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aorth

2,556 karma · joined June 25, 2014

GNU/Linux, Indian food, and death metal. Owner of way too many blogs! https://mjanja.ch, https://englishbulgaria.net, https://alaninkenya.org, https://picturingjordan.com.

Email: hn@mjanja.mozmail.com

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aorth··on Last.fm is now independent
You could scrobble to Last.fm or ListenBrainz to track your personal library listens.
aorth··on Splinter Cell veteran says realistic modern lighting has screwed up stealth game
> Celebrated designer Clint Hocking – him wot worked on Far Cry 2, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Watch Dogs Legion, and the forthcoming Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe

Is this "him wot worked on" a typo or a deliberate style of speaking, presumably for dramatic effect?

aorth··on Uv is fantastic, but its package management UX is a mess
> Manually edit pyproject.toml to add upper bounds for every single dependency.

Hah! I thought I was the only one. Still very happy with uv though.

aorth··on The quiet renovation at Bitwarden
Another vote for pass. I've been using it for ten years with a git repository. I sync to all my machines and use https://github.com/agrahn/Android-Password-Store on Android. Not a solution for non-technical people though...
aorth··on A desktop made for one
Brilliant! I hate it. The author will surely admit that there was "joy" in creating this suite of software, but it's a different kind of joy than most of us here would recognize. I am looking forward to being a part of the group of detractors doing things the old way, similar to the "small web" or other counter cultures on the Internet. I fantasize about being here to pick up the pieces after all the others went full-on into AI-assisted everything and lost their critical thinking capacity, programming skills, knowledge of Unix command line, etc.

There is part of me that understands the appeal of the all-in on AI and personalized software approach. It's a bit cyberpunk! In terms of open-source software, the downsides outweigh the benefits in my opinion, though. Important principles like community ownership and commitment are absent, and this approach is even radically antisocial. And then there's the inevitable issues with maintainability, to say noting about dependence on big tech companies.

To each their own, but this is not for me.

aorth··on This Month in Ladybird – April 2026
> GTK4 / libadwaita frontend

Nice! Looks good. I prefer GTK UI/UX over Qt. Looking forward to seeing the development progress on that.

aorth··on Zed 1.0
Massive congratulations to the team and the community. Thanks for the solid product. It's fast and native on Linux with Wayland. I don't use any of the AI stuff, though, so I'm glad there is a switch to disable it.
aorth··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
I know gitea / forgejo will be a popular suggestion, either self-hosted or via something like Codeberg. Despite also being a GitHub user since 2010 and also "doomscrolling" issues for projects I am involved in, I do host a gitea for personal projects where I don't need the GitHub network effect. It works well and is surprisingly capable!

Having said that, I stumbled upon this curious blog post about a security issues in Forgejo: https://dustri.org/b/carrot-disclosure-forgejo.html

aorth··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
I doom scroll GitHub issues too. :( I'm so addicted to open source hahahahah.

I'm GitHub user 191,754 (2010). Wow...

aorth··on JSON formatter Chrome plugin now closed and injecting adware
A good reminder to go through my extensions and remove some that I can live without.
aorth··on One item purchased, ten emails
I highly recommend using an email alias service. The author mentions SimpleLogin. I've been using Firefox Relay for a few years and it's great!
aorth··on Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan
What version of npm has this? This isn't working for me on npm 11.6.2 (Node v24):

  ~/.npmrc
  min-release-age=7 # days
aorth··on The Slow Collapse of MkDocs
I'm not an MkDocs user yet but I've been meaning to be for years! It's unfortunate to hear about the issues with project leadership. Why bring the drama about gender into this?! It should be closed as off topic.
aorth··on Grafeo – A fast, lean, embeddable graph database built in Rust
Figurative!
aorth··on Blacksky AppView
How much was the 8TB NVMe?
aorth··on The state of Linux music players in 2026
For local music it's my preferred client as well. I've set mine up to resemble the old iTunes interface, with three panes: artist (left), album (right), and song (bottom), and explicitly configured it to use album artists instead featuring blah blah.

For network-based music Navidrome is very good. A good client for that on desktop is https://github.com/victoralvesf/aonsoku. It's Electron, but I don't mind. Ironically, it was Tauri based until a few months ago and that was much heavier and buggy, which is what people complain about with Electron.

aorth··on US Government wants DNA and social media from visitors
American citizen living abroad for almost 20 years here. This happens to me ever so often when entering the US. Last under Biden, when I had been living in Jordan for a few years. I got pulled aside for a secondary inspection and the guy asked for all my phone numbers and social media accounts, and was surprised I didn't have Facebook—I just said I was a computer scientist and didn't like Zuckerberg. I gotta give him credit for being patient as he asked for all my addresses abroad etc. But this has been happening before Trump.
aorth··on I'll pass on your zoom call
It comes from жици in Bulgarian, which means "wires".

I think the author should remove that part of the blog post because it detracts from the author's point and is even a bit embarrassing that they hadn't looked it up.

A reference for the name: https://desktop.jitsi.org/Documentation/FAQ.html#spelling

aorth··on Tech Writers Are About to Become Obsolete
You guys had tech writers? I write everything myself—from the code to the reports to the policies to the deployment scripts. Well at least I also get to write the firewall rules myself! Sigh...
aorth··on Xfce is great
> Many people praise KDE. But to me, KDE is extremely ugly. > > Admittedly, I use Gnome.

Same. To each their own, but I also prefer the aesthetics of the GNOME and GTK ecosystem. Though I use Sway as a WM the past few years, I always opt for GNOME and GTK apps when there are options. I've been using Linux since about 2000.

aorth··on Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux
Love to see it. I've been a paying Kagi member for three years (!), and for now I trust them more than Google, but I echo the other users' concerns that to switch to this long term I'd want it to be open source.
aorth··on Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%
For technical users who are in the know, yes. I would not recommend Brave to less-technical friends and family knowing that they would surely be duped by some dark patterns in Brave's UI/UX.

Even Firefox, which is the best we have currently, surprises us a few times a year with questionable decisions. Still, it's what I recommend to people.

aorth··on Odoo: Open-Source ERP
Huge billboards all over Nairobi, Kenya for several years now as well.
aorth··on Scientists discover beer bottle in the Mariana Trench (2024)
I don't see any ads on Firefox (Android) with uBlock Origin.

That site seems horrible though. Random words in the body like reddit are hyperlinks to SEO landing pages on the same site. And there must be a better (original) source for the story than this...

aorth··on Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2025?
Thanks. I didn't realize Dan Carlin was still producing new episodes. Ten years ago I was enthralled by his series on the Persian Empire and then I forgot about him.

Fall of Civilizations is excellent too.

aorth··on AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos
I saw one Warren Buffett video where the voice was Buffet's and he said "in this video I will show you...". Most videos featuring Buffet's voice are snippets from actual interviews etc, but this one threw me off. I stopped it immediately. Sigh.
aorth··on Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI
Looks like a Cybertruck actually!
aorth··on Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
The Apple Magic TrackPad works well on Linux, both via Bluetooth and USB-C. I used one for a few years.
aorth··on Nook Browser
Right, as I read that I also thought, "Wait a sec, do they have the user's browsing data?" They should say "Your browsing data is local and we don't even have it!" instead.
aorth··on Why we built Lightpanda in Zig
Sounds fast. Does it respect `robots.txt`? My web services are not written in Rust, Zig, or Go. :)
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