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431 karma · joined August 23, 2022

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0xAFFFF··on Colonization of Venus
> It is also possible to terraform Venus, although much more difficult than for Mars.

We are facing an existential crisis in the form of climate warming on Earth that we are unable to address properly. The thing is, terraforming Earth is the easiest thing to do: we already live on it, it's already liveable. Mars, Venus or any other body in the solar system is magnitudes harder to transform on almost every aspect.

So unless humanity demonstrates it can tackle the easiest terraforming endeavour that be, anything else is firmly in the science fiction realm.

0xAFFFF··on Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall
Software should be at least as easy to uninstall as it is to install, so yes.
0xAFFFF··on Samsung Magician disk utility takes 18 steps and two reboots to uninstall
Parts of that article are just downright terrible.

First, the criticism of Electron is moot. Yes it's not sleek, but it's sufficient. This app is not supposed to be used heavily on a daily basis. Run it once to setup your drive, run it a few months later for a firmware upgrade or a quick health check and that's all. And when you had a taste of the absolute UX monsters some hardware vendors can produce on the software side, really an Electron app feels nice.

But it gets more ridiculous. Embedded fonts? God forbid companies enforce their own design guidelines in their software. Translations? Fuck non-English speakers. User guide with screenshots? The audacity.

0xAFFFF··on After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up
Being efficient in watering golf courses in the desert in certainly nice, but maybe it's time to question having over 50 golf courses in the desert with an impending massive water shortage.
0xAFFFF··on A One-Minute ADHD Test
This might depend on the country for EU. In France especially if you're an adult, getting an appointment for a diagnosis is either extremely long (public health sector delays regularly exceed one year), very expensive (over a 100€ out-of-pocket) or downright impossible (if you're in a big city you're fine, some places don't have anyone available at all). Sometimes it's a combination of those (yay).

And then if you're getting medicated, another whole world of fun begins (restricted prescriptions, shortages, etc)

0xAFFFF··on What nicotine does to your brain
Fellow ADHDer here, I'm not a smoker but long before I was diagnosed, lyrics from a song of my favorite band/artist hit me particularly hard. It was Drag by Joey Cape/Lagwagon, a song about the struggles of smoking. Here's the part, especially the last two lines.

  The drag on the next one
  Is something I can look forward to
  Something to slow the synapse
  Something to do with my hands
I'm lucky enough to be properly medicated now and to have been shielded from smoking by a combination of favorable family environment, a great pediatrist back then and great prevention efforts in school, because if not I'm pretty sure I would have been a heavy smoker. The need for mental peace and focus was just too strong.
0xAFFFF··on Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban
This was my first thought. Why TP-Link, why now? Looks like another extortion scheme from POTUS.
0xAFFFF··on Our first terraforming goal should be the Moon, not Mars
Our first terraforming goal should be the Earth, not the Moon, not Mars.

I.e. we're all threatened by the climate catastrophe and if we're not able to fix the planet we're the most fit to inhabit, the rest is just absolute lunacy.

0xAFFFF··on Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not
He didn't need to own Twitter for this, so even if you give Musk some slack about his God-awful opinions, his (real and hypothetical) achievements are still not a good reason at all to stay on X.
0xAFFFF··on ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web
They also need an outlet for all the garbage they generate, hence the transformation of Sora into a shitty social network.
0xAFFFF··on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence
Well no. French person here. While this verdict is a great victory for democracy in itself, a lot of problems around it are still not solved.

- Prosecuting white-collar crime still takes ages and takes over a decade, long after the resulting sentences have a real impact

- People like Nicolas Sarkozy have powerful media relays (most of the TV/newspaper owners in France are friends of him or at least sympathetic) and they can smear the judgment, smear the judges in the media with impunity

- His allies are currently in power, he was invited for a short discussion by president Macron and got a visit in prison from the minister of justice Darmanin, which reeks of favoritism

So the road ahead is still long, and I'm not even talking about current political climate which is horrendous.

0xAFFFF··on Why the push for Agentic when models can barely follow a simple instruction?
> Current state-of-the-art models are, in my experience, very good at writing boilerplate code or very simple architecture especially in projects or frameworks where there are extremely well-known opinionated patterns (MVC especially).

Which makes sense, considering the absolutely massive amount of tutorials and basic HOWTOs that were present in the training data, as they are the easiest kind of programming content to produce.

0xAFFFF··on The gaslit asset class
Don't make me tap the "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" sign.
0xAFFFF··on US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees
Ryanair talks a lot, but they mostly do it for the free PR they inevitably get when people act shocked. Almost all of their proposal are unfeasible or downright illegal and all of them should be considered bullshit until proven otherwise.
0xAFFFF··on x402 — An open protocol for internet-native payments
The protocol boast "no fee" but that's deceptive: if it's based upon a blockchain, there will be transaction fees.

Now if the problem they want to solve is the case of low amount payments (they claim "no high minimum") then a percentage fee is not an issue, but a per-transaction fee can be absolutely massive. Also depending on the blockchain, you're exposed to fee volatility, which might be another issue.

Am I missing something here?

0xAFFFF··on Nostr
Every time a crypto user faces criticism over their favorite technology they frame it as FUD. Quite a marvel of nature.
0xAFFFF··on Study mode
> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content

What's funny is tha LLMs got trained on datasets that includes all that incorrect, outdated or hostile content.

0xAFFFF··on Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?
There is no realistic way to do anything like that "close to the finish line" on a Tour race, especially during a mountain stage, there are people and cameras everywhere.
0xAFFFF··on Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?
It's not necessarily a new performance-enhancing molecule that nobody has heard of, but alternative posology or training regimen to stay under detection threshold, new masking products, etc.

Doping has been a cat-and-mouse game for decades, it's not unrealistic to think this is still happening.

The fact that Pogacar this year managed to reach Bjarne "Mr. 60%" Riis levels of performance in the mountain makes you wonder if this is only standard athletic and performance science or if they're something else.

0xAFFFF··on Font Comparison: Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono vs. JetBrains Mono and Fira Code
Yep, modern fonts have features that can be enabled or disabled, depending on client support. IDEs typically allow to enable/disable ligatures and you also can control font features with CSS (see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-featur...)
0xAFFFF··on LLM Inevitabilism
Most prominent example was this one: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-pulls-back-more...
0xAFFFF··on A receipt printer cured my procrastination
Most symptoms of ADHD are things almost everybody experiences from time to time, some even regularly. What makes ADHD is combination of many symptoms cranked to 11.

ADHD is the difference between having difficulties starting some tasks and being absolutely unable to start a mundane task until you curl yourself into a corner and cry.

That being said, things that help people coping with ADHD can totally help people not having ADHD but suffering similar issues (case in point: planning and handling tasks)

0xAFFFF··on Left-Pad (2024)
If anything, the left-pad debacle has shown that NPM package granularity has gone way too small, at a point where package overhead was outweighing the package simplicity benefits.
0xAFFFF··on Show HN: I am making an app to rival "Everything"
It's also not working well on Firefox desktop (MacOS), same issue.
0xAFFFF··on Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests
It's not just about a lack of interest in walking. If your infrastructure is extremely hostile to walking, it's outright dangerous and unreliable and force people out of it.
0xAFFFF··on X's new "encrypted" XChat feature doesn't seem to be any more secure
Concerning
0xAFFFF··on Binary Wordle
This is obviously improper. The valid strategy for this game unfolds as follows.

Step 1: Guess 11111.

Step 2: Replace all grey cells with 0s.

Thank you for your careful consideration.

0xAFFFF··on KDE for Windows 10 Exiles – Upgrade your software, not your computer
I've been pondering switching to Linux for my mother in-law that has a pretty limited use of her computer (online groceries, emails mostly) and their page is pretty unconvincing in that case. I mean yeah OK, you guys have extensive customization, virtual desktops and all the bells and whistles that appeal to power users, but is it easy to put it in the hands of someone else without having to do customer support all year long?
0xAFFFF··on AI: Accelerated Incompetence
> the goal is less and less good engineering and more and more pure output

Code is a liability. Code is expensive to maintain, has bugs, security issues, performance issues. The short-term profitable solutions will have a very narrow window to succeed because they will quickly crumble under their own weight.

0xAFFFF··on Another way electric cars clean the air: study says brake dust reduced by 83%
> I was talking about safety for the drivers in the car that collide with the EV. They are less safe with EVs on the road.

This argument would look sensible if the car industry, especially in North America (but the rest of the world is slowly following suit) wasn't pushing for bigger and bigger and bigger cars, that are inherently safer for their passengers and way more dangerous for everyone around.

You can have BEV and reasonably sized cars. Car bloat overall is way bigger than the EV weight issue.

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