kalaksi

Thanks for the context. I don't really know the Taiwan situation well.

My main gripe was mostly around the perceived reasoning that ethnicity or culture of some people would make it more okay to try to annex, or invade, anything.

> When it comes to Japan in particular, the deepest desire in many Chinese hearts is for Japan to start a war first—so China can finally settle the historical score once and for all. But even in that scenario, turning Japan into “part of China” is not on the table.

From GP. That is also a bit worrying to me. Who decides what's the fair "historical score"? But mostly, people shouldn't desire for war or use past wars as a reason for new wars. This is more complicated than ethnicity or culture, but it's dangerous and people should just learn to let go or it never stops.

False flag attacks are a thing and have been used many times as a pretext for an attack. Russia has done it. Russia also often uses history as an excuse for new wars. I'm sure it's always possible to dig out some rationalization. The result is mostly more suffering of innocent (who might not have even been born during the cited conflict).

I don't claim to know the Taiwan situation well. I'm just saying that culture or ethnicity of people isn't a sufficient argument in general.

> Taiwan is different: the vast majority of people there are ethnically Chinese, so reunification is seen as an absolute necessity.

How does that make it a "necessity"? It's not for China to decide? This is the reasoning Russia uses when invading neighboring countries. To "protect" russian people and claim that <insert part of country> are russians anyway and want to get annexed (still wouldn't make it right). If someone wants to join Russia, they should move to Russia.

(Or maybe it could happen through some longer and slower political process. And the country as a whole should agree, with a lot more than 50% agreeing, to a unification.)

> The Chinese way of thinking is that only after a group has been fully Sinicized (language, culture, identity) can they be considered “one of us.”

Like above, I hope you're not implying that a culturally similar people in another country #2 somehow gives country #1 power over it's sovereignity.

> western homeless crisis

Haven't really heard about this crisis. Are you referring to the US?

Algorithms that are profit-motivated (trying hard to get you hooked) also reward "engaging" content which means clickbait, ragebait and content that often triggers some emotions and is easy to consume. So not the most balanced content.

They still have VPSes with 2G of RAM? I'm checking the cloud price page* and you can get CX23 with 2 vCPU, 4G RAM and 20TB of traffic (seems to say that it's 1TB for US) for 3,49€/month (~4 USD).

You can save additional 0,50€ if you go with only IPv6.

Maybe it's location dependent, I can't get it to show me prices for US.

* https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

When I'm doing the coding myself, I'm at least making steady progress and the process is predictable. With LLMs, it's a crapshoot. I have to get the AI to understand what I want and may have try again multiple times, many times never succeeding, and end up writing a lot of text anyway. And in between, I'll have to read a lot of code that probably ends up being thrown away or heavily modified. This probably depends a lot on what kind of project one is working on, though.

But it's like you said, I like using LLMs for completing smaller parts or asking specific kind of help or having conversations about solutions, but for anything larger, it just feels like banging my head to a wall.

For me, it feels so fake that I'd rather have it not try to be nice. I guess I've gotten a bit used to it and ignore it for most parts.

Yes, immediately felt weird and a bit uncomfortable. I can almost see, or kind of sense, all those parts moving in the image even though I can only see the movement clearly in the center. I can easily imagine getting a headache from watching that for a longer time.

I was actually glad they went with AA batteries for the controllers. They are easily replaced, of course, and I already have a charger on a shelf with AA/AAA batteries always ready to go. I tend to avoid internal batteries if I can also so that I don't have to manage them so much or wait for charging. Had my DS4 controller internal battery go bad after a year probably because the battery got deeply discharged a few times. Not buying that again.

I was just pointing out to parent that it already happens...

> I would love to see this taken one step further and have states/countries prevent companies from tracking me altogether if I reject their cookies

You're in luck since EU's GDPR is about informing users of PII harvesting and consent in general (among other things). So the banner is not only about cookies. And I think nowadays there are similar regulations elsewhere.

Zero-click RCE tracked as CVE-2025-48593.

Years ago, I specifically went with zigbee because it's low-power and a simpler protocol stack (and open). No need to even think if the device will run offline or what kind of API it will use. I'm running HA and all the hardware I needed was a USB zigbee dongle and that's it. You pair your sensors, outlets etc. to it using a GUI and by pressing a physical button. No need to coordinate anything yourself, the mesh network can take care of itself.

I agree, but your camera doesn't currently have Android either, so you're comparing current situation to what could be. The manufacturers could fix the bugs and make pairing more useful. I'd rather have manufacturers app on my phone than Android on my camera.

You can pair the camera with your Android phone and use that to do whatever.

But also, manufacturers could do apps and support APIs without adding a whole Android OS with all the downsides that it entails.

But maybe we're talking about different kind of cameras.

You don't need Android for that (thank god).

I initially started programming with C++, then did a bunch of scripting languages and then Rust and C#. I feel like there are pros and cons to strictness.

I don't like all scripting languages, but Python, for example, has a simple syntax and is easy and fast to learn and write. I think it also has a good standard library. Some things can be simpler because of the missing guardrails. But that's also the weakness and I wouldn't use it for large and complex software. You have to be more mindful to keep a good style because of the freedoms.

C++ and Rust are at the opposite end. Verbose to write and more difficult syntax. More stuff to learn. But in the end, that's the cost for better guarantees on correctness. But again, they don't fit all use cases as well as scripting languages.

I've experienced the good and the bad in both kind of languages. There are tradeoffs (what a surprise) and it's probably also subjective what kind of language one prefers. I think my _current_ favorites are Rust, C# and Python.

For now.

For me, this limitation applies only to my phone. I have plenty of other wireless devices and deliberately prefer devices that can use AA batteries. One reason is that I don't have to manage the multitudes of internal batteries as much and I need only 1 battery charger with batteries always ready to go. And obviously, battery going bad won't make my device useless (My DS4 controller's internal battery went bad in about a year. So I'm sticking with xbox controllers.)

Not my experience. I've tried several such cameras and most of them are underpowered and suffer from very low fps or are fine when there's no movement but with movement the fps drops drastically essentially making the camera close to useless.

I agree about manual file hashing. For data that rarely changes it also has some benefits.

Some time ago, I ended up writing a couple of scripts for managing that kind of checksum files: https://github.com/kalaksi/checksumfile-tools

ah, right!

I don't get it. Then you just install the tool outside of venv? then it's installed for your user account.

I think you're assuming an ideal world where there's no information asymmetry, all the market participants receive and understand all the information and the risks, and clients could realistically move to an alternative platform that provably handles things better.

> it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first

While it's obvious that everybody makes mistakes and has blind spots, I'd wager that, in general, being more knowledgeable gives you better tools to spot actual holes.

And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.

I don't think it's so black-and-white. There are multiple forces at play simultaneously.

I agree that people don't care enough about owning their data for it to matter more than what the companies want to push, which is of course monetizing the data and maximizing user lock-in.

Similarly, I think it's in the companies' interests to use non-swappable batteries: simpler and cheaper to manufacture (I think this is the main reason) and the device is made obsolete earlier which is an added bonus. Maybe small improvements in size etc., but that's a very small difference. Modern phones are already larger even with non-swappable batteries so I'm not sure it mattered. But again, having a non-swappable battery has to be weighed against other features, and availability of alternatives. In the end, people just care more about the other features, even though swappable battery would be a good thing.

Just to conclude: I don't believe markets work to fully cater to what customers actually want. It's more like customers (and other parties) get a compromise between what different parties in the market want.

I've used zfs and btrfs and while I haven't quite lost data, I have also hit some unnerving pitfalls / sharp edges that have confirmed that I should keep at least one copy using just LUKS + ext4. I like the features but I think the more complicated filesystems bring about other kind of risks.

I don't think you actually know the history.

I see your point but code isn't completely detached from it's writer. Of course, you have to be able to receive criticism and not take it too personally, but I don't think you can just use all kinds of overly harsh and unconstructive language about the code and then claim it's only about the code and doesn't reflect on the author at all, so it's okay. After all, who's the one that writes the "incomprehensible" "garbage code".