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arp242

21,123 karma · joined October 28, 2016

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arp242··on Passkeys and Modern Authentication
TOTP should just be a (typically base32) secret string; I don't know if Authy allows exporting that though (and if not, that only underscores the point of this article).

I just use a simple shell script with dmenu/xclip/oathtool:

  #!/bin/zsh

  typeset -A opt=(
      Docker ABC
      GitHub DEF
      # ...
  )
  k=$(print -l ${(ko)opt} | dmenu -i)
  [[ $k != "" ]] && oathtool --totp --base32 $opt[$k] | xclip -rmlastnl
arp242··on Twitter Shadow Bans Turkish Presidential Candidate
I guess the thing is that Musk does actually fight this sort of thing, but seemingly only on certain topics that align with his pretty far-out views.

It's rather hard to take that in good faith. This is "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." kind of stuff.

Old Twitter wasn't perfect, but at least tried to be somewhat neutral and even-handed.

arp242··on What's New with Firefox 142
Or about:performance, for a less detailed but arguably nicer quick overview.
arp242··on Take something you don’t like and try to like it
"Taste" is such a funny concept:

- A few weeks ago I looked up some music from my youth: Korn, Deftones, System of a Down, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, Mudvayne, Slayer, Testament, Iced Earth. I played much of this to death back in the day. And ... I found I don't really care for much for most of it now. I also no longer care much for the "Trash metal classics" I liked at the time such as Testament, Slayer, and Iced Earth.

- I did like Papa Roach's Infest album though. I have no idea why I like that one now and not the other nu-metal type stuff that I liked back then.

- There are many things I "should" like because they're adjacent to things I do like, but that I nonetheless don't like. Sometimes I can find reasons for this. Often I can't. Deep Purple's Made in Japan is one of the best albums ever created and I will punch anyone who says any different into paralysis. Yet I don't care much for most other Deep Purple albums. This makes no sense to me.

- For a while I was really into prog rock. There are still tons of prog rock stuff I like, but also ... tons that I liked ~15 years ago but care much for any more.

- For years I didn't like wine (red or white). I really wanted like wine and I tried many times, but I just didn't like it. Then I didn't try for a few years and a friend brought some wine over for dinner and tried out of politeness, and ... I liked it! I've had tons of (red) wine since, and never had a bottle I strongly disliked.

- When I stayed at a hotel in England years ago I got a few of those little plastic jam containers for toast, which included Marmite. I didn't really know what this "Marmite" thing was. Instant regret ensued, much to the amusement of my girlfriend. Being Dutch I do like salty liquorice, which is similar in a way I suppose. Yet I dislike Marmite (without being aware that it's controversial).

I don't really have a deeper point; just some observations I guess. Cultural and psychological factors absolutely play a role, but I also think it's just a matter of different people being different, and people just changing over the years.x

I also think it's okay to dislike things as long as you're not a dick about it.

arp242··on Take something you don’t like and try to like it
"I don't like X" is of course not an absolute statement (and neither is "I like X", for that matter). I don't like Hip-Hop. Of course there is some hip-hop that I think is alright, but by and large, "I don't like Hip-Hop" is accurate.

Different people are different, and different things resonate with different people. I find snobbery highly obnoxious, but to be honest my opinion of this kind of dismissal of different people liking different things with a fairly condescending "you have simply not understood it" is not much better.

arp242··on The day Return became Enter (2023)
> in slack, the behaviour of shift+enter entirely reverses if you're inside a multi-line code block

There's a setting to turn that off so it behaves consistently. Or there was last time I used Slack.

arp242··on The day Return became Enter (2023)
Editing a file like that with a text editor is a right pain. Inserting these characters isn't all that straight-forward, and everything will be on a single line. In theory RS could be treated as a newline, which will only add to the line ending confusion.

I think this is one of those things that sounds kind of nice in principle, but where the real-world practicalities just don't work out.

arp242··on Steve Ballmer Interview
> We were trying to get our browser to be a platform, embrace and extend I think is what we said. We’ll embrace the Internet and we’ll extend with these ActiveX controls.

Haha, yeah, I think you've forgotten the last third there Steve.

arp242··on The future of 32-bit support in the kernel
To clarify: NetBSD has never supported non-MMU systems, or at least hasn't for decades. As opposed to something they removed recently(-ish).
arp242··on The future of 32-bit support in the kernel
You can still run an older kernel. There are the "Super-long-term support" releases that have 10+ year support cycles. Some distros may go even further.

If you install 6.12 today (via e.g. Debian 13) then you'll be good until at least 2035. So removing it now de-facto means it will be removed in >10 years.

And as the article explains, this mostly concerns pretty old systems. Are people running the latest kernel on those? Most of the time probably not. This is really not "running after the last shiny thing". That's just nonsensical extreme black/white thinking.

arp242··on Bear is now source-available
Well, it's edited now, but previously it contained strong accusations, and doubled down even stronger after someone else pointed out they're wrong.
arp242··on Bear is now source-available
Quite a few people commenting here are having problems with it in the case of Bearblog though, including some pretty wild accusations.

And lets be real here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/graphs/contributo...

Looking at the details of that, the only two (small) substantial code changes from other people are "User can delete their own account" from 2020, and "Use cloudflare online dns api to perform domain check" from 2021.

arp242··on Bear is now source-available
Different Bear. https://bear.app/

Which you could have known by spending five seconds on https://lambdalpha.com, or actually reading your own link which calls Bear an "Apple Design Award winner notes app", which doesn't really sound like the Bear blog.

Stop spreading rampant misinformation.

arp242··on Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"
Look, I get where you're coming from. It's not unreasonable. I've said this before.

But there are also reasons why things are the way they are, and that is also not unreasonable. And at the end of the day: Linus is the boss. It really does come down to that. He has dozens of other subsystem maintainers to deal with and this is the process that works for him.

Similar stuff applies to Debian. Personally, I deeply dislike Debian's inflexible and outmoded policy and lack of pragmatism. But you know, the policy is the policy, and at some point you just need to accept that and work with it the best you can.

It's okay to make all the arguments you've made. It's okay to make them forcefully (within some limits of reason). It's not okay to keep repeating them again and again until everyone gets tired of it and seemingly just completely fail to listen to what people are sating. This is where you are being unreasonable.

I mean, you *can* do that, I guess, but look at where things are now. No one is happy with this – certainly not you. And it's really not a surprise, I already said this in November last year: "I wouldn't be surprised to see bcachefs removed from the kernel at some point".[1] To be clear: I didn't want that to happen – I think you've done great work with bcachefs and I really want it to succeed every which way. But everyone could see this coming from miles.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42225345

arp242··on Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"
Kent brings up Debian himself, unprompted.

This is one of the problems: Kent is frequently unable to accept that things don't go his way. He will keep bringing it up again and again and he just grinds people down with it. If you see just one bit of it then it may seem somewhat reasonable, but it's really not because this is the umpteenth time this exact discussion is happening and it's groundhog day once again.

This is a major reason why people burn out on Kent. You can't just have a disagreement/conflict and resolve it. Everything is a discussion with Kent. He can't just shrug and say "well, I think that's a bit silly, but okay, I can work with it, I guess". The options are 1) Kent gets his way, or 2) he will keep pushing it (not infrequently ignoring previous compromises, restarting the discussion from square one). Here too, the Debian people have this entire discussion (again) forced upon them by Kent's comments in a way that's just completely unnecessary and does nothing to resolve anything.

Even as an interested onlooker who is otherwise uninvolved and generally more willing to accept difficult behaviour than most people, I've rather soured on Kent over time.

arp242··on Bcachefs Goes to "Externally Maintained"
People have explaining things, at great length, many times. Many of these have been posted to HN before, either as submissions or comments.

Kent just does not listen. Every time the discussion starts from the top. Even if you do agree on some compromise, in a month or two he'll just do the same thing again and all the same arguments start again.

You can't expect people to detail about four or five years of context in every single engagement for the benefit of interested 3rd parties like you or me.

arp242··on US Homeland Security chief reports breach at FEMA, fires 23 employees
> Noem's statement gave few specifics about the nature of the breach except to blame FEMA's staff, two dozen of whom she said she had fired. Noem said the hack threatened "the entire Department and the nation as a whole" but at the same time said that "no American citizens were directly impacted." She added: "No sensitive data was extracted from any DHS networks."

So it's a breach that's extremely dangerous for the entire nation, but also there is no real impact on American citizens or extraction of sensitive data. Eh?

The entire thing smells of a pretext for a political purge. Either it's a minor incident hugely blown out of proportion, or it's just outright fabricated.

arp242··on The Synology End Game
And given they're using very old versions of everything, it just sounds like dysfunction and/or moribund development.
arp242··on PSA: Libxslt is unmaintained and has 5 unpatched security bugs
If no one cares enough to do some basic maintenance then maybe it should die?
arp242··on China is eating the world
You can't capture a complex reality in a single number.
arp242··on China is eating the world
No system is completely immune of course, but it's exceedingly rare for a dictatorship to remain stable and benign for for even just a few decades, never mind hundreds of years.
arp242··on China is eating the world
GDP is an extremely imprecise inaccurate rough measure of economic strength. Every country is unique and has its own set of footnotes and caveats. Even within the same country there are often huge differences (e.g. North of England is not the same as London, and California is not the same as Mississippi).
arp242··on China is eating the world
Zero-COVID lockdown policy as was implemented was absolutely not supported by the majority of the Chinese population. And it was more about saving face than caring about people.

The initial COVID response in 2019 was to punish doctors reporting it. Such solidarity. Much caring.

arp242··on China is eating the world
> My thesis is something like "any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm seas". The government of China's hard times are ahead of it. It's too early to write an epitaph for democracy.

This applies to neither Russia nor China. Especially not China – authoritarian China if the 50s-70s was a complete clusterfuck every which way, in no small part due to Mao's staggering incompetence. A key part of Xiaoping's reforms of the 80s – which lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty – was renouncing some of Mao's more mad notions.

There are plenty of other examples where authoritarians screwed over their countries quite badly, from Mugabe to Suharto to Maduro. To say nothing of people like Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and similar jolly fellows who outright murdered their own people by the millions.

In authoritarian regimes you have no meaningful pushback. When Putin says "we're going to invade Ukraine real quick, stoke me a kipper, back before supper" then no one is going to say "you idiot, that's fucking mental" because you risk brutally accidentally falling out of the window while taking a shower. And now Russia is "stuck" in this pointless war because Putin has painted himself in a corner, and there is not going to be a peaceful change of governance in Russia, after which a new administration can change course.

In addition authoritarians are free to be as corrupt as they like of course. Who is going to hold them to account?

In the short term an authoritarian can do the right thing (Xiaoping is an example), but in the long term it never works out because sooner or later an idiot and/or asshole will plant their arsecheeks on the throne, after which you're fucked.

arp242··on Colleges see significant drop in international students as fall semester begins
> humanize international students and emphasize suffering

Good grief, how dare they humanise international students and emphasise with suffering!

arp242··on Brazil offers America a lesson in democratic maturity
There are of course multiple ways to do multi-party systems, and the Brazilian system is quite different from some other multi-party systems.

IMHO the state of things in the US seems unique dysfunctional. None of the major institutions really work as were intended. The constitution is so hard to change that it's effectively ossified, which results in the Supreme Court deciding on huge swaths of life. In a healthy democratic system, many of these should be decided by democratic vote and not a tea-leaf reading of a vague 250-year old sentence.

arp242··on The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech
> A perfect example: the Python documentary releases tomorrow, featuring interviews with Python community leaders and contributors. Despite creating one of the most foundational Python libraries in history, I wasn't even contacted about participating. No email, no mention, complete invisibility. The omission speaks volumes about how mental health disclosure transforms you from community asset to community liability

It features 22 people, which already seems quite a lot for a 90 minute documentary. And I can think of several other prominent Python people who are not listed. And lets be real here: "I made a Python library people like" really doesn't compete against "I was a core Python dev for 20 years". requests being "one of the most foundational Python libraries in history" seems quite exaggerated.

This kind "I need to be front and centre of attention and when I'm not I am being oppressed" type stuff is a big part of the reason why so many people found it hard to work with Kenneth. His constant self-aggrandizing and need for endless validation gets very tiring very fast.

I appreciate that Kenneth's mental health struggles are very real and I do not mean to devalue that in any way, but his constant use of his mental health to dismiss and and all criticism of his behaviour is another thing that gets very tiring very fast.

Of course I have no insight in many aspects of Kenneth's life and can't comment on any of it. I am perfectly willing to believe that sometimes in some places he has been discriminated due to his mental health diagnosis.

I can however comment on the state of things in Python because much of it is public, and the problems there have been mostly or entirely unrelated to his mental health diagnosis.

arp242··on The cost of transparency: Living with schizoaffective disorder in tech
> Im certain this guy is terrifying when he’s having an episode

Why are you "certain" of this?

Whatever else can be said about all of this, this seems little more than stereotypical fear-mongering, and is exactly the sort of discrimination the post talks about.

arp242··on Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
Yes, you need to specifically ask for it, but you can get them and it works. I got mine last year.
arp242··on Interactive map of Paul's first century travels in Roman world
Right; I understood that more as "the person Jesus", rather than the broader concept of the Messiah.
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