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hostyle

78 karma · joined March 14, 2012

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hostyle··on We built our house for LAN parties (2024)
Look into KVM extenders. Beware though that there are two main types - standard KVM Extenders (which is more or less point to point - you can't connect these to an existing wired network) and IP KVM Extenders (which can run across an existing ethernet or fibre network). Its get complicated but getting those two confused at the outset can lead to a lot of unnecessary pain and expense.
hostyle··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
how will that help? being a business owner magically makes you immune from ai stealing your job?
hostyle··on Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain
> Even if you have an mp3 collection, the streaming apps are good for discovery, recommendations ...

No they are not. Hi there. We noticed you have been listening to Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Deftones. Why not have a listen of this Robbie Williams song too ... blasts out some pop song at extra high volume.

hostyle··on Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout
It would disrupt UKs defence (nuclear submarines in particular) and energy (oil fields) both of which currently are primarily based geographically within Scotlands territory. This is classic Russian tactics. Its not about whether Scotland joins EU or stays with UK, or which is economically or politically the best decision - its about seeding chaos and uncertainty within one of Russias largest antagonists.
hostyle··on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
Most people spend maybe 1/4 of their working age life at a job working for someone else. Why would you deliberately sabotage that by checking out mentally and waste all that time on sub-standard work? How do you expect to earn a promotion? You can produce good code at work and even better code at home for yourself. Deliberately producing slop at work will not help anyone.
hostyle··on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
Not everything is about money. Have you never wanted to be good at something because you enjoy it? Or do something for the love of the craft? Have you heard of altruism?
hostyle··on Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?
Popular isn't necessarily good, and success can be measured in many different ways.
hostyle··on Microsoft won't let me pay a $24 bill, blocking thousands in Azure spending
Maybe don't use Azure? It's not like there are no other options ...
hostyle··on OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race
wasn't it always?
hostyle··on Denmark summons top US diplomat over alleged Greenland influence operation
> Democracy will eventually decay. It's not permanent.

Can a (more or less) two party system where the population hovers around 50/50 support for each side truly be called a democracy?

hostyle··on Monitor your security cameras with locally processed AI
Its hit and miss to be honest. They do have a day/night mode. One camera is indoors in a shed - it picks up moths (as birds) and even a bat a couple of times. One camera that is outdoors regularly detects the fox that visits us almost every night. However another camera pointed at his next destination never picks the fox up at all. The main difference between the two camera environments appears to be third party lighting - there are street lights in the direction of the one that does not detect the fox, and also the glow of a robot mowers charger light. One or both seems to be putting off the cameras ambient light sensor and prevents night mode from kicking in. The simicams do have some configuration for night mode also, none of which I have tried out yet. Options like infrared lamp vs white lamp vs dual, and day-night mode of "photoresistor" vs "scene brightness" and also some "color to black luma" and "black to color brightness" settings. I should really play with those some more, but they've been left as defaults so far.
hostyle··on Monitor your security cameras with locally processed AI
I picked up a bunch of 4k POE "simicam" cameras from AliExpress for 25 euros each. These serve up RTSP streams to frigate. I made some minor frigate config changes - I set it to keep 7 days of full recordings (just because i am paranoid), so this uses approx 1Tb of storage (5 cameras currently, more to go online soon). Frigate is running on an old laptop with a Coral AI USB and 2Tb NVME for storage. I enabled detection of cars and animals as well as the default of just humans. It works pretty well, but has some annoying quirks, e.g. if a dog runs past where a car is parked it will trigger an alert for both a dog and a car. It also detects weird conglomerate shapes as human sometimes, e.g. a bucket left at the end of some rolled up bird netting with some pieces of timber sticking out underneath can be vaguely human shaped when viewed from a height. I run the free open source version, and I'm sure I could get better results if I played with the configuration more.
hostyle··on Ollama's new app
This link is for the existing cli version, not the new gui app.
hostyle··on My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]
Wait. Were you were investing in that burger?
hostyle··on Manipulating trapped air bubbles in ice for message storage in cold regions
Won't the tree die if covered for an entire year, and thus when you ... EOFError: Please remove tarp
hostyle··on New EU rules on digital accessibility to come into force
The part that you may be missing here is that Europe puts people first. America (in particular, but not exclusively) puts business (or money) first.
hostyle··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
For a long time there has been back chatter on how to turn programming into a more professional field, more like actual engineering where when something goes wrong actual people and companies start to take security seriously, and get held accountable for their mistakes, and start to actually earn their high salaries.

Getting AI to hallucinate its way into secure and better quality code seems like the antithesis of this. Why don't we have AI and robots working for humanity with the boring menial tasks - mowing laws, filing taxes, washing dishes, driving cars - instead of attempting to take on our more critical and creative outputs - image generation, movie generation, book writing and even website building.

hostyle··on Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Recall
"Move fast and break things."

"Its easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission."

There are many other well known mantras that i can't recall right now. SV and VC companies do not care in the slightest about users and their data - only about making more money (which these days always seems to involve stealing^Wwarehousing more and more data).

hostyle··on Canada demands 5% of revenue from Netflix, Spotify, and other streamers
Its to level the playing field. Licensed national broadcasters already have to pay a fee which ends up supporting local news / content. International streamers charging money to Canadians for their attention do not currently pay this fee. It seems only fair that all broadcasters / streamers should have to pay the same fee to access the same market.
hostyle··on Starting emails with "BEGIN PGP MESSAGE" will fool the filter
I have vague memories of it being a Microsoft thing to insert two spaces at the end of every sentence? I could be misremembering.

The bug here was not "begin" followed by two spaces, but rather its "begin" followed by some other text followed by two spaces, which if i recall correctly is exactly what Microsoft would auto-format your text to.

hostyle··on Firefox search update
That says more about the web developers that you know than it does about Firefox.

Its anecdotal I know, but would have to say that I know more web devs who use Firefox as their daily driver (or use more than one browser), than those who use just Safari or Chrome only. The better web developers (better able to solve bugs, and write less error prone code) are the ones who don't use Chrome for everything.

hostyle··on Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise
$ dpkg-query -W liblzma5

liblzma5:amd64 5.4.1-0.2

hostyle··on More Stupid LLM Tricks
Another prompt i have seen that fools some LLMs but not others is "How many legs does a Manx cat have?" Some will answer with the expected four, but some get confused and will tell you that it has no legs (the Manx cat is known for having no tail, but has the standard four legs). I wish I documented it at the time but one LLM even returned the answer that a Manx cat has no legs, and then quoted a long paragraph from somewhere (possibly wikipedia) as a reference that clearly stated it has four legs but no tail.
hostyle··on Platforms are selling your work to AI vendors with impunity. They need to stop
Many tech corporations appear to operate under the "its easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission" mantra. So they simply don't care about copyright. They will happily break the law by downloading millions of copyrighted works, make billions from the results and then eventually pay back a few hundred million to those that it has wronged.
hostyle··on Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero
Perhaps. Or perhaps we are just seeing push back against the long tail of effective corporate lobbying, where every problem is caused by somebody else. See: Coca Colas campaigns to undermine plastic recycling efforts; or Big Oil hiding their own research about climate change since the 1970s; or Monsanto spending millions trying to legally bury the long term effects of the chemicals in their products; or Big Tobacco doing what big corps do.

The problem was never Flipper Zero. The problem was always insecure cars (and other devices). Shareholders don't care about security defects, they only care about the bottom line. Therefore spending a relatively small amount of money on propaganda denying all responsibility and foisting it upon other innocent parties is deemed a success, rather than spending a larger sum on fixing the real issues. Its not FUD, but its something similar.

hostyle··on OpenAI says it's "impossible" to create AI models without copyrighted material
> I do think OpenAI has a point in what they're saying: if we expect human-level competency of AI, it needs to be able to see and train on human-accessible content and ideally with a similar distribution.

Any human who wants to access copyrighted works is by law required to honour the copyright - whether that means purchasing of licenses, timed rental access or immediate cease and desist of usage. Why should AI (and the billion-dollar-backed companies building them) get different treatment?

Or to turn it the other way: if the billion-dollar-backed companies building AI models do get a free pass then surely humans should too?

hostyle··on Apple and Irish Government suffer major setback in €13B EU case
Most landlords (and property owners) in Dublin are not citizens but rather foreign investors and vulture funds.
hostyle··on Distributed Hash Table Protocol (2008)
router.bitcomet.com router.bittorrent.com

the latter runs: https://github.com/bittorrent/bootstrap-dht

hostyle··on Ask HN: What was the easiest buck you've made on the web in 2014?
i have to ask: do you not consider this dishonest? why charge so much for doing so little? sure. people will pay a mint for something they discern as hard andhave no knowledge of, but i have to say i am concerned about your ethics in doing so. this is the ugly side of both capitalism and entrepreneurship.
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