jeroenhd

The EU would be better off promoting separatism for the redneck states rather than specifically supporting California. Direct trade with California is tough, but if the southern states were to fall off, the east coast of the USA would still provide a decent area to trade with.

This article is the most engineered rage bait I've seen so far. We've got 15 minute cities, COVID, work from home, "who pays for it" for public services, congestion pricing, somehow even NATO and the WHO got mentioned.

Add some outrage over bike paths (for or against) and this post will circulate reddit for weeks!

For context: 21% VAT and Amazon resellers pretending 1 euro is worth 1 dollar in their pricing makes for the biggest price difference between what I found and what you bought.

From what I can tell, the affordable BD players cannot play all discs. They can read (and probably write) all data discs, but when I buy a disc, there's no guarantee I will be able to rip it and make it accessible over my LAN. That's the kind of drive I want, and that's what ends up getting scalped.

I could write a program that does this of course, but interpreting the current state of Slack threads is not something a Python script will be able to do without involving another LLM. I automated and script what I need or want to automate and script already, but for things like this where understanding of language is useful, I leave it to the slop machine.

Things like "this is a holiday in country X but only for people living in province Y except for in town Z" are massive pain to script. Plus, if the issue tracker and source control automation were working correctly, I wouldn't need to read the status of both to get a good understanding of the situation. Any time scripting there should probably be spent (by someone else) on fixing the problem in the first place.

When Claude eventually doubles or triples the token cost to stop hemorrhaging money, I'm going to lose these scripts and I won't be upset about it in the least. But until then, my "somewhat understanding of context" script-but-not-really setup is proving quite useful.

There's a piece of merch that I want to buy that will take weeks to ship to where I live. I currently have nothing that's capable of playing optical disks, so I was looking into buying a drive that can help me out (I'd rather rip the thing and stuff it into my Jellyfin than deal with a dedicated machine hooked up to my TV).

I can take a $120 gamble to just buy a USB BD-drive and hope the disc isn't DRM'ed enough to make it a problem, but I'd rather just be sure and grab a drive that can rip everything. Unfortunately, because we can't have anything nice, scalpers make these drives impossible to obtain.

I've looked into that, but it looks like the drives are ten or twenty times as expensive as a normal DVD reader capable of reading discs. Any time anyone publishes firmware for a new, affordable drive that can rip movie discs, the drives quickly go out of stock.

Yes, as the article states, the $22 is for buying a USB DVD drive. I don't think many PCs come with optical media readers these days.

At work, I have my Claude set up to go through the issue tracker, source control, dashboards, team Slack channels, calendar appointments, and have it look for things like upcoming scheduling issues and deadlines that might get tough. A lot of those services need a corporate VPN or access to my local machine for the LLM to get the information right.

Nothing I can't do myself (and generally I do keep an eye on that sort of thing), but it did catch a holiday for my foreign team members that seemed to have gone unnoticed, and remarked about a status mismatch between Jira and source control that made the dashboard misrepresent progress. It's not much, but it's an extra little check that works quite well.

Another trick I'm experimenting with is having Claude rebase my open PRs waiting for review every day, and auto-solving conflicts when they arise. I don't trust it enough to let it push code to the repository, but I think I have the prompt set up in such a way that I might soon start using it.

Hopefully anyone who wants to run anything other than Windows on an Nvidia-produced device has learned their lessons at this point. Although, a cursed Nvidia Hackintosh would be extremely funny.

For normal people, there are three computer operating systems: Windows, Apple, and ChromeOS. Nvidia isn't going with ChromeOS and Apple hates their guts, so Windows is the only normal operating system they can market.

Their marketing makes clear that these devices aren't the piddly Chromebooks that ruined the desktop experience for so many people (expensive Chromebooks were nice, but rare in practice).

Qualcomm promised Linux support, failed to deliver, and now anybody burnt by their promise won't want to buy their hardware again. If they promise a Windows PC, people won't have reason to complain when Linux or FreeBSD or SerenityOS won't boot on there. Given Qualcomm's failures here, Nvidia is probably doing the right thing.

> I avoid them on phones as well by just buying Apple

To each their own, but I don't recall Apple ever mainlining any of their drivers on Linux. You're rightfully angry on the laptop side of things, but Apple is much worse than Qualcomm when it comes to open source support for their phones.

Qualcomm probably shouldn't have promised Linux support in the first place. Everyone seems to love Apple's hardware even though you're practically stuck with macOS. Had Qualcomm just stuck to Windows-only, they would've probably received a much better reception by the tech press.

The problem with these chips on Linux is that something has been happening for months but you still end up needing to download special editions of ARM Linux images to get these devices to work properly.

Some distros still need extracting Qualcomm firmware from Windows to get Linux to work properly. Audio remains a challenge, like x86 Linux decades ago. Apparently camera stuff works these days but produces images of subpar quality.

These issues also occur on normal Linux. My experience with my Lenovo+Intel laptop was that it took three months after release for the firmware to work properly (and the Nvidia drivers took much longer, but that's my fault for buying something containing Nvidia hardware). Intel managed to do what Qualcomm did in months rather than years.

I hope Qualcomm finally sorts this shit out, I really do, but with the prices of computers these days, I'm going to need to see quite the discount before I'll consider buying anything with a Snapdragon.

I wish more companies would try to serve tiny shops at the same time they serve multi million euro companies. The requirements for the two are very different, as is the support and customer care requirement. Integrating directly with Adyen as a small business is like running a kubernetes cluster on AWS to host your blog, except they'll have even less time for customer support to spend on your tickets when things don't go right.

Platforms like Stripe where anyone can sign up at any time drive up prices because the amount of low-profit companies needs to be offset by the companies making more. Great for small startups but a bad deal for major companies.

Stripe has also been criticised for forcing growing companies into enterprise plans the moment they hit certain growth numbers. That's one way to keep the business profitable, but it's not necessary if you only take on businesses that are already profitable enough dedicate a sales team onto.

Aside from one or two very bad Bluetooth and WiFi bugs (the worst ones usually being device-specific driver bugs), Android's OS itself actually doesn't have a huge external attack surface. Even if you do break in, the SELinux security mechanisms are a major pain to break through, especially with many devices running model-specific configurations.

The real risk of running old Android versions is that apps can escalate privileges or even get root access because of sandbox bypasses. As long as the pre-existing apps on there are updated against vulnerabilities, it's not easy to break into these things.

If it were, enabling ADB access on these things wouldn't be such a big deal, after all!

The mere concept of having Facebook install a camera into your home should be enough for anyone not to want these devices in their homes (with stock firmware). The hardware is very nice but the software cannot be trusted.

With enough encryption, obfuscation, and security-through-obscurity, you can make it extremely difficult to obtain those keys.

Companies like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony ship consoles that are the target of a very motivated black market/cheating industry, and it usually takes years before any serious leaks surface.

Additionally:

> Note that Cosmos 2546 was launched in May 2020 and so cannot be responsible for the interference events that occurred in 2019. Moreover, Cosmos 2546 was not over Europe during some interference events after May 2020. But during all events on the 75 days shown in Table 1 there was at least one EKS satellite above a 35∘ elevation angle with respect to every reference station that observed the interference. Thus, it is highly probable that the EKS constellation is collectively responsible for the wide-area transient GNSS interference events noted since 2019.

I think I didn't put the emphasis right in my comment above. The code is still fully open source, but the project that produces the code isn't. It's not dissimilar to other projects producing open source software.

This is the first time I've seen a project with this much history in community contributions close down, though. I suspect AI will cause more projects to follow in Ladybird's footsteps.

> Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences.

It probably accelerated the decision, but I don't think that's all of it. I think they're moving in the WebKit/Safari direction: open for you to look at, but not really an open source project.

This just proves that Go URL formatting was a mistake. IPv6 addresses existing long before Go decided on how they should be formatting strings. Python has a similar problem with parts of its standard library.

This is what happens when language and standard library designers ignore a spec like IPv6 for a couple of decades.

Looks like South Korea is taking a page out of its northern neighbour's book.

Will this impact software exported out of Korea? I can't imagine Samsung will gain any popularity if their phones come prepackaged with AI censorship tools. It massively backfired when Apple planned to do it on iPhones.

In a great many cases when it came to academic measurement regarding any geological event or phenomenon, the US has historically been at the forefront and shared data with its allies. Very few of those countries have their own measurement systems set up because the US already has them ready to go anyway.

When the second wave of Trump idiocy hit academic institutions by forcing foreign institutions to sign a document indicating they "do not support DEI", this caused some major trouble. Public institutions gave in to the Americans' demands because there was no way to gather the information necessary to finish research in a reasonable time frame.

I think it's time Europe treated the USA the way they want to be treated, as an outsider and a potential threat, and that it's time to stop seeing them as a partner when it comes to science. We need our own measurements, our own instruments, our own satellites, our own databases, and we need to invest now.

Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism isn't just on the rise in the USA. Plus, now now that many countries are struggling with the increased fuel prices thanks to the USA's invasion of Iran, it's hard to find money to invest in science that a worrying amount of people choose to ignore/pretend doesn't exist because it doesn't suit their personal interests.

> Email is not as urgent as text or phone calls

I receive emails that need immediate attention and texts that can wait a day or two. The only urgency attached to these communication methods is the urgency you assign them.

The limited communication options and the frankly weird choices for what to include and what not to include (no email, WhatsApp and Uber are included?) make this a very weird product in my opinion.

The same can be said about any computer that runs macOS or Windows. Being able to run your own software doesn't have to be a vulnerability per se.

The reflashing interface being available over Bluetooth is weird but you will need physical access to pair with the speaker AFAIK

Edit: I was wrong, this is a BTLE endpoint that works without pairing. In that case, this is a ridiculous vulnerability. I hope they'll patch it in a way that doesn't take away the ability to run your own software.

Because it's already hard enough to get someone to understand what you're saying if you write full, flowing sentences.

Back when I did customer support, I occasionally dealt with people who lacked the capability to express themselves in written language. These weren't people born in other countries or people with some kind of intellectual disability, often they were just never taught how to read/write/compose a message.

There's also a social stigma to sending a job application written like "good. morning. sir i. wnt too. Wrk for ur Compny u. hve job. for Me im steven i.m" and so on, even if the job in question has nothing to do with any form of written communication.

Plus, there are plenty of things people just don't know how to do. I once had to Google "how do I write a letter of resignation" and Google will now generate a fulll message for you if you type "i want quit next month how write".

I think the author of this blog post assuming a prompt to help improve a message (obnoxious glowing button aside) somehow implies that Google thinks they're stupid showcases the perceived link between the ability to write and intelligence.

Obviously, using LLMs for this is just patching over the lack of resources put into (adult) education and literacy, as well as a societal shift to stop treating illiterate people badly. However, structural improvements take many years, probably several rounds of elections, and doesn't help someone today.

21% of Americans are functionally illiterate. 54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level.

Things that seem trivial to someone well-read can be insurmountable tasks for millions of people.

Those people may do fine day to day, you don't need to write all that many emails for many if not most jobs, but when they do need to get their intentions across, things might get dicy.

Or course this solution is far from perfect. If you use LLMs to word your message because you're not very proficient in reading or writing, you may not understand what the output is saying, so you can't verify that it didn't misinterpret you.

Having had to work on an application supposedly supporting cron expressions: the numbers are just the basic parts of the language.

When someone inputs something ridiculous like "5,3/4 4-8,11 1 4,5,6,9-11 */2" you get to enjoy the fun of reverse engineering what they meant (it's never what they actually wrote).

And that's before you get to all the extensions supported in some cron environments (but not all).

I find systemd timers a lot more manageable. Things like having control over whether or not long-running jobs are allowed to overlap and the ability to run tasks between start-finish rather than a fixed time window are major improvements for me. At some point my VPS went down because the backup job ran into some kind of symlink loop and cron just kept spawning more and more backup tasks even though none of them finished.

Having to re-write commands and scripts because CRON had its own special PATH was also a pain point, but the same can be true for some types of systemd timers. But: you can execute those timers manually if you want instead of updating the crontab to trigger in 30 seconds and simply waiting.

Windows has had the rename feature for ages and I don't know why Apple can't just copy that. They've copied plenty of other stuff, why stick with the weirdly restrictive desktop naming scheme?

Making the prompts understandable helps a lot when it comes to preventing your grandma from installing a keylogger. I don't mind the setting not being obvious exactly because people who don't know computers shouldn't be tricked into toggling them.

But it is funny to see the daily barrage of permission prompts fly through when macOS made an entire ad ridiculing Vista for half the popups and permissions macOS requires these days.

Blocking bots is how Cloudflare makes money. There are cheaper CDNs out there but Cloudflare doesn't waste as much of your paid CDN bandwidth on bots.

This has nothing to do with identity and everything with bots and scrapers. Nobody but a handful of advertisers cares about the actual fingerprint of your browser, all they care about is letting through people and rejecting bots.

If tech companies weren't waging a war against public resources in an attempt to get their grubby little hands on every bit of data they can, we wouldn't be in this mess.

If there were a more reliable "I'm not a bot" signal and maybe some reliable method of rate limiting, we could do away with Turnstile and just let people through again. Unfortunately, every well-intended privacy measure is abused by AI's war against the public good.

I have blocked several Asian countries because their IP ranges kept sending stupid scrapers that repeatedly downloaded the same image with a made-up query, bursting through the basic cache setup. Now a billion or so people can't acces my server.

Rate limits didn't work because they kept rotating IP addresses.

I'm pretty sure Turnstyle would allow more people through than my current solution, but this was quick and easy. I expect to have to ban more ASNs from other countries in the future but the worst bots are now gone.