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josteink

15,173 karma · joined September 5, 2011

General stance: open or not at all.

https://jostein.kjonigsen.net

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josteink··on X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok
> hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation?

Its the usual deal from the that crowd:

- when the left does it, it’s just them using their civil liberties

- when the right does it, its illegal manipulation, election interference, fascism and/or Russian disinformation.

It’s the same crowd which keeps using the phrase “our democracy”.

Behaviour like this really makes me wonder who they are, and who they deem not worthy to be included in “their” democracy.

josteink··on Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode
> Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/

It's not even rotting away. It was never completed.

It's XCode 26, and you still can't have the navigator and tabs work like in all other software on all other operation system, also including MacOS.

It's absolutely bonkers, and one of the reason's I decided to use Emacs if possible when working on "XCode projects".

XCode is good for project-reconfiguration and step-by-step debugging, but as an editor it's absolutely unusable.

josteink··on Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support
I’m talking about that developer, yes. And I’m sure there’s more to the story than just ABI compatibility.

He wanted X11 to thrive. Freedesktop however has a goal for Wayland ultimately to replace X11, right? X11 should die. This is not hyperbole. It’s a stated goal.

So I think there’s more to the story than the simplified ABI aspect often mentioned here on HN.

Also Gnome killing X11 support is real.

So is KDE backing down on BSD-support.

These are facts, not opinions.

josteink··on Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support
> All I want is init scripts and X11, but the horizons are shrinking. I've already compromised with systemd, and I don't like it. I see BSD in my future

Freedesktop wants to kill X11 and are working continuously on that, to the point if rejecting patches and banning developers.

Popular desktop environments are increasingly depending on Linux-only things. KDE has officially removed support for FreeBSD in Plasma login manager (because of logind dependency).

Gnome 50 plans to obsolete X11 completely.

If you want that simple, bright future of yours, you’ll have to fight/work for it.

josteink··on It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
When on macOS using Finder I often wish I had something as nice and consistent and usable as Nautilus.

Finder is genuinely horrible. It’s obvious no one at Apple cares about files anymore nor anyone working with them.

We’re all supposed to consume cloud these days or so it seems.

josteink··on Linux is good now
> How much work is it to get snaps out of your way?

If you don’t want what makes Ubuntu Ubuntu, why not just run vanilla Debian instead?

josteink··on Windows 11 Outperforming Linux on an Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop
Could this be due to how Windows vs Linux does process scheduling on CPUs with P- and E-cores?

To my knowledge Linux isn’t that capable on BIG.little architectures, and Linux power-management (as this intersects with) has always left a little to be desired - when comparing battery life to Windows.

Disclaimer: pure speculation. Possibly misinformed :-D

josteink··on Backing up Spotify
> It sucks too. The way folks discover music is important. The convenience of streaming has lead to some interesting outcomes.

I think carefully curating music was something we did when music was a scarce commodity. Our collection was limited by how much we could afford to acquire. As such, acquiring the right stuff become a valued skill, not only for DJs, but for music enthusiasts just playing music at home.

Streaming killed all that. For 99.9% of the people out there, streaming has all they need and will ever need, at a fixed cost. It's absolutely abundance.

So the skill of curating music as a human activity went out the window as well, because there's no cost in playing the wrong track and deciding you didn't like it, before moving to the next item in your AI-generated playlist.

Put bluntly: How people discover music isn't important. At least not anymore.

(And I say this as a music enthusiast myself)

josteink··on Backing up Spotify
> What.CD [0] was widely considered to be the music library of Alexandria, unparalleled in both its high quality standard and it's depth.

It was quality in technical quality of the audio in the files, but also in the organization and sourcing of the material, the QA-process of the encoding - down the the specific release the audio-file was from.

There was quantity, sure, but that was secondary to the quality. The quantity was just a side-effect of the place being known for quality, making it an attractive arena to participate in.

And it also had all the "weird"/non-standard things you don't find on mainstream streaming-services precisely because that is what independent curators are good at and often driven by.

This Anna's release... While in itself impressive in many ways does not compare to the things What.CD represented. It's almost the exact opposite:

- focus on most popular content - niche content (even by mainstream Spotify-standards) is not included

- quality is 160kbps ogg files, which is far from lossless, it's not tightly coupled to a release and even as so far the audio-grading goes, there's no transparent QA process for the content, nor is it available in audiophile fidelity.

This is definitely Apples vs Oranges.

josteink··on Skills for organizations, partners, the ecosystem
Is that intentionally designed to completely occupy the full context window of the earlier GPT models?

Either way, that’s hilarious. Well done.

josteink··on Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates
While clever, as a Scandinavian I regret to inform you that I would read that as: Uh Uh Seven, not (double) Oh Seven ;)
josteink··on Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach
It seems very politically convenient to be able to hide that one number behind the other. To obfuscate something highly controversial by making it artificially conflated with something everyone would agree on with.

This is what governments do when they want to avoid public scrutiny. This is not the win you are looking for.

josteink··on Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach
These tweets had 33 views. At least before being made a charge.

I think that puts the likelihood-factor at zero.

josteink··on Independent review of UK national security law warns of overreach
> mass surveillance comes from the European Council, the thing is that literally are "just" the locally elected leaders...

Factually incorrect.

The European Parliament is elected. The Council is appointed, so there is no direct democratic incentive for the council to act on and no direct electorate to please.

On top of that the actually elected European Parliament can only approve (or turn down) directives authored by the Council. They have no authority to draft policies on their own.

To make matters even worse the European Council, which drafts the policies, has no public minutes to inspect. Which obviously makes it ripe for corruption. Which evidently there is a lot of!

Looking at the complete picture, the EU looks like a construct designed intentionally to superficially appear democratic while in reality being the opposite. The more you look at how it actually works, the worse it looks. Sadly.

Europe deserved something better than this.

josteink··on Show HN: I made a down detector for down detector
If my checks are correct, this site uses Cloudflare for DNS and AWS for hosting.

So if any of the things you want to know is down is down, chances are this site will be too ;)

josteink··on I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something…

But are you accusing someone of promoting vendor lock-in (cloudflare) while at the same time promoting vendor lock-in (tailscale)?

If you’re ok with vendor lock-in, shouldn’t you in theory be ok with any vendor?

josteink··on AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem
Incorrect.

AirPods noise cancellation can be controlled by holding the AirPod stalk.

And that’s not an excuse or a workaround: That’s how I always do it. I’ve never bothered doing it through software on my iDevices, because that’s much more cumbersome.

josteink··on The disguised return of EU Chat Control
So you’re just going to accept a digital invasion happening and not care, because of some semantics and details somewhere in a document which was penned 200 years prior to the internet being invented?

I don’t know about you, but to me that seems kind of naive and short sighted.

josteink··on The disguised return of EU Chat Control
That’s just semantics.

If a website which otherwise wouldn’t censor you begins to censor you because of threats from foreign nations, that’s a foreign nation pressuring an American company into suppressing rights of American citizens.

That’s a foreign nation imposing on your rights. In the past that used to require an invasion, so it was a bit more obvious what was happening, but the result is still the same.

Yes it’s through a website, which is owned by a company, which technically speaking owes you nothing.

In the digital age though, where are you going to use your speech, if not on a website?

What you (and others) are doing is trying to reduce the significance of a major transgression over a minor technicality. Way to miss the forest for trees.

The EU can stuff it on this one. And I supported (still support!) the GDPR.

josteink··on The disguised return of EU Chat Control
So they’re asking American companies to repeal the first amendment rights of American citizens on all websites accessible in the EU.

How this not a declaration of war?

josteink··on Think in math, write in code (2019)
> Or even: 1. Test 2. Implement IMO, this last popular approach gets things completely backwards. It assumes there is no need to think about the problem before hand

I think you misunderstand this approach.

The point of writing the tests is to think about the desired behaviour of the system/module you are implementing, before your mind gets lost in all the complexities which necessarily happens during the implementation.

When you write code, and hit a wall, it’s super easy to get hyper-focused on solving that one problem, and while doing so: lose the big picture.

Writing tests first can be a way to avoid this, by thinking of the tests as a specification you think you should adhere to later, without having to worry about how you get there.

For some problems, this works really well. For others, it might not. Just don’t dismiss the idea completely :)

josteink··on A brief look at FreeBSD
I fondly remember working with FreeBSD in my younger days when I would tinker more.

Back in those days I could make any Windows installation unrecoverable. I could severely botch a Linux system. But FreeBSD would always keep chugging, no matter what crazy idea I wanted to try.

It may not be the fastest. It may not be the flashiest. But in my mind, it has this whole "reliability" thing written all over it like no other OS has.

For instance, when I was a student (and thus poor), I had a PC made of (free) scavenged parts. It wouldn't boot Windows. Linux would crash during boot. But FreeBSD just chugged along like there were no issues at all.

I later discovered there were some physical issues with the UDMA mode on the IDE controller, and that's probably what tripped of the other OSes, but FreeBSD would just work. Albeit slowly, but it actually ran fine. For years.

So while I no longer rely on FreeBSD myself, I look back on it with fondness. That's also why I decided to help port .NET to FreeBSD when the first cross-platform version of .NET Core was launched (for Windows, Linux and Mac only). I thought every decent OS deserved to have a working .NET version ;)

josteink··on X.org Security Advisory: multiple security issues X.Org X server and Xwayland
I started programming on the Tandy TRS-80. Never made significant X11 contributions.

So I doubt age is the deciding factor ;)

josteink··on X.org Security Advisory: multiple security issues X.Org X server and Xwayland
I think the short story is that the people who develop Wayland are the people who used to develop Xorg.

And they’d rather spend their energy on giving you a compelling reason to switch, rather than using it to add to the reasons for staying on a project they now consider obsolete.

You may disagree with their assessment, but you can’t blame them for how they decide to prioritize.

josteink··on How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM
I bought one to replace my aging Amazon Kindle Oasis, after the DRM move.

I've loaded it up with the epubs I have in my Calibre library (which ironically contains mostly books I've bought from Amazon before they made stripping DRM unreasonably hard).

Now I won't buy anything from Amazon because I can't strip the DRM, and hence can't read the books on my e-reader of choice.

Their loss, not mine.

josteink··on DDoS Botnet Aisuru Blankets US ISPs in Record DDoS
> That would be really easy to block -- if we were on IPv6.

Make that: If the service being attacked was on IPv6-only, and the attacker had no way to fall back to IPv4.

As long as we are dual-stack and IPv6 is optional, no attacker is going to be stupid enough to select the stack which has the highest probability of being defeated. Don't be naive.

josteink··on DDoS Botnet Aisuru Blankets US ISPs in Record DDoS
> How about we actually finally roll out IPv6 and bury CGNAT in the graveyard where it belongs?

That depends on the service you are DDosing actually having an IPv6 presence. And lots of sites really don't.

It doesn't help if you have IPv6 if you need to fallback to IPv4 anyway. And if bot-net authors knows they can hide behind CGNAT, why would they IPv6 enable their bot-load when all sites and services are guaranteed to be reachable bia IPv4 for the next 3 decades?

(Disclaimer: This comment posted on IPv6)

josteink··on Android's sideloading limits are its most anti-consumer move

   git clone
   repo init
   make lunch
   "Can’t get more open source than that!"
Man that seems like a long time ago, eh?
josteink··on Vite+ – Unified toolchain for the web
> Even autotools feels nice in comparison to that mayhem.

For all its warts and all the hate that it gets, at least autotools is stable and not introducing breaking changes.

josteink··on About the security content of iOS 15.8.5 and iPadOS 15.8.5
The camera clicked, but they were never saved. Hard to back that up, really.
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