emacdona

Yeah, I should have mentioned that Kagi isn't free. I was _thrilled_ to pay for it, though base on just two things:

1. I was all but certain it couldn't provide worse search results than Google (that bar is pretty low now).

2. I knew it would let me exclude websites from search results.

The fact that it provides pretty decent search results and a nice user experience were just icing on the cake.

> If you like a site to go back to it repeatedly don't you think it would be fair to "pay the fee" of seeing the ads, thus supporting that site...

I struggle with this. Of course I want the producers of content that I like to make money. And it seems obvious to me that if I'm one of the people consuming (and liking) that content... some of that money I want them to make should come from me.

But the pipeline that the "modern web" provides to complete that transaction is openly hostile towards me. It makes content creators that I want to support participants in a giant machine designed to build a dossier on me (and every other user of the "modern web"). It also encourages VERY LARGE numbers of content creators I do not want to support -- those whose primary goal is to be participant in that machine; who only produce content because the machine requires it.

I would argue that this machine has never built this dossier with my "informed" consent (but lawyers could make the case that it has). But now, the machine builds it without even bothering to get my "uninformed" consent. For example: Facebook is known to build profiles on people that don't have Facebook accounts -- ie: people that could never have agreed to their TOS.

The top priority of this giant machine is putting ads in front of my face. Helping me discover content that I want to consume is only a secondary priority.

And there is a GOOD reason for why this machine evolved: people don't want to pay money _directly_ to content creators, so a way evolved for them to receive compensation _indirectly_. So yes, this is -- at least in part -- my (our) fault.

But I really feel like things have shifted to the point where the large majority of compensation that content creators receive is a function of their value to that machine... not a function of the value they create for the people who consume their content.

This is all a very long way of saying: I don't believe the value of a content creator _to me_ should be calculated based on their value _to this machine_.

I don't know what the solution is. Find a way to accurately assess the value _to me_, not _to the machine_ -- and then provide a way for me to pay the content creator directly. If I like the content enough -- and IF I'm not shown ads or tracked once I'm a paying customer -- I will pay. This is how newspapers worked for... centuries? (Save that newspapers did show ads, though they did not track you).

The problem is... I think that being part of the machine is more lucrative than selling content directly to consumers. And the hostility of this machine towards me has turned this into a fight. Of course I'm going to fight back.

> ...however annoying they are?

This is where you start to lose me. I don't think "annoying" captures just how "hostile" this machine has become.

I'm old enough to remember switching from Yahoo Search to Google Search -- NOT because the results were better, but because Google's ads were less intrusive. I never blocked those ads. I even clicked a few...

Heh, you got me. A password manager is the ONE plugin I have installed in my profile that I use to access my banks.

Simply put, I trust the password manager. Recently, however, I have considered uninstalling that plugin and using only the desktop version of the password manager -- and then copy/pasting username/pw from the password manager to websites.

One reason I don't do that, though... is because having the password manager as a browser plugin guarantees (?) that the password it presents to me is for the site I am visiting. If I end up on a webiste with an IDN that was chosen very carefully to look like my bank's domain, my password manager plugin won't present me with a password -- which will trigger my paranoia.

If you can't tell, I wrestle with this decision pretty regularly...

I don't think so (I looked). Best I could find was some articles online claiming you can add "-unwantedChannel '...'" to your YouTube search to exclude individual channels. I didn't even test it because it would be WAY to cumbersome. Maybe that's all Channel Blocker does under the covers -- add a bunch of those switches to my search.

What frustrates me the most is that this is one place where mine and Google's interests actually align! Let me help train them to not show me crap I don't want to see... then I'll use their products (YouTube and Search) more and give them more opportunities to show me ads! (Well, theoretically -- I block as many ads as I can right now).

That was one of the big reasons I looked for an alternative to Google search. IIRC, you used to be able to exclude results from Google search. In order to do so, you HAD TO LOGIN TO GOOGLE (another huge win for Google!). Now I use Kagi -- primarily because they allow me to exclude sites from their search results.

That's a good question. I don't know -- I never considered private browsing. If I close a private browsing session, are all traces (ie: cookies, history, etc.) of it erased? If so, I don't think that's what I want. I'm okay with my bank (and websites I trust) setting cookies, for example.

For anyone curious as to how I solve the problem right now, I just have two separate Firefox profiles. One has a ton of plugins; I use it to browse the web. The other has no plugins; I use it to visit my bank's website.

Thanks for the tips. I will check out the filter lists you mention.

You might be wrong about PopUpOFF, though. I started using it as a solution to websites that pop-up an overlay asking me to subscribe to their newsletter when I mouse-out of the window. It is fantastic at putting an end to that.

I recommend using an ad-blocker while visiting that site :-/

Lately, I find myself using more and more plugins to make the "modern web" tolerable. To list a few:

Channel Blocker (lets me block channels from search results on Youtube); uBlock Origin; Disconnect; F.B Purity; Consent-O-Matic (auto fill cookie consent forms); Kagi Search; PopUpOFF; Facebook Container; Privacy Badger; ClearURLs; Return YouTube Dislike

Basically, if I visit a website and don't like the experience, I either never go back (Kagi lets me exclude it from search results) or find a plugin to make it tolerable.

What I really want now is the ability to exclude entire websites from any permissions I grant to plugins. I feel like in the last year, I've read a couple stories about companies buying successful plugins and then using them to track you or show ads or whatever. I'm worried this will be the next stage in the battle for our attention -- best case: companies will buy popular plugins to track us and show us intrusive ads; worst case: nefarious actors will buy them to scrape information we think is private and collect it.

IE: I just want to be able to say "Hey, Firefox... those permissions that I granted to plugins x, y, and z? They don't apply to www.myfavoritebank.example.com"

Is there a browser that has that feature yet? I spent a few hours trying to figure out if Firefox did. It did not appear to.

edit: Added semicolons to separate plugins in list b/c HN stripped the newlines from my comment.

Thanks for the info. I'll have to try to run some experiments with other devices in my house that have microphones. I swear, there are some things that I mention casually in conversation with my wife... that end up in my Twitter or Facebook feeds. I thought my phone was the common denominator, but I must be wrong.

I mean, it's not like the apps advertise what they are doing somewhere easy for me to see. Yes, I'm sure that somewhere in their ToS they indicate that they may "collect data".

Are you certain you are not using such apps? If so, please tell me how I can easily determine which apps that request access to my microphone are not selling my data :-)

DisplayLink is a daily source of frustration for me. If I disconnect my DisplayLink hub, and then plug it back in... I have to open and close my 13" M1 MacBook Pro a few times; restart the DisplayLink software; and sometimes reboot my computer before it will work again. For some reason, Zoom will just _hang_ after all of this. I just keep repeating the above until Zoom works again.

This is my employer provided MacBook Pro. I hate the experience so much that when it's time for a laptop refresh, I'm going to ask for the Windows option if they haven't upgraded their Mac offering to one that supports two monitors.

I love Apple products -- but I never understood how they could release a "Pro" laptop that supported only one external monitor.

Agree that lowest common denominator is a VM.

But... I'm curious: has anyone here made an attempt to go "cloud-agnostic" by targeting managed kubernetes offerings? (GKE, EKS, AKS).

Just curious how much pain I'd be causing myself if I ever attempted it ;-)

Ah, victims of their own success? Glad to see people are lining up to pay for it :-)

Has anyone been able to sign up since this announcement?

I get to a "Confirm your payment details" screen, but there is no further action I can take (ie: no button to press or link to click to "confirm"). It does say "You will be billed $100/year starting August 20, 2022" -- but when I view my "settings", it tells me I haven't signed up for copilot.

I tried various browsers, including Edge on Windows 10 sans plugins (the combination I would expect to be the most supported for MS owned github.com).

> There are situations where named pipes fail, where you actually do need a plain file

In general: If the command you are passing the named pipe to expects a file which it can randomly access, a named pipe won’t work.

I ran into this today using a python tool, yamldiff. I was trying to diff a local yaml file with one from a cluster obtained via kubectl, eg:

yamldiff localManifest.yaml <(kubectl get … —output yaml)

and it failed with python telling me the file wasn’t seekable. Then I remembered this thread which I had initially read a few days ago and tried =() (since I use shell) — and it worked!

Okay, but how does Handshake solve that problem? It seems like the answer is "everyone buys their own TLD", right?

That works great until the only names that are left are all too long to remember.

And if you buy space from someone else's TLD, well... you've just given someone the power to censor you.

Or am I missing something here?

But you can buy a new TLD in the DNS, right? Granted, for more money and pending approval. How is the TLD you get from Handshake different? You still control it, right? And you have the power to revoke sub delegations within it, right? That's what's confusing me... the article seemed to indicate that by switching to Handshake, you won't get your name revoked ever again. But the detail that seems to have been left out is "... if you buy a Handshake TLD, as opposed to 'renting' space from a Handshake TLD holder".

Maybe the value is that b/c it's on the blockchain, you can see to which IP address a name referred to at ANY point in its (the name's) history?

But now that I think about it, the registry IS already decentralized. IE: .com is managed by an organization separate from .org. And the whole reason for "renting" from .com is because .com owns the space. If you "buy" a TLD on the Handshake blockchain, do you lose the ability to rescind delegations under that TLD once people have "bought" them?

Followed by this: 'Handshake is “is effectively a decentralized domain name server,” Roquerre said.' -- thus implying that DNS is NOT decentralized? The article is pretty bad. For his sake, I hope they are taking his quotes out of context. Because I had a quick look at https://www.namebase.io/ -- and it does look interesting. It appears that they have decentralized the REGISTRY by putting it on the "Handshake" blockchain.

Can I configure my resolver to use this "Handshake" blockchain?

Wish you had posted this yesterday! I could have used it this morning. I bought a copy so I could use it for a presentation on Friday. Thank you for making it!

Suggestion: Make the diameter of the cursor highlight an option I can tweak.

Looks like the wikipedia page says there's a Chaitin's constant for each Computable Function, so yeah, countable. That's if I'm reading it correctly. Even if the constant differs for every program that computes a given Computable Function... still countable, though (if I'm doing my math right).

I say "it" when I mention Chaitin's Constant, but really I believe it's an entire set of constants. Is that set countable? So many questions... :-)

The author claims in the notes that "The useful reals are similar, but not quite equivalent to other ideas in mathematics, such as [...] computable numbers."

Is that correct? What is the complement of the Computable Numbers in the Useful Reals? What is the complement of the Useful Reals in the Computable Numbers?

I've always thought of Computable Numbers as all numbers able to be represented by a finite string, ie: a computer program that would generate the number to any desired precision. How does that differ from the set of numbers with a finite symbolic representation?

Hmmmm... maybe by asking that question I've led myself to the answer. Chaitin's Constant has symbolic representations, one of which being the Wikipedia page that describes it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant. Does that mean it's included in the complement of the Computable Numbers in the Useful Reals? Are the Computable numbers a subset of the Useful Reals?

Scott Chacon wrote a book on git internals that was published by peepcode some time ago. Searching for where to buy it turned up this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7999515

Looks like peepcode was acquired, but the book was open sourced: https://github.com/pluralsight/git-internals-pdf

I'm reading through it now. It starts with the fundamental git structure and works up from there.

Right, in order for you not to be wasting your time, you'd have to get some value from attending. I think you could argue for any of the following: (a) educational, (b) entertainment, (c) charity work, or (d) none of the above. Depends on the person...

I always thought it would be kinda fun to get a group of people together (maybe a Meetup) who would attend timeshare pitches for fun. The goal would be to pack the room with people who had no intention of buying in.

Time is money, and I suspect the best way to cost them money is to waste their time.

Googling for "iphone witch doctor repair shop" gives 263k results. So there are roughly half as many iPhone witch doctor repair shops as iPhone micro soldering repair shops?

The question I came here to ask relates to your comment:

> 'The universe doesn't need to "calculate" it's systems before it executes them, they just do what they do (for lack of a better description).'

What I want to ask someone who knows a bit more about modern physics is this: is this article evidence that we do, in fact, live in a simulation?

This is really great news for me (I "cut the cable" a couple of years ago). I was thrilled when HBO released a lot of content on Amazon Prime. I've been buying content they haven't released on Prime through Amazon streaming (Silicon Valley, Game of Thrones). I have been anxiously awaiting the day where I could buy a "season pass" for current run HBO content.

I've concluded there were a few benefits HBO got from their close relationship with cable companies: 1) The huge customer base that cable companies have 2) The advertising that cable companies provide 3) The distribution of content that cable companies provide

I always felt the release of content to Amazon Prime was an experiment and judging by this news, I think that experiment was deemed a success. I suspect that HBO concluded that Amazon is more than capable of distributing the content and that there are plenty of customers willing to pay for it when it's delivered by a means other than the cable company.

I still suspect that Amazon will play a role in hosting and distributing content for whatever "HBO Go" becomes one year from now.