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nativeit

2,906 karma · joined November 25, 2021

Freelance I.T. consultant and web developer in Charlotte, NC - sdavis@nativeit.net

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nativeit··on Apple Just Lost Me
Because folks don’t continuously talk about something that happened 14-years ago on a device that’s been off the market for nearly as long?
nativeit··on FSF statement on copyright infringement lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic
I interpreted this to be a class action to which they were a party, not something they principally launched themselves?
nativeit··on FSF statement on copyright infringement lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic
That’s a wild take. AI companies are to blame for AI coding.
nativeit··on Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers
I have been using Webmin/Virtualmin for all of my 15-years as a web host. I love it, although it can be a little idiosyncratic in places, once you know how to operate with it, you won’t ever need anything else. It’s never been the most bleeding-edge or fully-featured, but it’s also never fallen behind with security and compatibility updates, and it’s had a surge in new development lately, which is exciting. On a Debian system, it’s always been rock solid for me.

Virtualmin in particular is more targeted towards production web servers, but I think they’re both something of a happy medium between a GUI and the terminal; The interfaces are all pretty explicit about the components you’re interfacing with, and nearly all of them include the ability to pop open the conf files to edit them directly.

The extensive UI isn’t the most flashy or polished, but it’s functional and if you get bored enough (as I did) you can theme the entire thing with a single CSS file (be prepared for a lot of ‘!important’ and other things that will drive UI/X folks nuts), and make it look rather stylish.

The only downside (and this isn’t really a downside for production servers) is it’s opinionated on how some things “should” be configured. It’s not restrictive, per se, but it’s not very tolerant for “coloring outside the lines”. You can run an Apache or Nginx reverse proxy, but if you want to use Caddy or Traefik or something similar, this may not be the admin panel for you.

Myself, I just run Webmin/Virtualmin on my production servers, and use a separate server for Docker and apps, where I’ve used both Cockpit and Portainer, but generally tend to stick with the CLI. The command line will always be the best, most efficient way of interfacing with Linux. Once I’d learned enough to be comfortable, I found it becomes increasingly preferable for most common tasks.

nativeit··on From Oscilloscope to Wireshark: A UDP Story (2022)
Here's a more specific example: PicoScope 9400 series supports just 500Msps per channel, however it's advertising "70ps transition time and 1TS/s (1ps resolution) random equivalent-time sampling", this sort of "equivalent sampling" is presumably where that seemingly crazy spec comes from.
nativeit··on From Oscilloscope to Wireshark: A UDP Story (2022)
> Random equivalent-time sampling takes advantage of the nature of a repetitive signal by using samples from several trigger events to digitally reconstruct the waveform. Since sampling occurs on both sides of the trigger point, pretrigger capability is very flexible. Because repetitive signals are being sampled, the bandwidth of an equivalent-time scope can far exceed its sample rate.

https://www.tek.com/en/documents/application-note/real-time-...

nativeit··on Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
We do a lot of things that require subsidizing, very much including the things commonly found in/around a lot of the rural farms where these services would target. If broadband internet access is a fundamental need for contemporary communication--much like the postal service, telegraph, and telephones were--then historically we do what's necessary to provide them.
nativeit··on Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
I apologize for the initial ambiguous snippy comment.

I'm an I.T. consultant in N. Carolina, and I've worked in very rural areas setting up connectivity for farms. Indeed, I have recommended StarLink on at least two occasions, albeit in concert with 4G/5G cellular (bad weather remains a problem). StarLink sounds great for airlines, RV's, boats, base camps, disaster relief--but those are almost all examples where affordability aren't usually high priorities, and I'm not sure if it's significantly better than upgrading geostationary satellite tech.

I do firmly believe that StarLink is, at best, a flawed solution to the largely solvable problem in the context of rural broadband access. We very recently had federal programs and funding to advance cable/fiber rural broadband services, but it was so weighed down with bureaucratic cruft that basically nothing got done. I dunno if that specific provision of Biden's infrastructure bill remains law, but I'm pretty sure it ceased being a priority after the last election (not for nothing, StarLink had plenty to gain by those federal programs dying, although I have no direct knowledge that Musk, DOGE, et al made any direct moves to stop it--I think it was mainly the shite implementation/execution by the Biden administration).

So "readily available" in the sense of "we could do it at any time, and it would be a helluva lot cheaper and more durable than continuously launching hundreds of satellites into LEO". Poor choice of words on my part, and even still I'm sure there's still plenty to disagree with there.

nativeit··on Warranty Void If Regenerated
> The milk pricing tool consumed the feed tool’s output as one of its cost inputs. The format change hadn’t broken the connection — the data still flowed — but it had caused the pricing tool to misparse one field, reading a per-head cost as a per-hundredweight cost, which made the feed expenses look much higher than they were, which made the margin calculations come out lower, which made the recommended prices drop. “You changed your feed tool,” Tom said.

“Yeah, I updated the silage ratios. What does that have to do with milk prices?”

“Everything.”

He showed Ethan the chain: feed tool regenerated → output format shifted → pricing tool misparsed → margins calculated wrong → prices dropped → contracts auto-negotiated at below-market rates. Five links, each one individually innocuous, collectively costing Ethan roughly $14,000.

Ethan looked ill.

--

I've re-read this a few times now, and can't work out how the interpreted price of feed going up and the interpreted margins going down results in a program setting lower prices on the resulting milk? I feel like this must have gotten reversed in the author's mind, since it's not like it's a typo, there are multiple references in the story for this cause and effect. Am I missing something?

[Edited for clarity]

nativeit··on Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?
A few more words: they’re struggling to find a niche where their ungodly expensive product makes more sense than the readily available alternatives. In this case, fair play it’s objectively better.
nativeit··on Death to Scroll Fade
I consider it context-dependent. If a site is intended for users to jump around to different pages often, then sticky headers make sense. If it’s designed for long-form articles or scrolling through feeds, then non-sticky headers make sense. When I have implemented them on my own sites, I try to keep them minimal and unobtrusive. But I also have never heard this complaint specifically, until now.
nativeit··on AI coding is gambling
I have had very similar experiences. I am not a professional software developer, but have been a Linux sysadmin for over a decade, a web developer for much longer than that, and generally know enough to hack on other people’s projects to make them suit my own purposes.

When I have Claude create something from scratch, it all appears very competent, even impressive, and it usually will build/function successfully…on the surface. I have noticed on several occasions that Claude has effectively coded the aesthetics of what I want, but left the substance out. A feature will appear to have been implemented exactly as I asked, but when I dig into the details, it’s a lot of very brittle logic that will almost certainly become a problem in future.

This is why I refuse to release anything it makes for me. I know that it’s not good enough, that I won’t be able to properly maintain it, and that such a product would likely harm my reputation, sooner or later. What frightens me is there are a LOT of people who either don’t know enough to recognize this, or who simply don’t care and are looking for a quick buck. It’s already getting significantly more difficult to search for software projects without getting miles of slop. I don’t know how this will ultimately shake out, but if it’s this bad at the thing it’s supposedly good at, I can only imagine the kinds of military applications being leveraged right now…

nativeit··on The American Healthcare Conundrum
This is an interesting way of presenting a topic, I like it. Especially if it’s got included datasets that allow others to mess with said topic. I don’t want to suggest bloating it up with any complicated UIs, but a Jupyter notebook could be nifty. Maybe not for this specific topic, but other data-heavy subjects.
nativeit··on The 49MB web page
It's certainly one of the reasons why I ended my NY Times subscription in 2024, and split that money between recurring donations to public media, Archive.org, and the EFF.
nativeit··on The 49MB web page
I remember browsing the web in 1993-1994. It was literally a list of webpages. Yahoo was there, though, so presumably they've fallen farthest?
nativeit··on The 49MB web page
Got to this article/comments section via FreshRSS. Still the greatest way to consume media on the web.
nativeit··on Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
So you’ve vibe coded an app. That’s just swell. You want to release it? Don’t. You can’t support it. You can’t update it. You are one bad prompt away from it collapsing.

We are convincing a generation of morons that they can do something they plainly cannot. This will be a major problem, and soon.

nativeit··on Digg is gone again
As someone who came of age before “the internet as you know it”, I am looking forward to all of the cancerous Web 2.0 OG slop and narcissism factories succumbing to their own fates. Let me tell you, the internet as we know it sucks, and the internet it ate 25-years ago is a marked improvement. We should be so lucky. Now go write a personal blog in plain text, and rejoice.
nativeit··on Suburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency
Major paradigm shift: What if, hear me out, the school administrators talked to the students and their parents?

I’ll pause for everyone’s minds to finish blowing.

nativeit··on Colon cancer now leading cause of cancer deaths under 50 in US
As a Multiple Sclerosis patient since I was a teenager, let me just say: all you “healthy diet” zealots aren’t helping. Your advice on which blended kale and gogi berry smoothie I should try is cringe and annoying. Normally, the person is right in front of me, and well-intentioned, so I typically smile and politely thank them with a non-committal gesture towards trying it someday.

But since this is all one-party and relatively anonymous, I’d like to take the opportunity to tell everyone that unless you have a PhD or MD in a relevant field, your thoughts about fiber are irrelevant and unwelcome to anyone actually suffering from the disease(s) in question.

nativeit··on Colon cancer now leading cause of cancer deaths under 50 in US
Because anything that allows another person to look down on you and feel superior must therefore be true and moral.
nativeit··on Apple releases iOS 15.8.7 to fix Coruna exploit for iPhone 6S from 2015
The bar has become incredibly low, it’s true. I could argue that’s all the more reason for recognizing when these monoliths do the right thing, but I would probably struggle to claim they deserve any of it at this point.
nativeit··on Spectre I, shuts down microphones nearby you
To be less of a cynical idgit, here's some cool future tech that does work--not great, I imagine, but getting better and could certainly be employed to keep the sounds you emit localized to a single point (controlling/defining the point might be tricky, and would require the listener to stay stock-still):

‘Audible enclaves’ could enable private listening without headphones - https://www.psu.edu/news/engineering/story/audible-enclaves-...

nativeit··on Spectre I, shuts down microphones nearby you
Related: This Jammer Wants to Block Always-Listening AI Wearables. It Probably Won’t Work - https://www.wired.com/story/deveillance-spectre-i/
nativeit··on Spectre I, shuts down microphones nearby you
Interesting, but coming from the perspective of an audio engineer it all sounds a little too woo-woo without specifics. The $1200 price also seems absurd for something that appears to emit ultrasonic noise and scan for IoT devices. The fact it's taking pre-orders is also something of a red flag.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but these things strike me as money grabs that prey on peoples' understandable paranoia surrounding privacy. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise, but those were the first impressions of someone with a passable knowledge of how such devices ostensibly function. Unless it's doing something special I'm not aware of, a fairly basic filter on the microphone to limit any sounds outside of audible midrange would likely render these devices moot.

nativeit··on Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command
I wonder if Iran is considered a “production environment”?
nativeit··on Never buy a .online domain
You’re confessing to several actual felonies here, may want to change strategies.
nativeit··on $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents
We could pay teachers even half of the median salary for HN users, and then see if outcomes improve?
nativeit··on We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
I’m not saying he shouldn’t have won, we have the system we have, but to then act like he’s got a mandate is unjustifiable.
nativeit··on We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science
An electorate is only as good as the information it uses to make the choice. Fewer than 10% of Americans both stated they routinely read a newspaper (in print or online) yet still walked into a voting booth in 2024 and voted for Trump.
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