OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

From a follow up post on Mastadon https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110497512340479...:

"Also in this update:

We now have a cpuidle driver, which significantly lowers idle power consumption by enabling deep CPU sleep. You should also get better battery runtime both idle and during sleep, especially on M1 Pro/Max machines.

Thanks to the cpuidle driver, s2idle now works properly, which should fix timekeeping issues causing journald to crash.

Also thanks to the cpuidle driver, CPU boost states are now enabled for single- and low-threaded workloads, noticeably increasing single-core performance.

Thermal throttling is now enabled, which should keep thermals in check on fanless (Air) models. There was never a risk of overheating (as there are hard cutoffs), but the behavior should now more closely match how macOS works, and avoid things getting too toasty on your lap.

Random touchpad instability woes should now finally be gone, thanks to bugfixes in both the M1 (SPI) and M2 (MTP) touchpad drivers.

A bugfix to the audio subsystem that fixes stability issues with the headphone jack codec.

New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode.

U-Boot now supports the Type A USB ports (and non-TB ports on the iMac), so you can use a keyboard connected to any port to control your bootloader.

And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon."

>And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon."

Amazing

"New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode."

This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a feature implemented by Apple and now supported by the Asahi team? Does that mean that macOS supports this charge control feature?

I really hope Apple brings the same charge limiting to iPhone as well.

> This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a feature implemented by Apple

Yes, battery charge control is a hardware(/firmware) feature supported on other modern laptops as well, such as the Lenovo ThinkPads, but it's not a standard so it requires explicit driver and OS support.

OpenBSD recently added support for this as well for both of these implementations (Apple silicon and ThinkPads).

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168436150408382&w=2

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168458409622780&w=2

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168521616605492&w=2

I know certain Android/Samsung phones support this as well, not sure about iOS/macOS.

If your laptop firmware doesn't support it, here is one trick if you have a removable battery:

Put a piece of paper over one of the batteries middle contacts. That will make the firmware think the battery is overheating. It will then refuse to charge, but will still happily discharge.

You can do that to keep your battery at 80% while still on AC power. Handy if you operate from AC power 99% of the time, yet don't want your battery to die from being stored at 100% charge and hot for many years.

I am on macos 13.3.1 and have noticed this feature for at least a couple of months, maybe longer. It says Charging On Hold (Rarely Used On Battery)

> e includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoC

Does this mean Apple gave them prerelease hardware early? Might apple start helping these guys more - like for example donating a 5 person dev team for a few months maybe?

M2 Pro/Max were available in January. I think they needed to wait until now to be sure the M2 Ultra announcement didn't have too huge of changes from the way the M1 Ultra was done. In other words, the Asahi Linux team don't have an M2 Ultra to test on, they are getting ready for when they can get some test results, possibly from users.

Please consider donating if you have the means. https://asahilinux.org/support/

It means that Apple isn't radically changing the internals of the SOC every year.

>Apple’s first iPhones ran on Samsung SoCs, and even as Apple famously announced that they were switching to their own designs, the underlying reality is that there was a slower transition away from Samsung over multiple chip generations. “Apple Silicon” chips, like any other SoC, contain IP cores licensed from many other companies; for example, the USB controller in the M1 is by Synopsys, and the same exact hardware is also in chips by Rockchip, TI, and NXP. Even as Apple switched their manufacturing from Samsung to TSMC, some Samsung-isms stayed in their chips… and the UART design remains to this day.

https://asahilinux.org/2021/03/progress-report-january-febru...

> I really hope Apple brings the same charge limiting to iPhone as well.

This was added to iPhones in 2019.

> If your iPhone stops charging at 80%, it's most likely due to a feature Apple introduced in iOS 13 called Optimized Battery Charging. It aims to prevent over-stressing the battery and hence extend the battery life of your iPhone by limiting the charge to 80%.

Your iPhone learns your usage patterns and delays 100% charging until moments before you wake up in the morning.

https://www.makeuseof.com/why-your-iphone-stops-charging-at-...

Such an amazing set of engineers jacking away at this. What awesome work they’re doing.

It's a bit different, though. I don't often need my iphone to last multiple days on end. Yet, if I keep it plugged in as often as I'm sitting at a desk, it'll never go below 80%. If I get it below 80%, sooner or later, it will figure "i want to use it" and will charge it all the way to 100%. The lowest my battery ever got on this phone was 40 something when I was away for a weekend without a charger. It's very rare I use it a lot, so the "intelligence" clearly doesn't care how long the battery needs to last.

The way it's implemented on my mom's android, it always shows 80 or 85% (can't recall which one it is), even if she leaves it plugged in for the whole weekend.

On my HP laptop, if I activate the "battery saver mode" (as opposed to "AI"), it reports the maximum capacity as somewhere around 80% of the design capacity. I don't know whether Linux cooperates with this, but probably not. HP only talks about OS compatibility for the "AI" mode, which not only requires Windows but a specific HP app.

> It's a bit different, though.

Yes.

It learns your normal waking time (if you have one) and gives you a full charge before you wake up.

Which is what I want. A full charge for the working day, without needlessly shortening the batteries functional lifetime.

Sure, but if I know I won't drain my battery more than 10% that day, I can't tell it not to top it up more than 80%. That's the case for me 99.9% of days.

This also seems to work only if you've drained the battery below 80%. If it says 90% and I plug it in? It'll charge it fully right away.

I can never get that to activate, even though I use my MBP 14" 100% at home...

I also appreciate the detail in which the Asahi team presents the progress they have made.

I do not follow Apple's release notes so I cannot compare.

> Put a piece of paper over one of the batteries middle contacts.

Bad, very bad idea if you don't know what you are doing - depending on where the "smarts" in the BMS are, you may damage your battery or make your BMS think the pack is broken or prevent your BMS from recognizing a charge state mismatch (and in the worst case, a cell going undervoltage or reverse polarity) as you have a good chance that you cut off one of the cell balancer contacts. This trick only works with removable phone batteries.

That's not how Apple's implementation works.

It doesn't charge the battery over 80% at all, unless it detects that you have a normal waking time, in which case it charges fully right before you normally wake up.

Unfortunately, other companies copied the 80% charge bit without copying the part about figuring out if you have a normal waking time and giving you a full charge right before that.

For instance, Samsung's S23:

>Once you turn off the battery protection function, you'll be able to charge your battery up to 100%

https://www.samsung.com/ae/support/mobile-devices/battery-pr...

> This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a feature implemented by Apple and now supported by the Asahi team? Does that mean that macOS supports this charge control feature?

It does, but in a weird way. You can turn on "adaptive charging" and it will randomly decide to charge to 80%.

If you want to properly control it, just install the wonderful AlDente utility ( https://apphousekitchen.com/ ). Then you can manually control the max charge percentage. Mine is permanently set to 80% because I never really use even 40% of the battery on my M2-based laptop.

ugh ruined by autocorrect

s/jacking/cracking

My Sony Xperia 10 IV lets you set it to never charge above 90 or 80 %, as an alternative to it learning your habits. I have it set to 80%, and I've been unable to use it up in under 2 days. I've heard that iPhones have similarly good battery life as the 10 IV, so it seems, to me, that get quite far on 80%.

> I've been unable to use it up in under 2 days.

Take up playing a resource intensive game like Genshin Impact and you can very easily drain the battery in a day.

> 60fps highest settings 100% brightness Low sound Home WiFi 3:20 total

https://www.reddit.com/r/SonyXperia/comments/onb3dw/genshin_...

Optimized Battery charging has been available since Mac OS 11. Works on intel MacBooks too.

https://www.macworld.com/article/235001/macos-big-surs-batte...

I bought the same phone recently, and for my light usage pattern (some texting, the browser, Google Translate, Google Maps, a calculator app, and the camera), the battery lasts almost 5 days!

I had completely forgotten how it is to own a phone that doesn't need to charge everyday...

Would an engineer really make a consumer design where a sliding contact failing open led to a safety incident?

Every laptop since the 90's has the balancing and protection circuitry inside the battery, not inside the laptop.

The Apple release notes for macos look like this https://www.apple.com/macos/sonoma-preview/

I really want to try this out on my work ThinkPad since it stays plugged in effectively all the time. It requires a kernel module though, I'd need to get that approved first and I haven't got around to it.

Naïve me doesn't understand why it can't be done from userspace, but I'm sure there is a good reason...

Huge respect for these people. Wish I could do what they do.

> It doesn't charge the battery over 80% at all, unless it detects that you have a normal waking time, in which case it charges fully right before you normally wake up.

My iPhone disagrees with you. I go to bed and wake up at just about the same time. If I somehow managed to drain the battery below 80%, when I plug it in, it'll charge to 80 and then tell me that by the time I wake up in the morning, it'll be fully charged. Which is the case.

But the most common use case, for me, is waking up, leaving the phone plugged in (WFH). Maybe go for a walk around noon, snap a picture or two. Forget to plug it back in and get back to work. Plug it in as I go to bed at 95%. It tops right up, doesn't wait until the morning.

> Unfortunately, other companies copied the 80% charge bit without copying the part about figuring out if you have a normal waking time and giving you a full charge right before that.

But that's actually what I want. With very, very rare exceptions, I never need a full charge on my phone. Hell, until a few weeks back, I was rocking an iphone 7 with a battery in a questionable state (started bulging). That thing never went below 60% with my use patterns. 60% meant night out, so a hefty dose of maps use. Normal days, it didn't go below 85-90%.

I think the issue is that Apple expects that when you wake up in the morning, you unplug your phone for the day and actually use it a significant amount. Which isn't my case at all. If I don't leave my house, it'll stay plugged in. I usually forget about my phone since everything I need to do, I do on my computer. For the occasional phone call, I can either keep it plugged in (the cord is long enough) or it's already connected to my headset, so don't even need to go fetch the phone. If I don't go to work, it can stay plugged in for days on end (I don't always grab it when I go out).

Indeed, at worst you'll get a "no battery installed" and the laptop might not even try to discharge it.

The comment you're replying to is just paranoic FUD. Which removable laptop battery has external balancing contacts!?!? They're all +/-/data.

Some engineers are probably of that persuasion too. I'm not going to judge. LOL.

It’s in settings under battery

I'm a corporate firefighter assistant. If there's one thing people should not be messing around with, it's Li-Ion batteries. These things are dangerous enough even without people messing around with their control and management systems.

smirking as an engineer myself I can only confirm as much haha.

I thought you meant like a jack hammer.

> that's actually what I want

Why protect your battery's ability to hold a full charge over a longer lifespan if your battery is constantly throttled to a partial charge anyway?

Because it's my understanding that charging and keeping it all the way full shortens significantly its battery life compared to 80-85%. I would rather not have to dick around plugging and unplugging the phone to not have it be full all the time. Plus, that also counts as consumed cycles.

I've used my old phone for a good six years. I've swapped its battery some three years ago, and it would've needed a new one now, had I continued using it.

If that phone is any indication, my current one should be in service for at least as long. If I can avoid having to swap its battery, it's a win in my book.

It can also sometimes happen that I foresee being away from an outlet or otherwise need as much charge as possible. In those situations, I'd just deactivate the battery saver feature and let it charge to 100%. So if the remaining capacity is closer to its original one, again, it's a win.

> Because it's my understanding that charging and keeping it all the way full shortens significantly its battery life compared to 80-85%.

If you don't charge fully until just before the user's normal wakeup time you aren't keeping it all the way full all the time.

You protect the battery lifespan and get a full charge at the beginning of the day, instead of having a battery that constantly holds less charge.

> If you don't charge fully until just before the user's normal wakeup time you aren't keeping it all the way full all the time.

You keep repeating this and seem to ignore my observation that if the battery isn't drained below 80% when I plug it in, it will recharge it fully immediately. It will not wait until the user's wake-up time.

And in my case, it's rare that the battery falls below 80%, so whenever I plug it in, it gets recharged fully right away.

So, in practice, it's all the way full all the time.

Another follow up on Mastodon is about the ban evasion that HN does specifically for Asahi. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503050993279759

I find it pretty tasteless for HN to do that.

It’s a little hard to understand what is going on. Can you explain? Thanks.

Asahi Linux's site previously redirected any site with the Referer header set to 'news.ycombinator.com' to google.com. They did this because they believe that Hacker News' community fosters a hostile environment, and thus it was blocked. Setting `rel=noreferrer` on an `a` tag means that the browser will not submit this header, thus meaning this sort of redirect will not occur. Also(as per Marcan's Mastodon account), this rel tag has only been added to asahilinux.org links, not any other links on HN. This means that the moderators of HN believe that the commentary that has in the past been quite misinformative should be allowed, and they are deciding to bypass the block that was put in place by the Asahi team. Now, as per https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503331622393719 , they're adding an HTML header to anyone who has submitted a post to HN(or has the submit page in their history), as they have no other way of doing anything, as they no longer have the Referer header.

This raises interesting moral questions that I'm not sure I have an answer to.

For one, I don't believe this place fosters a hostile environment, although it's definitely a place where people love to tell you how you're technically wrong about something.

For another, I would guess that there are a very limited number of websites that would opt into this sort of anti-traffic behavior. Hacker news could certainly choose to honor it, but it also feels within their right to bypass the block.

I wonder if there's a sort of middle ground, where HN alerts the user of the redirect that would have occurred, but still shoots the user to the desired location.

But now you're getting into user flows and begging the question as to why the redirect is there in the first place.

I'd love to know more about the perceived hostility, even reading up on Mastodon left me with more questions than answers.

Doesn't seem to be applied to older posts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33891197

there is constant transphobia against Asahi contributors on display on this site. Every single article that gets to the frontpage will have dozens of vile posts in the deads and a couple sprinkled inbetween. I’m not sure if HN staff doesn’t care about it, agrees with them or simply isn’t aware.

It’s not limited to the Asahi project, either. The site isn’t safe for queer folks.

> in my case, it's rare that the battery falls below 80%

Yet year after year, surveys show that more battery life is the feature people want in a phone the most.

> 9 out of 10 phone users have low-battery anxiety

https://electrontogo.com/blog/9-out-of-10-phone-users-have-l...

Intentionally throttling the battery's ability to charge no matter what is going the wrong way.

It seems HN's philosophy is like that of (early) Reddit, where the commenters self-govern and down/flag comments like that - and it seems to be working if they're all dead, right? They're hidden unless you have an account and specifically enable showdead.

> there is constant transphobia against Asahi contributors on display on this site

Could you be so kind as to link me to an example?

People have discussed Marcan's anime alter ego, certainly, but I've never seen anything transphobic in the slightest. Maybe it's all flagged before I get to see it, but I honestly can't figure out what you might even be referring to. I enjoy reading Asahi updates when they come up, so I am unsure how I could be missing something so 'constant'.

> It’s not limited to the Asahi project, either. The site isn’t safe for queer folks.

As a 'queer person' myself, I find that statement utterly ludicrous and I reject it completely.

> Every single article that gets to the frontpage will have dozens of vile posts in the deads and a couple sprinkled inbetween.

But that's why they're dead. Turn off "showdead" if you don't want to see them.

The ones that aren't dead, I would assume the moderators haven't seen yet and/or haven't received enough flags yet. Moderation is hard.

> This raises interesting moral questions that I'm not sure I have an answer to.

It's not really all that much of a moral conundrum. Marcan's belief - expressed a number of times on his Mastodon - appears to be that he can prevent other people from discussing something, for the sole reason he doesn't want it discussed. It's not a particularly defensible position in an open society.

In particular, he is upset that people on Hacker News tend to point out that a contributor on Asahi - Lina - appears to be a computer-generated anime alter ego of Marcan himself.

Me, I have absolutely no problem with Marcan having an anime alter ego, but I don't think it's entirely reasonable to expect people to refrain from noticing this and remarking on it. Marcan disagrees, and this is the source of the HN-Marcan rift.

(As I've remarked before, I do mind OSS projects listing fake contributors, for both ethical and legal reasons, but that's another discussion.)

You are misunderstanding. You can discuss your conspiracies anywhere you want, just not on a post pointing to the people that have to deal with the fallout of your unfounded conjecture.

Also assuming there is a "fake contributor", who cares under which names contributions are split up? The work still got one. Also, it is absolutely not your project, you don't get to demand people show their ID when they write code for a project.

> People have discussed Marcan's anime alter ego

This is pure and poor conjecture, just like the rumor (originating on chan boards and KF) that a person close to marcan had faked suicide. Exactly this sort of rumor mill is what is wrong with HN linking to Asahi developers.

> As a 'queer person' myself, I find that statement utterly ludicrous and I reject it completely.

Are you a cis gay? I remember a few cases where people reached out to have information redacted to dang and it took weeks. While the people mentioned above were digging into private lives. This site absolutely requires you to shut the fuck up about your own life if you are at risk of being turned into a "lolcow" or pedojacked or whatever else these people will come up with. I understand that's not a consideration yet for 'queer people' currently not conscripted to the front of the culture war.

> Also assuming there is a "fake contributor", who cares under which names contributions are split up? The work still got one. Also, it is absolutely not your project, you don't get to demand people show their ID when they write code for a project.

If I contribute my code to an open source project, then I - as the copyright holder - agree to license my work under an open licence.

If I use an OSS project, I am using other people's copyrighted work under an open licence from them. Without that licence, I have no legal basis on which to use that work.

Only real people can (currently) hold copyright. If person X writes some code, but the licence (incorrectly) attributes the copyright to person Y, and person Y purports to give me an open licence to use that work, then - crucially - I have no license from the actual copyright holder (person X) to use their work.

Until an effective open source license is made, this code is not open source; it is completely proprietary. If person X chooses to sue you for copyright infringement, it is no defence to say that you're using it under a license from person Y, because person Y had no right to give you that licence.

This is a major ethical and legal problem. I would be very wary of the Asahi codebase.

If you wanted to split hairs this thin, you wouldn't use any project with at least one german citizen as contributor, since they can never truly yield all copyright on a work. You'll be fine. Anonymous contributions to free software (or even entire releases done anonymously, e.g. Bitcoin) are not actually uncommon.

As I said, very weird hangup to have, definitely not motivated by other reasons.

Yup. That’s exactly what I meant.

> If you wanted to split hairs this thin, you wouldn't use any project with at least one german citizen as contributor, since they can never truly yield all copyright on a work.

Nor can anyone else, copyright is not generally 'destructible'. That's why it's a licence. The holder keeps the copyright, but licenses the work to the general public. (Assignments are another way to achieve something like this, provided the assignee then licenses the work.)

I assume what you're referring to is inalienable moral rights - hence the reference to Germany - but those are a feature of many (most?) of the world's legal systems. They are included in one of the revisions to the Berne Convention, if I recall correctly, which is an international treaty on intellectual property.

I understand you're sceptical, but the legal dimension of OSS does matter. Using copyrighted material without a licence would constitute a major business risk. I would appreciate it if you could kindly refrain from making ungenerous assumptions about the intentions of others.

I can honestly say I've never, ever, heard anyone call anyone else these terms on Hacker News. I don't think I've ever even heard those terms before. It sounds like you might be very online, in a way that seems to be making you unhappy.

Some of my most upvoted comments on here have been from a 'queer' perspective. It helps to assume good intentions and engage with others constructively and in good faith.

I must admit, I feel saddened by your dismissiveness of certain 'queer people'. You have no idea who I am, what my identity is, and yet you so casually dismiss members of the marginalised group you purport to be defending. How callous of you.

Perhaps the reason I can so easily dismiss your hysterical claim that HN is unsafe is that - in my day - 'unsafe for queer people' meant 'reasonable likelihood of getting a brick to the face', and not 'seeing words online you don't agree with'.

this is very dismissive for how much you're projecting i'm dismissing you. it's okay if you can't relate to me, just don't assume you understand.

hn is unsafe in the way that it provides zero control over what you have submitted and a perfect history of your posts, mostly set in stone unless you email an administrator. at least reddit lets you self-service delete posts.

those are perfect conditions for a certain kind of group that spend way too much time digging up and correlating info to then start harassment campaigns that exceed 'seeing words online you don't agree with' quite often.

you can of course now go on to scold me and others with this problem about how we need to up our opsec or shouldn't post in the first place. i find such arguments, if you were to make them, entirely unconvincing. being aware of your risk profile is one thing, shifting all the blame for making it harder to retroactively rectify little pieces of information (these people found a place from a blurry 500x500 picture of a parking lot out a window) on the user is just a bad excuse for shitty UX.

Quit with the gaslighting. It's not about an anime avatar, and you know it.

The problem is more that HN is perceived, with good reason, to be transphobic, and Asahi has several trans developers. This is also the reason why a couple of other people I won't mention don't want HN to link to their projects either, because for every link, several people will bitch in the comments about the validity of their gender and pronouns. (As if creating a web app somehow makes one an authority in biology.)

I mean, obviously, it's not like everybody who comments here takes part in the abuse, but when you spend every damn day of your life seeing it and depending on where you live, possibly being harassed by the government over it too, HN turns out to be one more place where you simply can't have any peace.

(And honestly, even if Lina is a anime alter ego, which you haven't proven, and only suspect, why the fuck do you care? Don't you have something better to spend your time on?)

I mean, every time Foone asked to be respected and not posted here HN staff didn't seem to care...

What makes ze Germans special?

Right to moral objection.

> you can of course now go on to scold me and others with this problem about how we need to up our opsec or shouldn't post in the first place

Not at all. I neither think you should up your opsec nor avoid posting. I think you should be unabashed of what you have to say. I also think you should hear out others doing the same, generously and in good faith.

That tiny minority who harass and abuse queer people today? That used to be virtually everybody, all the time, everywhere you'd go.

The only reason queer rights are where they are today is because people weren't afraid to speak up, even when they had every right to be. When coming out meant admitting to criminal acts - proclaiming them in public, no less. Had they not put themselves out there - had they refused to speak to those that didn't already agree with them - this would be a much darker world, and your definition of 'unsafe' would be a lot more visceral.

People used to march, faces out in the open, in their small towns, for their rights, past neighbours who hated them. That's what 'unsafe for queer people' means. I'm just never going to be able to see 'people disagree with me online sometimes' as being in any way comparable.

> gaslighting

> and you know it

I'm always so knowledgeable in the eyes of people who criticise me!

No, I didn't know Asahi had a single trans developer. I've never seen it come up on HN, where I most often hear about the cool work being done by the Asahi team. The vast majority of comments on here about every new Asahi article are effusive praise.

I dispute the characterisation of HN as some transphobic hellsite. That characterisation is simply not accurate, in the slightest, whatever perception may prevail on the Asahi Discord.

> why the fuck do you care

My other comment below, explaining the legal issue with fake OSS contributors, was already up by the time of your comment, so I refer you there. More broadly, I think Marcan should get to have as many anime alter-egos as he wishes. I'm just not particularly surprised that people find that noteworthy, and I think if you choose to have a public anime alter ego, you probably should be able to deal with that? I feel like Marcan's attempt to shut down this discussion is a perfect example of the Streisand effect - I certainly would have never found out about 'Lina' were it not for this silly feud.

That doesn't explain anything. Can you elaborate?

The most commonly cited example is a musician objecting to use of their music during a neo nazi rally. They won that case as the court judged the integrity of the work to be compromised.

I see. Well, I don't think that would affect code in the same way. If they have already contributed it then it's out in the open, and unless the maintainer was doing something objectionable they wouldn't have a case, and even if they did it would only be enforceable in Germany.

A key tenet for many people appears to be that they should be able to do whatever is within their rights, but that leaves out the fact that sometimes doing something within your rights makes you an asshole.

I see the HN admins failing this moral test.

I’m confused by this comment. I follow the asahi Linux developments here on hn and read the comments. In this thread alone there are several high rated posts to the effect of “this project rocks!!”

The only reference I can find to trans- anything is basically this comment. Quite honestly, I recommend a thicker skin. Some people will be assholes, whether you’re trans, straight, bi, whatever. Pretending that assholes don’t exist will just make you angry… you can’t just wish away the assholes but you can ignore them and prove them wrong by being awesome (which in this case the asahi linux developers work speaks for itself!)

Adding noreferer tag is “tasteless”? What’s tasteless is jwz for example silently redirecting visits from this site to goatse. This just reminds me of the clueless businesses in the early days of the web asking for “license agreements” to link to their content.

I had a look at the comments on this post. I don't see any saying anything at all about gender, pronouns, trans-ness, etc. (Other than in this little discussion right here about what is allegedly wrong with HN.) I have showdead on, incidentally; I'm not seeing any dead comments on those topics either.

Maybe for whatever reason this particular post is better than others? I put <<asahi site:news.ycombinator.com>> into DuckDuckGo. (Not because there's anything magic about DuckDuckGo search results, but to get a sample of Asahi-related HN posts without cherrypicking.) The first hit is to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35394297; no trans-related things there that I can see either. (It does have some discussion of why the Asahi Linux site was turning away people coming from HN, and the reason given there was nothing to do with "Lina", nor with transphobia, but was that marcan feels that HN discussions of Asahi are full of mistakes.)

Second hit is to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35928000. Again, nothing trans-related.

(To look for trans-related things I (1) skim-read the comments by eye and then (2) searched for "trans", "gender", "pronoun" and "man", the last because people being obnoxious about trans issues often can't resist going out of their way to call someone a "man" or a "woman" if they think they might be upset by being called that. I specifically kept an eye out for dead comments. It's very possible that I missed things, but it seems to me that a minimum threshold for saying that there's "constant transphobia on display" is that someone explicitly and somewhat carefully looking for it should be able to find at least one example.)

Next few links aren't obviously strongly-Asahi-related articles. Next one that is is to a comment about "Lina" somewhere in the middle of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233479, so I took a look at the comments there. There was indeed a "Lina" subthread, some of which was pretty rude but none of it in a visibly-trans-related way.

My general impression of the HN comments on Asahi-related threads, from this, is that they are on the whole very positive, that some people think marcan is weird for Lina-related reasons (which may or may not actually make sense; I have no knowledge of that business), and that if anyone is being obnoxious at or about trans people in those threads then either they're doing it in ways I'm failing to see or else it's being cleaned up effectively enough that it's gone by the time I look.

It seems your experience is very different. Where should I be looking for some examples?

Forced participation has no place in open society. In such a society, when in private spaces, the valid response when told "You are not welcome here" is to leave and not to harangue the host about open societies.

> several people will bitch in the comments about the validity of their gender and pronouns.

I've seen these posts, and they're horrible, mean-spirited, and hurtful.

But as far as I've seen all those posts have also been downvoted to hell, flagged, and hidden, and the users often banned, and they're often from new "green" users rather than regulars. It's entirely possible that some of these posts remained (especially if they're posted after the conversation died down and there are less eyes), but I'm certain that if you email dang that he will take action.

At some point the first comment on one of my articles was "gay n---r soiboy" or something to that effect from a new account – a curious comment since my website has a picture of me being white enough to get a sunburn in Ireland – but how do you prevent that? Limiting sign-ups is the only thing I can think of.

I can definitely understand that people feel very negative about these things, but I think it's unfair to judge all of HN by it – you're essentially judging a community by the posts that were considered inappropriate and were removed.

And if you don't like HN (for any reason) then that's fine, so don't visit HN then. All this tomfoolery with referer blocks seems rather at odds with how the internet is supposed to work; "microsoft.com blocks links of the referer is from lwn.net" would cause a loud uproar here.

> vile posts in the deads and a couple sprinkled inbetween. I’m not sure if HN staff doesn’t care about it, agrees with them or simply isn’t aware.

So basically you're judging a community by the posts the community and moderators deemed inappropriate and moderated away? Rather curious metric.

If you don't want to see dead posts then turn showdead off (which is the default). That you get some transparency in the moderation is a feature, IMHO, but it's also opt-in.

Maybe there should be a "verydead" for these kind of outright idiotic posts so they just won't display at all for anyone, but then how do you prevent abuse and keep the mod workload reasonable marking endless posts as "verydead"?

In my experience for it to take effect you need either a predictable window of plugged in time (it will delay charging until it needs to to hit 100% by when you normally unplug) or just to use your compute almost exclusively plugged in (at which point it will start letting the battery drift down to 80%). If you regularly unplug to work on the couch or whatever you may not ever see the effect directly unless you wake up an hour early to check the charge state of your laptop.

A good comment on this at last.

> that he can prevent other people from discussing something

And again, when some rando says "they want to prevent people from discussing, free speech!" the topic is always the same, they want to be freely racist, homophobic, whatever. Cmon man, just stop.