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feikname

343 karma · joined June 18, 2017

Computer engineering student. HPC undergraduate research.
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feikname··on Git-crypt – transparent file encryption in Git
As I said, it's not the pedantry that gets the free software movement to be made fun of, its the overloading of terms and then having to overly explain them.

Creative Commons is very clear in its license and it - rightfully - doesn't get as much complaint as open-source evangelists about its lingo.

Having to say "but technically a product is anything that is produced" to go against a expected reading and then complain about pedantry in the same comment is way more humorous as it's a prime example of what they're talking about.

feikname··on Git-crypt – transparent file encryption in Git
Yet no one calls their homemade food a product and offer to others for free calling it that. The semantic prominence of a commercial product would prevail as the first thing that comes to mind for anyone because that's also one of the meanings of the word product.

It's simply confusing to call something that can and is commonly monetized as a (commercial) product - that is, software - and not expect others to believe its something paid.

e.g. "Apache is a product for serving web pages" would surely be read by majority of people not familiar with Apache as if it's paid.

> That type of pedantry is why people make fun of the free software movement.

No. They make fun because people use terms like open-source to mean more than just a source that is open.

Or free and open-source whereas free, like product can also have more than one meaning. And they expect people unfamiliar to understand it means free as in liberty not as in price.

These are confusing, just like using the word product for unpaid software done that is done in spare time and has no commercial support whatsover.

If I could decide, the movement would have been called something like "source code free to see and to modify (and redistribute, if applicable)". Lengthy, yes, but also pretty clear.

feikname··on Caniemail.com – like caniuse but for email content
Email attachments are defined through MIME and don't depend at all on HTML being available as a Content-Type. We could well have had another format and attachments together.
feikname··on What makes a translation great?
To me a great translation should have Translator Notes (TN) and not be afraid of using neologisms. It seems TNs used to be more common but are increasingly rare.
feikname··on The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”
Interestingly, in Brazil's transit code a person carrying their bycicle unmounted is considered a pedestrian. Otherwise, they're a non motorized light vehicle.
feikname··on In every country people think others are less happy than they themselves say (2017)
I don't like that this graph starts at 20%
feikname··on AI tools like ChatGPT are built on mass copyright infringement
> If you publish something, you should be prepared for others to reproduce it and take it without credit.

> the net cost of copying data is effectively nothing.

Since the cost of including the author and the link to original work is so cheap I dont see why not have the courtesy of adding that info. They're are already doing the work for free, recognition is the least you could pay in respect for it.

Granted, sometimes things are a complex tree of authorship transformations and it's an interesting question of how far back you d go for that but sometimes its pretty cut and dry too.

feikname··on Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS
> GPT is million times better

Agreed.

> It wasnt windows's fault its just that its update utility had to overwrite a part of MBR

It was a reasonable assumption that whatever drive Windows' was installed on already had a working bootloader installed, otherwise it wouldn't have been able to boot itself to do Windows Update. Windows did NOT have to override it.

This was not MBR fault. AFAIK Linux did NOT do the same thing as overriding, which is why it has separate `grub2-install` and `update-grub` commands. Once installed to a drive, `update-grub` will only change the simple config file it reads at boot. Perhaps both of them did override themselves when a bugfix or new feature was available, but I don't think Windows's bootloader changed much after any OS release.

Now, GPT/UEFI is a million times better in that aspect because it can allow easily multiple different bootloaders that don't have to know of each other's existence. But I blame Windows in MBR case very much.

Also, some though not all motherboards allow you booting from BOTH old-school MBR and newer GPT so you may not need to disable CSM and still eat your GPT cake. This may be useful if you e.g. have an old MBR drive with Linux and another GPT one with Windows.

feikname··on QEMU 7.0
One that have the same binary name as yours for compability reasons, but then proceeds to be not so compatible with slight command line options. Thus, made a whole lot of confusion because people didn't expect that depending on what distro they were using they could be using similar but incompatible software with the same executable filename.
feikname··on 27 years ago I accidentally ran the hardest, strangest Easter egg hunt
I believge the name you're looking for is Jungle Gym (non-UK) or Climbing Frame (UK). In portuguese we call them trepa-trepa ("climb-climb") which I think is quite fitting.
feikname··on Fuchsia Workstation
You might be interested in ReactOS[1]. Their objective is to make a 100% FOSS Windows Compatible OS, including drivers.

Currently, they're at around ~WinXP level support

[1]: https://reactos.org/

feikname··on Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
> The 3% of Linux desktop users would disagree.

We don't know how much of that 3% is there for the FOSS aspect.

I suspect most are because of the free aspect and being better than Windows for their use case, the open source is just a bonus.

> They are collectively willing to pay millions of dollars every year in perpetuity for a product

People love free stuff and will prefer it if its good enough, that's why Discord and Google Docs are so popular.

Funding open source would be cool though. Specially if we started hiring UX people

feikname··on Google says employees flouting vaccination rules will eventually be fired
> Force people into draconian measures that won't stop infection and violate their rights.

It won't stop infection. But it greatly reduces that rate and, above all, your risk of death and the strength of the disease in general in case you do catch it.

> Convince them that it's necessary to stop the pandemic without giving any arguments.

The argument should be very clear: vaccines are a known and easy way to make the virus a non-threat, or a small one at that.

To that end, you can see the numbers for yourself after vaccination started[1] and how greatly the number of deaths and cases has reduced.

[1] see for example Brazil since June till now: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/brazil/

> Have them defend your measures in public forums and feel very smart.

Given this is a place where IT Big Corp and govts. are constantly critized, I don't think anyone here is defending this as an WHO or any institution ass kisser

feikname··on Show HN: My proposal for a new keyboard layout
I think as a keyboard for French language, this is great.

However, the affirmation “extra characters are added so that one can effortlessly type in French (as well German, Spanish, Italian, etc.)” doesn't really hold well IMO. For example, there's “é” but no “áíúó” keys. This lack of acute diacritic for other vowels is a big dealbreaker for Spanish and Portuguese. Possibly, others too.

As someone used to the Brazilian (ABNT2) keyboard, I think dedicated keys for characters with diacritics is not the way. Typing with diacritics for dead keys to the right is just as easy, if not more, as using alt gr, with the advantage of having more free keys.

Otherwise, this is great.

BTW, I like how this is closer to US keyboard than ABNT2, which switched the `~ key for quotes and makes typing stuff such as ``` for blocks of code a big pain, and annoying to open developer console in Source games. ABNT2 also annoyingly switched braces location to be vertically stacked.

feikname··on Spy tech that followed kids home for remote learning
You may be interested in an anime called Psycho Pass that kinda has that as a plot point.

Law enforcement can point a gun at you to evaluate your psychiatric level and kill you if deemed to high

feikname··on A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
it's too "uncompact". Font size too big and could use a bit more horizontal space.

I find it comfortable to use at 60% zoom level

feikname··on S.Korea fines Google $177M for blocking Android customisation
I wish I could have thought of that argument on a previous discussion about iPhone/ iPad jailbreak discussion thread
feikname··on What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
I'd like to add being able to switch languages in a website is really heplful for learning another language.

I commonly do it with Wikipedia

feikname··on Data detectives spotted fake numbers in a widely cited paper
> Did YOU even check what you cite?

I did completely read what was available to me without having an account.

> The AUTHORS of the original paper got a dataset from a company. They didn't assume the fraud from the start and published the paper based on it.

My comment is not about who the culprit is or isn't. Indeed, I don't mention anything about it.

Rather, it's about how, as the title says, a WIDELY cited paper has fabricated data following rather (IMO) obvious red flag patterns and none of the people -who cited the paper- raised issues about that.

Thus, I questioned whether scientists read or not the papers they cite in the parent post. The question is not a judgment, I'm just truly curious since I'm not part of the formal academia, just an undergraduate.

feikname··on Data detectives spotted fake numbers in a widely cited paper
It always suprises me how people don't do minimum effort for hiding this stuff.

And no one notices. (or don't care about the obviously suspicious aspect)

Do scientists actually read what they cite?

feikname··on So you want to write a GUI framework
One of my favorite offline "classic" programs of all time is.. Microsoft WordPad.

It's by no means great, but it's so lightweight and gets off your way that it puts modern online Microsoft Word and Google Dpcs to shame with its mere 16MB memory usage for simple documents.

I wish more apps did that, even if they looked like a Windows app inside macOS or vice-versa

I wonder if releasing a new framework that doesnt try to look native but still tries to make flow for each OS optmized (e.g. allows to choose file picker between native and own) would be a resonable alternative to electron. Perhaps even with JS support so the gazilliins libraries out there arent totally lost.

feikname··on How to Hack APIs in 2021
Could also be reverse: why pay for software that won't run on your computer anyway?
feikname··on Operating Systems: Timeline and Family Tree
Link to SVG because scrolling doesn't work in website: https://eylenburg.github.io/pics/Eylenburg_Operating_System_...
feikname··on Google hits undo on limiting JavaScript capabilities in cross-origin iframes
They also could very well improve the cross-origin alerts to say "This message is from ANOTHER website embedded in this tab, please act carefully. (source: xxx.com)" instead of outright removing it.
feikname··on Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization
how is less and more accurate (read: not done wrong) studies pruning opportunities for future research?

from my view, it becomes easier to make research.

less, more condensed literature is easier to cite and read, as it's "unified".

from there, many other researches can easily base the work off the paper for novel research.

less doesn't necessarily mean worse.

feikname··on Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization
Correct me I'm mistaken

The difference between diamond native and diamond WASM demonstrates how, even with WASM, native implementations beat browsers hard, and native implementations performance-wise are still very worth, specially for lower powered devices, and, perhaps, reducing battery usage (as consequence of less CPU use) in mobile devices.

feikname··on The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway
that's easily verifiable doing the searches yourself;

a search for "hvor ofte bør man dusje" in my english google, conencting from brazil shows havfruen4220.dk as 6th and 7th result, which is pretty high for a spam website

"hvordan regne prosent" shows 2 dk websites www.humanrebels.dk, and havfruen4220.dk as 9th and 10th results

could be since the OP clicked on these links to find out google made his personal algorithm show even more of this stuff

thus, I imagine a never ending cycle of even more spam could easily be generated, specially for an innocent user

feikname··on 'Arthur,' the longest-running kids animated series, is ending
It's ok for a radio to focus on its own country, but to make a claim for something "in all history" looking for information in at least a few other countries is the bare minimum.

Here where I live I commonly see "touristic museums" and touristic places make claims that can be easily disproven by a google search and that is just not OK.

Imagine in a few decades some museum in US about media goes on to claim Arthur was the longest running kids show in the world and even link to npr as a source?

npr should have known better and put "In US" in their title.

feikname··on Windows 96
If you click activate windows it says its not a genuine copy, greys out and starts spitting out DLL errors haha, nice easter egg.
feikname··on About the security content of iOS 14.7.1 and iPadOS 14.7.1
> Dangerous tools often have safety guards built-in to the design

A phone is not, usually, a dangerous tool. Unless you can make it explode :)

> For most people, iOS limiting the damage when they get compromised is a huge plus.

Then just dont unlock. The unlock would need to be done from inside the OS, by the user, not by external actor.

> Now, consider what that means for something like unlocking the bootloader. Allowing that means undetectable malware, potentially irrecoverable. There's not really a good way around that and even if you try to inform people at the time they enable it that doesn't help if it's done when the device is out of their control (abusive partner, boss, police, etc.)

If you have an abusive partner, boss, etc. you're already at risk because they will keep looking at your phone anyway and you're in no position to refuse. A way better solution is to have a burner phone they don't know about.

Agreed with the police point, but I think after getting your phone from police you could just clean install iOS again to make sure nothing unwanted is there.

P.S. On 2nd hand market, you could just as easily reinstall stock iOS once you buy a new phone to prevent buying 2nd hand unlocked iPhone with malware.

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