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petterroea

1,393 karma · joined December 15, 2022

Hacker / DevOps engineer. me @ <nickname> . com
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petterroea··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Yeah, the NSF cast quality is more amateurish, and certain cast members aren't that good at doing live casting. But it's nice listening to like minded people. And their camera shots are beautiful.
petterroea··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Only on X, sadly.

My experience however is that NASASpaceflight provides an overall better coverage than the official stream, only recasting when they don't have camera angles themselves (Such as when the ship is in space or during reentry)

petterroea··on The "Windows XP Box" (2003)
I miss when software came in nice boxes
petterroea··on Transit rewards
Embrace, extend, extinguish.

The sad reality is that it is practically impossible to tell a good act apart from one with ulterior motives. It could be just a cross promotion, but it could also aim to be friendly to lawmakers or to grow in ridership with the goal of extinguishing the competition.

The VC playbook heavily suggests the latter

petterroea··on Typesafe-computer-use drives a Mac toward a goal for 1/50th of a cent per step
It's better that everyone is loud about it then everyone giving up and being silently irritated. At least if people complain it's possible to read the room
petterroea··on A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos
This comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
petterroea··on Waymo in Singapore
Waymo are working towards Tokyo as well. I'm worried. Living in here, I've noticed that the taxi industry acts as an unintentional social support system. Many taxi drivers are in-between jobs or stages in life, or simply didn't fit in to the corporate life. It doesn't pay well, but it's a decent job all things considered.

I worry the death of the taxi industry means even less avenues for these people to escape to.

Of course the argument here is "well Japan should fix the corporate situation" but the current prime minister seems to be hellbent on the opposite. I think this will suck for a lot of people.

petterroea··on Google auto-banned my Bug Hunter account for exposing their fake "Delete" button
> The 4-Point Checkmate (Why they can’t defend this):

> I didn’t invent anything. I just put Google’s own official documents next to each other.

Ai writing

petterroea··on An update on Wayback Machine access
I'd be happy to pay a 5$/month donation to get a higher rate limit/more lenient filter put on me
petterroea··on Ask HN: Career paths to consider if I am better at supporting than creating?
Sounds like you may enjoy being a QA engineer. Good QA engineers are a really really good value add to a software team and can really save our ass. Technical QA engineers understand why things break, and are easy to coordinate with when preparing a larger release.

At my previous employer, the head QA engineer was the one pushing back at the PM when they were too ambitious. They basically owned the current "Is the next release still a buggy mess?" state.

petterroea··on Instagram's head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm
For a lot of people that's a good thing
petterroea··on Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract
My uneducated take here is based my my friend's experience, who is an electrician. He's happy to be more flexible than the law allows him to. Work more hours, longer shifts, worse times of the day. Whatever gets the job done as good as possible. But there's an expectation of mutual respect here. If the boss starts not compensating him sufficiently for the work he is asked to do, not giving him time off and periods of calm, and listening to him when he thinks he's nearing his limits, the system doesn't work.

Just like laws in reality are the to protect the average Joe from an abusive employer, unions are similarly a strength in numbers approach to being treated better.

It seems unionisation is one way people slam the breaks on companies that don't treat them fairly for the effort they are expected to put in. Your evidence seems to indicate the companies had plenty of chances to ask "why are people unhappy" before their employees unionised

petterroea··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
When it first released I correctly predicted that the game was overhyped and destined to flop, making fun of friends who bought the game and ending up being disappointed.

The internet historian video made me buy it, thinking it was maybe worth it now.

I think I got like 5 hours in before feeling like I was just doing an endless grind. I felt like I had fallen for the hype, which I think was deserved ;)

Maybe the game doesn't get good until you grind past the first N hours, but I just don't have the time any more.

petterroea··on Site Is Closed on Sundays
Japanese websites still do this. If you buy shinkansen tickets between 23:00-05:00 you get:

* JR central - you can buy, but not reserve seats, as the system actually registers your ticket at 5am

* Jr east - you cannot buy.

Some banks/government sites also simply don't want to work at night.

Very frustrating. To me it spells incompetence, but maybe there's some non-technical stakeholder who made a stupid rule once. For JR its probably some nightly accounting system - not 100% sure but I assume all the modern systems are just plugged on top of the ancient ones just like the airline industry does it.

petterroea··on 2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
Good point. I wonder how many articles discuss old games and over-analyze choices that may actually be labelled as

//TODO: good enough, fix later

In the actual source code

petterroea··on Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
> I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.

My favorite part about this is that since names are largely a social construct, given the right situation, we could just nullify all the paid names and start again.

Sure, whoever does this will lose a lot of credibility. But say a disliked president signs an order forcing his country to stop accepting names that were paid, it only takes nobody reinstating it. And the rest of the world also giving up on the names, of course.

So you can totally fund space exploration this way, and then society can decide that it sucked and nullify it after the buyer is dead and unable to protest. I guess the family could, but...

petterroea··on Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane
Sorry for the long wait, I wasn't ignoring you, just busy.

Yes, symbols were obfuscated, but Java software with obfuscated symbols is trivial to reverse, at least compared to its native counterparts. My understanding is that the biggest change when releasing symbols was that the MCP team no longer had to manually update symbols for every update. Java also has great reflection features that make it a lot easier to make mods - you don't need to patch binaries like you do with native code.

I think you are right in that Bedrock and JE players are different segments. I think the main goal of Bedrock is to target the casual market, maybe not by intention but by the fact that the community itself is mostly stuck on JE. I still think the long term wish is to get everyone over and kill Java, as Java inherently is less suited for the microtransaction model I am sure they want.

Then again with the rise of LLM-based RE, I guess the largest hurdle for modding bedrock is somewhat lower now, as you can automate a lot of the skill-heavy but not difficult work required.

> But also just realized, if this changed, rather than locking down JE, they'd probably just kill it and maaybe release Bedrock for Mac/Linux to keep those players. Possibly not.

I think this is a good instinct.

petterroea··on Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane
Its proprietary, but trivially decompileable. Sure, maybe if the game was released today they would try obfuscating better, but the thing is that modding culture had already basically torn the game apart by the time Microsoft came around. I don't think they had a choice but to accept the status quo.

There are mods to disable unwanted Microsoft-pushed features like chat signing, for example. Microsoft doesn't want this, but it is so trivial to do with the Java edition they don't really have a choice but to either accept it or legal it.

I am also surprised they didn't drop mac/linux support, but as long as maintaining it is free I don't think they will. They have lost a lot of market share to mac after all - that's a lot of customers to miss out on.

petterroea··on Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane
When bedrock was announced I was sure Microsoft had won the os arms race and had everything they needed to make an impenetrable monopoly:

* They could make bedrock moddable using .net, and make it so basically every kid interested in programming learned .net

* They could then drop the Java version and get more control over the game with it being harder to mod in un-sanctioned ways while still enabling the content most people want from mods

* And gain a powerful platform they can use to treat Windows/Xbox players better.

* With everyone writing .net it makes more sense to use Windows to develop, effectively reducing the number of fresh developers with posix experience. Stopping the mass exodus to posix since the 2010s MacBook air sublime text nodejs days.

But alas. Microsoft are incompetent. Minecraft was THE tool to turn the future in their favour and they completely overlooked it.

Bedrock exists to make more money. They don't like the Java free modding. They want a marketplace. They want to make money off all content in the game. They want to sell DLC. Make no mistake, they aren't platforming modders to make money because they are charitable. It is because they want to profit, and they can profit at scale by outsourcing the work.

That is in my opinion why most people are against bedrock, including myself. Bedrock is capitalist Minecraft. Enshittified Minecraft, with much more enshittification potential not yet realized. Java version is the only thing protecting bedrock from not being milked further, because it is competition.

They know most people prefer Java. Content creators mostly use Java. But it sells bedrock, and bedrock makes money. And if they can get enough people over, they can kill Java and finally milk bedrock

petterroea··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
The unlimited private repos for free tier would have happened anyways. You have to remember that this was around the time people were jumping ship from GitHub exactly because they didn't offer private repos for free. It was something many wanted, and they were actively seeking out other places that would give it to them.
petterroea··on Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B
I have never seen an acquisition be good for the users. I struggle to believe this one will be different
petterroea··on Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
The whole fable thing really did the company a number. Their filters are incredibly sensitive now and I got banned for bootstrapping a react app. 13 days and still no response, and they haven't even refunded the subscription as the FAQ says they should have. Their support system is designed around using your account to contact support, and if you are banned you cannot. How are you supposed to build trust around that. The last half year has been more and more haphazard.
petterroea··on Fixing a bricked Framework laptop
I don't disagree, but consider that second hand machines are of unknown state, and often have no (or limited) warranty. Just like with a second hand car, there is a higher maintenance burden. How does an average joe know if a machine on ebay is great? If the answer is "they have to learn how to spot a good one", it is already an increased burden.

People like you and I are happy with this, but the average person could not care less about computers and simply need something to send emails, do taxes, and browse the internet. They don't want that extra burden, they want something that is guaranteed to "just work".

Proper second hand refurbishment pipelines that are well known and trusted is something we should aim for and want, but I believe the current state is that people want new and want cheap new. What is wrong with wanting cheap + new, and wanting laptop producers to cater to this?

petterroea··on And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway
This will be my new go-to article whenever I talk to someone about how technology isn't a silver bullet and their thesis is that "yeah it is, we just dont have that technology yet".

The use case outlined in this article should make it very clear to most that believing technology solves all our issues is at least wrong, and at worst dangerous. Technology cannot protect you from bad actors, the solution must be social.

Bitcoin fans in the "cryptobros learning why we have regulation any% speedrun" is another example that comes to mind.

petterroea··on Fixing a bricked Framework laptop
Most people I know don't own enterprise computers. They are pretty pricy and visually tame - not really made for consumers. To me, buying a framework is more about ideology than them being the best at everything. You can't expect them to be the best when starting out either. I am buying a future.

I don't think any framework owner seriously thinks they are buying the most repairable laptop in the world or the most cost effective laptop in the world.

petterroea··on Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
I'm basically unable to work on boring things without LLMs now because it just doesn't feel like a good use of my time. I am also unable to work on thinks that are mostly vibecoded, by hand, because I know the code is bad, and I know the work will often be surpassed by a model in 1/5 the time once I get tokens again. This is not a "AI is replacing me" comment, but more a "The 90% of my job that takes time and that nobody wants to do is now automated, and not using LLMs is no longer motivationally an option". Vibecoded projects have short term rewards but long term I just find I don't really care, its not "my project" and I'm not proud of it.

I am at my happiest when I am out of tokens and working on projects that I care about myself, and am forced to tradcode. I think going forward I will have a few "Tradcode only" projects that personally interest me, to work on when I need a fix-me-up.

petterroea··on My Homelab Got Hacked – A Postmortem
Whelp. This is one of the reasons I stopped believing in exposing my homelab to the internet. Everything is now on my private VPN network. It means I don't have to worry about staying up to date all the time. For something that is ostensibly a hobby, it's nice. Only downside is that you can't share it with people.
petterroea··on New Bedford police officer accused of using Flock cameras to track ex-partner
In my experience there's almost always a way in which things like this can be abused, which is why I lean more towards it being made illegal altogether and accepting the cost of not having mass surveillance. I am yet to find a way in which its not a large can of worms no matter what you do.

But if prohibiting mass surveillance is not an option, the second best thing would be good checks that make sure tools like this can't be used in silence.

petterroea··on New Bedford police officer accused of using Flock cameras to track ex-partner
It's not that I disagree, but police looking up protestors license plates in order to trigger a "law enforcement looked you up" email is one hell of an intimidation tactic
petterroea··on Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2
The original CTO, Martin Sandsmark, was a heavy Linux user and made some incredibly based choices for remarkable. If you look in the right places on the internet there are some really cool images of remarkable hacks he was showing off to people for fun.
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