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potamic

2,325 karma · joined August 22, 2020

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potamic··on F-Droid 2.0
The builds are reproducible. Developers can also choose to fetch binaries directly from their repositories, and fdroid will verify that those binaries match the sources. So this is actually safer than downloading directly from developer's repo.

https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds

potamic··on F-Droid 2.0
Do you rely on Google Play reviews? Those are known to be highly manipulated and you can find any number of services offering to "boost" your reviews. I personally find online posts where people discuss about some app to have more meaningful feedback on it.
potamic··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
DDO website is refreshingly clean. Very reminiscent of early 2000's era, it just gets out of your way inviting you to browse through all the content. I wish more websites retained such functional design. The amount of visual stimulus thrown at you these days can be quite overbearing. While I just glanced through pentagram's site, I found myself spending a lot of time going through DDO's pages. They seem to have some really solid articles too. Thanks for sharing!
potamic··on How Hacker News ranking works: scoring, controversy, and penalties (2013)
Do they want to buy your account or do they want you to perform some activity for an incentive? Possible to share some of those emails?
potamic··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
Going through pentagram's site, their shakespeare in the park posters do give me that AI vibe. Perhaps AI has been trained in many such similar posters, but as a layman, I'd be hard pressed to be able to distinguish these from AI generated ones.

On a side note, I wanted to link that collection here, but unfortunately there's no hyperlink, it just opens in a popup. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of their home page to find it. I hope for their sake they just overlooked this one thing, because if designers don't see the role of hyperlinks in user experience, I can't take them seriously.

[1] https://www.pentagram.com

potamic··on South Africa is at risk of becoming a mafia state
Even a cursory search will find you literature from respected economists on this subject. There may be debate on how much wealth transfer or the actual impact of it, but there's wide consensus on the fact that there was. Comparing these ideas with flat-earthism is quite extremist, I'm curious if you've reached this conclusion on your own or have been led to it by some sources?

[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-impact-colonialism

[2] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/r...

[3] https://monthlyreview.org/articles/the-drain-of-wealth/

[4] https://wid.world/document/unequal-exchange-and-north-south-...

[5] https://ideas.repec.org/p/gnv/wpaper/unige144406.html

potamic··on South Africa is at risk of becoming a mafia state
The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich. When you have everything and lead a comfortable life you're more likely to spend your free time at the pub than go enlist with some private gang or militia. If you look at all the places where organised crime is rampant, the common denominator is always extreme poverty. People living a wretched life, unable to meet their basic needs, with no glimmer of hope for their future are just begging to be recruited into a gang for even the smallest of incentives.
potamic··on Ask HN: Are others seeing Google's reCAPTCHA rejecting Firefox users?
How do you know they are spam? I use disposable emails for registration wherever I can, and if there's too much friction I'll just drop it.
potamic··on The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing?
What is their source that the non-fiction book market is collapsing? Their entire premise seems to come down to the fact that non-fiction in 2025 took a smaller share of the top 25 best-selling, hardcover books compared to 2015. It's baffling enough to draw any conclusions from the top 25 of anything, but then to narrow down to hardcover disregards any confounding effects of preferences in format. On top of that they seem to be strangely unaware of this whole phenomenon called ebooks that has been taking the market over by storm.

Besides, non-fiction isn't analogous to fiction, it's not a useful category even. The subset of people who may read biographies may be very different from those who may read popular science or those who read self-help. There is no common denominator encompassing all of these other than the fact that it is a written medium. Fiction is different this way that it is a creative expression often read for the sake of reading and the point is not so much to reach the end. What would be more useful to see is the trend of specific categories of non-fiction over time and which ones are growing and which ones are not.

Perhaps in some ironic way, this article demonstrates why interest in non-fiction may be declining. When you take a singular, weak data point and stretch it over 5 pages saying the same thing, to create a complete non-issue over something that concludes nothing of significance by the end, you have to wonder if one would want to read more of such spiel.

potamic··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
If you follow the way the private jet thing is done, it is structured as a gift to the government and not the president. It is perfectly legal and you won't be able to find any "proof" of corruption over it. This is how most corruption is done, in an underhanded manner, but everything by the book, with enough plausible deniability.

In many cases corruption is only known to the perpetrator, because it is a matter of intent. One can always proffer a different reason for what they are doing than what they actually intended and when those reasons later turn out to be false, you may never really know whether they acted in good faith in the first place.

So corruption largely comes down to perception end of the day. It is ultimately a matter of trust and when that trust is eroded, the perception of corruption grows. There's no smoke without fire. When we see smoke in a building, we do not go searching for proof of fire, we just gtfo because the risk is too much. We should do the same when we see red flags in people in powerful positions.

potamic··on Anthropic & friends caught paying religious NGO's 3.3M for propaganda
No, see the entire thread. They claim article author's salary is paid by some Coefficient Giving organisation.
potamic··on The ColorChecker, photography's most important 24 squares, turns 50
Pleasantly surprised to see dpreview still running, I thought they had shut down. It was a fantastic site back in the day. Not sure how it fares these days.
potamic··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Well, the question primarily seemed to contest the scope of corruption, so I responded in view to that.

The big banks were one of the top donors to Obama's 2008 campaign. The fact that none of the banks were prosecuted or even held accountable for the crisis raises big questions how much the campaign funding influenced the way the bailout was structured. It also doesn't help Obama that he was famous for going after private funding after backtracking on his pledge not to do so.

Bush's story is similar but with energy companies the most famous being Halliburton who funded his election campaign and turned out to be the biggest beneficiaries to profit from the Iraq war. It probably wouldn't have upset people as much had it not been that the Bush family had close ties to this company and where Dick Cheney also happened to be the CEO. It was a big scandal at that time you can go read back on, but as is with many of these scandals everything seems to be forgotten or forgiven with time. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same with Trump 20 years from now.

potamic··on Anthropic & friends caught paying religious NGO's 3.3M for propaganda
Aren't Guardian's journalists full time employees? Why is their salary being paid by an outside entity?
potamic··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Most of the big ones. The government in fact was issued equity in these banks that they later sold to recover the funds. So it was very much necessary to preserve shareholder value.

This arrangement probably wouldn't have upset people so much were the people responsible for the crisis held accountable. Worse still, they paid themselves huge bonuses as soon as they got bailed out from the bailout money itself! All this made people question the real intention behind the bailout. Corruption is often effected indirectly, so as to give the perpetrator plausible deniability.

potamic··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Not directly, but indirectly by declining any punitive actions. Ideally the banks earnings should've been used up towards the bail out punishing shareholders in the spirit of the free market. But if I remember at that time, execs paid themselves large bonuses immediately following the bail out.
potamic··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Corruption is not limited to financial profit. There are many ways to engage in acts of self interest like grant personal agenda, favours to friends/donors, quid-pro-quo etc.
potamic··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Do you have a source that says it was an analytical error? Everything I've read over the years suggested they knew there were no WMDs, yet went with the narrative. Here's one post that cites a CIA report that shows the administration knew there were no WMDs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xmd8ut/why_d...

potamic··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
What about the whole WMD debacle? Isn't it widely considered to be an act of corruption?

And bailing out bank shareholders during the '08 financial crisis.

potamic··on Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
> The one thing I find slightly grating about links to Kagi blogs is the top comments are almost always "I use Kagi and it's great!"

Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something meaningful and insightful about a product, there's no better endorsement of it. But low effort platitudes are probably doing more harm than intended.

potamic··on Rust Glancer: Rust LSP using 100x less RAM
Could you elaborate a bit on why RA's incremental approach takes more memory? Intuitively it feels that it should take less, because you're only processing what you need? Whereas you seem to indicate that you save a full analysis snapshot to disk and load it all up when needed? Shouldn't that consume the max memory for a workspace?

Fantastic project btw, and it couldn't come at a better time. With the way prices are going I really hope people start paying attention to memory again.

potamic··on Go 1.27
> Generics are convenient but they come at a cost in complexity in the type system and run-time.

By run-time they mean compile-time? There shouldn't be a run-time penalty right?

Also, is there some measure of the additional compilation cost now that generics has been added?

potamic··on Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
I dunno how it is in America, but in my country if the largest individual donor was granted carte blanche to run his own department within the administration, with his own people, answerable only to the head of the government, it would cause a helluva lot of outrage.
potamic··on Ask HN: What's a Dirty Secret No One Wants to Admit in the Tech Industry?
That most people could care less about tech and are just in it for the grift.
potamic··on India has paved the way for charging merchants a fee on UPI transactions
> someone has to pay to maintain the infrastructure

Do you know what it costs to run the cash infrastructure? Maintaining physical branches, employees to handle cash, counting machines, counterfeit detectors, security personnel, armoured transport, theft risk etc. The costs of maintaining a centralised digital infrastructure pales in comparison to this. If anything you should get a discount for using digital.

potamic··on India has paved the way for charging merchants a fee on UPI transactions
Where do you see $1B subsidy? There is no subsidy. The system is already profitable. This will generate a new revenue stream of $1B for banks out of thin air that has no reason to exist.
potamic··on 2026 Eclipse Webcams
What makes it better?
potamic··on Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)
Thanks a lot.
potamic··on Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)
Timing? How many hours before bed?
potamic··on Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)
How much of each do you take and when do you take them?
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