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drabbiticus

122 karma · joined June 16, 2014

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drabbiticus··on Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home
Most likely the (legally) correct thing to do in the US is to first report the landlord to the relevant agency, possibly named something like Licensing and Inspections or Fair Housing or somesuch. Each local jurisdiction will have it's own agencies for this, so do research. Failure to respond to that would next involve a landlord-tenant lawyer.

Whether or not it's worth all the trouble and time is a different matter. For most people, I'd say reporting to relevant authorities to make the landlord's life harder without needing much continuing effort is probably worth doing, but the lawsuit side is likely to be a huge time and money sink and it's almost always easier to just move. Let the city sue them for continuing to accrue complaints of unsafe living conditions.

In the same way, a landlord cannot evict you themself if you just fail to pay rent, but there are multiple legal mechanisms to eventually get the sheriff to do it for them. Basically, if landlord-tenant negotiation fails, I think the only legal recourse is to involve governmental third parties unless you technically open yourself up to legal reprisal.

drabbiticus··on Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need
No. MIDI controllers have their place, but many people work without one, or only use one for live performances. There are often also way more knobs in the various FX chains in a DAW than you would reasonably want to map to a controller, but still want to touch at least a few times while making a song.

Knobs are confusing when converted to a mouse paradigm because there can be a few strategies to control them (click+drag up/down, click+drag right/left, weird rotational things, etc), and you have to guess since each FX studio and software may implement it just a little different.

drabbiticus··on Pebble Watch software is now open source
For the sake of easy reference, I'll leave the relevant snippet from the linked article so people can decide for themselves with a bit more information:

> Another important note - some binary blobs and other non-free software components are used today in PebbleOS and the Pebble mobile app (ex: the heart rate sensor on PT2 , Memfault library, and others). Optional non-free web services, like Wispr-flow API speech recognizer, are also used. These non-free software components are not required - you can compile and run Pebble watch software without them. This will always be the case. More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future. The core Pebble watch software stack (everything you need to use your Pebble watch) will always be open source.

drabbiticus··on Theft of 'The Weeping Woman' from the National Gallery of Victoria
> being dead is quite a good alibi

Maybe I'm misreading either TFA or your comment, but both Picasso and Apollinaire were alive in 1911?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Apollinaire

Some more details from the Apollinaire wikipedia page:

> On 7 September 1911, police arrested and jailed Apollinaire on suspicion of aiding and abetting the theft of the Mona Lisa and a number of Egyptian statuettes from the Louvre, but released him a week later. The theft of the statues had been committed in 1907 by a former secretary of Apollinaire, Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret, who had recently returned one of the stolen statues to the French newspaper the Paris-Journal. Apollinaire implicated his friend Picasso, who had bought Iberian statues from Pieret, and who was also brought in for questioning in the theft of the Mona Lisa, but he was also exonerated. In fact, the theft of the Mona Lisa was perpetrated by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter who acted alone and was only caught two years later when he tried to sell the painting in Florence.

drabbiticus··on I have recordings proving Coinbase knew about breach months before disclosure
Just chiming in here - any time I've written something online that considers things from multiple angles or presents more detailed analysis, the liklihood that someone will ask if I just used ChatGPT go way up. I worry that people have gotten really used to short, easily digestible replies, and conflate that with "human". Because of course it would be crazy for a human to expend "that much effort" on something /s.

EDIT: having said that, many of the other articles on the blog do look like what would come from AI assistance. Stuff like pervasive emojis, overuse of bulleted lists, excessive use of very small sections with headers, art that certainly appears similar in style to AI generated assets that I've seen, etc. If anything, if AI was used in this article, it's way less intrusive than in the other articles on the blog.

drabbiticus··on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account
What are you comparing it to or what do you feel is missing? Remote desktop has gotten way better on Linux since the days of only X-Forwarding or VNC, at least from a performance perspective.
drabbiticus··on Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
This is really cool, so thanks for sharing. Since the motivating goal for the question you are answering is WCAG compliance, is the output of pdf2htmlex meaningfully more WCAG compliant?
drabbiticus··on Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?
> renders properly

Depending on your requirements on both PDF input and HTML output, there is often no way to do this that is both easy and general. At it's core, PDFs are not designed to be universally reflowable.

drabbiticus··on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room
Given the thread, I'm assuming their mostly referring to CS 1.6, but games like Minecraft are another example.
drabbiticus··on The Chrome Speculation Rules API allows the browser to preload and prerender
Can someone explain how this works with links that cause changes? (i.e. changing the amount of an item in a cart, or removing an item from a cart)

I assume you would have to tailor the prefetch/prerender targets to avoid these types of links? In other words, take some care with these specific wildcard targets in the link depending on your site?

drabbiticus··on Google and Microsoft Trusted Them. 2.3M Users Installed Them. They Were Malware
Published date looks like Jul 8, 2025 but I ran across it today Jul 24. Affected extensions at least on Chrome seem to have been pulled at this time; haven't checked Edge, although I assume they would have been pulled too.
drabbiticus··on The Gentoo Perl versioning scheme
lol what?

For those without perl readily accessible to them, 'v102.111.111' becomes 'foo' and 'v128513' gives you a smiley emoji.

I'm not sure I even want to know.

drabbiticus··on The Gentoo Perl versioning scheme
> I think it often depends on context, too

I get that people can be flexible about understanding that `.` and `,` do not have a stable definition especially in an international world, but I would have thought that 50.000 EUR in context would clearly be 50 thousand. Who specifies cents with 3 digits?

drabbiticus··on The Gentoo Perl versioning scheme
I suppose you could argue many things? I would not naively expect Perl's versioning behavior, and a system package manager will have many users who are not Perl devs but who may nevertheless have Perl packages installed on their machines. "There is more than one way to do it" is fine for some things, but I also think it's desirable behavior for a system package manager to only require users to learn a single versioning scheme. In gentoo's case (and in most cases of system package managers I've seen), this happens to be dot-separated sequence of numbers, not floating point.

A system package manager also needs to be able to compare versions, and within gentoo's dot-separated versioning scheme 1.2 < 1.12. However, a perl package could have a dev sequence of 1.1, 1.12, 1.2. If these versions are entered naively into the gentoo packaging scheme, the intended order will not be preserved. So there must be some conversion in order to handle it correctly.

drabbiticus··on Piano Keys
That regular layout also makes it likely to feel better to the hand to play diminished or augmented chords, while comparatively punishing major/minor chords. It would be an odd choice considering the traditions of western music.

There's also something to be said about each key having a specific motor pattern/spatial layout. Sure, it makes it harder to move knowledge of one key into another, but during playing it also makes it easier to not accidentally completely change the key unless you mean to. It's all tradeoffs.

drabbiticus··on Personal care products disrupt the human oxidation field
For a slightly more digestible take, see https://news.uci.edu/2025/05/21/lotions-perfumes-curb-potent...

But really, I wouldn't worry about the result of this study _at all_ in daily life. It's quite surprising to me that this would be the top HN article at the time of this comment.

drabbiticus··on Show HN: Lstr – A modern, interactive tree command written in Rust
First off, the display looks great!

Second off, I didn't realize how deep the dep tree would be for this type of program -- 141 total! So much of it is the url crate, itself a dep of the git crate, but there's a bunch of others too. I'm just getting into learning Rust -- is this typical of Rust projects or perhaps typical of TUI projects in general?

(EDIT to strikeout) ~~The binary is also 53M as a result whereas /usr/sbin/tree is 80K on my machine -- not really a problem on today's storage, but very roughly 500-1000x different in size isn't nothing.~~

Maybe it's linking-related? I don't know how to check really.

(EDIT: many have pointed out that you can run `cargo build --release` with other options to get a much smaller binary. Thanks for teaching me!)

drabbiticus··on The Diary of Samuel Pepys
From https://www.neh.gov/article/honest-fault

> In an incident that is difficult to interpret as anything but rape, Pepys recounts entering the home of a ship’s carpenter—a man very much under his control, since Pepys was a naval official—and noting that, after a struggle, “finally I had my will of her.” His only recorded regret is “a mighty pain” in his finger, which he injured during the apparent assault.

> The victim, identified only as Mrs. Bagwell, had been instructed to offer herself to Pepys by her husband, who thought it would help his advancement. “The story,” notes Tomalin, “is a shameful one of a woman used by two bullies: her husband, hoping for promotion, and Pepys, who was to arrange it. Pepys did not present it in quite those terms, but it is clearly how it was.”

> Another obvious victim of Pepys’s sexual involvements beyond his household was his wife. In 1665, he had married fifteen-year-old Elizabeth St. Michel, the daughter of a French immigrant. Loveman describes the marriage as a “love match, albeit a tempestuous one.” The diary records the couple’s arguments over Pepys’s infidelities, and there were other tensions in the marriage. In an especially heated quarrel over Elizabeth’s management of the household, Pepys gave her a black eye.

> The full record of Pepys’s mistreatment of women is too extensive to detail here. That grim record could fill a book—and, in fact, it has. In The Dark Side of Samuel Pepys, author Geoffrey Pimm explores Pepys’s predations at length, drawing on the diarist’s own accounts of his misdeeds to build the case against him. Pepys, writes Pimm, “faithfully recorded acts of moral turpitude that in later centuries might have caused his name to be blazoned across the newspapers and in some instances, most probably lead him to be arraigned in the courts.”

drabbiticus··on DiffX – Next-Generation Extensible Diff Format
> you're fabricating imaginary problems

That's a very strong statement. A less aggressive approach to discussion might involve asking for a concrete example of a problem rather than assuming bad faith argument.

Off the top of my head, and just spitballing, I would be more surprised if mature game devs or animation studios didn't want to version control pretty massive asset libraries.

drabbiticus··on Vim vs. Kakoune Puzzles
In general this author is comparing robust vim solutions with golf-style solution in Kakoune (i.e. assuming the example is the only thing in the buffer).

I'm not saying multi-select and Kakoune's predicate-then-verb (instead of vim's verb-then-predicate) aren't cool, it's just that he has very strawman comparisons because the vim solutions could often be phenomenally simplified if the same assumptions were made in the comparison.

OTOH, I learned some cool Vim features from those incantations that may be handy in a pinch someday.

drabbiticus··on Show HN: Hardtime.nvim – break bad habits and master Vim motions
Not a criticism, just noting that it says it helps master Vim motions, not Vim
drabbiticus··on Show HN: Semantic Calculator (king-man+woman=?)
The specific cherry-picked examples from GP make sense to me.

   data + plural    = datasets 
   data - plural    = datum
If +/- plural can be taken to mean "make explicitly plural or singular", then this roughly works.

   king - crown     = ruler
Rearrange (because embeddings are just vector math), and you get "king = ruler + crown". Yes, a king is a ruler who has a crown.

   king - princess  = man
This isn't great, I'll grant, but there are many YA novels where someone becomes king (eventually) through marriage to a princess, or there is intrigue for the princess's hand for reasons of kingly succession, so "king = man + princess" roughly works.

   king - queen     = prince
   queen - king     = woman
I agree it's hard to make sense of "king - queen = prince". "A queen is a woman king" is often how queens are described to young children. In Chinese, it's actually the literal breakdown of 女王. I also agree there's a gender bias, but also literally everything about LLMs and various AI trained on large human-generated data encodes the bias of how we actually use language and thought patterns. It's one of the big concerns of those in the civil liberties space. Search "llm discrimination" or similar for more on this.

Playing around with age/time related gives a lot of interesting results:

    adult + age = adulthood
    child + age = female child
    year + age = chronological age
    time + year = day
    child + old = today
    adult - old = adult body
    adult - age = powerhouse
    adult - year = man
I think a lot of words are hard to distill into a single embedding. A word may embed a number of conceptually distinct definitions, but my (incomplete) understanding of embeddings is that they are not context-sensitive, right? So averaging those distinct definitions through 1 label is probably fraught with problems when trying to do meaningful vector math with them that context/attention are able to help with.

[EDIT:formatting is hard without preview]

drabbiticus··on I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC
Code is a way you treat your coworkers - Michael Feather, https://x.com/mfeathers/status/1031176879577780224

TL;DR, not AI

The code defers a function call until the point in time that an object goes out of scope. The implementation uses C macros to create a more succinct syntax that omits parts of the necessary C lambda/unnamed function definition and to create a unique variable name for managing the deferred function call. However, the resulting syntax eschews the common convention of using UPPER CASE to denote C macros, and instead appears similar at first glance to a function call from an object pointer.

This can cause confusion if one is not familiar with this pattern and expects macros to be communicated differently. Some commenters say this is common enough, or useful enough to them, to be considered almost idiomatic in some contexts.

For technical explanation, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43959403#43960905 provides a useful breakdown of how the macro works.

drabbiticus··on Microbe that infests hospitals can digest medical-grade plastic ― a first
https://archive.vn/OwleU
drabbiticus··on How Bad Is China's Economy? The Data Needed to Answer Is Vanishing
https://archive.vn/dt7MU
drabbiticus··on UTC+08:45 (Australian Central Western Timezone)
Apparently dates to at least 1935, where a train took multiple days (presumably two?) between UTC+08:00 (Australian Western Time) and UTC+09:30 (Australian Central Time)
drabbiticus··on Suno v4.5
In the context of my comment and the linked website, could you explain your point?
drabbiticus··on Deadly Screwworm Parasite's Comeback Threatens Texas Cattle, US Beef Supply
If lived experience is the only bar of evidence you will consider, there are plenty of stories of fraud, corruption and anti-competitive behavior in industry that have hurt real people. Insurance (duh), devs who get shafted by Apple store policies or other entities without recourse to a human, outright scams and spam i.e. cryptodumps, every major game release that seems to either get delayed or released with show-stopping bugs, etc

EDIT: s/accept/consider

drabbiticus··on Deadly Screwworm Parasite's Comeback Threatens Texas Cattle, US Beef Supply
Do you have evidence suggesting a clear discrepancy in efficiency in other sectors?
drabbiticus··on Deadly Screwworm Parasite's Comeback Threatens Texas Cattle, US Beef Supply
> Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

Do they?

The first two results on Google for "government vs private efficiency" are https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/publicati... and https://www.epsu.org/article/public-and-private-sector-effic..., which both suggest that it is a myth that companies are inherently more efficient than government.

It's also worth mentioning that governments and companies inherently must operate differently. Governments are not set up to recoup investment; in fact, proponents of small government (as opposed to no government) generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons" by funding initiatives and programs that fundamentally do not make sense for a single market player to address. I.e. government helps when there isn't a good path for a single market player to see a good/reliable economic and market-competitive return from their investment.

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