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ptx

5,230 karma · joined October 16, 2013

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ptx··on Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free
I think GPLv3 already does this, with its anti-tivoization requirements. People just need to switch to an up-to-date copyleft license rather than permissive licenses.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#Tivoization

ptx··on Native apps written in TypeScript and CSS
What do you mean? You were so excited that you didn't want to talk about what excited you and left it to an LLM instead?
ptx··on Nvidia dismisses "circular financing", says every $1 it invests brings back $100
But it seems this "economic value" is often created by depleting actual physical resources (e.g. people's health, clean air and water), usually resources belonging someone other than the person capturing the "value".
ptx··on JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation
There is with jpackage. The packages it builds could include install scripts (or custom actions in the case of MSI) to run at install time.

The script wouldn't have to do the training run at install time, as I understand it, just the AOT compilation. See the section on "AOTMode=record" vs "AOTMode=create" in the JEP.

ptx··on JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation
It would be nice if jpackage could bundle the generated AOT configuration data along with a custom action in the MSI package to run the machine-dependent AOT compilation step at install time.
ptx··on Extinct Tasmanian tiger's 'snap' unlike any living mammal's bite
That leaves a few questions though (which I'm not implying that I know the answers to):

Did this planted forest (used for logging) replace another forest that was used as a habitat for animals? Is it counted as an equivalent to non-logging forests to justify the destruction of non-logging forests?

Can this sustainable industry sustain suitable living conditions for animals in the forest? Or can the industry only sustain itself and its own interests in future resource extraction?

ptx··on This Month in Ladybird – August 2026
No, it isn't.

Ladybird [0]: "We will no longer accept public pull requests. From now on, code changes to the Ladybird codebase will only be introduced by project maintainers. [...] There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means."

FreeBSD [1]: "So you want to contribute to FreeBSD? That is great! FreeBSD relies on the contributions of its user base to survive. Your contributions are not only appreciated, they are vital to FreeBSD’s continued growth. [...] If you are submitting a simple patch to the src repo, please consider submitting it to the project’s GitHub mirror as a pull request."

[0] https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/

[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributing/

ptx··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
As far as I can tell, all the recording, storing and transmitting of audio from the microphone happens after 34 minutes in, after the point where they start hacking the TV and telling it themselves to do these things.

LG's advertising features appear (from what they discover before 34 minutes in and from the clips of the LG execs boasting about their ad platform) to be concerned only with what's played on the TV (and networks, devices, ..., but not microphone audio).

If I'm wrong about this, I would appreciate a timestamp for where in the video they show LG actually storing and transmitting audio recorded from the microphone.

ptx··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
I don't think the title (edit: of the thread merged into this one!) is accurate.

Starting at 16:04, they say that they merely claim that the TV has the capability to be used as a listening device. In the first 34 minutes, they don't seem to show that LG are actually recording audio from the surroundings (only from the content playing) and after that they start investigating whether you could record audio if you take control of the device (obviously yes).

So the video doesn't seem to support the claim in the article (edit: linked in the merged submission!) that "LG smart TVs continuously [...] log microphone audio while appearing to be turned off".

Of course, all the stuff LG are actually shown to be doing is bad nevertheless, particularly the "Automated Content Recognition".

ptx··on LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices
Probably best to treat the wifi password as compromised and change it after the TV has had access to it. But I suppose there's nothing you can do to prevent it from accessing open wifi networks that happen to be nearby.
ptx··on Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
I don't see how the AI reply could be more concise, clear or exact than what you wrote. If it didn't get the details from you, where did it get them? How do you know it got them right? If it got them from the docs, why not just point to the docs?
ptx··on Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions
Before JS and WASM we had arbitrary code delivered in the form of ActiveX components, Java applets and Flash applications, which were much worse. At least now we have multiple open source implementations of the runtime.
ptx··on How Fairphone built the Fairphone Gen 6+
I can't find anything about that in the article or the Fairphone 6 manual. Do you have a source for this?

My main problem with USB-C headphones on my Android phone is how unreliable they are. But if the USB-C port can just pass through an analog audio connection, that should work much better, I expect.

Edit: This feature is apparently deprecated (removed?) in newer versions of the USB spec! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C#Analog_Audio_Adapter_Acc...

ptx··on O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11
> It is not listed in the Linux Mint App Installer. The Portables downloaded from Sourcefoge do not work.

It's packaged in Debian and Ubuntu as "doublecmd-qt" and "doublecmd-gtk", so Linux Mint ought to have it as well.

> Can it filter-as-you-type the file list?

Yes.

> Does it have chainable script button bars?

I don't know what that is.

> Is there a poweful rename tool?

There's a Multi-Rename Tool, yes.

> Can it look pretty

You'll have to be the judge of that. It looks good to me. It uses the Lazarus component library, so it can be built with either Qt or GTK (or native win32 on Windows) and uses whatever themes and configuration applies to those.

ptx··on O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11
They could still switch to using a Linux machine for most things (that don't belong to the employer), segregating the Windows machine off as much as possible and never letting Microsoft near any of their own data.
ptx··on O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11
Double Commander is pretty good: https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/

It's cross-platform, so could switch file manager on Windows first to make it easier to switch to Linux later.

ptx··on Thinking in Python
The last pre-AI version seems to be this commit: https://github.com/BruceEckel/ThinkingInPython/tree/76a1310d...

But that version seems to have some remnants left from Java version of the book, such as talking about visibility modifiers in the testing chapter.

ptx··on Thinking in Python
The author is apparently still in the early stages of revising what the AI wrote, according to the README, so readers might want to hold off a bit on downloading the epub.

But both the license terms (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and the repo's LICENSE.md appear to agree that distributing the epub is OK.

ptx··on HTML Can Do That
When a form has two sets of mutually exclusive options it might be appropriate? But I find the user experience confusing. It's hard to tell what happened when all the elements moved around, at least without animations.
ptx··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
Why are developers "inherently expected to run untrusted code"? Running untrusted code on developer machines seems like a terrible idea, given that it will compromise everything they build or deploy and (as you mentioned) all their credentials.
ptx··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
FreeBSD does this with Capsicum: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum
ptx··on Thunderbird's Desktop Calendar Visual Redesign
What's going on with those dialogs? Are they real dialog windows with hidden window decorations, or are they fake windows drawn inside the calendar view?

And why do they have what looks like a maximize/zoom button, a "..." menu button and a close button? This is a desktop application – we have real window borders for resizing, real menus for menus and real close buttons provided by the window manager.

ptx··on Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port
More concretely, Microsoft's license [0] gives you at most one of the four essential freedoms:

0. Freedom to run for any purpose? No.

1. Freedom to modify the program? Maybe; Microsoft can revoke it without cause at any time.

2. Freedom to distribute unmodified? No.

3. Freedom to distribute modified? No.

I'm using the free software definition [1] because it's simpler and clearer than the open source definition [2], which is usually considered mostly equivalent in practice, but as far as I can tell Microsoft's license satisfies zero of the latter's ten criteria, apart from perhaps non-discrimination and technology-neutrality. Most of the criteria of the open source definition have to do with distribution, which is not allowed by Microsoft's license.

[0] https://computerhistory.org/blogs/microsoft-research-license...

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

[2] https://opensource.org/osd

ptx··on GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
Does Codeberg support Windows runners at all? Forgejo only seems to have unofficial third-party builds of the Forgejo Actions runner for Windows.
ptx··on GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
Are there any other CI providers that offer free cloud-hosted Windows runners?

Or has Microsoft made sure (through Windows licensing terms and pricing) that it's not possible to compete with their own CI offering?

Edit: CircleCI seems to offer 750 minutes/month (whereas GitHub offers 1000 minutes/month).

ptx··on Critical CVE issued for hallucinated SQLite vulnerability
Or maybe they didn't train it that way to be manipulative (although it's certainly a plausible explanation) but simply as an accidental artifact of trying to make it give honest answers?

LLM-generated images sometimes includes text from the prompt as literal text in the image, so perhaps this is the same sort of artifact? If they've told it to be honest, it responds by talking about being honest instead of actually being honest, because it has no actual understanding of anything.

ptx··on SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?
This does make some sense if it's considered a valid fix to document that you have verified that Bluetooth is disabled on the servers and therefore not vulnerable. But that assumes that the scanning tool can be told about this kind of fix, so that it stops warning about it, which I guess it might not.
ptx··on AI migrated legacy COBOL programs to Java, bugs included
Wow, their Java code example [0] makes COBOL look elegant and terse by comparison.

[0] https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/gregory-cerne...

ptx··on Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption
What do you mean? Their package manager allows you to add additional repositories, if that's what you want.
ptx··on Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub
Doesn't GitHub do this already? If I force push the PR branch, the PR shows a message about this with a link to diff it against the previous version.
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