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mftrhu

303 karma · joined May 11, 2017

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mftrhu; my proof: https://keybase.io/mftrhu/sigs/VmVZb3Bi2xjXA9N9Yg55vP7KmmbkF9OSGOZ-ykVkKl4 ]
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mftrhu··on LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'
> If I buy an iPhone, I have the expectation of installing apps on it after purchase, and that necessarily involves a relationship with the app store provider (ie. Apple), not the store I bought the phone from.

That's because Apple supplies both the hardware and the software. Being a software supplier - the only such supplier - they need to keep being involved. This wouldn't be the case if third-party OSes existed for the iPhone - it doesn't need to be the case for M1/M2 MacBooks, for example, thanks to Asahi, or for any x86-based hardware.

mftrhu··on U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective
Thank you. Almost didn't recognize the name, as upside-down as it was.
mftrhu··on My server is a phone now
Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5MA685ApE ?
mftrhu··on The AirPods Effect
You mean, what about the tall, handsome, well-dressed creepy men?

The dichotomy is not conventionally attractive/creepy, it's understands boundaries/creepy.

mftrhu··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Do they, really? Because putting data centers in space would mean multiplying the infrastructure cost by a few orders of magnitude, while being far, far away from cheap energy - photovoltaics would work, certainly, but it will take a lot of it, and it's not like you can just slap panels on the roof - easy cooling, and people.

It's a ridiculous idea, and I don't believe it's what they are really pursuing.

mftrhu··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
You don't necessarily need a computer for that. They built more than a billion typewriters, IIRC.
mftrhu··on Flipper One – we need your help
Yes? There is nothing incoherent with disliking something and putting in effort to see less of it. "Ignore it" is an answer, not the only possible answer, and probably not the optimal one in the long term.
mftrhu··on Map of Metal
For some reason, I was actually expecting a map of metals - tungsten, uranium and such. Not sure why.
mftrhu··on Internet Archive Switzerland
What colour are those bytes? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
mftrhu··on Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
Said human would likely not be able to create a clean-room implementation of any of the codebases they worked on.
mftrhu··on I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
That's exactly the problem. Digital natives have, by and large, grown up with computing devices which try their best to be the opposite of general-purpose: their skills are siloed to the few apps they rely on, and e.g. files, keyboard shortcuts, the command prompt are not part of the "API" they learned.
mftrhu··on I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
> They know what a file is, they use & manage files more than any other generation prior.

Unfortunately, they don't.

They might have had a computer in their hand for hours each day, but they barely know anything about it. The ones who do tend to be those who grew up playing on PC, as opposed to console or mobile, because the latter - despite falling under the "digital natives" aegis - are really shockingly ignorant of even basic concepts.

mftrhu··on PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
Yes. In five years, once the PMOS devs manage to get a 2025 device in working state, they might have less devices to play around with, so there could be an indirect effect on the project.

What I struggle to believe - what I don't believe - is that there any sort of connection between the report about likely declining sales and PMOS' announcement.

mftrhu··on PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
Right now, their wiki page on device support [0] lists zero actual devices as "fully supported":

> These are the most supported devices, maintained by at least 2 people and have the functions you expect from the device running its normal OS, such as calling on a phone, working audio, and a functional UI.

> Besides QEMU devices, this is currently empty. The ports we had here earlier weren't as reliable as we would have liked. We plan to add new devices here with a higher standard.

The most recent smartphone in the Community section of that page is the Fairphone 4, released half a decade ago, in 2021. Pixel devices can trivially be bootloader unlocked, but that doesn't make the work that goes into supporting them much easier: the latest device in Testing is the 6a/6 Pro, from 2022, and its device page lists all the features but the most basic (touchscreen, flash, internal storage) as "Untested".

[0] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

mftrhu··on PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
> The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/smartphone-ma... which forecasts declining smartphone sales meaning less devices for this OS to run on.

Why would declining sales of new smartphones have anything to do with PostMarketOS, which only supports phones more than half a decade old?

mftrhu··on EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
It refers to evaporative cooling of group belief - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
mftrhu··on Converting a $3.88 analog clock from Walmart into a ESP8266-based Wi-Fi clock
Not quite - the chip the article refers to is the 47L04 [0], which is "just" NVSRAM built out of a RAM + EEPROM. I do agree on FeRAM being cool, though - I have a few I2C chips en route, and I can't wait to get my hands on them.

[0] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/47L04

mftrhu··on Our European search index goes live
People who do not want to read and trust the slop that whatever LLM du jour is regurgitating after calling out to said search engines.

Humans are already unfortunately prone to bullshitting and bloviating, but they are also used to dealing with other humans: there's no need to add an additional layer of both from a black box which does not behave like one.

mftrhu··on Web Translator API
Setting aside general-purpose LLMs, there exist a handful of models geared towards translation between hundred of language pairs: Meta's NLLB-200 [0] and M2M-100 [1] can be run using HuggingFace's transformers (plus numpy and sentencepieces), while Google's MADLAD-400 [2], in GGUF format [3], is also supported by llama.cpp.

You could also look into Argos Translate, or just use the same models as Firefox through kotki [4].

[0] https://huggingface.co/facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M [1] https://huggingface.co/facebook/m2m100_418M [2] https://huggingface.co/google/madlad400-3b-mt [3] https://huggingface.co/models?other=base_model:quantized:goo... [4] https://github.com/kroketio/kotki

mftrhu··on First baby born in UK to woman with transplanted womb
You can't say "$TRAIT is binary" when you follow that up with "$TRAIT can only be true, false, or sometimes something else". That's not a binary trait by definition.
mftrhu··on First baby born in UK to woman with transplanted womb
They would just move to calling the procedure a violation of the "natural order" - "Lovecraftian horror", "Frankenstein arrangement", "something Mengele would do" - argue that it is akin to rape, create conspiracy theories about uteri being stolen, and/or invoke "Think of the children!"

I saw all of that already. Some of it in this very thread, some of it on the defunct /r/GenderCritical: I remember someone proposing committing suicide by volcano to keep her uterus out of "male [sic] hands".

mftrhu··on I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
Do you work in circuit design?
mftrhu··on Lynx: Open Source Native Cross Platform framework used in TikTok
Lynx is a well-known project which has been around for far longer than Github even existed - since 1992, in fact - which is in any case irrelevant, since it's not developed on GitHub: the commits for ThomasDickey/lynx-snapshots are snapshots of the code from the website proper.
mftrhu··on The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time
I am still using a 2012 X230 and it taking 40 seconds to boot already feels slow. Six minutes sounds like an HDD boot, but console lagging? I don't know how that could even happen - I occasionally run OpenBSD on an even older Atom netbook, and even (un-accelerated) X doesn't really lag.
mftrhu··on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE
They are... not spending tax money? If so, that would still be the only entity given power by the US Constitution to decide what to do with it.
mftrhu··on Italy's privacy regulator goes after DeepSeek
To head off people's facile comments, I will just quote the first two paragraphs of the article, and then ask what part of it seems objectionable.

> Italy's data protection authority is asking Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek for formal responses on how it handles Italians' data when they use its AI chatbot app.

> The authority known as the Garante on Tuesday said it sent DeepSeek requests to disclose what personal data it collects, where it comes from, how it’s used, what legal basis it has to process that data under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and whether that data is stored on servers in China.

mftrhu··on Italy's privacy regulator goes after DeepSeek
It sounds like 95% of shops - of shops you know well enough to have an opinion about - should get their shit together, then. Why should people tolerate their sloppiness?
mftrhu··on Italy's privacy regulator goes after DeepSeek
Where is the GP taking a pro-EU or anti-EU stance? Where are they arguing against "ad revenue decrease" which "created more problem for small companies", or the impact of GDPR on the EU R&D budget?
mftrhu··on Italy's privacy regulator goes after DeepSeek
Yes. You should have a system for tracking every single dataset containing personal data: that data does not belong to you. You are just its steward.

You should have had such a system even before GDPR came into existence, but after it did? Your organization's lack of organization is not the legislator's problem.

mftrhu··on The DIY Multideck
They aren't that uncommon outside of physical stores, where board game nerds gather - off the top of my head I can think of at least three similar multi-game decks: Everdeck [0], Badger Deck [1], and Singularity Deck [2], while a cursory search nets me another dozen or so [3].

There's also the Decktet [4], of course, even if it takes a very different approach than the rest (for one thing, it does away with traditional suits - it is a very interesting deck, and one I really like).

[0] https://www.drivethrucards.com/product/291492/The-Everdeck [1] https://www.drivethrucards.com/product/130446/The-Badger-Dec... [2] https://www.drivethrucards.com/product/189681/The-Singularit... [3] https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/252876/playing-card-game-... [4] https://www.decktet.com/

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