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foresto

2,097 karma · joined April 22, 2018

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foresto··on Cloudflare Email Service
> what is cloudflare exactly?

Man-in-the-middle and gatekeeper of (large parts of) the web.

It's getting harder and harder to participate online without being subject to their surveillance and/or approval.

foresto··on DIY Soft Drinks
Apparently kits are now available for those who don't want to shop around for parts. Here's a photo:

https://www.kegoutlet.com/prod_images/xlarge/2/0/SP202T-SS.a...

foresto··on DIY Soft Drinks
Hmm... Those steel growlers look appealing, if a little pricey, but their 45 psi relief valves would prevent carbonating with as much fizz as I like. I wonder if the PRV could be swapped with a different one that holds more like 75 psi.

Thanks for the link. This gives me a direction worth investigating, at least.

foresto··on DIY Soft Drinks
I paid about 20-25 USD for my last 5 lb refill. That was a few years ago, and it's still providing. My prior fill lasted more than 5 years (maybe 6 or 7) serving one fizzy water fan and occasional guests.
foresto··on DIY Soft Drinks
> I found it cheaper and much, much more convenient

Cheaper? I don't see how. We're filling from the same CO2 cylinders, and my total hardware cost was less than that of a midrange SodaStream without the adapter you describe.

More convenient? Maybe, depending on environment and use.

But mine has advantages, too: More fizz, no counter space required, fewer fragile plastic parts, standard components that are easily serviced/replaced, and the ability to carbonate liquids other than water without worry of backspray gumming up a countertop machine's internal components. (Your unit's instructions probably tell you to use only water, for this reason.)

> you can leave the larger tank shut off and away from living areas so that a leak doesn't pose a hazard.

I close my cylinder's main valve when it's not in use, and the two additional valves downstream of it (at the regulator and ball lock fitting) also work, so I think a leak is very unlikely. Even if there was one, I would expect it to be noticed quickly or else too slow for the released CO2 to cause harm.

foresto··on DIY Soft Drinks
If you want to carbonate water but don't want to buy a countertop carbonator or its overpriced CO2 refills, you can get a ball lock valve cap that screws onto 1L or 2L soda bottles for around $8-16.

That valve will attach to a standard female fitting, which you can put on the end of a hose coming from a pressure regulator, which will attach to a full-size CO2 cylinder available from a brewing or gas supply shop. CO2 refills are a lot cheaper this way.

Put cold water in the bottle with some extra space at the top. Squeeze out the air and attach the valve cap. Set the pressure regulator, connect it to the bottle, open the regulator's output valve, and watch the bottle that was slightly crushed by your squeezing expand back to its normal shape. Slosh the water around with pressure applied for maybe 10-30 seconds. Close the output valve and disconnect.

Voilà. Carbonated water.

IIRC, PETE soda bottles are pressurized to about 50 psi for retail shelves. I don't think they're likely to burst until well beyond 100 psi, and they'll deform before they burst, so if you're careful, you can go a little higher than 50 and make fizzier water than what you can buy in the store. I have used 70 psi many times.

Read up on precautions for handling pressurized gas before doing any of this. Wear eye protection. Don't turn your bottle or gas cylinder into an unguided missile. :)

Sadly, I don't have any info on microplastics released by this process. (Nor by countertop carbonators and their rigid plastic flasks.) I wish I knew of a suitable steel bottle to use instead.

foresto··on What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
That's a fair criticism for some workflows, and I like the lightweight model, but we should keep in mind the context of the time:

When these DVCS appeared, Git's branch design departed from what "branch" meant practically everywhere else. That added to its already significant learning curve, creating more friction for people trying (or being asked) to adopt it.

Meanwhile, Mercurial's "branch" was closer to well-established norms. This was one of several factors that made it the easier of the two to learn, which was was important when already asking people to uproot from their familiar centralized systems and learn the ins and outs of distributed version control. I suspect it also made repository migrations more straightforward, avoiding the impedance mismatch presented by Git's branches.

foresto··on What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical
> bazaar... Not sure what they were trying to solve there with git and forges already existing.

You are mistaken here. Bazaar, Mercurial, and Git appeared at about the same time, and I think Bazaar was released first.

IIRC, Bazaar tried to distinguish itself by handling renames better than other version control systems. In practice, this turned out not to be very important to most people.

(Tangent: It wasn't clear at the time whether Mercurial or Git was the better pick. Their internal design was very similar. Mercurial offered a more pleasant user interface, superior cross-platform support, and a third advantage that I'm forgetting at the moment. Git had unbeatable author recognition. Eventually, Git's improved Windows support and the arrival of GitHub sealed its victory in the popularity contest. But all of that came to pass well after Bazaar was released.)

foresto··on Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?
Looks like there are examples here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIRDOcSQGe8

foresto··on I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok
> It only needs to be "an app" if it is using hardware to do it's main job.

Even then, there's a good chance that web a API exists for the required hardware, so it still doesn't need to be an app.

foresto··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
Are you sure? Bluetooth dongles these days can be smaller than most low-profile USB drives, barely protruding from a laptop's exterior. It might be worth browsing the available models.
foresto··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
> This is true, but you may be missing out on performance and compatibility improvements from recent ("bleeding edge") drivers.

No, not missing out. Just waiting a few weeks longer than I would on a rolling distro, until the improvements arrive in Debian Backports. (If I'm really impatient, I can install something manually or make my own backport, but I'm assuming most people won't do that.) I have experienced cases like you describe, such as when I bought an RDNA3 GPU shortly after the platform was released, but they have been infrequent in my experience, and never so urgent that I couldn't wait a few weeks.

> you don't need rock-solid stability on a gaming rig or even a "workstation," since uptime isn't really a consideration.

System uptime is a consideration whenever I need my computer for something immediately, but my choice of Debian is not only about that. It's also about my time. Debian generally requires attention less often than other distros. Less time spent troubleshooting when things break. Less time re-learning things or adjusting workflows when new software versions change their behavior or interface. Fewer annoying interruptions. A low-maintenance system leaves me more time to get work done, or play games.

Also worth noting: These days, a lot of the components that games use are provided by the likes of Steam or Flatpak, which means they will be at exactly the same version and updated exactly as often on every Linux distro.

foresto··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
> I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was running, then shortly after silently switches back to the green Play button again, without any visible error and without actually starting the game.

You might want to enable Proton logging and have a look at what it says is going on.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/?tab=readme-ov-file#...

foresto··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
Debian Stable gamer here.

> Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.

Please stop spreading this misconception. There are only a tiny handful of packages that a Debian gamer might need to update, and those are generally available in Debian Backports. It's not what I would call a beginner distro for any purpose, but gaming on it is perfectly viable.

I'm having a good time in games, still getting other computing tasks done, and enjoying Debian's low-maintenance respect for my time. AMA.

foresto··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
Your computer's bluetooth module could be the source of the trouble. Some people have found that using a different dongle fixed their wireless controller problems.
foresto··on Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March
> The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.

It could also be lucky consequence of what games you play and what else you do with your computer.

I was a long-time Nvidia user, and had plenty of problems with their drivers. They ranged from minor annoyances when switching between virtual consoles (which some people never do) to total system freezes when playing a particular game (which some people never play). It would have been be easy for someone else to never encounter these problems.

Since switching to AMD a couple years ago, I have been much happier.

foresto··on CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font
Neat.

I wish the sample text included _underscores_, since I have occasionally found that they disappear with certain combinations of font + size + renderer.

And a run of all the numeric digits 0123456789, to show how their heights align.

And [square brackets], to show how easily they are distinguished from certain other glyphs.

And the vertical | bar, for the same reason.

...

Adobe Source Code Pro and Ubuntu Mono were my finalists. I think my preference would come down to window and font size, since Ubuntu Mono seemed to be narrower and leave more space between lines.

(Also, I kind of rushed the first few comparisons, so it's possible that I prematurely eliminated a typeface that I would have liked more.)

foresto··on Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music
> quickie comments on HN should be taken more as mental stimulation and kickoff points for further discussion

Agreed, and my comment was aimed at exactly that. :)

An example of my concern: What would happen to GPL-licensed software if the copyright expired quickly? Would that allow someone to include it in a proprietary product and (after the short copyright term ended) deny users the freedoms that the GPL is supposed to guarantee? I think those freedoms remain important for much longer than 10 years.

> (and no changes since remember, it's a constantly rolling window)

Do you mean that the copyright term countdown would reset whenever the author makes changes to their work? (I'm not sure if this is the case today.) If so, couldn't someone simply use an earlier version in their proprietary product in order to escape GPL obligations early?

> "if you're releasing under an open source license and thus giving up your standard first, second, and part of your third period of IP rights and monopoly, you're excluded from needing to pay a license fee because you've already enable the public to make derivative works for free for decades when they wouldn't otherwise anyway."

Yes, I think this makes sense. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

foresto··on Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music
I think I like the idea, but I can't help wondering if it would have unforeseen consequences.

Could this approach undermine the protections afforded by open-source licenses? (IANAL.)

foresto··on Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains
> I would assume most of them? I'd be surprised if distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. would ship non-mainline kernel features like that.

It's best not to assume with these things. With my stock Debian Stable kernel, Proton says this:

fsync: up and running.

And when I disable fsync, it says this:

esync: up and running.

> But it sounds like fsync got you performance pretty close to what ntsync can do, but esync was quite a bit behind both?

No, esync and fsync trade blows in performance. Here are some measurements taken by Kron4ek, who maintains somewhat widely used Wine/Proton builds:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250315200334/https://flightles...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250315200424/https://flightles...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250315200419/https://flightles...

> With vanilla being quite a bit behind esync?

Yes, vanilla Wine has historically fallen behind all of them, of course.

> Also, jeez, fsync, what a terrible name. fsync is a syscall that has to do with filesystem data. So confusing.

We can agree on this. :)

foresto··on Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains
> if Valve didn’t enable that on their build then I don’t have it.

The Proton build is Valve's build. It supports both fsync and esync, the latter of which does not require a kernel patch. If you're gaming on Linux with Steam, you're probably already using it.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/?tab=readme-ov-file#...

foresto··on Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains
The common gaming-focused Wine/Proton builds can also use esync (eventfd-based synchronization). IIRC, it doesn't need a patched kernel.

The point being that these massive speed gains will probably not be seen by most people as you suggest, because most Linux gamers already have access to either esync or fsync.

foresto··on Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains
Most people? What mainstream Linux distros ship without fsync or esync support?
foresto··on Scott Hanselman says he's working on Windows local accounts
xcancel.com seems to work at least as well as any other still-maintained nitter instance. Here's a list:

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances

foresto··on Flash media longevity testing – 6 years later
See also: F3

https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

foresto··on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
> Also, the LGPL text doesn't say "work based on the library".

It does, about a dozen times.

Are you perhaps referring to LGPL3? I think the license under discussion here is LGPL2.1.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/6.0.0/LICENSE

I'm not well versed in copyright case law, so I won't argue with the rest of what you wrote. Thanks for elaborating on your thoughts.

foresto··on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
That's interesting, but it misses my point:

The library's test suite and interfaces were apparently used directly, not transformed. If either of those are considered part of the library's source code, as the license's wording seems to suggest, then I think output from their use could be considered a work based on the library as defined in the license.

foresto··on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
> It's transformative, so no.

I'm not following your logic there, and I don't see any mention of "transformative" in the license. Can you explain what you mean?

foresto··on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
From the article:

> He fed only the API and the test suite to Claude and asked it to reimplement the library from scratch.

From GPL2:

> The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.

Is a project's test suite not considered part of its source code? When I make modifications to a project, its test cases are very much a part of that process.

If the test suite is part of this library's source code, and Claude was fed the test suite or interface definition files, is the output not considered a work based on the library under the terms of LGPL 2.1?

foresto··on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
> Blanchard fed the spec to the tool,

Yes...

> and Anthropic fed the code to the tool,

Presumably, as part of the massive amount of open-source code that must have been fed in to train their model.

> so Blanchard didn't do anything wrong, and Anthropic didn't do anything wrong. Nothing to see here.

This is meant as irony, right?

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