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firen777

287 karma · joined June 11, 2019

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firen777··on Security auditing in the age of (good enough) AI
People on HN have a tendency to shove in analogies where it doesn't need one. Even worse when most of the time the analogies do not make sense.
firen777··on AI companies are shredding rare books
> access and ease of sharing

I'm gonna sound argumentative, but what happen if you lose access to computers in general? The thumb drive or hard disk or whatever will just become a magical rock you cannot communicate with.

Honestly, given... recent world developments, I'm starting to doubt the robustness of digital media.

Archive.org has already been under constant assault by copyright holders. Who's to say there won't be something much more authoritarian coming over dealing the final blow?

Bittorrent-like distributed content sharing all have publicly traceable traffic afaik (only exception I'm aware of is torrenting over I2P). Therefore, again, something authoritarian can just walk in and ruin the party.

As for thumbdrives sharing, what if government signed and approved OSes start doing content scanning and DRM enforcement (or whatever excuses) on the OS level? We might be able to just install Linux or whatever now, but what if PCs in the future start doing bootloader locking like smartphones do nowadays? Given the recent age verification political theatre around the world, and whatever super duper secure guard Google is pulling right now on Android, this seems like a much more likely direction the world is heading than I would like to admit. Oh, and AI driving consumer hardware prices way up doesn't help.

Total war nuking us back to pre-computer age... yeah I don't wanna get into this one.

Books don't have this accessibility problem. Granted, preservation and sharing wise, they have their own very real challenges. But as long as you have one on your hand, you can just read it.

firen777··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
I guess companies saw SKG being effectively thrown out by the EU, got bold enough and decided to normalize this practice to the rest of the digital medium.
firen777··on Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees
I was about to say the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse#Equus

Of all the examples to pick from, seeing GP picked horse made me wonder if GP was doing it for gits and shiggles.

firen777··on Immich 3.0
> Upload asset directly to album on the mobile app

Does this fix this problem? https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/12748

It's a pretty big issue for me having multiple devices and multiple people who want to pool pictures of our cats together in one album.

Currently I have to do this kind of set up:

1. Syncthing sync our photos back to the homelab server hosting immich - /mnt/Syncthing/a1/cats/ - /mnt/Syncthing/a2/cats/ - /mnt/Syncthing/b/cats/

2. cron job copying (hard-link) the photos to a folder mounted as read-only external library volume - /mnt/immich/ext-lib/cats/

3. cron job to run a script that automatically creates albums from external library folder structure: https://github.com/Salvoxia/immich-folder-album-creator

4. cron job clean up photos in the syncthing folder that are older than a year to free up space for our phones (~1TB total. Yes we have problem)

--------------

That said, congrat on the 3.0 release. Although I'm slightly bumped out because I literally just discovered this program a month ago and stabilized my self-host set up just one week ago.

firen777··on Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
Similarly: https://nypost.com/2026/04/21/us-news/top-maga-influencer-em...

Some highlights:

> The move made him a mint — and Sam was soon raking in thousands of dollars a month.

> “I was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student,” he recalled.

> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.

The effort-to-profit ratio is so insane that you almost can't blame them for turning the internet into such toxic wasteland.

firen777··on Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license
I feel like a lot of things Valve does, with the exception of loot boxes, are the bare minimum of what a good (not great) companies should do.

So of course every single company look at Valve and decide they should do the complete opposite of everything Valve does except loot boxes.

firen777··on Microsoft terminated the account VeraCrypt used to sign Windows drivers
It's like LibreOffice all over again: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-bans-libreoffice-devel...
firen777··on DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
> a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit

Try 200% (tho tbf our boss sit on that quote for like a year and a half because he thought it was too pricey. Bet he regretted it now).

And all the quotes are now only valid for a week due to insane price fluctuation.

firen777··on Iranian Women Graduate in Stem 3× the Rate of U.S. Women and Has 5× More PhDs
> most countries in the world

Can you provide actual statistic to support this claim instead of just saying hip anti-America rhetoric to sound cool?

There are a lot of legitimate criticisms regarding the US infrastructure. I'd even agree with a "most WEIRD countries in the world beat America..." take. But to omit the numerous less privileged countries, or even the less privileged majority part of supposedly powerful countries in order to clown on the US does not sit right with me.

North Korea is absolutely not one of them and you would know if you read even a slight bit about the stories from the defectors, or corroborate their stories with stories from Chinese merchants shipping supplies to North Korea and their interactions with North Korean soldiers.

firen777··on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state
>giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security

When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime.

I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus.

All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.

firen777··on Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues
> because applications and windows are a separate concept

Is this the reason why "closed" applications still show up in cmd+tab?

firen777··on HSBC blocks its app due to F-Droid-installed Bitwarden
Tangentially related, but some banking apps also implement their own in-app keyboard in their password fields, making password manager unusable and basically forcing me to use a easy to remember (to guess) password.
firen777··on Crypto got everything it wanted. Now it's sinking
>It’s sole value proposition is a means to facilitate criminal activity

I used to feel this way until visa/master pulled that project-2025-mandated stunt on nsfw games.

firen777··on Steam Machine
>"Coming Soon" (January 10, 2017) | December 20, 2024 | 7th Issue of Team Fortress Comics: The Days Have Worn Away

Out of all the IPs Valve owns, somehow it's TF2 that got a story conclusion and it couldn't have been more perfect.

firen777··on Steam Machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster#Decline
firen777··on The scariest "user support" email I've received
just feed the thing to any base64 decoder like cyberchef:

https://cyberchef.org/#recipe=From_Base64('A-Za-z0-9%2B/%3D'...

Isn't it just basic problem solving skill? We gonna let AI do the thinky bit for us now?

firen777··on DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia
>if they have the capability

They absolutely do: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...

firen777··on Android's sideloading limits are its most anti-consumer move
>you can install your own OS

https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame

firen777··on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without MS account
> only 8 gb of ram

I still have fond memory of my brother upgrading his windows XP desktop to 1 GB RAM to play BF2142 and I was like "school hasn't even taught me that number yet".

What the hell happened to software development when "only 8 gb of ram" is used sincerely?

firen777··on How the “Kim” dump exposed North Korea's credential theft playbook
It's both frustrating and all too common to see blatant historical falsehood being casually thrown around as if it's well known fact. Doubly frustrating knowing that in order to rebut such falsehood, you have to either do your own lengthy research to find the evidence of __absence__ (which is a lot harder comparing to the evidence of __existence__), or hopefully someone else already did said research and more hopefully you can unbury it from the increasingly enshittified google search.

And by the time you managed it the falsehood already netted a few dozens/hundreds/thousands more victims in the best case scenario where the rebuttal actually managed to attach itself right next to the falsehood.

Regular folks just can't compete with professional disinformation spreaders and their horde of victims.

firen777··on ICANN fee price hike by 11% [pdf]
>Generally, my advice would be to stick to country code TLDs.

Why? Unless you're talking about the country code of the same country you are operating in, (mis)using ccTLDs is basically gambling your domain's survival on the generosity of the country or even the very survival of the country itself. See Mali taking back .ml domain for a recent example.

Just stick to .net, .org or maybe .com for stability sake with only slightly higher but capped pricing.

firen777··on By default, Signal doesn't recall
While it's been improved a whole lot, it's not all sunshine and rainbow as some game companies decided to drop support after they decided kernel anti-cheat is the way (notably GTA onlin & Apex legend).

That being said, I personally use proton compatibility to gauge whether a game is worth my time so I'm not too bothered by this. And I'm constantly surprised by how much the Venn diagram of games that don't run on Linux and games that have off-putting bullshit unrelated to Linux looks like a single overlapping circle.

firen777··on Mississippi libraries ordered to delete research in response to state laws
I appreciate your effort to reign in some reality here to show how privileged Americans are, but the word of the day is "trajectory" and it's aiming right at bottom right now.
firen777··on Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
Judging from the way things are going, what's the difference?
firen777··on Malaysia is betting on data centers to boost its economy
In the future these kind of "whatabout" comments should be auto-flagged due to how unproductive they are.
firen777··on X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links
Xitter is the least of the issues considering his tie to China and Russia and the all-you-can-eat buffet happening right now in the US government.
firen777··on How about trailing commas in SQL?
From my own experience:

1. It makes git diff less noisy when I need to add new element at the end since you don't need to add an extra comma at the end of the now-second-to-last element.

2. It makes reordering the last element a lot more pleasant during development since you don't need to add and remove comma when you are moving the line.

And the same applies (or I wish applies) to SQL. Time and time again I wish trailing comma is a thing in SQL when I'm constructing and testing even slightly more complex queries.

firen777··on Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza
> But being someone who HATES trump as much as they hate Hamas is a bit lonely

Sometimes I genuinely feel like the world is being shoved into some manufactured simulacrum where we must reside in one of the two arbitrarily binary political camp. You must either be a maga loyalist and bow to the russian overlord, or be a "liberal" and unconditionally accept islamists as victims of oppression and hamas is the final solution.

firen777··on Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza
> Israel has likely also created multiple generations of anger and hate against themselves

Israel would have created multiple generations of emboldened anger and hate against themselves if they failed to respond to the massacre and mass kidnapping.

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