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d_k_f

142 karma · joined May 29, 2014

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dkoch; my proof: https://keybase.io/dkoch/sigs/xAVjr5VrYr9KMvVVrYXvmOcfcekyKqSgBP7iAFa13uY ]
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d_k_f··on LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent
Anecdata from two days ago, after installing a fresh Windows 10: after inserting the dongle, a definitely non-native (styled by Logitech) popup asks me whether I want to install their app. I decline. One reboot later, the app is available in the start menu.

Edit: To be fair, I immediately uninstalled it, so I don't know if this was "just" a link to their installer app or the full app. But something definitely got downloaded and moved to a place I could not have moved it myself without accepting a UAC prompt m

d_k_f··on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges
Your best bet would be to check which models are supported by Valetudo, which is a local-only firmware replacement: https://valetudo.cloud/ and https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo
d_k_f··on EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance
The state might be comprised of people, but unless everybody is directly involved in the final decision process you'll always have (at least) a principal-agent problem between the people acting as political representatives and everybody else.
d_k_f··on Theft is not fair use
I was talking about the definition of theft and whether what you did in your example constituted it.

If I did your taxes (as in: did all the calculations) and you took a picture of my results, copied the values, etc. no theft happened. If I filled out your tax return and you took that without paying then obviously theft happened, but I assumed you didn't mean that since then your example would have no connection to TFA.

What did happen, though, is exactly what you described: you asked someone to do work for you ("contracting"/"work for hire") and they did just that. Then you decided not to pay them, which is a simple civil law case of contract fulfillment.

EDIT: depending on the "creativity" of my tax calculations, copying them might be considered IP theft and I could come after you using the DMCA, but I guess creative accounting only goes so far ;)

d_k_f··on Theft is not fair use
In terms of property theft: exactly. Which is why your tax advisor would insist on a contract with you that outlines compensation for services rendered, time and material, etc.
d_k_f··on Sid Meier's Pirates – In-depth (2017)
Give them a try without any of the expansions/DLC, if you want a "simpler"/leaner experience. One of the big complaints you'll see for every new iteration of Civ is how parts from the previous one are missing, which is usually fixed through DLCs later on. So this might be right up your alley (or at least closer to it).
d_k_f··on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
As I understood it, it's less of a real problem and more of a perceived annoyance. People accelerate, let go of the pedal, realize that a deceleration sets in, accelerate again, etc. so their brake lights are flashing all the time (instead of just using their cruise control to have this happen much more smoothly and ideally below the relevant thresholds).
d_k_f··on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
I'm with you, and at least here in Germany this is already the law, though it is only required if your deceleration rate is greater or equal to 1.3m/s² (it is allowed starting at a rate of 0.7 m/s²).

There are already voices against this, as the recuperation functionality of electric vehicles can repeatedly trigger this feature if the driver lets go of the gas pedal for a short time.

d_k_f··on Windows Is Free for Business (2008)
This article about software piracy in Italy in the 80s and 90s was linked here some time ago: https://genesistemple.com/a-swashbuckling-tale-of-italian-so... – seems to be very similar to your story in Portugal.

I don't think it was that extreme here in Germany, but I do recall my father coming home various times throughout the years with cases containing ~20-50 3.5" floppy disks for our Atari STs that were either completely unlabeled or with hand-written or home-printed labels. Always interesting finding out how to start each game and looking at the colourful intros.

d_k_f··on Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle
I've only got superficial knowledge in this regard, so please take it with a grain of salt, but: the way I understand it is that PCIE has full direct memory access, so devices connected through it can use zero copy and similar techniques to access and process data much faster, especially with lower latencies than over regular USB. Using USB might/will require copying the data to transfer/read from and to different buffers, between user/kernel space, etc.
d_k_f··on Show HN: Tramway SDK – The Unholy Union Between Half-Life and Morrowind Engines
An MIT license file was added (or edited) a minute ago in the repo :)
d_k_f··on SmolLM2
They linked two examples in another blog post, only the smaller models, though:

[135M] https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM-135M-Inst...

[360M] https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM-360M-Inst...

d_k_f··on Understanding Round Robin DNS
Honest question to somebody who seems to have a bit of knowledge about this in the real world: several (German, if relevant) providers default to a TTL of ~4 hours. Lovely if everything is more or less finally set up, but usually our first step is to decrease pretty much everything down to 60 seconds so we can change things around in emergencies.

On average, does this really matter/make sense?

d_k_f··on Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
Every single time I see the YouTube handle with the "8" in it linked/posted...

There are a few videos of their previous homepage designs available on YouTube, it's an amusing window into the past. Right below the first one was another video about 2Advanced, which I also hadn't heard of since 20? years.

d_k_f··on I Rented Out a Movie Theatre (Again) and Used My Steam Deck to Play Co-Op Games
Interestingly, at least one of the old apps (rif/Reddit is fun) still works through VPN for me even if the web UI blocks the same thread from exactly the same IP.
d_k_f··on How to fix America's aviation system (2023)
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-... seems to have a mostly unpolitical interpretation of the situation based on the case files of a related class action lawsuit. And no matter what you think of Fox and Tucker Carlson - it doesn't sound good.
d_k_f··on How to fix America's aviation system (2023)
The biographical assessment has been retired in 2018, by the way: https://www.faa.gov/faq/faa-getting-rid-air-traffic-skills-b...

EDIT: The next point might not be true. According to https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-... the introduction of the BA "blindsided and outraged" CTI schools (the pre-training mentioned below). END OF EDIT

Additionally, it was only ever required for the general, open-for-all applicant pool (dubbed "off the street"). If you had certain qualifications or participated in a pre-training initiative, you were exempt (https://123atc.com/biographical-assessment). No idea what the distribution between "off the street" and other air controllers looks like, though.

d_k_f··on Thanks FedEx, this is why we keep getting phished
I've implemented the bank account checking flow for a German client in a purely B2B setting, and this is essentially based on the PSD2 directive, which requires all/some/most (not entirely sure) banks to provide exactly this functionality (google keywords "PSD2" and "XS2A"). The bank's T&C should reflect this ... somewhere.

The main protection to you not getting scammed out of money this way is in the kind of TAN used for this process. It should/must only allow read access to your account, and at least one of my banks very clearly shows this in the 2fa approval app. Technically, checking your account history and then deducting money will (hopefully) have been two different processes.

The moral/ethical implications of requesting (up to) 365 days of full bank transaction details and being allowed to store this information is a whole different animal, tough, and I'm glad I haven't had to do this myself yet.

d_k_f··on German Bundestag Passes Cannabis Legalization
A slight addendum from another German: we have the adjective "händeringend", which is the verbatim translation of "hand wringing-ly". It's usually not used in a negative, scheming connotation, though - if you look/search for something "händeringend", your are desperately looking for that something.

The actual act of wringing your hands is associated with generic Bond villains, though.

Language is weird.

d_k_f··on What it was like working for Gitlab
They're likely taking about being able to query for additional data from the view layer. Rails makes this very easy since you often simply pass along query results to the view, which are "database connected" ActiveRecord instances. This way you can easily build the infamous "iterate over Posts and show their Users" N+1 example.

According to them, other frameworks require you to fetch all required data before passing it to the view layer, thus preventing this issue from coming up on the first place.

d_k_f··on Tailwind Isn't for Me
The custom element specification (section 4.13) deals mostly with the registration and usage details, but the general extensibility section earlier on covers the basic use case: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#e...

"User agents must treat elements and attributes that they do not understand as semantically neutral; leaving them in the DOM (for DOM processors), and styling them according to CSS (for CSS processors), but not inferring any meaning from them."

d_k_f··on Tailwind Isn't for Me
Like I said: If you want to use the JS-based functionality, you obviously have to register it. Simply using any made-up element in your HTML and styling it via CSS just works ouf the box. See https://codepen.io/dkoch-org/pen/yLwPVYG for a quick example.
d_k_f··on Tailwind Isn't for Me
Depends on what you're going to use them for. If you need the actual JS functionality web components can offer, then yes. Though at this point you're in JS land anyways and probably using some kind of web component library (or your custom-built helpers/wrappers/etc.), which usually handles this for you.

If all you want to do is prevent the "div/span-tag soup" as he calls it, you don't have to register anything, though. You can just write <ui-card><ui-card-header>My header</ui-card-header></ui-card> and style that using regular CSS à la ui-card { background-color: red; }.

d_k_f··on Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
When you didn't know how this worked, CoffeScript's fat arrow functions became a life saver when attaching callbacks from inside some object you were writing that probably had an init() method to set up the handlers:

  // Doesn't work, <this> is <window>.
  document.body.addEventListener("click", function(event) { this.handleClick(event) })
vs.

  document.body.addEventListener "click", (event) => @handleClick(event)
You only needed a .bind(this) in the plain JS version, but it felt like surprisingly few people knew this back then.

Interestingly enough, the current version of CoffeeScript compiles this code into a ES6 arrow function itself, but I think back then they used bind() in the transpiled JS.

d_k_f··on Why are we templating YAML? (2019)
In addition to this: ruby-like classes and "sane"/expected handling of this using fat arrow functions. I've worked with a few developers at the time that considered themselves pure backend/rails developers and didn't (bother to) grok the details around the way this worked in JS.

I distinctly remember lots of var that = this; in JS code back then, which wasn't required anymore when using CoffeScript.

d_k_f··on Ballerburg SDL – Play classical castle combat game from 1987 in the browser
If only you'd written that 15 years ago :/

I've played Ballerburg on my dad's Atari ST when I was a kid and everybody else already was on DOS/early windows. I later on attended the DHBW (back then still the "BA Mannheim") and would have loved to know that he was the creator back then.

Thanks for making me smile, anyways!

d_k_f··on How does macOS manage virtual cores on Apple Silicon?
Honest question, not intended to be disparaging: do you not see a difference between the various animations on [1], for example? To me, they are very apparent.

[1] https://www.testufo.com/

d_k_f··on Intel Arc A580 could be the next great affordable GPU
To be fair, though, pretty much the entire (vocal) enthusiast PC gamer niche has universally panned the recent releases from Nvidia and is hoping and waiting for the next 5000 generation. If Nvidia had released a "good" and competitively priced 4060/70/ti segment, their numbers might have looked different.

Anecdata (n=1): I'm currently running a 3070 but increased my screen size lately, so I'd like to upgrade and hand down my current card to my wife. After checking the current market, I essentially have two choices: either spend ~300€ more than I should have to on a 4070ti/4080 or bury the chance of properly working with AI locally and go with AMD (which might increase my power costs immensely as well).

So I just do neither and wait, and I'm surely not alone in this position.

d_k_f··on Intel Arc A580 could be the next great affordable GPU
Absolutely fair.

As long as there are physical releases in the first place, that option will probably never vanish completely. Personally, I'm more "concerned" about the Indie/AA scene - when there's no physical release in the first place, I can't even visit the ship down the road to buy it. But that's independent of the PC/console divide, so I'm just rambling now.

d_k_f··on Intel Arc A580 could be the next great affordable GPU
Increasingly, the situation for console games is the same as for PC games. So you're also only licensing the game, need to be online to at least authenticate or even always to play, etc.

There probably still are games where you can just insert the disc into an offline console and start playing, but the trend goes in the other direction.

EDIT: I'm obviously talking about modern consoles. Get a used PS2 and some games and play to your heart's content!

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