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hellcow

3,695 karma · joined January 31, 2012

https://signal.me/#eu/_jV21dwUUrbXFhPaW7AOCvj54mjGdwZeUDN8_Pi1x9oepqZDCpdDlY_1CVOPi8VY
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hellcow··on Looking forward to Git 2.56 – and 3.0
Behold: https://fil-c.org/

An important improvement over rust is that "Fil-C has no unsafe statement."

hellcow··on GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard
Google can shuttle network requests to any of their other apps (or play services, if that's running) via IPC, even with the network permission disabled in Gboard.

So if you're using Graphene for privacy from Google specifically, it's not safe to install things like Gboard even with the network permission disabled. Even if they don't use IPC in this way today, there's no telling what the Google-of-tomorrow will do.

hellcow··on .name Termination
Seems like you could use an escrow to defeat this and sell domain names safely and easily.
hellcow··on Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
Yes, all this talk about the language used still leads us to the same frustrating outcome: customer pays for something, and at some unspecified point in the future that same thing is taken away from them. I don't care if 6 years earlier I clicked a button that said Pay vs Buy, I care that my purchase is being removed due to some backroom licensing issue.
hellcow··on [dead]
What alternatives do people recommend that are secure and easy to use for nontechnical people with auto-backup?
hellcow··on Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
vimium is my solution to the web.
hellcow··on Chicken Scheme 6.0
There's raylib and sdl2 eggs available. Those are a great place to start.
hellcow··on Chicken Scheme 6.0
The eggs are great. For instance I can be up and running building an SDL2 game or make a webserver quickly.

It has good emacs support with geiser-chicken.

Because it compiles down to C the FFI provides a lot of nice ergonomics beyond what I get with Chez Scheme.

Error messages are actually useful with a stacktrace. Can't overstate this.

It supports optional type definitions which reduces the number of tests I need.

The docs are adequate, though I frequently add "MIT scheme" to my search queries. I wasn't able to get chicken-doc setup in NixOS, and the docs website has gone down on me a bunch lately. I wish Chicken had complete documentation available including its eggs in an offline format, like a PDF.

hellcow··on Fastmail offers EU data region
Fastmail is an Australian company.
hellcow··on Framework discloses data breach via Metabase 0-day
There's no reason Framework needed to be storing this much PII about me all this time including my address, IP addresses and phone number.

I just requested a full delete courtesy of GDPR and CCPA and encourage others to do the same.

hellcow··on Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year
There's a Pink Floyd song about just such a thing, Fletcher Memorial Home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDDzR2zSgsM
hellcow··on For most US drivers, EVs offer emissions benefits and cost savings
Electric cars face a lot of depreciation, so you can get a really good deal on a used one. Plenty of supply, low cost, and cheap to keep running.
hellcow··on I regret migrating to Codeberg
Did we read the same article?

> To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.

This seems like a staggeringly reasonable take.

hellcow··on How I use HTMX with Go
There's security consequences to allowing inline JS, which hyperscript requires.
hellcow··on A Erlang style pure Scheme Webserver and further
It's sad to see the pre-LLM history of this project dating back years completely nuked in favor of this.
hellcow··on Organic Maps
They tried to put ads into Organic Maps, and they only backed down because CoMaps sprung up in response.

Others in the thread highlighted other issues, like Organic Maps' proprietary license for some parts of the repo: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/blob/master/DATA_....

hellcow··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
I'm hoping for a renewed focus on writing software that runs well on constrained machines and helps people get many more years of useful life out of their existing computers.
hellcow··on Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see
GrapheneOS lets you restrict the internet access of any app on install.

But yes, agreed it should be everywhere.

hellcow··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
Apple still pushes ads to you. I can't recall how many times I saw ads in the App Store, and how many times they tried to push me into subscribing to whatever nonsense their executives' KPIs demanded (Apple Arcade+? News+? Music+?). No matter how many times I told Apple "No," they just kept pushing it. And now ads are coming to Apple Maps as well.

GrapheneOS has zero ads in the OS and main services.

hellcow··on Commodore Releases Flip Phone
Sheesh. $500 is a hard pass from me. Too bad because I was psyched to try this.
hellcow··on Chuwi Minibook X
Sure, I _could_ carry more weight, but I'm not sure why I'd _want_ to. Why should I sacrifice for example an extra pair of socks or a shirt, when I don't need to? Having a bigger screen or a faster PC doesn't matter more to me in light of that space and weight trade-off. I use a code editor from 1992, a programming language from 1989, and a tiling window manager with no frills. An N100 is more than enough.
hellcow··on Chuwi Minibook X
I travel with strict luggage limits (both size and weight) and hike all day. Removing weight absolutely helps.
hellcow··on CAPTCHAs can still detect AI agents
Meanwhile the moment I (a human, of which I'm reasonably confident) see a Cloudflare captcha I nope immediately out of the site and block it forevermore in Kagi. It's not worth the waiting game. "Verifying..." lasts ages.

The anime girl captcha works fine and provides no such annoyance.

hellcow··on People Can Record Your iPhone Calls Without You Knowing
Another clanker comment...
hellcow··on Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc
I care that runtime developers know and understand their codebase deeply. 1M LOC written by 1 dev in a short time does not inspire confidence in such an important dependency.

There's no way this code is understood fully by the original author, let alone anyone else. I wouldn't accept this from an intern, let alone in code that's fundamental to my business.

hellcow··on France moves to break encrypted messaging
> WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source

And explicitly does not encrypt metadata.

Meanwhile NSA top brass publicly stated, "We kill people based on metadata."

hellcow··on SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
It's trivial to set up WAL-based streaming backups. Same thing as you'd have with Postgres on GCP. Restore from your latest backup.
hellcow··on StarFighter 16-Inch
The MNT Reform has a trackball option.

https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform

hellcow··on This Month in Ladybird – April 2026
When these mega-companies block new competitors it really ought to be seen as collusion. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft certainly have the resources to test and approve the occasional new browser.
hellcow··on For the first time in history, more Americans are moving to EU than vice versa
I used an immigration service to help me through the process. Alongside that I spent several months learning the language then weeks traveling through PT before making the decision.

You can do the immigration process yourself, but it's a long process with a lot of i's to dot and t's to cross. It was helpful to have experts guiding me through the process. Learning the language also helped a ton. The Portuguese in cities all speak English extremely well, but they really embrace you when they see you putting in some effort to speak Portuguese. I learned with Pimsleur for native pronunciation and Anki frequency vocabulary decks. I had some background with Spanish, so it was easier for me to learn Portuguese than starting from zero.

I also considered Uruguay and Malta but preferred the safety of Portugal and its bigger size.

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