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alias_neo

5,312 karma · joined September 16, 2016

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alias_neo··on Gun Mistakes in Fiction Writing: Handgun Edition
> It is very tiring to hold back the shot in a position like that. In real life you just wouldn’t do that

That makes a lot of sense, and is kind of obvious when you think about it. They'd just be wasting energy.

I suppose the way we see it portrayed in film (for some reason it's always LoTR that comes to mind), is for dramatic effect, with scores of arrows flying through the sky at once. But I was always mildly irritated (though without knowing why) by the fact that despite so many arrows flying, the vast majority would miss any target.

alias_neo··on CarPlay Is Additive
I think it's just typical that this is allowed because it maximises profits; let's be real, a big fat touch screen and nothing else, is significantly cheaper than all of those expensive buttons, knobs, dials and switches that have been engineered and tested to perfection.

Did cars get cheaper when they took all of those out? I certainly didn't notice.

alias_neo··on CarPlay Is Additive
> Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop

I recently had the idea of taking the FireStick 4K Max that I bought ~1year ago for the living room smart OLED TV which is getting a little older, I had gotten ready to take it on a few trips I'm doing this year, thought I was being clever, unfortunately it died a literal week after the warranty, boot looping constantly.

I won't buy another Firestick again, it was atrociously add-riddled and often showing things inappropriate for the kids in the middle of the day, but if generic Android TV stick like that was available with good performance and all the necessary DRM levels, I'd probably use that.

For now, I will just carry an HDMI cable and use my laptop.

alias_neo··on Gun Mistakes in Fiction Writing: Handgun Edition
What's the correct term? Loose? I'm sure I've heard that before.

I know nothing about arrows except to identify the pointy end.

alias_neo··on Half-Baked Product
Interesting you found this funny. I didn't find it funny at all, my response at the end was somewhere between a sigh and a gasp.

- Mario

alias_neo··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
$449
alias_neo··on The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader
The screen size isn't really an issue for font sizes. Just put fewer words on the screen.

There are e-readers that put a single word on the screen, this can fit plenty in a decent font size, you'll have to switch pages more often, but I haven't found that to be an issue, the button is very light to press and the page transition (with Crosspoint) is fast.

alias_neo··on I indexed 669 GB of my GoPro videos using my M1 Max computer and local ML models
Music memories are the best.

I booted up my old PS3 from my uni days (20 years ago?) and found all of the music I had on it because I used it for everything at the time. Some seriously nostalgic music I'd completely forgotten about.

alias_neo··on Claude Fable 5
This isn't some random dipshit, this is Simon Willison[1]. He has a bit more cred than some "AI influencer".

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Willison

alias_neo··on Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics
I wonder if something like this could work for thumbnails in the terminal; I prefer to browse my filesystem from a terminal rather than the point and click file manager typically, and it would be really useful if I could have a grid-style `ls` with terminal based renders of the 3d models (thinking STL/STEP, 3D printing) in that directory. Bonus points if I could preview/rotate the model to inspect it.
alias_neo··on How to turn anything into a router
> Why not?

It seems like you weren't really asking, but I'll answer anyway.

It's bad security practice, and opens up your network to attack and/or compromise, you're massively increasing the attack surface, and a compromise of one of those components leaves the attacker sat on your edge router, at which point your entire network is fair game.

Generally speaking you shouldn't expose anything on your edge router / firewall, it's a safety barrier.

You can sit things behind it in a "DMZ" and port-forward and isolate them etc so that there's no packets terminating on the actual edge device itself.m, that lowers the risk of a full network level compromise.

Chances are you might be fine and never have a problem, but it's still recommended against.

alias_neo··on Stop Publishing Garbage Data, It's Embarrassing
I was looking at that RAC chart this morning. Given it's Sunday, and I was reading before my morning coffee, I'm not ashamed to say it took me a good few seconds of zooming in and out to realise they'd used a decimal point where a comma should have been.

Easy type to make, but seriously, does no one even take a cursory look at the charts when publishing articles like this? The chart looks _obviously_ wrong, so imagine how many are only slightly wrong and are missed.

The fuel prices one could surely be solved with a tiny bit of validation; are the coordinates even within a reasonable range? Fortunately, in the UK, it's really easy to tell which is latitude and which is longitude due to one of them being within a digit or two of zero on either side.

alias_neo··on AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip
Ouch, were you not willing to RMA for that ethernet port? I wouldn't be too pleased after only a week if parts of the board stopped working.

I don't really want to run my RAM that slow which is why I'll probably stick with two sticks.

alias_neo··on AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip
In January I upgraded my desktop, 9950X3D £600, 64GB DDR5-6000 £600, MSI MAG Tomahawk X870E £300, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB £350, Asus Prime 9070XT £580. I spent a another £250 on PSU and cooler and reused my case (Phanteks Evolv Enthoo TG, beautiful case but horrible cooling. Will cut some holes in it and if it doesnt work out look for something with more airflow).

The RAM price was already inflated at that time, and the same kit is now £800, but in October or earlier last year I'd have saved possibly the cost of the CPU/GPU on the whole thing, but now it's be about the cost of a CPU/GPU more expensive.

On a side note for anyone not aware, 9950X3D isn't the best choice for pure gaming, 9850X3D is cheaper and marginally better, also I went with 2 sticks of RAM kit, 4 sticks is much harder to run at the advertised speed (6000) which is actually an overclock.

Im a dev and a linux user/gamer hence my choice of CPU/GPU.

alias_neo··on Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive
I think I remember reading something about that at the time, the accelerometer thing, maybe it was in the manual.

Sounds quality was great and I loved the dock too.

alias_neo··on Chuck Norris has died
> are you really under the impression that Chuck Norris is the only man who can factually slam a revolving door? :)

Face palm I hadn't realised we weren't talking about _actual_ facts about him, this makes a lot more sense now.

alias_neo··on Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive
Nice! I loved that phone, was one of my favourites. One of the only, if not the only phone I ever owned that had a metal shell that I an recall.

I had most of the N range, and was particularly interested in music ones, N95 was love/hate because the music button/reverse slide was so slow sometimes, and generally it just wasn't as good as N91 for music listening with its proper headphone jack placement, and always accessible controls.

What kind of magic did that HDD have that it could be thrown around like a phone typically is without the issues we would see if we'd handled a laptop with HDD the same way?

alias_neo··on Chuck Norris has died
Interesting. I get the likeness thing, but surely one could publish jokes about anyone they wish and that would be satire or fair use or something?

Facts and copyright is an interesting one, because I'm surprised a fact can be copyrighted, unless it's the wording specifically.

alias_neo··on Chuck Norris has died
I'm pretty sure they were all the rage when _I_ was at school, but that was long before the iPhone.

I'm curious on what grounds they blocked the app.

alias_neo··on Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive
I remember my Nokia N91 which had a 4GB version of one of these tiny HDDs, blew my mind at the time.

Man do I miss the N-series, I had so many good phones in that era.

alias_neo··on My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
Do you know which HA integration I would use if I want to try out Qwen 3 ASR in HA? Some screenshots in the OP reference Qwen 3 ASR for STT but I can't seem to find any reference to which integration I'd use.
alias_neo··on I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
I'm in the same boat as OP.

The question I'd ask myself is; who would _I_ trust to implement privacy preserving verification?

The only answer I can come up with right now is; myself. I would trust myself.

alias_neo··on Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal
Yeah, I went through it 3 times in the first decade of my career, two of them were just like yours, I was told "look, this has to go like this, so you're gonna have to go through the stuff, but don't worry, we're promoting you so you won't be affected". After the second one, I left because it just becomes a shitty place to work. The good people who weren't given a hint they're safe end up leaving because of the risk and hit to morale, then the morale for the rest of you drops.

The third one was a little different, they just said this entire country is redundant were moving operations abroad. So everyone was gone.

alias_neo··on Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal
It has legal implications, as others have expressed.

It means your position was made redundant, and it allows you to be terminated with little legal complication, but on the understanding that the same position can't be re-hired for within a period, I think it's 6 months.

Of course in reality it's not that simple, you get "made redundant" then they rephrase the job title a bit and hire someone else.

Redundancy in the real, proper form is a consultation process where they will try, if possible to relocate people into other positions, government does it all the time when there's cuts, and they'll often offer voluntary redundancy where they pay you X amount to quit, it's usually a reasonable sum and should leave you with more than enough cash in "normal" circumstances to find another job comfortably, or see you through to retirement if you're pretty close.

Sometimes it's just a way to get rid of people who are shit or you don't like.

If you're gonna lose your job, being made "redundant" is the way you want to do it.

alias_neo··on Samsung Upcycle Promise
I'm almost certain this was to win some sort of grant, award, subsidy, exemption, green credentials....something, and then once they had it, immediately forgotten.

I've seen this happen plenty where companies start campaigns for reasons and then ditch it as soon a they've achieved the thing from the list above.

alias_neo··on I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
I think you've pretty much summed it up.

As far as I'm aware, it has less functionality than the OEM, so you use it to _remove_ features (good and/or bad).

Aside from that, I suppose it means you can run a more up to date firmware if yours is no longer maintained, but I'm not sure what that means in practical terms.

There's also the "hyper paranoid" fork "canoeboot" which has no proprietary blobs, and presumably _even less_ functionality.

The short answer is; if you don't know why you want it or need it, you probably don't.

alias_neo··on I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
As far as I can tell, this is the only reason, you'll likely lose a bunch of functionality (that's been my experience); so "principle" is the only reason I'm aware of (or minimalism, but that's a principle too is it not?).

I suppose if nothing else, you can run a more up to date firmware if the vendor stopped supporting yours, but I have no idea what that means in a practical sense.

alias_neo··on Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme
They're also holding the photos that are left hostage; unless you pay them, you can't download the photos you have left there.
alias_neo··on I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
It replaces a proprietary component of your system with an open source one.

Reading https://libreboot.org/#why-use-libreboot might provide further enlightenment.

alias_neo··on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
"Forgejo was initially created in December 2022 as a fork of Gitea. The fork occurred after a for-profit limited corporation ran by the lead maintainer of the project, Lunny Xiao, silently transferred Gitea's trademarks and operations to the company and began to establish an open-core model."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgejo

Also see: https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/

EDIT: HN discussion on the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471

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