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andmarios

2,212 karma · joined July 9, 2012

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/andmarios; my proof: https://keybase.io/andmarios/sigs/DO16Zw_YX43L9JNyfytzOEygyauC1OCCcXbHSI6D2Jk ]
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andmarios··on Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
Contrary to the popular opinion in the rest of the comments, I do like my GoPro (Hero 11). Good and robust hardware, a lot of thought into usability for professionals, many accessories, and hackable with official firmware from the company.

The "problem" is that I don't use it that often. Most people do not need action footage regularly. It was more like a impulse/hobby buy rather than a need.

andmarios··on From Australia to Europe, countries move to curb children's social media access
I never wrote something like this, I didn't discuss the implementation mechanism. The parent said the most important thing is not the children but some rights that in a few years are not gonna mean anything the way we go. I think it's the other way around.

I also think your idea of rights may be skewed. It is your right to not give a name and address to a website. If a website requires it, then just skip it. If you cannot skip a website, then you've already lost your freedom.

andmarios··on From Australia to Europe, countries move to curb children's social media access
I think it's the other way around. Only by raising children without access to social media —and ideally without access to online mobile-phone games, subscriptions and other pay as you go schemes—, can we make sure that the next generation of young adults will care for their freedom and privacy.

Today's rights will not matter tomorrow if the next generation is raised without any notion of privacy and ownership.

andmarios··on Iran-backed hackers claim wiper attack on medtech firm Stryker
This raises the question: Are mass layoffs less frequent than a company's MS administrator account getting hacked?
andmarios··on Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users
A quick search for their developer support revealed they accept submissions via GitHub issues for their API. Perhaps try there? https://developer.viva.com/get-support/

Sometimes you have to get creative to reach out to a company's engineering department...

andmarios··on Claude Opus 4.6
The model seems to have some problems; it just failed to create a markdown table with just 4 rows. The top (title) row had 2 columns, yet in 2 of the 3 data rows, Opus 4.6 tried to add a 3rd column. I had to tell it more than once to get it fixed...

This never happened with Opus 4.5 despite a lot of usage.

andmarios··on Cross-Region MSK Replication: K2K vs. MirrorMaker2
Disclaimer: I am part of the Lenses team, but I thought this might be interesting since Kafka replication is a pain point we keep hearing about.
andmarios··on Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server
I guess it's latency and data residency.
andmarios··on KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser
It's the other way round, at least some, if not all, of these screens were in KDE before they were released in Windows. In general, KDE tends to be widely copied. Even macOS has borrowed a lot from KDE.

It has been over 10 years since I stopped being a KDE fanboy and became just a regular fan, but I remember that during my flame-war era, many features from KDE would often appear in Mac OS and Windows and their most popular applications (such as iTunes).

These days I don't care so much, I use KDE and I'm too old to switch.

andmarios··on KDE celebrates the 29th birthday and kicks off the yearly fundraiser
I would argue it's the other way round. :)

Even GIMP, the one GTK app I would never expect to be surpassed by a KDE app, is being outdone by Krita these days.

andmarios··on Red Hat confirms security incident after hackers breach GitLab instance
To be fair, once your data has been stolen, it doesn't make sense to engage with the hackers. There is no way to guarantee that the stolen data won't be used.

What you must do immediately is notify the affected customers, bring down or lock the affected services, and contact the authorities.

andmarios··on Native ACME support comes to Nginx
Nginx (and Apache, etc) is not just a web server; it is also a reverse proxy, a TLS termination proxy, a load balancer, etc.

The key service here is "TLS termination proxy", so being able to issue certificates automatically was pretty high on the wish list.

andmarios··on Automating Git Bisect with Ephemeral Environments
The magic of bisect is that you rule out half of your remaining commits every time you run it. So even if you have 1000 commits, it takes at most 10 runs. An n-bisect wouldn't be that much faster, it could be slower because you will not always be able to rule out half your commits.
andmarios··on ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project
The article says:

  As well as firing the person in August, ByteDance said it had informed the intern's university and industry bodies about the incident.
andmarios··on Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit
Most probably, said ops folks have quite a few war stories to share about logs.

Maybe a JVM-based app went haywire, producing 500GB of logs within 15 minutes, filling the disk, and breaking a critical system because no one anticipated that a disk could go from 75% free to 0% free in 15 minutes.

Maybe another JVM-based app went haywire inside a managed Kubernetes service, producing 4 terabytes of logs, and the company's Google Cloud monthly usage went from $5,000 to $15,000 because storing bytes is supposed to be cheap when they are bytes and not when they are terabytes.

I completely agree that logs are useful, but developers often do not consider what to log and when. Check your company's cloud costs. I bet you the cost of keeping logs is at least 10%, maybe closer to 25% of the total cost.

andmarios··on Attackers spread backdoor via eScan antivirus software update process
Some customers actually ask for it. The correct behavior is to have https as the default and have the user explicitly switch to http.
andmarios··on Kate editor on all platforms
A few years later, I also switched to Emacs on the terminal. I just find the terminal a better place to work. But I still do use Kate for some tasks.
andmarios··on Kate editor on all platforms
And I've long since switched to a streaming service. But I am still on a Linux desktop —and KDE. :)
andmarios··on Kate editor on all platforms
Haha, indeed! I was pretty frustrated with configuring WAMP, though. Once I started spending more time on Linux and noticed that Linux was using the slash instead of the backslash for directories and all other OS differences, suddenly, the WAMP configuration made a lot of sense and became one more reason to switch permanently to Linux.
andmarios··on Kate editor on all platforms
Kate was one of the main reasons I switched to Linux in 2004/2005.

I had a lab in MySQL, and back then, the only option to develop in Windows was MySQL Workbench, which was as heavy as it got. Running an SQL statement was painfully slow, and iteration cycles were huge.

In Linux, you would write your SQL in Kate, and run MySQL's cli in the embedded terminal. Once ready, you would click the button “pipe to terminal". Instant run. What took many minutes in Windows took less than 2 seconds in Linux. How can you not love this?

Another reason was Amarok, an (the) mp3 player. Do you like how Spotify and other providers create automatically infinite playlists, radios, etc based on your tastes? Yes, KDE had this since 2002 I think? It was first copied by iTunes, then by Spotify, and now is considered a standard function. :)

andmarios··on Intel Brags of $152B in Stock Buybacks. Why Does It Need an $8B Subsidy?
It can be both at the same time. By buying out your stock, you alter the company's assets, but the price of the stock remains the same since you still have the same number of stocks issued. You just replaced your money assets with stock assets.

Once you cancel the stocks you bought back, the rest of the shares will hold a more significant percentage of the company and increase in value.

But this is one part of the equation. The other part is that your stock is inside a market, and buyers and sellers combined determine its price. If you keep buying your stock, you create buying pressure, helping keep the price from falling.

andmarios··on Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off
I run my household on 4G too. I live at the center of the town. My ”realistic” speeds with a CAT4 LTE router are 4-34mbps. My guess for this range, is that other people are using the network too, so I cannot get the max bandwidth all the time. I also own a CAT6 LTE router (serving currently another house), which doubles the bandwidth, so around 8-68mpbs, quite better. With a 5G router I expect quadruple speeds, so around 32-270mbps.

Now we finally reach a usable area, where I can zoom or netflix anytime during the day. :)

andmarios··on USB-C head-to-head comparison
The article still is quite interesting to understand the technology and work that can go into a USB cable and why there are huge price differences.

Of course I would prefer too a comparison between reputable manufacturers. :)

andmarios··on Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located
Users are only supposed to know about `/etc`. The rest of the directories are useful for distribution maintainers, people who package software for a distribution (but may not be maintainers), and some developers.
andmarios··on 1min high-intensity exercise 3x a week improves fitness as much as 3x aerobics (2016)
Being able to walk for 3-5km, maybe with a little incline, play with your kids, do a few chores, is important. A 25-30 minute jog every now and then or 10-15 minutes of light cardio/HIIT mixup can help with this, no need to go full endurance.

Furthermore a more proper fitness regime will fix your posture and improve your quality of life immensely. Things like a flight of stairs, getting in and out of the car, carrying a couple bags of groceries, or just getting up from the floor will become much easier. Again, not going into hours of training, but to 15-30 minutes a few times per week. Your kids can watch. :)

I don't challenge the research results. Just saying that there are more upsides than just cardiometabolic health, as someone who has seen this first-hand, going from couch potato to a little more active lifestyle.

andmarios··on Bitwarden design flaw: Server side iterations
Ah, that makes it clear. Thank you for the explanation. :)
andmarios··on Bitwarden design flaw: Server side iterations
I am not sure I get the flaw. The author says that the problem is an attacker only needs 100,000 iterations to get the master password hash, instead of doing the 100,000+100,000 iterations to get the master password and the master password hash.

Wouldn't though the master password hash be so long, that 100,000 iterations would be really hard to brute-force?

andmarios··on I prefer semi-automation
Sometimes it makes sense to automate failure. This can be way quicker than automating a task and ensures quality. Then you can proceed to automate various steps of the process depending on available time, each task's automability (is this even a word?), position in the critical path, etc.
andmarios··on Ok, Cloudflare I am leaving
Although it is not clear from the blog post, I think what the author did, was to use an old technique for blogs, where you would serve images under many different subdomains. You did this in order to force the web browsers to deeply parallelize the requests, as browsers used to limit to around 4 concurrent requests per domain IIRC. This was pre-HTTP2/QUIC era, and it made a huge difference, as a website could have tens or hundreds of requests per page.

There were even specialized wordpress plugins to take care of this. You just assigned multiple subdomains to your website and the plugin would round-robin the subdomain each image would come from.

If this is indeed the case, then we are in a gray area, where he did and did not violate cloudflare's rules at the same time.

andmarios··on GIMP Turns 27
I think it was more about companies than individuals. European companies (e.g. SUSE, Mandrake) defaulted to KDE, whilst US companies (e.g. Red Hat, Novell) to GNOME.

I don't know why. Maybe it was RMS who pushed for GNOME as back then Qt wasn't free software (as in FSF or OSI approved license). Maybe it was that KDE started in Europe and later GNOME in the US to provide an alternative to the “non-free” KDE.

This caused European funding (from companies and institutions) to go to KDE, and US funding to go to GNOME, thus creating the communities and ecosystems we have today.

Another point for GNOME back in the day for companies, was that it was (could be?) more locked than KDE and it had less customization options. These are desirable traits if you want to install it to your company's workstations, so maybe it made sense for Red Hat to adopt GNOME.

The key point in time where GNOME became way more popular, was when Ubuntu came out with GNOME as the default desktop. A smaller point was when Novell bought SUSE, so SUSE switched to GNOME, leaving almost no commercial distros that default to KDE.

All in all, it doesn't matter much anymore. Our life and workloads have moved to the cloud and locked down devices, thus limiting the surface area of desktop environments and their ecosystem.

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