphics person. Currently work at NVIDIA. Opinions my own.

"Contains at least 40% post-consumer recycled content."

"HIGH BIAS - IEC TYPE II - EQ 70us"

Posts auto-delete eventually maybe

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Last Notes

2026-05-02 15:00:12 UTC

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Does it run on Windows?

2026-02-25 01:44:43 UTC

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It’s a big club and we ain’t in it

2026-01-24 21:05:06 UTC

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Who do you think joined ICE?

2026-01-18 03:21:58 UTC

"Beyond Cyberpunk!" the 2005 update of the 1998 web version of the 1993 Hypercard-on-floppies version of the classic cyberpunk zine
https://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/4zones.html
https://media.metalhead.club/media_attachments/files/115/913/943/229/226/792/original/12d92fc26b7a542d.jpg

2025-11-20 18:52:24 UTC

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Yes! Junior me would not believe how eagerly senior me goes around asking targeted questions to unblock myself as quickly as possible.

2025-10-23 18:48:58 UTC

I’ve had a personal epiphany as of late about socialism. I was always a skeptic because it seemed to me like socialism at its core is a utopian ideology. Humans, like other animals, are naturally competitive and possessive. How could any society deny this inherent trait? But recently I considered morality. We want people to be good. A society of humans always at their best behavior seems equally impossible. Should this knowledge stop us from even trying to be better? I think socialism doesn’t have to be about reaching a utopia of perfect economic equality. It can be about striving to get closer to it. And that seems worthwhile.

2025-05-16 19:39:11 UTC

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Not as uncommon as you might think. Max Cavalera mostly plays 4 string guitars. And Wes Borland does on some songs.

2025-03-17 19:14:30 UTC

Whenever we have Dim Sum I just think about NumPy.
Programmer brain.

2025-03-10 20:45:35 UTC

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Hey everyone wore a suit in the 1800s
Very important
Apparently

2025-02-28 02:32:19 UTC

I was just thinking. #fediverse really needs a kind of URL scheme which encodes both the origin URL and the fedi "platform", so fedi clients and browsers (perhaps with extensions) can reinterpret the URL and redirect the user to their own instance. This would go a long way to making federated services in the browser feel like one "app".
Perhaps simply adding ?fediapp=microblog or ?fediapp=threadiverse or ?fediapp=videos to the end might suffice, even though it's a bit ugly in the URL bar.
Or perhaps domains can expose this with a TXT record..? Hmm.

2025-02-27 15:52:28 UTC

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I still like Nix/NixOS btw. And I'll probably stick with it. But, yeah, I wish there was standardized simple devshell declaration in which I could've just specified "grab this overlay and also pull in a few more packages" without the complete packaging syntax dump.

2025-02-27 15:49:45 UTC

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I shouldn't have said "Nix language" when I meant the "nixpkgs API" if you can call it that.
Almost every line there is part of a complex multilayered API. I just wanted to run Rust 1.85, not wonder about why there's a dozen different ways to import nixpkgs, why there's an external flake-utils package in this example, etc.
I pretty much understand all these things, but I think dev shell declaration syntax could've been a lot simpler for simple usecases. I don't know of any other platform which requires normal users to learn their packaging API for routine tasks.

2025-02-27 03:11:30 UTC

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If a "normal" programming language showed me this as an example of a really common use-case, I'd run away screaming. Maybe I still should ;)
( screenshot from https://github.com/oxalica/rust-overlay?tab=readme-ov-file#use-in-devshell-for-nix-develop )
https://media.metalhead.club/media_attachments/files/114/073/652/749/928/333/original/9793b44dcb60206f.png

2025-02-27 03:07:49 UTC

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Thanks for the tip. That's exactly what I did, and I got it to work.
I do really like the ideas, and things like overlays are great. But why so much syntax complexity is forced on users even for really very normal tasks is incomprehensible to me.

2025-02-27 03:05:06 UTC

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I got it to work btw. And that's cool. Nix dev shells are great. But the process was needlessly complicated and annoying.
I needed an overlay, and most of them don't work (or don't have instructions for) shell.nix. So I tried flakes. More syntax, hooray. It worked, but ugh.
And why the hell does a flake.nix NEED to be in git. What if I don't even want to use git..

2025-02-27 03:01:38 UTC

I'm seriously beginning to question the sanity of relying on #NixOS
The ideas behind Nix and NixOS are very clever and very powerful. And superficially as a distro it's been working quite well.
But the Nix language is one of the most craziest overcomplicated-by-default designs I've ever seen.
It wouldn't be so bad if there was one clear way to do something, but when looking around I typically find half a dozen completely different approaches. I'd practically have to learn *all* of Nix and NixOS just to make sense of it. And that's really frustrating when I just want to, say, get the Rust 1.85 toolchain to build run a little hobby project...

2025-02-14 04:21:43 UTC

Peertube is so cool. I'm watching a recent video from a popular channel and just noticed I uploaded more data to other peers while watching the video than I downloaded from the server. It's a clever and completely frictionless implementation which alleviates some of the load (and cost!) from servers hosting videos.
#fediverse #peertube

2025-01-22 03:03:25 UTC

"Ik ben Grady, en dit is Practical Engineering."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQCB3N8Vaxk

2025-01-18 01:32:19 UTC

I now have two #NixOS systems up and running, a laptop and a desktop.
And they are by far the most usable Linux installs I have ever had.
My laptop has functioning standby, hibernate, hybrid graphics (iGPU+dGPU) and disk encryption.
My desktop plays nearly every game I have on Steam, GOG and Epic. It also does low-latency audio and neural amp modelling for my guitar through my Scarlett 2i2 audio interface.
Hmmm.. 2025, the year of Linux desktops?

2025-01-08 05:14:51 UTC

I realized NixOS makes me happy in the same, very specific, way Rust makes me happy.
Many of us here have incredibly powerful computers in our pants pockets, on our laps, and under our desks. And I mean "incredibly" literally. Unless you've done some compute performance analysis it's unlikely you can appreciate how fast modern computers really are.
NixOS and Rust both leverage the plenty of modern computing performance to unburden humans from specific concerns. And that's pretty neat.
#nixos #rust

2024-12-16 15:53:52 UTC

Another cool story from the Meshtastic high altitude balloon experiment:
Exactly where it landed was unknown, because during the final stages of its descent it was out of range of both the mesh and radiosonde tracking. So there was a considerable projected area to search.
However, by chance someone on a business trip brought a few Meshtastic receivers along and as their plane overflew the general area where the balloon went down, it worked! At 40,000ft they picked up the balloon still dutifully reporting its precise GPS position to the mesh. Amazing.
Some folks will be headed there today to attempt to retrieve it.
#meshtastic #hamradio #amateurradio
https://media.metalhead.club/media_attachments/files/113/663/273/493/392/807/original/d230295fcb26b8ee.jpg

2024-12-15 19:44:41 UTC

I just got a Meshtastic packet to travel 100km by going through a node lifted on a high altitude balloon, currently at 14,000 meters. Totally awesome.
A collaboration by https://bayme.sh and https://sf-hab.org
#meshtastic #amateurradio #hamradio
https://media.metalhead.club/media_attachments/files/113/658/546/445/490/607/original/38102ff84e139fe2.png

2024-12-12 23:16:54 UTC

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Have we tried the LHC (Large Holy-Father Collider)

2024-12-10 15:45:57 UTC

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Well stay away from to the US then. By the side of the roads around here are many crosses and memorials for dead cyclists and pedestrians, thanks to our "car culture".
Just the one city I live in, San Jose: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/02/11/map-san-jose-traffic-deaths-in-2022-pedestrians-bicyclists-drivers/

2024-11-19 06:11:22 UTC

TIL Michiru Yamane has a YouTube channel where she plays through some of the excellent music she's created for the Castlevania games over the last 30 years.
Bonus: Cat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU6h4XzWpb4
#vgm #castlevania #retrogaming

2024-11-15 01:31:53 UTC

One thing to look out for when you've got a #meshtastic node is not to disconnect the antenna while it is on. Unlike normal radios it can decide to transmit at any time, and transmitting without an antenna can fry it. So shut it down before changing antennas.

2024-11-08 06:01:05 UTC

Received my first #meshtastic message on 915 MHz from someone in an airplane today. Distributed mesh networking at altitude, how cool is that.
https://media.metalhead.club/media_attachments/files/113/445/787/530/242/737/original/a660ce0dc8d92896.jpeg

2024-11-06 00:16:28 UTC

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George/Washy 2024

2024-10-23 03:19:03 UTC

https://media.metalhead.club/media_attachments/files/113/354/565/163/887/064/original/00ddfe0fce98ee00.jpg