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akersten

10,843 karma · joined August 25, 2014

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akersten··on A.I. companies are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands
Yeah, who needs practical experience anyway? Dang gubment
akersten··on Darktable
Foss alternatives generally handle this by either not changing the format too much or by making old versions available to download in perpetuity and then you can manually upgrade your decades old library at your leisure. I'm really glad they don't spend their already limited resources on trying to handle every possible old library file under the sun, as long as you've got incremental upgrades working you've got a path. And if you are not using it on timescales that would allow for incremental upgrades you are not the ICP anyway so they've made a good engineering decision.
akersten··on Our position on open-weights models
huggingface asked the frontier models to help them analyze the attack and lock down their systems

the frontier models refused because their cyber detector went off

they had to use GLM 5.2 instead

akersten··on Our position on open-weights models
Demand #1 is standard political nonsense

Demand #2 is hypocritical ladder pulling

Demand #3 is contrary to freedom of speech

so they can clarify however they like, their position is still a stinker

akersten··on Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake
You don't think there are any millionaires on the world's preeminent VC forum?
akersten··on Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
> I dont get this. The question is are they a bot or a human. It doesnt matter what they are doing I dont want bots on my site.

Do you want your site to be discoverable by a search engine? (How do you think that occurs?)

akersten··on Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers
because then someone will complain that you're stealing their CPU cycles or something, on the website they chose to visit and execute
akersten··on Android may soon restrict on-device ADB
If my phone is going to be locked down anyway, I'm choosing the platform that at least pairs with my AirPods properly and doesn't get me weird looks at social events.

Google is really stretching their goodwill with this one. The ability to sideload and debug my phone is the only marginal benefit to these janky Java relics. If that's gone, no reason not to switch to a wholely better platform.

akersten··on LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps
is this some kind of tactical distraction from the other LG headlines this week?

I thought residential proxies are already banned from SmartTV apps by virtue of practically every APK under the sun being subject to the Google Play terms of service.

akersten··on Orion Browser by Kagi
> it's only in the last 30 years - when ads got a bad rap due to tech bros who don't didn't learn humanities

LOL, I take it you never saw the "doctors recommend Camel cigarettes" ads.

Advertising is a plague.

akersten··on Airbus Takes Flight from AWS
> emotional response to Hetzner having a policy that needs ID

It seems to me more like smart business tact, figuring out early on whether your infrastructure provider will be easy to work with or a bureaucratic pain in the ass

akersten··on EU ban on destruction of unsold clothes and shoes enters into application
Oh, yeah I forgot, who needs a dumpster when you can just bury your fiberglass in the ground. Of course.
akersten··on The lost joy of music piracy
> the NW-HD1

Ah, something tells me it wasn't the technical capabilities that held this very pronounceable and fashionable product back.

akersten··on Detecting LLM-Generated Texts with “Classical” Machine Learning
Text is simply not information dense enough to be able to decode some arbitrary signal of provenance from it. Sure you might be able to detect today's tells (particular sentence structures preferred by Claude, phrases, etc) to get you some arbitrary chance percentage it was machine generated, but it's a bad fiction to perpetuate that any of this is anything more than tarot card reading.

Images, absolutely, there are tell-tale artifacts from today's generators that simply aren't emitted by "natural" paths to create them, and you can "detect AI" with high confidence (for now). Words, no, the signal is far too sparse and we are well into undetectable sophistication with today's models, let alone tomorrow's.

akersten··on Precursor
control+F accessibility no results

Yeah so this mouse movement astrology is going to completely lock non-sighted/keyboard only users out of large swaths of the Internet isn't it.

akersten··on Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS
Well it's not really an airtag, I don't "attach" anything to your browser when I check what its GPU can do.

That's just a description of you that I share with my other stores. Casinos, Target, Burger King, etc all do this when you get 86'd, for example.

akersten··on Since Chromium 148, Math.tanh is now fingerprintable to link underlying OS
Why should it be illegal for me to recognize the way you walk into my store, even though you're wearing a mask and a trenchcoat? Some vague sense of indignation?

Yeah, tracking bad, I get it, but are whatever damages that kind of legislation would prevent (probably nothing measurable) really more important than fixing the easy, in our face social problems that politicians could instead be focusing on?

akersten··on Re: I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-Taker at Home
Are AI-assistant-enriched coffee catch ups an actual thing that's happening or is OP inventing scenarios to be mad at?
akersten··on The <usermedia> HTML element
> protections on making sure it's clear clicking that particular element is going to second chance the permission prompt is at least much less likely to get abused.

I guess I really don't understand the abuse they're trying to guard against. The protections are like "the button isn't transparent and there's a 3:1 contrast ratio, because click jacking." Alright, so I will just make the button say 'click to view content' or 'click for free bitcoins' or really anything at all and people will happily press it.

And when they do they'll get the same permission dialog they would have if I had been allowed to make the button invisible anyway.

I understand the use case for the second chancing. I think it's really crazy to make it require this special HTML (!?) element that you can only have up to 3 of on your page at a time (because we all know as soon as you hit 4 of these buttons it means you're up to no good).

If it were me I would have allowed second chancing via JS API, only if initiated by user action (we have that pattern already for events), and with exponential back off between retries.

If they were really dead set on this whole concept of secure enclave essential oils elements, they had a decent idea with the `<permission>` element that they mentioned in the article - but then we decided to throw that out, but don't worry, specific `<camera>` and `<microphone>` elements are coming soon.

I'm probably getting too old for this...

akersten··on The <Usermedia> HTML Element
It's kind of insane to me that effort was put into all these fuzzy make-your-site-randomly-not-work heuristics and at the end of the day it still pops open the permission dialog anyway. It's like the worst of both worlds
akersten··on The <usermedia> HTML element
Uughh why do we need this whole new html element and not simply make the getUserMedia API allowed to be called more than once if the initiator is a user click?
akersten··on Swedish court says Google is to pay $1.5B to Klarna in antitrust damages
So what is the resolution supposed to be? Randomize the results whenever a user searches for a vague product category that is also something that Google provides?

The article is pretty light on detail about what "favoring their own service" actually meant. Just that it appeared above Klarna's when a user searched BNPL?

It all seems vague and hard to cure. The algorithm is typically very good at surfacing the least shitty option, so if the resolution is "well you have to jumble them now" that's strictly worse for me as a consumer.

akersten··on We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme
They've been at it since 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
akersten··on Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
This, just like blanking out a football stream for a split second to binary search and find IPTV rebroadcasters, is far too good a solution. Suits prefer to make it seem like their job of fighting "misuse" is hard, justify their budget, continued existence of the trust & safety department, face scans, etc.
akersten··on Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
Fraud?

Anthropic sells some undisclosed and ever-changing number of tokens for $200, the customer uses those tokens. If there's any fraud here, it's that the $200 next month is silently worth fewer tokens than the last.

akersten··on The new HTTP QUERY method explained
Yeah I really don't understand the anti-GET-body argument.

"Using GET with a body isn't in the spec, WAFs and webservers that haven't been updated might reject it!"

Ok, QUERY wasn't in the spec when those were written either. What do you expect those appliances to do with a totally unknown verb?

It's a welcome addition but the new method is pure marketing. There's no reason the update couldn't have been to expand GET instead of add support for QUERY.

akersten··on Canyon HUD helmet for road riding
No mention of a built in camera makes this a total non starter for me. If I'm going all in on an AI helmet it better be able to record front and back so my next of kin can get a payout from whatever pavement princess flattened me in the unprotected bike lane.
akersten··on Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
> Then they give you shit configuration tools, a shit configuration experience, vendor lock in, and forced to the cloud.

you haven't had the pleasure of managing a Cisco environment have you?

akersten··on Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
> Overpriced piece of hardware

Sure maybe this NAS is overpriced compared to building it yourself but those are different target markets.

When it comes to wireless access points you really can't beat $99 for home use. I've never had any reliability issues, never had to even think about my network, rebooting my router, those issues are just completely in the past and the single-pane-of-glass makes networking such a non-burden. I feel confident knowing my network is not running on some piddly proprietary TP-link fork of openWRT running who knows what else.

> hardware that you will never own because it runs proprietary firmware,

I don't really buy these things to install a gameboy emulator on them, they're appliances to solve my problem of "need internet" and they work flawlessly. More power to people who achieve that solution by buying their own SDR PCIe cards and wiring that all up, but I don't have time for that nor does it really matter to me.

> forced to install apps to take full advantage from those devices.

As opposed to busting out an RJ11 cable and configuring them over serial or something? The management platform is part of the value prop, you're clearly not the target audience :)

akersten··on Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?
> I have 2x RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell

Where did you find/order these? All the sites I can find are either out of stock, only sell to businesses, or are otherwise sketchy...

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