Dunedan

I can tell for sure the current version of StreetComplete for Android does allow specifying that only one side of the road has a side walk. I solved a few of these quests just last week. No idea what's the state on iOS though.

It also got mentioned in Tom Scotts recent video about Bletchley Park, which is worth a view as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDLbO9KeddY

oof. Quite a bit to digest there. In practice I don't really see how that replaces the process of verifying through another channel to verify that the person on the other side of the conversation is the expected person. It could have been Mallory you've been talking to from the beginning.

Using a very few selected companies as auditors feels like an odd decision. I'd have rather preferred some kind of web-of-trust like CAcert.org does.

And then there is the final nail in the coffin:

> When Automatic Key Verification is turned on, the Signal client periodically fetches Merkle tree heads from the Signal key transparency server. The client requires that each tree head belong to a lineage endorsed by all registered auditors within the last seven days. If the server does not present valid auditor signatures, the client will raise a warning and Automatic Key Verification will fail. A fully malicious server may therefore maintain a split view of the system for at most one week before client applications start to display warning messages.

(from https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/08/11/how-trail-of-bits-he...)

All the AI hype aside, I wonder if there is a way to avoid becoming one of these faceless corporations where customers are just numbers. For years Amazon has been fantastically customer centered, but at some point they just lost it. I could compile a list where Amazon is actually way more customer unfriendly than in the past now, but I guess everybody already got their own anecdotes about that. So what exactly went wrong and how could that be avoided at other companies?

Firefox unloads tabs under memory pressure since more than 4 years: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/10/tab-unloading-in-firefox-9...

While your statement is true, it leaves out relevant details:

There is a certain threshold for radiation exposure where if exceeded the animal isn't deemed safe for consumption anymore. The vast majority of these cases are from boars in certain areas of Germany nowadays and affect less than 1% of all killed boars [1] [2].

[1]: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fast-3000-verstrahlte-wildsch...

[2]: https://www.wildtierschutz-deutschland.de/_files/ugd/173a38_...

While the spot market price for electricity in Germany gets negative from time to time, it's far away from doing so every day.

https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...

Mind that nuclear power relies on favorable weather as well. It's not uncommon in Europe that nuclear power plants have to shut down, because the rivers they use for cooling become too hot.

> 1. Stuff happens in the wrong order. […] You don't want the feedback loop after the commit you want it before. Let me do an enforced pre-commit hook to run the jobs remotely on the forge and provide the feedback to the user before they push.

My approach is to utilize https://pre-commit.com/ to have all checks available to run locally during commit (or push), but leave it to contributors whether they want to run it or not. If they don't, the checks still run on the forge after pushing. The upside of this approach is that it still allows contributors to commit without internet access or the forge being down.

> 3. PRs are too inflexible. I don't need 4 eyes on every change, especially in a universe where LLMs exist. The global GDP lost annually to senior engineers staring at a four-line PR waiting for someone — anyone — to type 'LGTM' could fund a moon mission.

Well, that's possible with Github and is just a matter how permissions to merge PRs are configured. Just let every contributor merge changes without explicit approval. And if you want LLM approval, make that a Github Action with mandatory success for merging.

> 4. Stacked PRs are just better. […]

Seems like Github is working on this: https://github.github.com/gh-stack/

> 8. On the flip side, since I need to be online all the time to really work with a team […]

Sure, for communication you need internet access, but working on code can be much more efficient if you can do so without relying on internet access and the forge being available.

I'd even argue working on issues and reviewing PRs should be available entirely offline too with just the state getting synced whenever internet connectivity to the forge is available.

That's not correct. "Arbeitnehmererfindungen" only apply to inventions you make as part of your paid work. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeitnehmererfindung

Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.

The even more concerning news to me is that chardet 7.0 is now vibe coded AI slop, as documented in the PR for the rewrite [1]:

> I put this together using Claude Code with Opus 4.6 with the amazing https://github.com/obra/superpowers plugin in less than a week. It took a fair amount of iteration to get it dialed in quite like I wanted, but it took a project I had been putting off for many years and made it take ~4 days.

Given the amount of changes I seriously doubt that this re-implementation has been reviewed properly and I wonder how this is going to be maintainable going forward.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177

> 18A is brand new, yields are probably rough.

That the CPU cores are low frequency cores probably helps with yield as well.

When was the last time you played 0ad? Each release brings new changes to balancing and especially a27 contained a lot of them.

> My understanding is that the simulation will be bottlenecked by the slowest PC.

That's correct. While 0ad is an RTS, behind the scenes it's still turn-based and in multiplayer games turns can only progress once every participants PC has responded. That's also why the game also feels slow when a player has a bad latency to the player hosting the game.

There is also some exciting work going on to improve the path finding of formations to make them behave more naturally: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8608

Fun fact: 0ad still doesn't support kerning. While I would've loved to see proper kerning support in r28, there is only so much a team of volunteers can do.

If you're interested in progress in this area, I suggest you keep an eye on https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/7945

The best players are incredible at microing (although horse rushs are just one of multiple strategies). It's also equally important to manage resources and units in a way that you use all of them all the time. That's especially important in early game.

It crashed for you? You must be running Arch Linux. ;-)

Arch Linux used system-provided SpiderMonkey which lacked a crucial bug fix. This issue should be solved by now, by Arch Linux switching back to vendored Spidermonkey.

Check out https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/0a... and https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/8757 for details.

Making a high quality campaign is quite some effort and the engine still lacks some features, which would be helpful for this. A dialogue system is one of them, which already has a PR available: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8614

There is also a thread in the forum, where people are brainstorming about an official campaign: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/123956-narrative-campa...

> I'd def be trying again since they've come out of alpha with this release.. a huge deal for a game that is so many years in development.

We're not calling it Alpha anymore, but we still don't consider it a polished major release. The announcement of the last Alpha, Alpha 27 had a section explaining the motivation for the change: https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/

> Only for really huge end of game final battles with the screen packed with troops did it lag out for us, but being free and all, we'd often gather around one monitor and talk crap at each other while we waited for it to clear up.

I'm not sure when you last tried the game, but a27 notably improved performance and feedback so far suggests that r28 did as well.

> […] the game either halts completely or forks so that they can't rejoin.

When a player looses the connection the game just continues. Usually one of the remaining player then pauses the game until the player who lost the connection returned.

The game state becoming out-of-sync is often a problem of players using buggy mods. That this happens without mods is pretty rare and of course clearly a bug.

> It's also impossible to save and restore in multiplayer.

It seems you haven't played 0ad in a while, as that's possible since a27 (see https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/).

I believe the main reason that Flattr failed was just bad execution. After a successful start and Flattr being used more and more, they just stopped iterating on it, leaving it dormant for years. Partnering with Adblock Plus was the final nail in the coffin.

Good point. Seems like I enabled it in ~/.ssh/config ages ago and did forget about it. Nonetheless, it's good to check whether it's enabled when using rsync to transfer large, already well compressed files.

I wonder if the at least partially the reason for the speed up isn't the multi-threading, but instead that rclone maybe doesn't compress transferred data by default. That's what rsync does when using SSH, so for already compressed data (like videos for example) disabling SSH compression when invoking rsync speeds it up significantly:

  rsync -e "ssh -o Compression=no" ...

Not sure how you got to that conclusion, as the pre-commit framework does indeed abstract them away. Maybe you're confusing it with something else?

> hooks shouldn’t be run during a rebase

The pre-commit framework doesn't run hooks during a rebase.

> hooks should be fast and reliable

The pre-commit framework does its best to make hooks faster (by running them in parallel if possible) and more reliable (by allowing the hook author to define an independent environment the hook runs in), however it's of course still important that the hooks themselves are properly implemented. Ultimately that's something the hook author has to solve, not the framework which runs them.

> hooks should never change the index

As I read it the author says hooks shouldn't change the working tree, but the index insteead and that's what the pre-commit framework does if hooks modify files.

Personally I prefer configuring hooks so they just print a diff of what they would've changed and abort the commit, instead of letting them modify files during a commit.

The pre-commit framework [1] abstracts all these issues away and offers a bunch of other advantages as well.

[1]: https://pre-commit.com/

The measures were related to the specific cause of the unintended charges, not to never incur any unintended charges again. I agree AWS needs to provide better tooling to enable its customers to avoid such situations.

Depends on various factors and of course the amount of money in question. I've had AWS approve a refund for a rather large sum a few years ago, but that took quite a bit of back and forth with them.

Crucial for the approval was that we had cost alerts already enabled before it happened and were able to show that this didn't help at all, because they triggered way too late. We also had to explain in detail what measures we implemented to ensure that such a situation doesn't happen again.

I'm not sure usability is moving in the right direction with KDE. Over the past years, more and more applications started to hide menus by default, sometimes adding hamburger menus instead.

There is also a "new way" (I believe QtQuick-based) for applications to create popups, which results in them not being separate windows anymore. System Settings makes prominent use of them for example and those popups just behave entirely different than one is used to. As far as I know it's not even possible to navigate these popups with the keyboard.

ASML doesn't sell chips, you're probably thinking about TSMC.