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entropyie

737 karma · joined March 30, 2012

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entropyie··on New Cyber-OSINT model released
It's a standard for accessing confidence and reliability of a source. See admiralty code
entropyie··on We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
Ian M Banks covers this in great detail in his science fiction books. Highly recommended.
entropyie··on Mother convicted of: her 5 yo walks short way to pond alone in Virginia
Haven't heard a single story like this from Ireland in the last 20 years, but I'm happy to be corrected. If anything the police here are too lenient on children running amok. It's common to see 9 year olds flying around on e-scooters. The UK might be a different story.
entropyie··on Ollama: All Aboard Open Models
To any ollama.com dudes and dudettes reading this: why won't you offer any embedding models on your subscription when they are readily supported by the software and fairly efficient to run?
entropyie··on The US grocery slowdown is real
I think if you take a global outlook, you'll find I am not the outlier. Wasting food is a recent Western phenomenon.
entropyie··on The US grocery slowdown is real
I have two kids and this is pure bollox. They'll eat what they are given if they are hungry enough. Or eat the leftovers yourself. Cook the fruit and make compote. We never throw out edible food, virtually zero waste. Just make an effort.
entropyie··on Ask HN: Why isn't Google indexing information about the AT Protocol?
Maybe they should have used a name that wasn't already taken...

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

entropyie··on Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
What an obnoxious comparison. Any engineer good enough to get into Meta has had their pick of tech jobs for the past decade. They could easily live comfortably, but less well paid, working for a myriad of less exploitative tech companies. Your average coal plant worker had no such options.
entropyie··on Meta employees protest against mouse tracking tech at US offices
Stunning hypocrisy.
entropyie··on Kagi is contemplating the removal of the assistant from its professional tier
Please keep Assistant, it's an easy to use alternative to OpenAI, and is not intrusive. I will say that I find the GUI infuriating though... It's never clear where the cursor is when you start a new chat. Don't understand the low contrast layout with too much whitespace.
entropyie··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
Another Irishman here. Stop trying to harken back to some notional "good old days" that didn't exist. People are better off than they've ever been. Energy was always expensive relative to income. When I was a kid in the 80s, we weren't allowed to turn on the central heating unless there were arctic conditions. The main issue driving COL issues is the complete lack of social housing construction for the last 15 years. You can't blame the tree huggers for that. Renewable energy is a matter of national security, and prevents our hard earned money being sent overseas to regimes like Russia and all the charmers in the Middle East. Our very first electricity plant as a free state was hydro ffs.
entropyie··on Uber CEO on culture: expects weekend email replies, will push out non-performers
What would you be spending that money on exactly? If you can't afford to unplug on the weekend, spend time with family / friends, then you are poor.
entropyie··on Battle-Testing Lynx at Allegro
That name is taken, especially for anything web related.
entropyie··on Ask HN: Has anyone else been struggling with search lately?
Search is great, using Kagi. Just bought the family plan, never going back to google. Also FastMail.
entropyie··on AI-generated videos showing young and attractive women promote Poland's EU exit
Indeed. This was not such an issue when everybody had their own website or blog or whatever, and you had to seek out content intentionally... It's the active intervention of an algorithmic megaphone that is causing the damage. To me this is when it stops being free speech and starts being corporate policy that needs to be regulated.
entropyie··on 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18
Delighted to see something made in Ireland that didn't come from a multinational... The Zorin brothers have worked on this since they were teenagers. https://stconleths.ie/the-zorin-brothers-technology-for-huma... They were even on the national news a few weeks back!
entropyie··on Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (1999)
Excellent piece, captivating. I found many parallels here to managing IT. So much of control theory and systems engineering is relevant to developing and deploying cloud systems, improving performance etc...

Many times I've seen engineers polishing and optimizing the code of an existing system without ever questioning the process itself or indeed the paradigm. I myself was in that position, spent 5 years optimizing the parameters of a complex system, only to realize that system was put in place based on faulty assumptions that were never questioned. The whole thing could have been removed and performance sped up 200%.

entropyie··on Medical student ate 700 eggs in a month and his cholesterol levels dropped
Virtually zero ads using firefox mobile... I don't know how normal people can stand surfing the web these days ..
entropyie··on Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods Is Completely Unrealistic
Is this a submarine article for food corps or what? Yes, it's hard work to make food by hand, but for fucks sake, our ancestors did it for generations, without any modern appliances or temperature controlled ovens. This article was so long, I don't even know the point was. Is she trying to say that UPF is not so bad? That you should just give in? At the end of the day it just comes down to priorities. There is almost nothing more important than what goes into a child's developing body. Maybe skip some of the after school activities and cook with them instead.
entropyie··on Fastmail desktop app
I am a paid user. I use Thunderbird on my desktop. This is a waste of time and money. Put the money into proper EU based data centres instead.
entropyie··on I only use Google Sheets
For those who hated the unmaintainable mega spreadsheet of death, MS Access was actually a quite decent solution. It allowed you to sprinkle some structure and maintainability onto a spreadsheet without losing the accessibility and ease of development. You could whip up really functional UIs without much coding knowledge. 20 years later and I still don't know what the replacement for Access is in today's world...
entropyie··on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch
Honourable mention to ZincSearch, if you are looking for a lightweight single binary (golang) alternative: https://github.com/zincsearch/zincsearch

I have no affiliation.

entropyie··on Gmail will soon stop support for the 3DES encryption cipher for incoming SMTP
If it's your connection, why on earth would you want to break the crypto? You already have the keys and the message...
entropyie··on Gmail will soon stop support for the 3DES encryption cipher for incoming SMTP
Unless folks are regularly sending 32GB emails, this CVE is not severe in this context.
entropyie··on 'The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen'
This pearl clutching is ridiculous. The harm caused by this is not even at the level of harm regular advertising causes on a daily basis. We blast people with ads for "food" that we know causes obesity and diabetes. As others have mentioned, the horse had well and truly bolted on psyops on internet boards. All this does is bring it into the open.
entropyie··on Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)
I ran labs in my university in Europe, in the early 2000s, and I'd like to think this would not have happened. We were selected as tutors due to our proficiency and dedication to the subject. Maybe it was a fluke, I've heard similar stories recently about local Unis.
entropyie··on A three month review of kagi search and the orion web browser (2024)
Been using it for a year or two, but recently I've been making heavy use of LLM results using the ? character. I actually discovered this by accident while searching. Even though I have a ChatGPT subscription, the Kagi interface is faster to use for simple questions and I have web results underneath as a backup if the LLM answer isn't good enough. I agree with another poster that being able to test ultimate would be nice before I shell out more money.
entropyie··on Belgium will ban sales of disposable e-cigarettes
Far more serious is that these disposable vapes are easily accessible to kids as young as 12. Literally one third of the kids in my child's secondary school are vaping in the toilets between classes. It would be much harder to do this if they had to pay for and use a large permanent vape . It's an epidemic and that is not hyperbole. The environmental gains of this ban are just icing on the cake.
entropyie··on The correct amount of ads is zero
Yes I enjoyed and used the ads in print computer magazines in the 90s. I think having highly relevant, content based static inline first party ads is tolerable and occasionally useful. Especially for specialist hardware / software. 3rd party ads that track you across the Internet are just evil and I will block them forever. As others have said, I would probably pay €50 per month for news, but not to a handful of mainstream sites. I need broad diverse coverage. Some micro transaction system is needed.
entropyie··on Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)
+1 on this. Number one source of bugs at a recent job was a homebrew TLS / HTTP load balancer. First chance I got I replaced it with nginx and bugs shot down immediately. With tools like apache, nginx, haproxy and caddy available, it was pure madness to reinvent that wheel... But the dev wanted open source CV padding...
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