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giamma

511 karma · joined November 24, 2021

meet.hn/city/45.4077172,11.8734455/Padua
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giamma··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
Possible alternative? https://twitterwebviewer.com/
giamma··on X sends in the lawyers to shut down open source project
Possible alternative? https://twitterwebviewer.com/
giamma··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/08/26/nitter-no-more-...
giamma··on Z.ai confirms Ox Alpha is a new GLM-series model and will release its weights
https://unwall.app/www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-2...
giamma··on The Amazon tax
I live in Italy, Amazon opened its Italian branch about 15 years ago. Initially it had a smaller catalog of products, with products sold almost entirely by Amazon. They were delivering packages in 3 days and the price was almost always much better than any other online or physical shop.

Over the years they largely improved the delivery time. Now if I am ordering a package before 4PM there is a high chance I will get it the next day in the morning. Prices however became higher and higher, at the point that for many products Amazon is not that convenient anymore: if you need home appliance (TV, dishwasher etc) other online or physical shops are now significantly cheaper. If you look sport equipment (e.g. climbing, mountain bike, hiking) the specialized shops are usually cheaper as long as you are OK to wait for longer delivery time and maybe combine 2 or more products to reduce the shipping costs.

I still find Amazon convenient during prime days and black Friday, and because of the large catalog with many alternatives and sometimes useful reviews (need a new shower head, a new mouse, a hole puncher, a tire for the bicycle...) but prices are not as good as they used to be. But if you need something in a hurry, the fact that you can order today and get it tomorrow is a big plus.

giamma··on Tesla Balance Bike
It depends what you do with such bikes. My son at 5 y.o. rode green trails in a bike park with a woom bike (not a balance bike), and I have seen other dads bring kids with balance bikes to bike parks.

If that is your objective you are ok to spend a few hundred dollars on a kid bike if that gives you the hope you will be saving a lot more than that from the dentist.

This said, a dad like me whose passion are expensive bikes, is very likely to be willing to spend a few hundreds on a kids bike, especially if you have more than one kid and you plan to pass the bike to the other son when the elder one outgrows it.

giamma··on Tesla Balance Bike
I agree, my sons learned cycling on woom bikes. They were the only brand in Europe that offered brake levers for small hands and crank arms with appropriate length.
giamma··on Tesla Balance Bike
This is a balance bike meant to attract the dads who are fans of the brand rather than a balance bike meant to be good for kids.

First the handlebar is too large for small hands and comes with no grips, second the top tube is too wide to be comfortable between the legs and the whole frame is just edges.

If you want a good balance bike look for brands like prevelo [0] or woom [1] who have been designing kid bikes for years.

[0] https://prevelo.com/products/alpha-zero

[1] https://woom.com/en_INT/balance-bikes/self-balancing-bike/wo...

giamma··on Orion Browser by Kagi
As a Firefox user, I make extensive usage of the location bar and the fact that Firefox allows you to search in history, bookmarks etc. etc.

It's so convenient to me, that I rarely use bookmarks. I keep a large history, and Firefox will efficiently allow me to find web sites I previously visited because it will effectively search in my browsing history when I type one or more words in the location bar, looking not only into the URL but also into the title.

This is something that I always miss when I try a different browsers. Also, while Mozilla Foundation has many issues, Firefox is opensource. I am looking forward into Ladybird but it will take time before it's usable. Until then, Firefox remains my favorite browser.

giamma··on Xiaomi-Robotics-1
Cool video but it forgot to pack underwear in the bag!
giamma··on Xiaomi-Robotics-1
I watched it on mute and was still satisfying, so I guess it's not the music.
giamma··on I also filed the corners off my MacBook
Kind of, for example I play games with motion blur activated, but my son switches it off.
giamma··on I also filed the corners off my MacBook
It's always entertaining for me to realize that there are people who find very annoying things that I don't even notice.
giamma··on Zig creator calls Bun's Claude Rust rewrite 'unreviewed slop'
I think that there are several points in the article.

1. Bun had quality issues. The quality issues were known to the Zig maintainers because Bun was one of the most popular and biggest projects using Zig so they were closely monitoring it.

2. The Zig maintainers considered the quality of the Bun codebase itself not good (but it's also true that typically implementors of programming languages have high expectations for code quality).

3. Bun has been rewritten in Rust using Claude

4. The fact that the test suite for Bun passes now that the code has been rewritten does not guarantee a better quality, because the coverage of such test suite was not enough in the first place to detect the quality issues when the code was manually written in Zig. So how can it be sufficient now to certify the code quality of the Rust rewrite?

giamma··on Italian Competition Authority launches investigation into Apple
The investigation is about interoperability of Apple’s operating systems iOS and iPadOS with alternative consumer clouds
giamma··on Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)
I was a point of two local bbses, my setup was Binkley Term as mailer, GoldEd as editor, plus a third tool, the tosser, whose name I cannot remember now. Everything running on OS/2 Warp.
giamma··on Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes
No mention of GeOS!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Softworks

giamma··on Why the heck are we still using Markdown?
Markdown is widely used but I agree that it's a mess, there are so many dialects..

A similar but better markup is ASCIIDOC; it's formally defined and comes with a Technology Compatiblity Kit (TCK) that can be used to certify the compliance of an implementation with the spec.

giamma··on When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
Imagine asking to your favorite LLM the following: "get the document attached to the most recent email from Joe and then upload it into my document management system in a new folder within archive 'Important', make sure to name the folder based the topic of the document following the naming convention already in place for folders in the same archive"

This could be possible for the average user after activating the appropriate "email" and "document management" MCP servers in their chat interface - maybe following an activation process similar to that of Alexa skills.

How could a regular user achieve the same via CLI? Where would the CLI process be running?

giamma··on Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
So even simple apps that are just code usage monitors are banned?
giamma··on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
This reminds me the old days of Windows 95 when I found a software to burn CDs that had a trial version which was limited to 150MB of data or so. If you tried to create a CD bigger than that it would refuse to burn and it would instead open a popup and tell you that the image exceeded the limit of XYZ blocks allowed by the trial version.

So I first decompressed the executable program (Windows executable were often packed at that time [0]), then I opened a binary editor, looked for that specific number in hexadecimal notation in the binary and changed to something much higher. I was than able to burn CDs without limitation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_compression

giamma··on 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
It used to be like that, computer had limited resources and desktop environments were light. Then at some point RAM became less and less of an issue, and everything started to get bigger and less efficient.

Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past? is it the UI animations, color themes, shades etc etc or is it the underlying operating system that has more and more features, services etc etc ?

I believe it's the desktop environment that is greedy, because one can easily run a linux server on a raspberry pi with very limited RAM, but is it really the case?

giamma··on Kernel bugs hide for 2 years on average. Some hide for 20
Is the intention of the author to use the number of years bugs stay "hidden" as a metric of the quality of the kernel codebase or of the performance of the maintainers? I am asking because at some point the articles says "We're getting faster".

IMHO a fact that a bug hides for years can also be indication that such bug had low severity/low priority and therefore that the overall quality is very good. Unless the time represents how long it takes to reproduce and resolve a known bug, but in such case I would not say that "bug hides" in the kernel.

giamma··on VS Code deactivates IntelliCode in favor of the paid Copilot
How about switching from VS Code to VS Codium? Same experience without the microsoft telemetry. I suppose Copilot won't be included due to licensing constraints.
giamma··on An SVG is all you need
Good question. In general charts are not accessible because visually impaired users cannot use a mouse.

You would need an interacting charting library that works with a keyboard and that is readable by a screen reader.

giamma··on An SVG is all you need
I believe that would result in non accessible content, I believe screen readers cannot properly assist impaired users with SVG content.

As such I think it's not a good idea for a document that should have a large audience.

giamma··on Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation
I am more interested in how MCP can change human interaction with software.

Practical example: there exists an MCP server for Jira. Connect that MCP server to e.g. Claude and then you can write prompts like this:

"Produce a release notes document for project XYZ based on the Epics associated to version 1.2.3"

or

"Export to CSV all tickets with worklog related to project XYZ and version 1.2.3. Make sure the CSV includes these columns ....."

Especially the second example totally removes the need for the CSV export functionality in Jira. Now imagine a scenario in which your favourite AI is connected via MCP to different services. You can mix and match information from all of them.

Alibaba for example is making MCP servers for all of its user-facing services (alibaba mail, cloud drive, etc etc)

A chat UI powered by the appropriate MCP servers can provide a lot of value to regular end users and make it possible for people to use their own data easily in ways that earlier would require dedicated software solutions (exports, reports). People could use software for use cases that the original authors didn't even imagine.

giamma··on Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain
I think the design is bad: my girlfriend would never wear it. Maybe they know already and that's why the webpage contains only picture of male hands.

Given the many smartwatches on the market which can do so much more, are lightweight and some of them with acceptable battery life (Garmin, Suunto, Amazfit), a smartring is of very little interest to me. But I often struggle to understand why certain products fascinate people, so I may be totally wrong and I wish the makers best of luck.

giamma··on CSS now has an if() conditional function
I agree, that is what I meant: there were people who installed Contrib to have <if> element, but in reality you did not need that you could just use Ant's built-in features like you said. In my opinion installing Contrib to use <if> was a demonstration of not having understood how Ant works.
giamma··on BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive
Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.

Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year.

Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil.

[0] https://tech.ridefox.com/bike/owners-manuals/2979/fork--2025...

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