pmontra

Or drivers prefer buying a Honda. They might not notice that they are the same cars. They should have interviewed a sample of the buyers but they are probably unable to do it.

And then there is the matter of the price. The links in the post point to a $39,900 Honda and to a $44,700 Chevrolet. I'm not surprised that the cheaper car sold more.

I like TUIs a lot and I use a TUI instead of a GUI as long as there is one available, but please note the main point of the post, the very last sentence

> I barely think about these things as “apps” (I have no intention to distribute them). They’re artifacts of me making my computer do stuff for me, the way I want it to. As a Unix nerd, I’ve always been able to do this, in the language of the command line. Now, it’s just as easy to do that kind of work with graphical interfaces.

And so the author (second sentence of the post)

> I built my first serious Mac application a few months ago, and since then I’ve built more native UI thingies than in my entire career prior to that.

I still build my personal stuff either for the command line (not even TUIs) or in a HTML page but I can see the point of creating a native app. Unfortunately there are some drawbacks: I would have to create the app for GNOME Debian and for Android, while a web app runs on both, and I would have to go all in on vibe coding because my last serious GUI programming has been in the 90s with Motif. The latter point is more or less the point of the author (the LLM does it for you) but it means that programming personal stuff will cost money paid to the LLMs companies. More and more money at each price hike and the multi thousand dollars box to run local models only makes the expense happen immediately instead of diluting over a long period.

Thanks. So one of the downloaded scripts is generating the audio and the browser should detect it.

Why does searching for a solution equal to cheating? I would have used google or whatever to look for solutions too. There is a difference between tests at school and what we do at work: at school I have to demonstrate that I learned something and do it without any outside help (in early classes we can't use calculators to compute 11 times 12) but at work I have to yield a result. Googling and yielding a result is fine. We use models at work so do we really want to evaluate them as pupils at school or do we want to evaluate them as coworkers? In the latter case give them the full internet and let them do whatever they manage to do.

The speaker icon would be handy but I think that it depends from both the good will of Firefox and the installed add ons. Of course if an add on blocks the audio file there is no need to display the speaker icon for that file.

To give you the idea of what is going on, this is what uMatrix shows about www.aliexpress.com in my Firefox browser on my laptop. It would be more difficult to copy and paste from uMatrix on my Android phone. It shows a number of sites. Nothing in first party and these that I must fully enable to make the site work (css, image, script, xhr)

* aliexpress.com

* ase.aliexpress.com

* it.aliexpress.com (my country two letters domain)

* umdc-global.aliexpress.com

* aidcgroup.net

* ase.aidcgroup.net

* 67372.ase.aidcgroup.net

* alibaba-inc.com

* epss.alibaba-inc.com

* alicdn.com

* ae01.alicdn.com

* assets.alicdn.com

* aliexpress-media.com

* ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com

* assets.aliexpress-media.com

* aliyun.com

* acjs.aliyun.com

Scary list, right? According to google aidcroup is

> Alibaba International IPP Platform

> https://ipp.aidcgroup.net

> Alibaba International is committed to the protection of intellectual property rights. Right holders and their agents can enforce intellectual property ...

Let me add a /s to the last line

There are two more sites that I can completely block

* googlesyndication.com

* pagead2.googlesyndication.com

so even Alibaba runs ads on Google.

I did not instrument the browser like the author of the post did, so I don't know where the audio comes from. There is nothing listed in the media column of uMatrix. This does not mean that the post is inaccurate. It could be that the browser gets the audio stream from a request in one of the other categories.

uBlockOrigin blocks two of other requests.

1. https://g.alicdn.com/code/npm/@ali/gmod-pop-disclosure-code/...

and this one that I anonymize

2. https://aplus.aliexpress.com/g.gif?logtype=0&title=WebPush Permission&pre=https://it.aliexpress.com/?gatewayAdapt=glo2ita&scr=1920x1080&_p_url=https://it.aliexpress.com/wp.html&cna=<whatever cna is>&category=&aplus=&$${beacon_mini}$$=&yunid=&=&trid=<trid>&asid=<base64 stuff>$${get_sign}$$&p=1&o=linux&b=firefox153&s=1920x1080&w=gecko&ism=other&cache=<7 letters>&lver=8.15.25&jsver=aplus_std&pver=0.7.12&_pw=0&_ph=0&tag=1&stag=-1&lstag=-1&_slog=0

Probably the audio file is coming from one of the unblocked requests but my Debian laptop does not pair with my Bluetooth earpieces so I can't test it.

I think that Comcast is a USA only service so have no idea of what people watch or listen to on Comcast. But above all, why do they need a consultant to do the switch? There is more to it than a credit card and a subscription?

Of course Apple will close the Store and make apps impossible if they could not extract their fee. That was the plan with the original iPhone and HTML only web apps in its browser. Then they got a more profitable idea.

For the apps to go away the store for free must be imposed on Apple, Google and everybody else but I don't think it will ever happen. If it will, people will use the browser and that would be enough. Some JS APIs will be dismissed, some hardware will be removed, some functionality will become impossible and slowly forgotten. Nobody will cry too much and business and entertainment as usual.

Yes, phone companies did not want this parties devices attached to their analog network, which basically was a low voltage power grid.

I don't know if we can say that those old phones were locked down: either they could not run any software at all or they run only what they got in their factory settings.

Symbian phones, palmtops from the 90s and the like could run apps and I did write a few of them. Usually Java and an emulator on my computer and an upload to the phone. They were almost general purpose computing devices but it was hard to get a 30% tax on them. All of these policies from Apple derive from the will of making money from services, not only from the hardware. It's understandable because it's a lot of money.

If apps will ever start losing money to Apple (e.g. they are forced to distribute them for free), apps will be dead, the Store will shut down, nothing could be installed anymore (privacy, safety, think of the children) and everything will be done with a web browser.

Wouldn't a nuclear powered ship sunk by enemy fire be a nuclear accident on its own? There would be a nuclear reactor on the seafloor, possibly a turned on one, surrounded by failed systems. I don't think it ever happened at war, but while I was looking for [1] I found a number of other incidents. I list them below

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00295...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-19

[4] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/soviet-nucle...

[5] https://gizmodo.com/sunken-soviet-submarine-is-quietly-leaki...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_incident_off_Kildin_...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_incident_off_Kola_Pe...

I checked on my phone. I don't have Google Photos so maybe I uninstalled it or the phone came without it. It's a Samsung so it has Samsung Gallery but I'm not logged in into a Samsung account. Photos are local. I installed Aves Gallery [1] and that's my main photo app. Backups are through Syncthing which of course is not a mass market app, but I'm a software developer and being able to use niche alternatives is one of our privileges.

[1] https://github.com/deckerst/aves

With that approach how am I going to block ads on long-tail-site.example.com and lots-of-ads.new-domain.com? I'll let uBO read my traffic. Firefox is reading my traffic anyway.

I think that by "Child users" parent meant children buying porn or selling porn to children. It probably happened but I think that it was much less common than children getting a porn magazine from an older brother that got it from an older friend and again and again until a legit sale to some adult.

I skimmed the constitution of my country (Italy) and there is no collective term. There is a section "Organization of the Republic" that lists the several components (Parliament, President, Government, etc.) When we say Government we refer only to the Prime Minister, the other Ministers and their staff.

I think that Blindsight's scramblers were intelligent but not conscious, which for us is very difficult to understand. For them consciousness was a blight.

For the HN readers that are missing the context: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm Full text on the web site of the author.

I checked your profile and you are cofounder of a company with branches all around Europe. At least the countries in the EU should have separation of powers, and the judicial (the courts) are independent from the government and there is a parliament which is more or less independent from the government too. Of course the government is usually backed by the majority of the parliament so the two of them often act together. The courts apply the law, whatever it is, but if the parliament or the government or the president (for presidential democracies) do something against the law or the constitution (or equivalent chart), there is at least a court that can undo that legislation and send it back for an overhaul. This is what happened in France.

Or realize that there is no way to know who is using a device without looking at the device holders for all the time they use the device. It's like ordering alcoholics or cigarettes: the seller looks at you see the white hairs (OK) or see a 16yo face (documents please.) A device registered to an adult can be used by a child. I know, it's a failure of parental control, but how many teenagers managed to get adult magazines in the last 100 years? They will get adult devices too. So there is no way to create a 100% effective system. Kids and teenagers will find workarounds, everybody else will live a worse life.

If that's the case it means that they can show the "Now boarding - remain seated" only to people that will board in economy seats. I don't think that they can, so it's a bad message that probably came into existence because of some entertaining concatenation of events that somebody in the airport business could be able to explain. But will anybody working in airports read that post?

The source code for that function is at https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/a75a8ccd9d2fa46eb68fe21469...

You can check the git blame and all the history. Unsurprisingly the function itself is from the 90s.

Opus 5 is too verbose.

I'm using Sonnet 5 on a large porting project and it's good. I switched from Opus 5 to Sonnet 5 on a project of another customer and I didn't notice a decrease in quality. I concede that it's very difficult to assess a difference in quality unless one uses both models on the same task and carefully compare the code, not the output in the terminal. I really don't have the time and the tokens for that. Anyway, Sonnet is still doing a good job.

That would work only for some people and even them will forget to check for updates. They would need a crontab or systemd timer, with git pull and the configure, compile, install pipeline. It gets unwieldy soon especially when you have to update or install dependencies.

> The next version will include a new built-in self-updating mechanism that users can trigger on demand. This will be the main release channel for Linux and hopefully the only one

This is what Mozilla is doing with Firefox. I downloaded the binary from their site and it autoupdates. Debian 11 and then 13, all is good.

I'm sure that the phone operators will not be happy about such a blacklist: they sell those numbers. Furthermore, they profit from spam calls in several ways.

It happened in Italy too (and we also had the fake job offer calls.) Suddenly I got spam calls from France and Spain and not anymore from Italian mobile numbers.

We have that kind of list in Italy too. I registered my number and I keep getting calls, so I stopped answering to numbers not in my contacts list. If I know that somebody will be calling me, I ask for the number and I add it to the list.

There are many paywalls that send all the content in the html and then hide it with a script.

However there are many more properly implemented paywalls that send only a few lines of content and you don't find the content even on the archive sites.

There are several variations of those schemes. Sometimes there is text but not images. Sometimes the first party js is fine and you have to block some of the third party js.

Sometimes the content is in a JSON blob.

Sometimes the reader mode trick works but only for a short while before the js paywall removes it (the sibling comment hints about it.)

You have to experiment with each site.

Reader mode bypasses it. It's only a JS layer on top of content that's already inside the HTML doc.

Disabling first party JS works too, using umatrix or similar tools. The site works perfectly without JS.

Edit: because of all of that, of course view source bypasses the paywall too and reveals tons of inlined CSS.

I wonder how vim will handle age brackets. Send all text to a LLM on the cloud in real time and refuse to show keystrokes with unsafe content? And censor unsafe text read from disk?

/s

Procedural Content Generation?

Prices must raise a lot to make self hosting mainstream or at least fairly popular.

Yesterday a coworker posted on a customer's Slack the specs of a box he is planning to buy to run local models. It's about 5k Euro. I am paying 18 Euro per month for Claude Pro and I'm going through a migration (almost a total rewrite) of a web app from Vue 2 / Vuetify 2 / Vuex to Vue 3 / Vuetify 4 / Pinia. I never hit the 6 hours limit. I could consider running an equivalent model on a 500 Euro machine (about 2 years of Claude Pro) but 5k is 20 years and that box will be obsolete or will have failed beyond repair (no spares) much earlier than that.

But maybe no customer will be there to actually buy, because cash flows could crash their businesses. So options on chips? Call or put?