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mavamaarten

1,081 karma · joined November 20, 2015

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mavamaarten··on HSBC blocks its app due to F-Droid-installed Bitwarden
My country launched an identification app (https://mygov.be/) that does the same thing. I have no idea what they're trying to achieve. Security through obscurity? Trying to piss off power users?

I'm a developer and use adb and some dev settings daily. Annoying af to have to disable developer mode constantly.

mavamaarten··on AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos
It's awful :(

I saw a video I wanted to share with someone, but it was part of a compilation. So you just search for it, right?

So I searched "cat lets brick fall onto mouse" and got... 100000 AI generated videos of cats with bricks? And cats with mice and cats being rescued by people (like you said). But not the video I was looking for.

We've totally passed the point where real information is impossible to find anymore. Video generation was really out of reach / delayed for a long time, and honestly all of those probably have a digital watermark in them that could be detected. YouTube could have prevented this if they'd have just been more proactive with detection and filtration. A simple "AI generated" and "not AI generated" filter would have prevented this.

mavamaarten··on Ask HN: What would you do if you didn't work in tech?
I'd probably be an electrician or fabrication (3D printing / CNC). Or does that count as tech?
mavamaarten··on Charles Proxy
If the devs behind Charles would just tweak their UI a bit, it would be the absolute perfect tool. Functionally it pretty much already is. Mainly being able to turn on and off and configuring features I use all the time (rewrite, map local, map remote) is always a journey through menu's that don't always make sense. The only functional thing I'm missing is some DNS stuff (e.g. throttling or breaking DNS specifically).

I tried using proxyman for a while, and while definitely powerful and more modern, it honestly didn't feel "better" or more powerful so I didn't go for yet another license.

mavamaarten··on iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]
I personally haven't found any keyboard that works better than gboard. And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.
mavamaarten··on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?
Yup. I would never be able to give my Jira tickets to an LLM because they're too damn vague or incomplete. Getting the requirements first needs 4 rounds of lobbying with all stakeholders.
mavamaarten··on Show HN: Boing
Heh. I expected it to be this one https://youtube.com/shorts/ocvBI_vtJwA
mavamaarten··on We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
I'm not going to share my employer, but this is exactly how we operate. Bugs first, they show up on the Jira board at the top of the list. If managers would abuse that (they don't), we'd just convert them to stories, lol.

I do agree that it's rare, this is my first workplace where they actually work like that.

mavamaarten··on A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
That's the problem in my country. They're not afraid of anyone. It's a true duopoly here. There's no FCC to complain to, I guess the most you can do is weasel your way out of your contract but that leaves you with no internet. Local politicians don't give two shits (nor do they have any power). You could switch to a different provider, but their network is either copper (aka low speeds and unstable) or fiber (which is a hollow promise right now - there just isn't any fiber in my area).
mavamaarten··on Germany: States Pass Porn Filters for Operating Systems
My visceral reaction is to the slippery slope, and the fact that our government is not to be trusted.

I'm honestly not against blocking social media for children. It's just sad that we got to this point. In an ideal world, parents would be the gatekeepers and the reason for not allowing their kids to use TikTok would be that it's simply not good for them. But I'm not happy with the solution, which means that you need a way to prove your age and/or identity to all these sites. Mkey. I guess. For social media that's one thing, but you already see that they're very keen on applying that same thing for porn now? Why? That gives my government highly fucking sensitive information about me. I seriously detest that thought, so I'd rather just not give any government the tools to interfere and/or closely watch what I do.

mavamaarten··on Germany: States Pass Porn Filters for Operating Systems
Okay. I hear your struggles and want to ask: would you rather give others the tools to block your porn, or would you rather have easier access to help?
mavamaarten··on FreeMDU: Open-source Miele appliance diagnostic tools
After having used their repair service for over 10 times for my dishwasher during its warranty period and having broken off its front handle (well, the entire front panel really) after 2 more years, I'm never buying an AEG device ever again. I opened it up and fixed it myself, and oh my god, the whole thing just screamed cost cutting. They literally used the power button of a different model or machine, and then just mounted a different power button on top that presses the underlying one. And of course the load bearing thing that holds the front panel and display onto the door frame is a just two tiny bolts in the corners. Great idea to have the entire thing flex constantly in one place. Absolute junk.
mavamaarten··on I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
An AI that automatically clicks through cookie walls, declining everything: yes please!

Chatbot integration number 7193: no thanks.

mavamaarten··on Steam Frame
Exactly. Performance is welcome for everyone. AR is, right now, a gimmick that would eat into performance if you kept the price point the same. Good choice by Valve imo.
mavamaarten··on Steam Frame
I'm sure they did their market research. For me it's the exact opposite. Performance is absolutely key to me, and AR is just a fad in my eyes. All it does for me is give a glimpse into the real world if I'm about to bump into something. AR games are scarce and have never truly impressed me.
mavamaarten··on Steam Frame
Well. It doesn't say in any docs or specs, but for what it's worth, Valve's hardware has always been open like that. You're free to install windows on your steam deck, for example.
mavamaarten··on Steam Frame
I have a quest 2 where the passthrough is laughable. Would you really use it for anything other than getting a glimpse of the outside world? I sure don't, but that may be because of the shitty camera's. But I never saw the appeal of passthrough anyways, isn't the point of a VR headset to see a different reality? Like, not the real world?
mavamaarten··on Steam Frame
I would agree, but I'm a bit sad about the resolution. I either want a mediocre resolution for cheap, or a can-do-it-all machine with great resolution for more money. I'm fearful that because of its great computing specs it's going to be expensive, but it's not going to be good enough for me visually to be used a lot.

I mean, I have a Quest 2 and it'd be a step up but not a huge one. I've seen the Apple Vision and that did wow me. The vision is just in a weird corner inside a closed ecosystem and a tech demo for apple. No thanks. Valve will absolutely do that ten times better. But will it be visually so much better than a quest 2? I doubt it.

mavamaarten··on Steam Machine
If it's just plug and play and works well, it'd be brilliant. I have experimented a lot with a couple or wifi dongles I had lying around and setting up a hotspot, but honestly I could never get it to work well.

Streaming VR content is just so sensitive. I have a good cabled network but even a simple switch introduced noticeable lag spikes. In the end I have a separate router that I just connect straight to my PC, and then I share my wifi connection through my PC to that network. A whole silly setup just to minimize latency and packet loss. If that could be replaced with a simple USB dongle I'd be amazed.

mavamaarten··on Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support
Hah. I always assume it's them actively trying to make the experience worse on anything that is not Chrome.
mavamaarten··on Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)
Exactly this. The perfect example is Google Assistant for me. It's such a terrible service because it's so indeterministic. One day it happily answers your basic question with a smile, and when you need it most it doesn't even try and only comes up with "Sorry I don't understand".

When products have limitations, those are usually acceptable to me if I know what they are or if I can find out what the breaking point is.

If the breaking point was me speaking a bit unclearly, I'd speak more clearly. If the breaking point was complex questions, I'd ask simpler ones. If the breaking point is truly random, I simply stop using the service because it's unpredictable and frustrating.

mavamaarten··on Kerkship St. Jozef, Antwerp – WWII German Concrete Tanker
Church ship or kerkschip, but kerkship is an incorrect combination indeed.
mavamaarten··on Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest
That's the first thing I thought when opening it. Sure looks like a "make me an app" response that Claude would output.

I mean nothing wrong with that, I needed a silly calculator thingimabob too yesterday (for some CRC checks on a piece of text) and Claude quickly cooked something up for me.

But I'm not writing blog posts about it, releasing the tool in the wild, and claiming I wrote it. Blegh.

mavamaarten··on We need a clearer framework for AI-assisted contributions to open source
Well, I gotta use whatever my organization whitelists and provides me a license for. I do use Claude models inside copilot (for Ask/Edit/Agent mode).
mavamaarten··on We need a clearer framework for AI-assisted contributions to open source
My opinion swings between hype to hate every day. Yesterday all suggestions / edits / answers were hallucinated garbage, and I was ready to remove the copilot plugin altogether. Today I was stuck at a really annoying problem for hours and hours. For shits and giggles I just gave Claude a stacktrace and a description and let it go ham. It produced an amazingly accurate thought train and found my issue, which was not what I was expecting at all.

I still don't see how it's useful for generating features and codebases, but as a rubber ducky it ain't half bad.

mavamaarten··on Valetudo: Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation
Haha yeah that's exactly what I did with my roborock as soon as I rooted it. The voice sentence "Going back to the dock" had such a weird accent that I immediately replaced it. So awesome to be able to do that with a device you own.
mavamaarten··on Valetudo: Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation
Ew.

I wholly agree with the anti-closed vibe. I even run Valetudo on my roborock. But lol I just want to control my vacuum cleaner locally and that's it. I haven't updated mine for years exactly because I just want shit to work and not have to be constantly fixing things and "be confronted".

mavamaarten··on Fallout from the AWS outage: Smart mattresses go rogue
Soooo you couldn't change some mattress setting on a cloud-controlled mattress. Not exactly "ruin sleep worldwide" and "go rogue". What trash journalism.

Also those images, wow, I really would have preferred no images over these soulless, generic AI-generated impressions.

mavamaarten··on Duke Nukem: Zero Hour N64 ROM Reverse-Engineering Project Hits 100%
In my limited experience (my use case was a decompiled minified jar that I just wanted to peek around in), LLM's are absolutely fantastic at it.

As with any LLM output, of course it won't be 100% perfect, and you shouldn't treat the output as truthful "data". But I could absolutely use it to make sense of things that at first sight were gibberish, with the original next to it.

mavamaarten··on Sora 2
Ugh. While technically extremely impressive, I'm so tired of the slop. Every AI content generation tool should have a watermarking system in place, and sites like YouTube should have a way to filter out AI generated content from search results with the press of a button.

Ever since the launch of Veo, there's already so much AI slop videos on YouTube that it becomes hard to find real videos sometimes.

I'm tired, boss.

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