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petterroea

1,407 karma · joined December 15, 2022

Hacker / DevOps engineer. me @ <nickname> . com
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petterroea··on Show HN: Yoink – Spotify to lossless with full metadata, self-hostable, ad-free
Maybe will get a resurgence of the limewire-style pranks people are so nostalgic for
petterroea··on The EU still wants to scan your private messages and photos
They only need to win once, while the public has to fight back every time. Incredibly demotivating
petterroea··on Google adds 24-hour wait and mandatory reboot to Android sideloading flow
In school I learned the definition of politics was "the distribution of benefits and burdens". We can and probably should view this as a political question. The benefit is the consumer right to do whatever you want with the device you bought (used by some), vs the burden of making yourself attackable by scammers etc. Google are pushing first and foremost for protecting end-users from scammers. They do benefit from this, so there is probably an incentive for them to do so. It is very practical that they can call locking down their phones "protecting users".

The big question here is where on the balance scale we care about "protecting users against scammers" vs "protecting users against enshittification, closed ecosystems, and possible future power grabs". One side is very tangible and easy to understand, the other more abstract, and most consumers simply don't understand it well enough to make educated choices about it. This uncertainty is being used by powers that benefit from pushing towards the "lock-down" extreme of the scale. Peter Thiel said so himself.

It is also worth noting that it is these security guys' job at Google to invent security schemes. All in all they did their job as engineers, and ignoring personal responsibility to engineer solutions that balance needs not only technical but also social, they did everything right. In a larger society there should be people who take on the job of setting boundaries for these technical solutions. Just like you need technical people to push back on technical demands from non-technical people within a company, we people who push back on this sort of stuff in our society. Us technical folks are best suited to do this job.

TL;DR: The political question boils down to how many grandmas are we as a society happy with getting scammed in the name of protecting consumer freedoms? In the extreme and hyperbolic case, are we happy with an infinite number of grandmas being sacrificed? Where on the line do we want to be? And what other measures can we put into place to make the problem easier to solve without sacrificing basic freedoms? If you are technical you should probably consider taking more space in the public debate.

petterroea··on HP trialed mandatory 15-minute support call wait times (2025)
I have to admit i solve some support cases similarly. If I get questions about what seems to be a trivial thing I tend to wait a while with responding because most of the time it solves itself or the user discovered the plug was unplugged.

To be fair this is over text to I can perform some heuristic to select what I want to respond to immediately or not. Phone support doesn't have this luxury. It's the kind of situation where you wish shiboleet was a thing

petterroea··on Prompt Injecting Contributing.md
> But the more interesting question is: now that I can identify the bots, can I make them do extra work that would make their contributions genuinely valuable? That's what I'm going to find out next.

This is genuinely interesting

petterroea··on Astral to Join OpenAI
How does this make sense
petterroea··on Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland
Yeah tbf I wouldn't underestimate Eastern Europe. The drone industry there must be booming nowadays, pun not intended.
petterroea··on Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland
I think the most interesting takeaway from this video in question is that he tried to buy material from an Indian seller, who promised it was Indian. When the box arrived, it had the name of a Chinese factory on it.
petterroea··on Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland
They are pretty happy with having superiority on high tech manufacturing and robotics. You basically cannot manufacture something without using China - even if you try. I don't think they consider the TSMC EUV monopoly a long term threat. Doing good on AI as well, you bet the OSS chinese models causing stock panic in the US makes them laugh.

On the topic of manufacturing outside China, the YouTuber "Smarter Every day" (Destin Sandlin) has a series on manufacturing and feels strongly about manufacturing having moved out of the country. As an experiment he tried to manufacture something without China, but was unable to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

petterroea··on Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland
Living in Japan, I meet and talk to Chinese when out drinking. Many of them are almost literally ROFLing about how the US practically just gave away everything they had to China. It's as if the US is playing poker with their cards facing up on the table. Chinese already consider themselves the defacto superpower.

If mainstream media in the US showed this, I bet the politics would look different.

petterroea··on Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line
The problem with the value prop for beyond meat is that good vegan food exists. There's no reason why you need to pretend to eat meat, and every meat product they made was clearly inferior to real meat.

Or, in other words, why would you eat mediocre fake meat when good vegan food that doesn't pretend to be meat exists, if your goal is to eat vegan.

petterroea··on Reverse-engineering Viktor and making it Open Source
Is this reverse-engineering or "just" data exfiltration
petterroea··on Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language
Will someone make a browser plugin for linkedin that uses this
petterroea··on Ask HN: What is it like being in a CS major program these days?
Something tells me it was always like that. My university professors were teaching things nobody wanted to learn, and people were practically begging to be taught more up-to-date hireable skills.

Every time there was project work, we would be recommended using Swing or similar because that is what professors knew, but everyone used React because nobody hires Swing developers.

Someone once said "Our SQL professor's SQL knowledge is 10 years out of date. Probably because he has been a professor for around 10 years at this point" and that kind of stuck with me.

petterroea··on Tell HN: AI tools are making me lose interest in CS fundamentals
I see things the opposite, LLMs are automating slow, easy, and tedious work so I have more time to spend on actually interesting problems
petterroea··on SpaceX IPO Scandal
I just love how his dry delivery makes his jokes hit harder
petterroea··on Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age
LLMs have really made pushing out protest websites easier recently, hasn't it.

We've seen tonnes on HN recently

petterroea··on Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions
I was playing rhythm games on a keyboard, so basically button mashing. The real killer was that I was pushing myself beyond what I was actually able to play. There's a certain technique to button-based rhythm games, and once you aren't able to read what is happening on the screen any more you tend to naturally transition to just brute force button mashing with high force, which tends to be very straining. I believe this was the problem for me.

If I had been a bit more intelligent at how I was learning, and focused on improving reading skill instead of simply wanting to play whatever music I liked, I would have probably never had problems. Rhythm games in general boil down to training your brain to read moving patterns and convert them to scheduled movements in your body (but mostly your hands). Once you get to an intermediate level you get these "flow states" where you realize you were basically unconscious for most of the song, not a single thought, just internally observing your body's reactions to the screen. Almost a type of meditation.

petterroea··on Shall I implement it? No
Kind of fun to see LLMs being just as bad at consent as humans
petterroea··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
Now this is a conversation piece
petterroea··on Dolphin Progress Release 2603
As far as I know it is mostly more immature emulators that struggle with straight out "stolen work" - something tells me the triforce branch is more a matter of "let's get triforce to work and then we can get it working well with the main branch again afterwards"
petterroea··on Dolphin Progress Release 2603
On the topic of Dolphin progress reports, one of the people who author them has written an interesting blog post on the state of open source emulators and the kind of community problems they deal with: https://emucross.com/rethinking-open-source/

TL;DR if you open source a project prone to hype before you are established with a community, identity, and results to speak for, you risk entitled and uninformed users demanding more than you can deliver. Others may take your half-baked feature branches and release them (to fanfare from users who were able to use it with the exact one game it worked with), taking your credit.

Running these projects ain't easy and the Dolphin team deserves a lot of credit for doing it with a level of professionalism I'm sure many in here don't even see at work. The social work involved in this kind of project should not be taken for granted either.

petterroea··on Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions
I think a good routine matters a lot. I played a lot of video games in my youth and got carpal tunnel from there, and haven't been able to recover 100% since.
petterroea··on Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions
As someone who got a pretty severe case of carpal tunnel in his youth that can still blow up today, I have to admit I have worried about my ability to work. "Will I have to become a manager?" Etc.

I think you have a good point

petterroea··on After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
I feel bad for the seniors who have to take on this workload. The general pattern I am seeing is that seniors at "AI-first" companies are being held back from doing their work by reviewing junior PRs, who are now able to ship much more code they don't understand the badness of.

Mentoring Juniors is an important part of the job and crucial service to the industry, but juniors equipped with LLMs make the deal a bit more sour. Anecdotally, they don't really remember the feedback as well, because they weren't involved in writing the code. Its burnout-inducing to see your hard work and feedback go in one ear and out another.

I personally know people looking to jump ship because they waste too much time at their current employer on this.

petterroea··on Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art
How is it not arrogant to be firm in your belief, even if signals say otherwise? If I believe it is OK not to shower, and everyone around me complains about it, is it not arrogant of me to ignore the signals because "they just don't understand yet"?

I think a much more useful question is whether some arrogance is necessary to succeed. I personally think it is. But we are discussing a post mortem here, and the author is (in my opinion) clearly beating around the bush and using "the time wasn't right" to hide what may be uncomfortable truths.

Is a post mortem valuable if it doesn't address these face first? I am not the one with all the answers here, but what I am used to in mature tech teams is that the uncomfortable parts are usually the most important in any post mortem.

There are plenty of stories about companies that failed because the timing was wrong, and then see another company succeed in their place later on. That doesn't mean failure simply means "the timing was wrong" - you are putting a lot of weight on society adjusting to your belief. Consider that venture capital often invests in hundreds of founders like this, betting that at least one of them wasn't wrong. That's not statistically in your favor.

It is OK (in fact it is valuable) to fail and conclude that your signals may have been wrong. There's a reason some venture capital funds prefer investing in people who have failed before.

petterroea··on Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art
> The timing wasn’t right. We depended on artists helping us to promote the platform, and they didn’t.

There's a certain arrogance to believing the timing "simply wasn't right". It looks really bad if you try it with any recent controversy:

* "The timing wasn't right to charge people for heated car seats"

* "The timing wasn't right to make Photoshop a subscription service"

* "The timing wasn't right to increase fees"

It's a way of talking yourself away from the fact that what you are making may, inherently, be disliked. The cited survey even seems to have been read as favourably as possible:

> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style.

This doesn't mean people want artists style to be generated by AI. It could mean they think it's horrible, but if it happens they should at least be compensated for it. In fact, the quotes survey even says 43% believe companies should ban copying artists styles. I could make the exact opposite argument with the same data:

"Many consumers believe companies should ban copying styles, and this may be a more common opinion than measured as most people have no experience with modern AI tools and therefore no chance to have made an opinion yet. What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated"

edit: formatting, typo

petterroea··on The human.json Protocol
If you have to perform a breadth-first search from your "seed" to verify a website, wouldn't every lookup become expensive relatively quickly? Unless max hops is set really low. Id assume you really need mass adoption for 5 degrees of separation to kick in, and that's still a lot of sites to crawl!
petterroea··on Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan
There have been used car scandals in Japan as well! Look up Bigmotor. But this is probably an outlier.

Mostly it is a high trust society and it makes things a _lot easier_. It feels so good to let down my guard. Of course, there are tonnes of people that want things from you (anyone who has lived here will tell you about the mt. fuji cult), the general "if things are too good to be true they are" rule still works well here. But trusting that things work just hits different.

petterroea··on Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan
I have to admit I haven't looked at house pricing much yet, mostly because buying isn't something I am planning on doing until I commit to permanent residency. But I can say the rumor that Japanese houses decrease in value seems to not count closer to Tokyo city center, so it isn't necessarily a bad investment. Talking to Japanese it seems they move out into the suburbs when they transition into the house buying part of life, because that's where it is affordable.

Renting apartments is also relatively affordable. I rented a standard 1k(bedroom + kitchen in the hallway) 14sqm apartment near the yamanote line (look it up "Tokyo 1k apartment" and you will see some floormaps). This cost 85k yen/mo, or ~650 USD in 2022 money.

When it comes to the free houses (akiya), there is apparently often a catch that you are expected to renovate them within a deadline, so you don't just get free property.

Greg from "Life Where I'm From" is a reputable source, and he has a lot of experience with property "out in the sticks". I recommend watching this, and maybe some other videos he has made regarding Nikko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3I9KXkJFPU

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