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alyandon

2,651 karma · joined August 16, 2011

Please consider adding to the discussion by replying instead of only upvoting/downvoting.

Email: my hacker news username at hotmail.com

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alyandon··on Your AGENTS.md file doesn't do anything
I generally set up the rules of engagement for a project in the AGENTS.md file and if it starts to get large break out to more specific files referenced from AGENTS.md to keep the constant per-request token overhead lower.

For Python, I have the agent use `uv` (even for direct script invocations) so that the agent doesn't need to burn tokens concerning itself with the details that `uv` is managing behind the scenes.

alyandon··on Dolly Parton has died
For a second I misread that as "The chipmunks at 16X speed" and was seriously confused.
alyandon··on In South Korea, some savour last season of legal dog meat
I had a high school friend that was born here in the US but his family were Vietnamese immigrants many many years ago. We'd often hang out at his family's house and they were very welcoming and had a "family" style cooking approach with large pots of cooked rice, vegetables and other things set out and you were welcome to always grab a bowl. They often imported native food stuffs so I was fond of the spices and peppers they often cooked with.

One day, I ended up over at his house before he actually had returned home from school. I was hungry and no one was actually at the house at that moment in time and I just helped myself to a bowl of rice and vegetables and there was this extremely stringy looking dried meat that was also set out. So I helped myself to some of that as well.

As I was eating, my friend showed up and I commented on the unique flavor of the meat because it didn't taste like chicken, pork, etc and asked him what it was. He deadpan looked me in the face and told me it was dog.

After that, I always made sure to verify what exactly it was I was consuming rather than helping myself. I don't know what the point of this post really is - but I'm glad that dog meat consumption is on the decline and I could have lived the rest of my life without knowing what dog meat tastes like.

It wasn't bad.

alyandon··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
I strongly suspect that it has had an impact on my insulin sensitivity as well.
alyandon··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
My diet consisted mostly of lean meats like chicken and vegetables.
alyandon··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
Similar experience here on minimal dose of GLP-1. There is definitely something going on here other than "you are just losing weight and that's really why you are healthier".

With my labs at my current weight you can not tell that I am a type 2 diabetic. Previously, when I was at this very same weight in the past - all my labs indicated I was prediabetic.

alyandon··on Qwen 3.8 27B
Replying since I can't edit - he tested it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EzVVj7DFPc
alyandon··on Qwen 3.8 27B
I noticed he does pay attention to feedback on his videos and I think some people have pointed that out.
alyandon··on Qwen3.8-27B
It's a relatively new channel - but yeah - I feel the guy puts a lot of effort into what he does and deserves more subs.
alyandon··on Qwen 3.8 27B
There is a down to earth guy on YT that performs a series of tests against LLMs running on non-god-tier commodity hardware. He will likely be testing this soon enough.

https://www.youtube.com/@lukesdevlab

I don't know if that is what you are looking for or not and as always your experiences may be different.

alyandon··on Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
I really worry about what happens to Valve as a company after he steps down.
alyandon··on Google is finally killing uBlock Origin in Chrome for good
Unless enterprise customers are screaming for MV2 compatibility I would expect Microsoft to make no effort at all to maintain a working MV2 implementation in Edge.
alyandon··on Google is finally killing uBlock Origin in Chrome for good
Yeah, once Google has ripped all the MV2 code out of chromium it'll be very interesting to see how long the chromium reskins are able to maintain their private forks.

I also expect Google to be a bad actor and do everything in its power to pointlessly refactor the chromium codebase specifically to make keeping MV2 alive as painful as possible.

alyandon··on WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access
I turned sample submission off permanently via group policy after catching defender uploading places.sqlite out of my Firefox profile.
alyandon··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
I'm not denying that X11 has known security issues. However, I don't tend to run untrusted random gui applications on my system so that factors into the risks I'm willing to accept.
alyandon··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
I stick with LTS releases so last honest attempt would have been on a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS system.

What is a compositor - thing that actually draws window content on the screen? Whatever KDE provides?

Edit: To be fair to KDE/Wayland, the Wayland Kubuntu 24.04 experience was vastly improved over Kubuntu 22.04.

alyandon··on Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release
I empathize but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11.

I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.

alyandon··on Love systemd timers
That and systemd having actually useful man pages.
alyandon··on Flathub disallows AI-assisted code and documentation
I'm pretty much neutral on the whole LLM thing as it has positives and negatives just like most other technologies. If their declaration had been scoped to "don't use LLMs and automated tooling to submit PRs for our packaging workflows and processes" that would have been fine.

Instead they go well beyond that and include this:

  * Applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowed.
So yeah, that's pretty much hysteria at this point. It's their project and their infrastructure though so they get to set the rules - I'm just going to shrug my shoulders and continue to not use flatpaks.
alyandon··on YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken
Same here but I'm using a ssh based proxy to avoid having my local ISP data mine my web traffic. Definitely not going to turn it off either to read a blog.

I really wish admins banned based on actual behavior instead of IP address != residential/mobile.

alyandon··on LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs
Old versions of Netscape Navigator had settings where you could tweak that kind of stuff - I don't recall if IE3/4 did or not.

Given the web of the 90s didn't include tons of overly complex javascript most of the settings were targeted at how much ram/disk was used for caching website assets IIRC.

It's the principle of the thing though - we should have the ability to set resource allocation limits instead of potentially handing our entire computer's resources to a random website just because we clicked on a URL.

alyandon··on LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs
Back in the ancient days of the web, browsers allowed you to set resource limits (ram, cache, etc) to prevent websites from hogging the limited resources of your desktop system.

It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.

alyandon··on Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record
It seems that AI-scraping hysteria/paranoia has reached a point that more and more resource sites completely block me without any recourse (e.g. having an account) if my traffic is coming from a datacenter IP. I really wish sites blocked agents/IPs based on actual bad behavior instead of reflexively blocking by IP != residential/mobile.

I do understand the frustration though. I've had to deal with bad bots scraping every crevice of a few web based services I host and while most went away after I tweaked robots.txt there were a few I've had to blanket ban IPs assigned to entire ASNs because the bots on their networks refused to play nice.

alyandon··on Libxml2 Enterprise Edition (AGPL, from the previous maintainer)
Since I've dealt with "EE" Java in a previous life, that's actually pretty tame as far as parodies go.

I hate the fact I can say that. :-/

alyandon··on "Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker
As long as there is a financial benefit to lying, there will always be people willing to do so.

I personally believe that many of these "influencers" do not believe any of the stuff they spew into the public space.

alyandon··on Zulip.com Values

  It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open, and no once wants to read any of them.
I really wanted to like Zulip and use it as a personal chat service for a small group and it was exactly that feature that made it basically unsuitable. Forcing everything into titled threads did not make any sense for lots of user to user interactions that are ad-hoc in nature.

I didn't think it was terrible software by any stretch of the imagination - just not really suitable for informal communication.

alyandon··on Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?
It does seem like a lot of doctors prescribe GLP-1s without any corresponding education on the dietary changes one should make while on them. A friend of mine's mother was hospitalized briefly because she was basically starving herself of proper nutrition while on GLP-1s.

Since I already knew that rapid weight loss is very unhealthy, I intentionally eat very nutrient dense foods in order to keep my weight loss in a reasonable range.

alyandon··on Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?
Another N=1, I've noticed zero impact on my desire to engage in my normal obsessions while on GLP-1.

What GLP-1 did (initially) was give me horrible insomnia that peaked a couple of days after taking the injection so I had to time my dosage so that I suffered through that on the weekend. That got better over time and eventually went away after about 6 weeks.

Regardless, as another poster mentioned, it's a weekly injection and if you don't like the effects you can stop taking it.

alyandon··on When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown
Same here too. Ironically, the blog is accessible over TOR for me.
alyandon··on We X-Rayed a Suspicious FTDI USB Cable
Exactly - the FTDI drivers refusing to work would have been reasonable and emitting a log or error message that my device was counterfeit would have actually been helpful. Instead, they vandalized end user equipment by permanently bricking the devices which is arguably illegal.

I am not nearly sophisticated enough as an end user to spot a counterfeit FTDI usb-to-serial device so I am not going to risk buying that brand and end up with their drivers intentionally bricking the device.

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