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notepad0x90

2,121 karma · joined June 3, 2024

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notepad0x90··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
I'm not paying hundreds of dollars for a glorified bus ride. I've had issues with passengers on other airlines too. There is no expectation of me as a passenger behaving a certain way, and therefore the likelihood of being mistreated by passengers or staff a like is low. As you noted, other people pay more thinking "higher class" people fly delta or whatever, and to protect that image and experience I expect mistreatment from staff and other passengers alike on those flights.

I would rather deal with someone putting up their nasty leg on the chair next to me, or listen to a movie with speaker on for the whole flight, than deal with rude flight attendants that won't respond to my needs, or dirty looks from other passengers because I'm wearing something comfortable.

Aside from what I see on social media posts though, I've never seen anything extreme like that flying on spirit in all the years.

notepad0x90··on Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
I get that, it's just geopolitics, but practically speaking, it is doable for some companies and governments, but can regular every day people manage their own linux desktops? the EU needs a mac competitor, and they're not spending to make that happen. They're just buying into Linux because of its popularity there, and they haven't seen the real price tag of "free as in beer" FOSS software.
notepad0x90··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
name calling aside, i think you missed my argument. If you think my taste is trashy, by my argument, your taste is also trashy, you're just dumb enough to spend extra money so you feel like you're above others. That's the point of the whole "value" thing, if more money gets you more value, that's great, if not then you're saying paying more for less is less trashy? It's like a person paying for a $15 wine and a $70 wine, the quality in that range isn't all that different, you're acting like you're paying $10k to fly singapore airlines when you're just flying cramped on united just like on spirit, but you're paying more.

And you sort of made another point I had: people like you, and companies who cater to people like you come with all that haughty snobbishness that's just unpleasant and degrades the experience. Good taste has to do with appreciation of value and quality, not polishing of one's ego, or pretending you're superior to others.

notepad0x90··on Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused
mixed feelings on this, edge is supposed to store creds via DPAPI to the most part. you should also really not use password saving feature on edge (or any browser), it exposes you to a lot more threats that you need.

But.. saved passwords are not the same thing as "secrets" the browser uses. It has to be able to provide plain text passwords to websites. This is a really bad feature browsers should just not have to begin with, but they do, and I don't see a better way to use this.

In the past, they used to store the passwords in sqlite dbs, but now they've moved away from that at least.

From an attack perspective, there maybe some instances where you can dump memory, but you can't attach a debugger to the process without getting caught. so it does make a little bit of a difference there, but microsoft will probably tell you this isn't a security boundary that's being crossed. They can store it via DPAPI in lsass, and if lsass isolation is enabled (only on physical computers, default on win11) even SYSTEM privilege won't get you the credentials.

But what's the idea here, you have access to the browser, but you can't visit the site the password is saved for to make it "in use" and in plain text, so you can dump the password? I mean, even if you don't have access to the desktop, you can just start msedge.exe with the URL for the site as an argument and trigger the password retrieval.

Edge has done a lot to improve credential security, even DPAPI's existence itself is huge. If your research has meat, that's great but I don't see it here.

This feels like some "researcher" hyping themselves up to me, but I could be wrong.

Also, I really despise how they posted this on twitter, not even considering the political landmine there, I can't see the comments or threads on there without logging in. I can't visit the site on mobile without being redirected to download the app. I just wanted to mention that if you use X as a security professional in this day and age, my opinion of you drops by like 50% immediately. I don't care if you use bluesky, vk, telegram, discord,facebook, threads or whatever else, twitter is the worst place for you to share your work and you should know better.

notepad0x90··on GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay
why do i keep seeing comments of this sentiment? can't they just take loans? I thought there were serious consequences to making an offer, and then backing out , especially if the other party accepts your offer.
notepad0x90··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
They did things differently compared to other airlines, so it does warrant an explanation. People pay for the cheapest flight, and expect things like free bag checkin. Other airlines will charge everyone more, even if you had no bags and provide free bag checkin. I've had flights where I only had a small backpack and nothing more, I don't want to the "priced in" fee assuming everyone will check a bag. Spirit gave you exactly what you paid for, which is how it should be. No marketing mind games to trick you into thinking you're getting some luxury service. Even in first class most domestic airlines provide a subpar experience, might as well be for a good value like Spirit did. International flights are different though, and the bar is much higher there due to length of flights.
notepad0x90··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
with other airlines my experience would also be bad, just unreliably. you're getting cramped sits and bad service on united and AA as well.
notepad0x90··on Agentic Coding Is a Trap
That's exactly what I predict as well, I think it's inevitable. there will be middle managers and project managers needing a stick with which to beat the LLM mess into order, and keep themselves relevant, and it will suck all the same. But even such efforts result in establishment of good practices. In attempting to discredit the "slog" devs will establish "but instead, we should be doing $X".
notepad0x90··on Agentic Coding Is a Trap
> I think the article is correct.

What I said doesn't contradict the article. if what you said is true, then since a human can't understand it well enough, that approach is not good according to my rule of thumb, thus agreeing with article. I only established the litmus test.

agreed on other points you made.

notepad0x90··on Agentic Coding Is a Trap
while those things sucked, patterns imprinted on devs minds, passed on from generation of devs to the other until that's just the way things are done. CI is a good example, as are some of the documentation practices. Lots of teams that don't use agile or scrum formally, follow those concepts because that's just how they've seen others do things in the industry. I predict, LLM work will get some overdone and abstract thing like agile/scrum that lots of people hate, and few thing is useful, but then out of it the actually useful bits and pieces become self-organizing standards of sorts.
notepad0x90··on Agentic Coding Is a Trap
it's a fairly new way of doing things. I predict, in the future it will be more formalized and standardized like AGILE and SCRUM and all that boring stuff.

The result of that though would be establishment of development patterns that are good practices.

The rule of thumb is: An agent can write it, but a human has to understand it before it gets pushed to prod.

I'm still not convinced about the doom and gloom over developers being replaced. I'm not a dev as part of my main job function, but where I do use LLMs, it has been to do things I couldn't have done before because I just didn't have time, and had to de-prioritize. You can ship more and better features. I think LLMs being tools and all, there is too much focus on how the tool should be used without considering desired and actualized results.

If you just want an app shipped with little hassle and that's it, just let Claude do most of the work and get it over with. If you have other requirements, well that's where the best practices and standards would come in the future (I hope), but for now we're all just reading random blog posts and see how others are faring and experimenting.

notepad0x90··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
I could easily afford any of their competitors but I always picked Spirit airlines. The pricing makes sense, pay more if you need more things. I liked Spirit because it was more akin to riding the bus, I got treated well every time by their staff and the experience was fairly consistent.

Other airlines also have cramped sits, what little they did better than Spirit isn't worth the price, and the experience was inconsistent: some times you'll get nice flight attendants, a comfy plane, and a good check-in/check-out, other times you didn't. can't plan around them. With Spirit I could plan around exactly how bad my experience would be reliably. Just about any inconvenience was some fee away to address it.

Frontier was the cheap airline that just wasn't worth it. On the flip side, AA was overpriced with snobbish (just my experience, very limited) staff. Because it's a "cheap" airline, Spirit came with low expectations, and it only exceeded them to the most part.

I shop at walmart compared to whole foods and other "better" chains for similar reasons. "great value" as walmart's motto goes, it isn't about the price, it's about the value you get for what you pay for. Spirit was the "great value" airline.

I don't think this effort to buy it will prevail, I only wish the GME betters were in on this action. The airline's value hasn't gone away, similar to Gamestop. The people like it, the demand for it there, the airlines assets and staff haven't lost their value. I don't see how it isn't a good investment. This attempt to buy it is to little, too late. but if it came in actual stock purchase agreements, I'm down for it. But donating random cash to some site as a pledge, I don't know about that.

notepad0x90··on Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs
why are they building data centers in states that are hostile to hosting content there? can't be latency, because california has plenty of data centers and is close by.
notepad0x90··on Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
It looks like it's the year of the MacOS desktop.

I think since apple is looking at the lower-end consumer market, it must also be looking at the corporate desktop market. Supporting enterprise software/fleet is a whole different ballgame. But it does play well into apple's strength, in that apple is great at letting others experiment and learn lessons from their failures.

If the new leadership at apples even glances in that direction, it will be wild for the desktop computing industry in general. Perhaps microsoft will rethink things, but better yet, entire companies and governments might start switching to MacOS.

Linux desktop is not ready for mass adaption, but it isn't that far off either. My opinion is that people using more macs get them more familiar with the unixy way of doing things. But better yet, a lot of the tooling and libraries for macs is easier to port to linux than from windows. macs dominating enterprise and consumer markets can mean improvements in linux desktop, and the eventual reality (perhaps in a decade) of seeing GNU/Linux desktops in those same spaces as viable options (Android/Linux is already there in the lowest of the low markets).

notepad0x90··on Windows API is Successful Cross-Platform API (2024)
It is successful because it succeeded. Not because how it succeeded with right, great or ideal. People in this thread keep confusing these two points.
notepad0x90··on UAE to leave OPEC
an interesting variable in all this is China. the whole crisis, and maduro being kidnapped by his american counterpart dictator, has left them only russia left as a major source of petroleum overseas.

If I had to guess, the UAE is looking to form petro-alliances, and have a negotiating leverage. They're have to compete, and they can't beat saudi. So, either the US caters to their demands, or they'll be forming alliances with india and china, where currently OPEC's price setting was a limiting factor.

notepad0x90··on BP profits more than double as Iran war sends oil prices higher
that's not what I meant, I meant how their actions and involvement keeps drawing them back to the origin of their name, thus their name having a deterministic effect on their fate.
notepad0x90··on BP profits more than double as Iran war sends oil prices higher
nominative determinism but for companies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company

notepad0x90··on Framework's new Linux laptop is selling faster than its Windows one
do you have a review i can look at by non-apple influencers, or are they all working for apple?
notepad0x90··on Framework's new Linux laptop is selling faster than its Windows one
There has been plenty of reviews and comparisons of the neo in this area, they disagree with your take. Comparing with similarly priced alternatives, it comes out on top. Every reviewer is trying hard to prove the neo sucks by comparison, it helps contrarian takes get better views.
notepad0x90··on The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
I thought the cause of the bronze age collapse wasn't known (it wasn't a single civilization either), and the end of Rome, whichever "end" you ascribe to isn't caused by failure to manage or adapt to new technology. they weren't out-teched by anyone, or forgot how to do some technical work.
notepad0x90··on Framework's new Linux laptop is selling faster than its Windows one
Not for people who don't know the first thing about laptops and how to fix them.
notepad0x90··on Framework's new Linux laptop is selling faster than its Windows one
mass market consumers don't even know what "SOC" is, and would pretty much disagree with the rest of your sentiment. I think I was clear on the context being for them, not tech enthusiasts like yourself.
notepad0x90··on Framework's new Linux laptop is selling faster than its Windows one
Is framework aiming for mass market breakthrough? if so, I hope they're planning on the macbook neo. I have no reason to recommend it outside of tech-enthusiast circles over a macbook now, thanks to the neo. But I really don't think they want mass market, it wouldn't be a win for anyone. By design, it's a "repairable" computer, so people who want to repair their own laptop are the main customers.

You can't repair macs easily, but they last long enough for that to not be an issue. and honestly, the apple care experience is ideal for most people.

I do hope then that they stick to the tech-enthusiast market perfecting Linux-friendly laptops. The laptop market hasn't learned from framework's success, so I was hoping at the wake of the neo's success, someone could prove a similar quality laptop is possible by a non-apple company, keeping the competition alive.

My biggest concern for them is, one of these bigger laptop makers panic because of losses from the neo, and takes over framework.

notepad0x90··on Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port
that's the point, people like it this way. Unless you're saying it looked better on the Windows version.
notepad0x90··on Notepad++ for Mac – Independent community port
that's lazy commentary. prove it. and prove why that matters in this specific context. If you're going to shit on someone's work, have a good reason.
notepad0x90··on The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
Opposite take here: the west is resisting AI too much, and not implementing guardrails to protect the public from human-hostile AI usage. I don't predict that will be its downfall (I think other factors have already started the process), but it will lead to losing a competitive edge over China and the rest of the world.

Right now, silicon dominance is what's keeping silicon valley afloat. that and the power of the American consumer base. The world is having to adapt to not relying on the US for consumption due to tariffs among other things. Not only that, attempts to curb competition from China by restricting chip exports, and imports of their tech (I don't disagree in principle with either) has led them to be more self-reliant and invest more on domestic R&D.

All this to say, there is no way around winning, and the fact of the competition is also real. You can't deny the competitive advantage proper use of LLMs brings. It's also hard to deny the destructive power of LLMs to societies.

In China, companies are heavily regulated by the state. This means being competitive against the west is a state matter, it also means harming citizens is somewhat tolerated if the economic benefit to the whole country is good, but companies chasing their own profit at the expense of the public good isn't tolerated. I don't agree with their way of doing things, but the only thing limiting their victory over the west is their hesitation and intolerance to all things outside of the SE-Asian sphere of influence. But then again, the anti-migration trend of the US also removes that slight technical advantage the US always held.

There are many problems that can't be solved by LLMs, and expecting developers' value to be the number of lines they type is silly. It doesn't matter so much if you use LLMs or don't use them, what matters is results. Westerners attitude in general is to resist LLMs. This is partly a result of (in my opinion), not realizing that there is non-western competition. It is absolutely possible to use LLMs to ship high-quality, performant and secure code, you just don't take the dumb approach of letting LLMs do everything and a human "reviews it"; how exactly depends on each development team and company.

Keep in mind, that for decades outsourcing developers offshore -- where usually sub-par code is tolerated because of lower cost to ship -- has been a prevalent trend. If companies can't get Western devs to learn to use LLMs, then they can just ship it offshore to companies that do use it. That didn't lead to the west forgetting to code, and LLMs won't either.

What will hopefully happen is you'll get less developers learning to code, which means the developers that do the work, will get paid better (it's been on the downturn) so long as they learn to sue LLMs.

What people are having a hard time coping with, is the expectation of needing armies of developers to get things done being an antiquated concept. Computers, and then the internet have done this to many industries. You used to have lots of travel agents in the past, you still do, but very few.

The bigger issue is refusal to learn from history. Concepts like capitalism, communism, market economy, centrally planned economy, etc.. are like half a century out of date. There was no "capitalism" 200 years ago (not in so many words at least). Economists and politicians aren't catching up to changes in technology. Historically, adapting to these changes has been brutal.

I won't claim to predict what will happen, but one way or the other, LLMs won't go away in response to resistance from western workers, similar to how other changes in tech didn't go away like that. Economies will have to adapt or get decimated until they do. In the mean time, there is ample opportunity for the dominance of the west to fade within our lifetime, should that opportunity be taken advantage of by the competition. If China starts being less dependent on local companies, and starts importing a lot more, they can displace US and EU consumption needs, and perhaps even force the west to be producers for their domestic demand. unregulated western companies (from Coca cola to Disney!) have been trying to achieve just that, because of the large earning potential in China. But again, China could take advantage of all that, they could have more influence over the west, but they're too inward thinking. They're so afraid of relying on a hostile west, they're preventing the west from becoming reliant on them completely. But this new image of an ineffective and declining US/West, and perhaps some success over Taiwan, and establishing a solid non-western global trade economy can give them that extra confidence?

notepad0x90··on The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code
what other civilizations died out this way?
notepad0x90··on Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?
but not as much as cancer or hiv
notepad0x90··on Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?
I'll say that I know nothing about this, but just commenting on the economics of it all: Cancer and HIV have been at the forefront of disease research, in terms of public interest and financial investment, and cancer is more like an umbrella of similar diseases than a single disorder. HIV is manageable these days, and cancer research is slowly seeing leaps in progress.

Alzheimer is very important, and affects a very large number of people, it is getting lots of research funding and attention, but perhaps not enough? If it takes a certain combination of time, human-hours, money, and lots of smart people being interested in doing research in that field. Is the economics of disease research that simple? it is unknown what numeration of those variables is required to tackle Alzheimers, but if it is a lot more than cancer for example, then it might be decades or more away from being well understood.

I hate to say it, but cancer and HIV feel more like things we can get, Alzheimers feels like something only old people get, and it's to easy to forget that we'll get old, and it's hard to think our older loved ones might be affected. If no one in your sphere has been affected, it's harder to prioritize the disease.

My opinion is, money is the biggest obstacle, and I don't mean money for research, but money for education for researchers, and the talent pipeline. If higher education (at least for medicine) was literally free, that'd be a start. then you need lots of people getting paid to do the research independently. Right now, it feels like most disease research is being done by big pharma, so they can find the next insulin they can use to maximize profits. The incentives are all wrong on all sides, for potential researchers, the public and R&D companies.

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