halicarnassus

Maybe a bunch of AI agents ganged up on starring it to help a fellow AI out?

Great move to counter the hostile takeover of the RubyGems GitHub repo (not the rubygems.org repo) and organization by Ruby Central.

I hope they find financing to cover hosting costs.

I get the occasional request to NordVPN image assets beginning with `/nordvpn/media/` on my server. Apparently this is or was a way to find out if an IP address is acting as an exit node.

In the comments here I read a lot about if this is whistleblowing or not, or if disciplinary measures are warranted for an employee "badmouthing" an employer's client while not having an official mandate to speak in public, while mostly ignoring the threats made by a government official.

This is exactly the problem why the world sucks so hard.

The engineer, certainly knowledgeable in this field, made a measured public remark, which could have saved lives. He has done nothing wrong, because he didn't claim to speak on behalf of his employer, and has the right to speak his mind as a person. In public, and with a lot of reach.

The government official, however, applied unconstitutional pressure to get the engineer fired and threatened his employer to lose business. Humanly very low and damaging to future public rail infrastructure, if a capable company is not allowed to provide services anymore and therefore most likely to increase prices through diminished competition.

If anyone should lose their job over this matter, it clearly should be the UK rail minister.

You are right about Gnome vs. macOS. It has many features which are not obvious and may be hidden behind an alt modifier key. But this makes it very usable for beginners and experts at the same time without alienating the other.

In the end Gnome seems to strive for a UI which scales from smartphones to big desktop screens with varying success. It's cool to know, that your desktop feed reader could work on your smartphone without changes in the future. But this Gnome future is always distant.

Did anybody expect Reddit to become a better place after all what happened a couple of weeks ago?

I was never a big Reddit user, but I'm sure as hell not going to be one in the future.

It's a boring stereotype of good and evil, which threw almost half the world's population from the wrong side of the iron curtain under the bus.

It chastises the behavior of those people while praising their own behavior, even though it's essentially the same.

It sees heroes in spies, even though they are villains.

Each side thinks, that they are on the right side.

Edit: Even though the novel tries to point this out a little, it still uses all of the above to great effect.

Many extensions need full access to the DOM, because their functionality depends on it. Their sole purpose is to manipulate the DOM for various purposes.

That's why it is always a risk to use browser extensions and you really have to trust the people behind the extension.

Obviously, if the browser supports it, the access should be limited to the sites where it actually matters. Like a YouTube ad blocker to youtube.com. Unless you make a living from YouTube. Then you don't want to block ads for ethical reasons as well as security reasons, because it can kill your livelihood.

> It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers.

That is true, but they're already a decade into shipping NUCs. Maybe it wasn't a problem after all. It could also be just a move to show the stock market that they focus on getting leaner.

RIP NUC :'(

I always liked NUCs because of their usage of mobile CPUs with low power consumption in a small case. No need to consume 50W idling for nothing.

I only need iGPUs for a zippy UI, because I don't game on my work devices, and don't want to have any added noise because of a dGPU.

This might be the right move for Intel, but not for users. NUCs are awesome, cost-effective devices.

Most CO2 footprints are not meaningful, because they are measuring the total and not per capita, and the CO2 footprint is counted against the producers and not the consumers.

Steel- or car-producing countries, like Germany, will always have higher CO2 footprints than the countries, which consume the steel and cars.

Of course, those producing countries shouldn't burn anything to reap the energy from it.

Most likely the EU created new dependencies, which will bite them in the future.

I'm not assuming that we must trade those features for improved latency. It is a possibility, but there are always alternatives.

Unfortunately in IT you always trade one set of problems for another. And clean architectures have to be watered down with time to stay practical.

Nobody is smart enough to predict all pros and cons accurately. We're always smarter after the fact. When we have finished a transition and gained some experience with the new technology. But then it's mostly too late to go back.

On top of that, computing is always a moving target. Now you have to target highly mobile devices with small batteries traveling at high speed in metal tubes connecting to unreliable networks. While more or less related to keyboard input lag, depending on where the action should be registered, you have to be careful where you spend your development resources.

That's why I think this is an oversimplification. True in its deepest form, but neglecting reality.

Dan Luu's post, which I also read months ago, is very detailed, has a lot of data, but fails to make sense or come to a helpful conclusion in the end. Like so many of his posts.

With helpful conclusion I don't mean just stating the facts or comparing transistors or input latency with network latency. As if developers stopped caring and created crappy software on purpose.

The post compares an Apple 2e, which is a single-tasking OS that just displays the pressed key in the basic interpreter on the screen, and modern devices, where it is not always clear, what kind of app or setup is being used. But we know, that it's plenty of layers of GUI and OS code, that most people don't want to miss. Not to mention, that mot of the higher input lag is not detectable by humans in normal work conditions.

Yes, there were years, were CPU performance couldn't keep up with added features, like immediate spell checking. I used computers through all those years and know this first-hand.

And I never dismissed the importance of input lag. I pointed out the oversimplification to support the main argument of the linked post, which suffers from this as a result.

In my opinion WordPress can be compared to Windows. Not just in terms of security, but everything.

WordPress is the Windows of content management systems.

They both are widely used, have an outdated architecture, are keeping compatibility above all, therefore don't innovate, are very extendable, can run almost anything, and are the go-to for many people.

It's up to you to decide, if these are good things or bad things.

While the premise of the post is interesting, I've stopped reading it when reaching "a computer from 2015 is 2-5 times slower than an Apple 2e from 1986 just at reading a keystroke and displaying it on screen" and only scanned the rest.

If oversimplifications are being used to prove a point, the argument becomes weak.

I actually read it some months ago, because I'm interested in the smol net, and I use and like the Gemini protocol quite a lot.

Unfortunately this post rants against perceived software obesity quite unreflectedly.

I read this article and wanted to weep.

You're mostly right. The problem I experienced is, that those people managing the old machine spec the new to lowly, because the prices are high. The optimize like before: for them and not the users.

The result is not just added latency, but actually slower build times etc. compared to your local laptop, not to speak about a high-performance PC.

Having a managed and even versioned workspace is an awesome proposition.

Unfortunately you pay for a 4-core 8GB RAM instance, which is only used 40 hours a week, more than for a comparable 8 to 16-core 32GB RAM local PC or laptop, which you use for three years.

Computational photography and AI related tasks need a lot more power than just using the UI or browsing the web.

I meant to wrote "That's why both are solutions to the problems the Gemini project is trying to solve." m(

I use Gemini with Lagrange, a Gemini GUI browser, as often as I use a normal web browser or RSS reader to read content. But I enjoy it much more. I'm a less-is-more-person, so it's a good fit for me.

TLS assures that nobody can tamper with the payload during transit. And while there's no POST, you can still post limited amount of data, which the linked article talked about.

Gemtext is a hyperlink format, Gopher is plain text. And some formatting takes you a long way.

HTML cannot easily be read in TUIs and needs layout engines only billion dollar companies can maintain.

Given that there are microblogging (gemini://station.martinrue.com/), reddit with optional git connection to allow for issue tracking (gemini://geminispace.org/), it seems you're wrong.

Markdown is not context-free and therefore hard to parse.

Caching can be abused for tracking.

That's why both are solutions to the problems the Gemini project is trying to solve.

But even a basic access most likely violates the GDPR and other regulations.

Because it's a discount for a family, which wouldn't pay for four separate accounts, but are used to share a lot. Families might share a smartphone, but friends and acquaintances wouldn't.

I only use extensions which have the ability to be limited by the browser to certain sites. Then any potential damage is limited.

E.g. I use an ad-blocker to insert JavaScript only on one site: YouTube.com. But I use an anonymous dummy Google account for YouTube. So if anything gets compromised, I don't really care.

Regarding the downvotes and the second comment on the linked page:

I guess the non-sensical argument "it's not the <insert technology> that <insert and thing>, but the person using the <technology>" will never die out.

If you don't have <the technology>, it's much harder to <do the bad thing>, has to be done hands-on from a very close distance with much higher risk for the perpetrator.

That only works for people with they right passport in the first place. Because if you have the wrong passport, you might not be able to get a visa for the country you want to go to or your stay in this country is very time-limited.