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janwillemb

1,355 karma · joined March 31, 2010

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janwillemb··on System-level ad-blocking in Android
I point "private DNS" to my VPS with pihole and stunnel, works quite well. Adguard as private DNS is also effective.
janwillemb··on Show HN: Hallucinopedia
It's nice, but after a few clicks my LLM content fatigue kicks in.
janwillemb··on I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
That is indeed a similar problem. Europe is now aware of this problem and starting to mitigate it, to reduce dependencies on big tech - how hard that may be.
janwillemb··on I cancelled Claude: Token issues, declining quality, and poor support
This is what worries me. People become dependent on these GenAI products that are proprietary, not transparant, and need a subscription. People build on it like it is a solid foundation. But all of a sudden the owner just pulls the foundation from under your building.
janwillemb··on [dead]
A website that lets you be the "A"I to other people.
janwillemb··on I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978
Same (GP). Schools were really unsafe places for children back then. It always strikes me of you see movies about schools in that period, that the story is often that children get horribly bullied and are called ugly, etc. I am glad my children grow up in better times.
janwillemb··on I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978
Thanks for sharing this. It is so sad! Sorry that there are people like that. The only thing we can do now, is be better people than those horrible teachers.
janwillemb··on I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978
As a 10y old, my father taught me about logical ports. I took a very large piece of paper and in a few days, I designed a tic tac toe "computer". It had LEDs that indicated the next computer move, based on the position of the pieces: every single possible state of the board led to a specific "next move" led. I do not think it actually would have worked, but of course I was very proud of my design at the time. Unfortunately, when I showed it to my teacher, he did not believe that I was serious. "This is a joke, right?" And that was it. Poor kid me... It did not discourage me however. I was a software engineer for a long time, and now I am a CS teacher. And I (try to) never ever discount the efforts of children.
janwillemb··on Suicide Linux (2009)
Douglas Crockford nearly got cancelled because he qualified JavaScript as "promiscuous". People not knowing what the word means plus having a sense of urgency about sensitivity can be a dangerous combination.
janwillemb··on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
> You're experiencing something real that the industry is aggressively pretending doesn't exist.

I agree with the article and recognize the fatigue, but I have never experienced that the industry is "aggressively pretending it does not exist". It feels like a straw man, but maybe you have examples of this happening.

janwillemb··on Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980)
His point is that the Orwellian way of surveillance is impossible to do in practice, and that a proper science fiction writer would have left the surveillance to machines. So I think his critique is about the art of SF writing, not about the prediction of surveillance itself.
janwillemb··on The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible
DNS is only for resolving the host part. The path is not passing through a dns query.

In example.com/blah, the /blah part is interpreted by the host itself.

And apart from that I would indeed consider DNS records a database.

janwillemb··on Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work
Firefox reader mode also helps
janwillemb··on How Markdown took over the world
No, that spec is the failed attempt to standardize by Atwood et al., that Gruber sabotaged.
janwillemb··on How Markdown took over the world
Here is a post from Atwood about it:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

And an interesting discussion on hn about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4700383

janwillemb··on How Markdown took over the world
The writeup does not mention Jeff Atwood (Stackoverflow founder) trying to convince Gruber to standardize markdown. Atwood approached him publicly in a series of blog posts, but Gruber kept silent, and if I remember correctly finally declined stating that he didn't want to spend time jumping through other persons' hoops. Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized, I still see this as an inspiring example of a person just doing what he wants to do.
janwillemb··on Show HN: SMTP Tunnel – A SOCKS5 proxy disguised as email traffic to bypass DPI
I used to host an SSH server at home at port 443, for the same reason! The sysadmin of my employer was so strict that 'solutions' like this were the way of the least resistance. Security gets worse when policies get stricter.
janwillemb··on The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup
He is singlehandedly responsible for using up an entire city's worth of power and water this way?
janwillemb··on Tags to make HTML work like you expect
This comment contains a few logical fallacies.

> It states the cargo culted reasons, but not the actual truth

This dismisses existing explanations without engaging with the mentioned reasons. The following text then doesn't provide any arguments for this.

> Pronunciation is either solved by a) automatic language detection, or b) doesn't matter.

There are more possibilities than a and b. For example, it may matter for other things than pronunciation only. Also it may improve automatic detection or make automatic detection superfluous.

> If I am reading a book [...] I will pronounce it correctly, just like the screen reader will. If I see text in a language I don't recognize, I won't pronounce it correctly, and neither will the screen reader.

A generalization of your own experience to all users and systems. Screen readers aim to convey information accessibly, not mirror human ignorance.

> There's no reason that the screen reader will get it wrong, because <hungarian sentence> isn't ambiguous

This is circular reasoning. The statement is based on the assumption that automatic detection is always accurate - which is precisely what is under debate.

> If you can translate it, you already know what language it is in.

This a non sequitur. Even if someone can translate text, that doesn't mean software or search engines can automatically identify that language.

> The lang attribute adds nothing to the proces.

This absolute claim adds nothing to the logic.

janwillemb··on Tags to make HTML work like you expect
:) true. I'm a teacher myself. I never dismiss questions, but I do get discouraged sometimes.
janwillemb··on Tags to make HTML work like you expect
Thanks! I didn't know that one.

I had a teacher who became angry when a question was asked about a subject he felt students should already be knowledgeable about. "YOU ARE IN xTH GRADE AND STILL DON'T KNOW THIS?!" (intentional shouting uppercase). The fact that you learned it yesterday doesn't mean all humans in the world also learned it yesterday. Ask questions, always. Explain, always.

janwillemb··on Tags to make HTML work like you expect
Doesn't it state this in the article?

> Browsers, search engines, assistive technologies, etc. can leverage it to:

> - Get pronunciation and voice right for screen readers

> - Improve indexing and translation accuracy

> - Apply locale-specific tools (e.g. spell-checking)

janwillemb··on Surveillance data challenges what we thought we knew about location tracking
It is about a company, First Wap, that makes it possible to track individuals. Their USP is a piece of software that operates at phone network level and uses the fact that phone companies still support an old protocol, Signalling System 7:

> Phone networks need to know where users are in order to route text messages and phone calls. Operators exchange signalling messages to request, and respond with, user location information. The existence of these signalling messages is not in itself a vulnerability. The issue is rather that networks process commands, such as location requests, from other networks, without being able to verify who is actually sending them and for what purpose.

> These signalling messages are never seen on a user’s phone. They are sent and received by “Global Titles” (GTs), phone numbers that represent nodes in a network but are not assigned to subscribers.

janwillemb··on Show HN: ASCII Drawing Board
Still only one point
janwillemb··on Show HN: ASCII Drawing Board
Doesn't seem to work on Firefox mobile. On each stroke it only renders one "point".
janwillemb··on Hacking Pinball High Scores
The links in the article are all annotated with a symbol (showing what happens when you click the link?), which breaks the flow of reading imo. I don't feel this helps communicating the message of the article.

[Example](https://imgur.com/a/wWltrg9)

janwillemb··on Suno v4.5
I have the same thing, really annoying. I can wake up at night at the same song too. I stopped listening music hours before bedtime, but that doesn't always help and I also tend to forget. I'll try out suno for this purpose. What do you use for prompting, if you want to share?
janwillemb··on Which year: guess which year each photo was taken
Long press the picture, open image in new tab. Then you can zoom.
janwillemb··on The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done
True, but this is about adults in a professional context.
janwillemb··on The ADHD body double: A unique tool for getting things done
I could read it using the reader view
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