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chrisallenlane

207 karma · joined January 28, 2013

Software and security engineer. Author of cheat and other popular FOSS projects. Former instructor in the public and private sectors.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/chrisallenlane; my proof: https://keybase.io/chrisallenlane/sigs/JRxC6dh_BPA-eK6eqSSX_kmifr5iXMvbsOC7dl6Un1o ]

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chrisallenlane··on GitHub was down
I've been running Gitea on my homelab for a few months now. It's fantastic. It's like a snapshot of a point in time when GitHub was actually good, before it got enshittified by all of the social and AI nonsense.

I've been moving most of my projects off of GitHub and into Gitea, and will continue to do so.

chrisallenlane··on Open-Sora does pretty good video generation on consumer GPUs
> If this is indeed the "future of making movies," I dunno, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I have no interest in watching anything made this way.

I'm still burned out on "regular" CG in movies. I'd be much more excited about a (hypothetical) return to practical effects than a push even further into computer imagery.

chrisallenlane··on Decompress Anything with "X Uz"
`unp` does this as well: https://packages.debian.org/sid/unp
chrisallenlane··on The Downfall of DeviantArt
> Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement.

Which is weird, given that "sex sells."

chrisallenlane··on Grace Version Control System
> Personal branches, not forks > With Grace, there's no need for forking entire repositories just to make contributions. In open-source repos, you'll just create a personal branch against the repo.

> This is what everyone does normally, except Github made forks a thing or whatever so you could clone someone elses repo and hack on it without having mainline permissions.

Yeah. I'm an open-source maintainer and the "everyone creates a branch on upstream" model is a complete non-starter for me, even if only due to the mess it would cause. This is a massive step backward from "fork and pull."

chrisallenlane··on Honda to spend $11B on four EV factories in North America
I think Honda's brand is a genuine advantage. They know how to make good cars, and people trust them as a result.

I'm in my 40s, but still only on my second car, which is an old Honda Civic. I plan to drive it until I can purchase a second- or third-gen EV Civic. (Surely Honda eventually plans to make an EV Civic?)

chrisallenlane··on The man who killed Google Search?
I've also been using (and paying for) Kagi for a few months now. It's fantastic.
chrisallenlane··on Memory and new controls for ChatGPT
Same here. I've found that I currently only want to use an LLM to solve relatively "dumb" problems (boilerplate generation, rubber-ducking, etc), and the locally-hosted stuff works great for that.

Also, I've found that GPT has become much less useful as it has gotten "safer." So often I'd ask "How do I do X?" only to be told "You shouldn't do X." That's a frustrating waste of time, so I cancelled by GPT-4 subscription and went fully self-hosted.

chrisallenlane··on Happy New Year HN!
Hope 2024 is better for you!
chrisallenlane··on Ask HN: Show Your Homelab and Home Server Setup for Inspiration
FWIW, at least on current-generation NUCs, you can set the fan profile to "Quiet" from within the BIOS. Doing this solved the problem for me.
chrisallenlane··on Nobody knows what's happening online anymore
I can't read the "Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore" article because it's behind a paywall.
chrisallenlane··on Ubuntu Pro Shenanigans
If you want Debian with a nice desktop plus some common packages installed, IMO Linux Mint Debian Edition (IMDE) is a great option:

https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

chrisallenlane··on Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?
In my experience, it's more helpful in some areas than others.

This year I used GPT-4 to write a significant amount of Terraform that was necessary to migrate an application onto AWS.

Writing Terraform, in my opinion, is problem that's broad but shallow. GPT-4 needed to do little beyond summarize documentation, but it was able to do so competently, and that was hugely valuable to me.

Conversely: In my free time, I've attempted to use it for a game-development side-project, and very little of its output has been useful at all.

chrisallenlane··on Top Mental Health and Prayer Apps Fail at Privacy, Security (2022)
FWIW, I don't have any pets (and haven't for some time), but I receive physical mail regarding dog food, dog toys, etc, all the time. There's a chance you've been fooled by randomness here.

That said, there's certainly no harm in treating your device as compromised. I do the same. "Better safe than sorry."

chrisallenlane··on BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
You can ask it to provide links to primary sources as part of your prompt. This helps quite a bit with this problem.
chrisallenlane··on Studio Ghibli to release Miyazaki’s final film with no trailers or promotion
I'm pretty sure every film since Spirited Away has been his last film. And I hope he has many more last films - they're all wonderful.
chrisallenlane··on How's the Stack Overflow strike going?
I agree. Also, I've had good luck asking GPT-4 to cite sources with its replies. It speeds up the process of fact-checking, and makes "hallucination" detection trivial. (Does the link 404?)

Obviously it's not perfect, but it's no worse than asking human coworkers, which are also sometimes wrong. (I'd prefer not to interrupt my human coworkers with questions with searchable answers anyway.)

chrisallenlane··on How's the Stack Overflow strike going?
I stopped using Stack Overflow years ago when they went on their jihad to remove "please," "thanks," etc from all posts.

I understand the motivation to keep "noise" low, but I disagree that civility is noise.

chrisallenlane··on I went down the rabbit hole of buying GitHub Stars, so you won't have to
I missed your reply a few days ago. Sorry! And thank you for taking the time.

I'm terrible at marketing myself. I suppose that is a hurdle that I must overcome. I'll check out your projects to see what I can learn.

Congrats on your success!

chrisallenlane··on Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore
> I sometimes learn something new by answering a question from someone who is looking at things from a different direction than I am, or discussing something I don't have a quick answer to

This can happen on Slack or whatever too, but with much less friction. I'm not ignoring teammates for days - I just want to be able to take 10 minutes or whatever to reach a reasonable place to context-switch versus being forced to do so right now.

> I can hop back into "the flow" pretty much immediately.

I envy you, but I very much cannot do this. If I'm working on something of sufficient complexity, I'm going to lose at least 15 minutes every time I'm forced to make a substantive context-switch. It's a huge drain for me.

chrisallenlane··on Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore
Yeah. One of my favorite things about working remote is that people can't do this to me. It's a feature, not a bug.
chrisallenlane··on I went down the rabbit hole of buying GitHub Stars, so you won't have to
I maintain one or two projects that are somewhat popular, and I'd love to monetize them (without compromising my FOSS ideals) so I could work on them more.

That said - perhaps I haven't looked hard enough, but it just doesn't seem like projects that accept donations make enough money (on the whole) to be worth the time spent setting up donations.

Sure, I've seen maybe two where a developer ends up being able to work on their project full-time (that's the dream), but most seem to make like $5/year or whatever.

Am I wrong? I would love to be wrong.

chrisallenlane··on Why don’t more people live close to friends?
Work-from-home (as much as I love it) has also killed the "second place" for a lot of people.

Not to mention grocery delivery apps and such. Just speaking personally, it's perhaps a little too easy to never leave my home. Doing so now requires a deliberate decision.

chrisallenlane··on Sam Altman: OpenAI is not training GPT-5 and "won't for some time"
Oh, neat. Thanks for the tip. I usually say "Please continue," but sometimes it reiterates too much of what it stated previously. (I've tried "Please continue where you left off," and so far that has worked 1/1 times that I've tried it.)
chrisallenlane··on Ask HN: How to tell the world about your project?
I'm the author/maintainer of an open-source project that receives a relatively large number of pull-requests.

FWIW, if you're contributing to a sufficiently large project, it's entirely possible that the maintainers don't even read your name or look at your avatar when they review your PRs. (Unless, of course, you're _heavily_ involved in the project.)

I personally seldom do. There simply isn't enough time to "get to know" contributors. PRs are business and transactional, and nothing else. Building FOSS is a team effort, but it's not a "social" activity. You can't "hang out" on Github.

(I don't say this to be disparaging or discouraging, of course!)

IMO, if you want to engage professionally with others in a more personal way, ~~Twitter~~ Mastodon, Twitch, and other similar platforms are the way to go.

When I'm reviewing your PR, I only care about the diff. When I'm talking to you on Mastodon/Twitch/HN/etc, I care about your thoughts and opinions. It's just a different, less task-focused way to interact with someone.

I wish you the best with your project!

chrisallenlane··on Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
Southerner here. The correct form is "all a y'alls."
chrisallenlane··on Password generator doesn't generate new password in the same session
I'd be incredibly interested to hear the rationale for this decision. Seems like an obviously disastrous idea.
chrisallenlane··on Ncdu – NCurses Disk Usage
TIL that my `.xsession-errors` file is ~16GB. Thanks, `ncdu`!

(I should probably look into this...)

chrisallenlane··on Ask HN: Hobby coding that doesn’t feel like work
I've been doing retro (Pico-8) indie game dev for about 2 years now, and I've been having a lot of fun with it. It's great because:

- It exposes me to entirely new classes of problems (pathfinding, graphics math, ai, etc), which are much more interesting than the daily CRUD nonsense.

- It forces me to branch out into adjacent interests and areas, like pixel-art, music composition, storytelling, etc.

- It provides a medium for self-expression.

- There's a well-trodden path for monetization (Steam, etc) if you're interested in that.

- It's fun to share with others! Nobody gives a shit about the Unix-y projects I typically work on, but people have actually been interested to hear about my game :)

This has really reinvigorated me. I do recommend checking it out if it sounds interesting to you at all.

Pico-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

chrisallenlane··on For some with ADHD, the low rumble of brown noise quiets the brain
I'll second this. I keep one at my desk now.

Between switching to a standing desk and the Theragun, my hips/back/neck are in much better shape than they were a few years ago.

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