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calamari4065

1,158 karma · joined November 8, 2023

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calamari4065··on Boeing whistleblower found dead in US
You vastly overestimate how hard it is to have someone killed.

It doesn't take nation-state resources to kill a random civilian. It's a few tens of thousands of dollars. Even a few million is basically nothing to a corporation like this.

calamari4065··on Boeing whistleblower found dead in US
You do know that professional hitmen actually exist, right? You can straight up pay a guy to kill someone for you.

It would be utter insanity to ask someone who legally works for you to kill someone. Which is why that doesn't happen. What actually happens is someone tells someone to deal with the guy and a paper bag full of cash appears in front of Joe's Killin Place in the middle of the night.

calamari4065··on US judge halts government effort to monitor crypto mining energy use
I need you to understand something. This comment is so utterly unhinged that it's either parody or something you take way, way too seriously. This is a caricature of the prototypical bitcoin bro that everyone makes fun of. Nonsense like this is the exact reason that people mock and dismiss cryptobros.

You seem to not understand that someone can disagree with you without it being some grand conspiracy or authoritarian cabal. It is infinitely more likely that people disagree because they think you're a moron. People think you're a moron because you act like one. Spouting off about conspiracies and cabals and you've somehow pulled Obama into it?

You aren't being dismissed because the big bad communists want to steal your bitcoins. You're being dismissed because you're pasting nine whole paragraphs of absolute insane ramblings.

calamari4065··on Dad died in 2022. Since 2023, things he selfhosted have slowly begun breaking
Ten or fifteen years ago I set up an email server on a cheap VPS for myself and my then-boyfriend. It took some doing, but I got it reliable enough that we both used it as our primary email.

Today I'm married to a different person and still administering email for my ex. Out of everything that came of that relationship, I regret the email server the most.

calamari4065··on Man Running AI-Powered Porn Site Horrified by What Users Are Asking For
Porn exists in literally every medium human beings have ever used. Sculpture, paintings, photography, phone calls, audio clips, drawings, animations, text, video games, 8mm film, digital video.

If there exists a way to transmit information from one human to another, it has been used for porn.

AI can replace porn stars in exactly the same way that drawn or animated porn does.

calamari4065··on White House urges devs to switch to memory-safe programming languages
Sure, "let foo = bar" is one of the worst things any language can do.

Let is redundant, that's what the = is for. Unless it's meant to be equivalent to 'var' or 'auto', in which case it's even worse.

Let contains no information, it's pointless clutter that replaced something that did contain vital information. Let tells you the next symbol is a variable. What type? Who knows and who cares, it's a variable, deal with it. C marks a symbol as a variable by using its type name.

I mean, this was a very large part of why Perl is so miserable. I will never understand why people choose to implement this in modern languages.

Anyway, variables and parameters without explicit, visible type information is a hard no for me. I took a sniff of a couple rust projects, saw this mess, and decided that rust is not for me. I don't care about all the other magical benefits that cure all my ails, this feature is a dealbreaker, full stop.

calamari4065··on White House urges devs to switch to memory-safe programming languages
It's like someone took C, Python, and Perl, extracted the worst parts of all three and jammed them into one hellish language. There's not one thing about rust syntax that I enjoy. It's probably the worst out of any language I've tried, including Perl.

I would rather read someone else's Perl script than Rust.

It's very much one of these new-age languages that feel the need to reinvent every wheel and invent entirely new syntactical idioms just so they can be different.

And yeah, the "just use rust, pleb" attitude is also super offputting. I'm not interested in dealing with people like that when I'm learning a language. I have plenty of much, much less terrible options.

calamari4065··on My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs
I recently started using radarr and sonarr.

I can just get any quality of any movie or show. It might take hours or days for obscure stuff to pop up, but mainstream media is usually downloaded in ten minutes. Then it lives in my jellyfin server where my husband and I can watch at any time anywhere.

It's been really nice. I was dismayed at first that there's no function to browse, only search for specific titles. But after a few weeks I think this is the right decision. I have to specifically seek out what I want, which has greatly reduced the amount of utter trash being consumed.

It's really nice. It's an actually pleasant experience when it works well. Netflix is more consistent than my multilayered stack of server containers, but Netflix is pure agony to use no matter how stable it is.

Piracy is now an order of magnitude easier than paying for something. Even if you do pay for something anymore, it's usually a license that can be revoked at any time with no notice or refund. Why would I even waste my time with that?

calamari4065··on The Disappointing Tea.xyz
Pyramids.
calamari4065··on Microsoft is driving users away
I even went and disabled web search in the registry and it still takes forever.

It's also terrible. "Fr" will find FreeCAD, the program I want. "Fre" pulls up "advanced system settings" because there's some subsection about free disk space. "Free" brings back FreeCAD.

Every single thing I do that involves any level of interaction with Windows has found some way of pissing me off.

calamari4065··on Microsoft is driving users away
Linux has never given me a notification that says "you previously removed this search box from your taskbar, but we put it back. You're welcome"

Paraphrased, but this actually happened on my work machine a few months ago. This kind of bullshit and bald faced disrespect is why I haven't used windows at home in years.

calamari4065··on Early humans had ADHD, scientists say after making people play game online
Pretty interesting. No great surprise that we've had these varied neurotypes all along, IMO.

Since one of the biggest advantages of our species is our brains, it makes sense that evolution would produce slightly different types that give different advantages. Given that we're a social species, having a variety of neurotypes in a group would offer all the advantages while the group as a whole offsets the disadvantages like inattention.

Imagine a group of hunters. Someone with ADHD might hyperfocus and be really good at spotting fast prey like rabbits or birds, but may not notice a wolf creeping up on them. The group can compensate for that, and are more successful than without the ADHD tracker.

Just think about the wide variety in our bodies. There's a whole spectrum of physical ability from very small and nimble humans to very big and very strong ones. There's a huge range of different adaptations evolved by different groups. It really just makes sense that we'd see a similar sort of variety in structure and ability of something as complex as a brain.

Humans evolved to fill niches, same as any animal.

calamari4065··on I don't think the cheapest APC Back-UPS units can be monitored except in Windows
3D printers use DC heaters.
calamari4065··on I turned my ThinkPad into a programmable USB device
To access the serial port remotely you need to add hardware to bridge it to the network. Or you go up to the machine and plug in another computer with a keyboard and monitor to access it directly.
calamari4065··on 'It has gotten out of hand': wage theft rampant in US construction
Why do you think that employee reporting doesn't work right now? You could have theoretically perfect coverage, including transactions that are not digital or even legal.

Faster discovery doesn't change the resolution. Random citizens cannot do anything even if they could see it. An employee can already post publicly, shout to the rooftops. Plenty do.

Technology can't fix this problem because it is fundamentally not technological in nature. We do not lack the technology to process payments at scale. We've been operating a global economy for a few years now. That is indeed a technological problem, but not the one we're talking about.

Wage theft is fundamentally a breach of contract. Your employer has entered a contract wherein they are legally required to pay you some explicit amount within some explicit timeframe. The problem is not that the transaction can't be processed or audited. The problem is that a person chose to never initiate the transaction, or they paid less than they agreed on. This is a legal problem which requires legal action to correct.

No matter how the evidence is collected, you still have to go through the legal process. The resolution is still retroactive and the employee is made whole for all missing wages present and past. You still have to pull bank records and have an auditor look at them. It really does not matter in the slightest if it takes milliseconds or days to pull the records. The legal process takes weeks or months and the employee is made whole for the same amount either way.

I'm not saying you're wrong because I don't like cryptocurrency, I'm saying you're wrong because you're proposing a technological solution to a problem that fundamentally cannot be fixed with technology. Your solution simply does not address the problem at hand.

The only actually relevant point you've made so far is that a public ledger would make audits easier. And sure, why not. Totally valid point. Also totally irrelevant. The outcome is precisely the same no matter what. The employee gets the same settlement either way. The legal process is still the same. The incentives for governments to investigate are still the same. The social and political issues driving lack of enforcement still exist. A public ledger just doesn't change any of that.

Cryptocurrency might solve some problems, I don't really know or care. But it definitely won't solve this problem. No technology will.

calamari4065··on I turned my ThinkPad into a programmable USB device
And what do you do when your ssh server stops working, or there's a hardware fault, a network fault, a failed OS upgrade?
calamari4065··on 'It has gotten out of hand': wage theft rampant in US construction
By what mechanism will cryptocurrency change the fact that the already existing wage theft laws aren't being enforced?

Your original claim was that auditing of bank accounts would solve the problem. Since you've admitted that we already have auditing mechanisms in place, what does cryptocurrency add?

Maybe take a second to consider why the problem exists, what the current mitigations are, and why those mitigations don't work. Then reflect on what your solution does differently than everything else we've tried over the last hundred or so years.

> Neither is eating but better technology has certainly reduced famine.

Agriculture is a technology. Growing food at industrial scales is a technological problem. Without cheap synthesis of fertilizer, absolutely no amount of manpower, social movements, or laws can produce food at these scales. It is purely a technological issue. Distributing that food to the world is a social problem that technology has not solved in the last century.

> If on a forum self labeled as "Hacker News" you don't understand that you can use technology to assist with solving problems I haven't much hope for you.

People usually resort to condescension when they know they don't have an intelligent argument to make but still want to feel superior. How's that going for you?

calamari4065··on Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
No.
calamari4065··on 'It has gotten out of hand': wage theft rampant in US construction
Wouldn't be an issue with banks.

The IRS could monitor outflows of the site's bank account and make sure that the employees are being paid regularly.

Wouldn't be an issue with enforcement of the law.

Employees could monitor their own bank account to ensure they're getting paid properly. If not, they can report it to the labor board who will enforce the already existing laws.

This is not a technological problem. Quit trying to make things even worse by shoving cryptographic woo woo into social and legal problems and insisting it will somehow magically solve everything. This is a social, legal, and political problem. Technology will not solve it. Technology hasn't solved it in the last century, it's not going to solve it now that the math is fancy.

calamari4065··on Ask HN: Should open-source projects allow disabling telemetry?
> Are we in the wrong here?

Unquestionably.

What I do with your software is quite frankly none of your business. You do not have the right to know what I do with my hardware. Your metrics are not my concern.

FOSS is a very personal thing. Try framing it as a conversation between you and your users:

"Hey, we work hard on this and would really appreciate it if you share telemetry so we can focus our efforts better"

Vs

"This application now collects telemetry. You cannot turn it off. You want privacy? Too bad."

The difference is asking your users to share data and demanding they give up their privacy on your whim.

> Give people the “more privacy” button and most are going to press it.

You should have a good long think about what this means and why removing privacy options is making your users upset.

When I implement telemetry in a FOSS project, I go well out of my way to do it in the most respectful way I can. This usually takes the form of a detailed list of what is and is not being collected, along with why I need it. During first run, there is either a very prominent notification or a full on blocking step where the user must choose whether to enable telemetry. This includes text explaining why I want telemetry and a link to the documents.

My philosophy is that users are not idiots and they are not children that need coddling. I make my request, give them the information, and let them make their choice. That's it, end of transaction. The user made a choice and the matter is totally out of my control.

Anything less is not respecting your users.

calamari4065··on Ask HN: Should open-source projects allow disabling telemetry?
That's not a choice, that's an ultimatum.
calamari4065··on GenZ treat employers like bad dates 93% ghost interviews 87% don't show for work
I mean, when 99.999% of jobs I apply to ghost me and 95% ghost me after the first interview, what do you expect?

Newsflash: boomers treating everyone with complete contempt and disregard get feelings hurt when treated the way they treat others. Boo fucking hoo.

calamari4065··on One place Planet 9 could be hiding
Just get out and push
calamari4065··on Frozen embryos are 'children,' Alabama Supreme Court rules
Given the not-so-thinly veiled intent of these laws, I'm sure we'll be seeing these cases pop up quite soon.
calamari4065··on If you're just going to sit there doing nothing, at least do nothing correctly
Do you have an actual argument or are you really committing to "nuh-uh"
calamari4065··on Ask HN: Why do some the best devs create some of the worst UX/UI?
I would expect that UI complexity is directly correlated with how bad the UX is.
calamari4065··on Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB Memory Appears on eBay for USD500
If that were the case, they wouldn't be running these anticompetitive strategies and leaving regular consumers at the mercy of GPU scalpers.
calamari4065··on Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB Memory Appears on eBay for USD500
Aren't they already? That's still not much of a consequence. If anything happens, it'll be years from now, which is totally out of scope for quarterly profit management.
calamari4065··on Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB Memory Appears on eBay for USD500
What possible consequences could there be? Are people going to start buying GPUs from the competition?

There is no competition. There's no choice for the consumer. You buy nvidia or you don't get to play.

Nvidia's reputation is already in the toilet. They have literally nothing to lose. There's no consequences for their actions.

calamari4065··on How to copy a file between devices? (2022)
Bluetooth caps out at a few tens of KByte/s.

Not very nice when you're trying to transfer an image several MB in size.

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