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cmroanirgo

2,684 karma · joined January 11, 2010

cmroanirgo at gmail

semi retired (only code for things I love to do for the improvement of humanity, rather than games or ponzi scheme financial markets)

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cmroanirgo··on Blockchains by number of nodes/validators
What is valuable to one person may not be to another. Does that make it a scam? Most people are adamant that gold is a fundamental unit of value, and yet it's paper value (by volume) is 10x the real thing¹. Does that make gold a scam?

Personally, I'm much more interested in the value inherent in the Human Spirit, but others place almost no value on human life. Insurance companies place a dollar value on human life. I look at words like human resources and see how it collectivises individuals and turns them into cattle, putting a dollar value on something I think is priceless.

People addicted to power are really interested in how many people they can control. Using this metric, managers, ceo's, etc are all buying into the scam that people have value but they're worth less than themselves. Using this metric any job is a scam, & it rides on the back of the notion that a piece of paper with $100 marked on it, formerly backed by gold, is actually worth anything.

¹ https://intelligent-partnership.com/paper-gold-volumes-vs-ph...

cmroanirgo··on A fully open-source and end-to-end encrypted note taking alternative to Evernote
"Obsidian is not FOSS"

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/publish-the-android-mobile-app-a...

cmroanirgo··on Framework is now available in Australia
Compare the 'Performance' model (i7-1260P, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) $2269AUD with a similar StarBook with Linux and choice of firmware (Am' Megatrends vs Coreboot) at $1831AUD, and the StarBook has plenty of ports too. The 400nit display is also very enticing to me.

https://au.starlabs.systems/products/starbook?variant=429313...

Every day I consider getting one... or an M2. But the deal breaker for an M1/M2 is the soldered SSD.

edited: typo in price

cmroanirgo··on Crawler Hints supports Microsoft’s IndexNow in helping users find new content
Although I agree heartily with the idea of a push model for search engines, I can't help but notice that it seems to provide more centralisation to the search engines out there.

Here on HN we've been seeing posts of alternate search engines. How will those small bespoke engines make use of IndexNow unless the website participates?

The way I see IndexNow, I'll still get crawled relentlessly by the bots I don't want crawling my site (because robots.txt never seems to apply to them unless there's a special listing explicitly for them)

So, unless you're a participating search engine, a website will still be getting crawled by low hanging fruit, not alleviating the problem.

A good compromise would be something like an RSS feed, which a site can publish, and crawlers can hit for updated changes. It would also allow easier management for those domains that have many moving parts: individual search engines can be pinged, but the search engine just grabs the changes.xml file... Or something.

cmroanirgo··on Ushering out strlcpy()
It definitely gets a bit murky when dealing with mbcs, when you want characters spanning multiple bytes rather than individual bytes.

I understand the topic is strXxx() funcs which are ascii only, but it does need to be said that size!=len for wide and multi char sets.

cmroanirgo··on Class action against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine
Why should people have to buy extra services for a non free piece of hardware just to remain ad free on that hardware? Apple is double dipping here (probably triple dipping if you also include AppStore fees and charges).

People want to be able to own the things they buy, without further nonsense.

cmroanirgo··on SSH commit verification now supported
> there is no ...reliable way to verify the identity of a creator's SSH key

GitHub exposes your public key via it's API. (Why? I have no idea. I call it a privacy violation) So, you need to create new github identity for every SSH identity that you wish to remain anonymous for, otherwise they just get tied together & one aspect of anonymity is lost.

cmroanirgo··on Military drone swarms and how to combat them
Perhaps rather than assuming that the other should lower their weapons first, it might be more prudent to lower your own first.
cmroanirgo··on Republishing a fork of the sanctioned Tornado Cash repositories
The author explains why it's on GH.

> I’ve worked with this code as a researcher and I use it to teach my classes, so it’s important to me that it stays easily-accessible on a major site like GitHub. (This is not the only copy, in fact it’s a fork of someone else’s.)

cmroanirgo··on Unicode Utilities: Confusables
DNS support is no where near Unicode. At best we get local language support for non-ASCII domains, but everyone else will see it as punycode. Of course, phishing is one good reason why it's this.

> Internationalized domain names are stored in the Domain Name System (DNS) as ASCII strings using Punycode transcription.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

cmroanirgo··on How does Fox vs. CNN compare in topic/event coverage over the last week?
I wish everyone knew about Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud, and father of modern propaganda, aka public relations, aka marketing.¹²

It's a real eye opener to be able to notice when you're being manipulated (often emotionally) by the others, including family and friends. The media and ad industries have been playing us for years. It lets you reevaluate where you stand as opposed to where you think you stand. I went through a period of outrage, violation & hate while learning this, but came out with a lot more calm & acceptance as a result. I haven't had a TV in 10 years & find it really irritating to watch bc of the way you're unnaturally enticed to resonate for or against whatever is being presented (note, I still do watch some movies). I think it's in everyone's best interests to learn to be in control ones own mind, free of manipulation.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

² https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american...

cmroanirgo··on High Court of Australia rules hyperlinking is not publishing [pdf]
As much as I'd like torrents to be more tolerated, there is a difference in that the torrent sites contain the .torrent files which contains all the necessary info to download files. ie, They're supplying more than just a link.
cmroanirgo··on PGPP (Pretty Good Phone Privacy) Beta Launch
You can buy visa gift cards for cash
cmroanirgo··on Backyard hens’ eggs contain 40 times more lead on average than shop eggs
Looking at the maps, the worst levels are in the city centre, not in the suburbs, which is a weird result because it hints at pollution being a cause, but there would be less chickens being raised there than in the suburbs.
cmroanirgo··on The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it
Have a look at their timeline. Very impressive, 3 mins from first sign (2 mins from first report), the domain is blocked.

(Edited a bit for brevity & mobiles)

> 22:49 UTC Attacker sends out 100+ SMS messages...

> 22:50 UTC Employees begin reporting SMS messages...

> 22:52 UTC Verify that the attacker's domain is blocked in Cloudflare Gateway for corporate devices.

> 22:58 UTC Warning communication sent to all employees across chat and email.

etc

cmroanirgo··on The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it
I was thinking of the twitter breach - just mention CF in your tweets or profile and become a target.

It should be a simple matter for CF to figure out which is the case.

It would be nice to know if CF customers were also targeted.

cmroanirgo··on ÆPIC Leak: Architecturally leaking uninitialized data from the microarchitecture [pdf]
I've been a long time away from CPU architecture, but isn't it time that instructions are added that target the caches so that they only fetch the size of the data allocated? That way there's no leaking of errant memory? Or did I completely misunderstand the problem set (which is likely)?

So far in our languages we have two bits of information, the start pointer and the size (the latter being stored as a variable, or intrinsically as a block size), whereas the OS/framework itself often only needs the pointer...

If there was a system that allowed the tightly coupled block of memory to be represented as an op code for the caches, wouldn't that fix up all of this?

cmroanirgo··on The tooling ecosystem that adds joy to KiCad
A comment from the reddit link which makes their alternate seem appropriate (I haven't used kiCad since around 2010, so have no opinion either way):

> What KiCad does have is "push and shove" routing, which is really nice. As you're trying to manually route a new trace, it will push existing traces out of the way as you incrementally route the new one. This is a huge time saver as you manually route your board.

cmroanirgo··on Circle USDC has blacklisted every Ethereum address sanctioned by the US Treasury
This is related to the discussion of Tornado Cash being removed from GH:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32389706

cmroanirgo··on Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
I'm using and developing on a 2013 MBA, thank you. Phones become obsolete because the underlying tech has been going through large changes, but I can certainly get more than 5 years out of them. To top it off, I live in an affluent country. Imagine those countries where a $500 phone is a gigantic deal.
cmroanirgo··on Hocus focus: how magicians made a fortune on Facebook
ElectroBOOM on youtube has 5.2M subscribers and that's exactly what he does: Every video he zaps himself, but while also trying to be educational.

I prefer EEVBlog as a result: No nonsense, no clickbaity titles (mostly). He's discussed the merits of "selling out" and had a frank discussion online with ElctroBOOM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UStV3zyhgnQ

cmroanirgo··on What is the cost of a cashless society?
Due to government tactics, a lot of australians are now deliberately using cash a) for the privacy b) as a statement against orwellian mechanisms.

I find it really sad when people are blaise about something that once gone, can't be put back. A social credit system, & everyone talking about it as an inevitable thing, have already bought into the propaganda.

I find it inevitable that with sentiments like that, that i'll be forced to live in a car & eventually the gutter & arrested regularly because of my nuisance factor. All because of the convenience.

cmroanirgo··on What is the cost of a cashless society?
Whole you're looking, check out the digital identity act which completely contravenes the referendum we had (in the ?80's) which voted against having a national identity card.
cmroanirgo··on What is the cost of a cashless society?
Australia is not cashless. New notes and coins are minted regularly. I still pay using cash, and increasingly so. Never once, ever, has there been a problem paying with cash, nor do I expect there to be.

For those online services that only accept cards, you can buy a gift card from the local post office or a few other locations & use that.

What you describe is my dystopian nightmare.

cmroanirgo··on How to use an iPad as a secure calling and messaging device
There are inter- relationships between privacy and security however. You can't maintain good privacy unless you have a secure platform, and what is the point of security if you cannot maintain privacy?

Eg. Signal fails privacy requirements with the telegraphing of your phone number when you join a public group. There is no need for a phone number to be available to people that you don't know personally. This can lead to all sorts of physical issues (abuse, doxxing, arrests...). It would be better if a phone number was treated as a private piece of information (like SSN, home address) that is not sent out without your explicit interaction.

cmroanirgo··on Apple is building a demand-side platform
From their FAQ (https://browser.kagi.com/faq.html#oss)

> Is Orion open-source?

> We’re working on it! We’ve begun with some of our components and intend to open more in the future.

Forking WebKit, porting hundreds of APIs and writing a browser app from scratch has been challenging for our small team. Properly maintaining an open-source project takes time and resources we’re short on at the moment, so if you want to contribute at this time, please consider becoming a beta tester.

cmroanirgo··on Solein – Protein out of thin air
Making use of nitrogen fixing plants alleviates the need of fertilization. An easy one: clover. Bees also love clover. However you can explore other systems of cover cropping (I recall Diakon radishes draw up nitrogen from down low, up to the surface) which you terminate before seeding your main crop.
cmroanirgo··on A looming copper crunch and why recycling can’t fix it
Correct. The article mentions that EV use 2.5 times the amount of copper though. It also mentions how it's more than just what's in the car - that more copper infrastructure is required to power them. Lastly, it also mentions how using aluminium as a substitute just moves the goal posts, bc more bauxite need to be mined and smeltered.
cmroanirgo··on Reference count, don't garbage collect
One reason you'd choose ref counting is because it's deterministic behavior, whereas you lose that granularity with gc, even if you did a gc cleanup.

I see great reasons for both systems being useful, but both systems also bring their own warts.

Yes, ref counting affects cache and branch prediction, but gc is a whole complete subsystem running in parallel with your main code, constantly cleaning up after you. It will always depend upon the application which will determine what's best for that application.

Some languages lean heavily one way than the other too. Scripting with ref counting would be a nightmare, as would running a garbage collector on an 8bit micro. Since the article's talking C & C++, then of course a pro ref counting stance makes sense.

cmroanirgo··on Asus Zenfone 9
... but it's so frustrating to click on some element of the page and then click/swipe back only to find suddenly you're back here on HN. Then, 2nd time around on the page you notice they've redesigned a simple web interface: Not a close button, but a 'minimise' but in a very light font. It seems they think throwing out tried and true user experience is a good thing. SPA has a lot to answer for.

Also, while I'm on my soapbox... Having a fingerprint reader as the power button just makes sure that my phone is unlocked just as I put it in my pocket, just after I've locked it (by clicking the power button). Just today I've spammed a couple of voice messages to people just because of that. I'll not be buying another phone with one of those again!

:rant off:

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