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pwg

16,936 karma · joined September 8, 2010

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pwg··on <input type="password" maxlength="20"> prevents me from logging into Vanguard
With Firefox, if one sets the dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled about::config setting to false, then websites can no longer block paste. Your pastes will work, despite their trying to intercept and block them.
pwg··on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart
Another comment in this thread pointed out that "return an SR-71 to operational flying" is /also/ the exact type of cover story that would be handed out for as cover for an actual project (likely some hyper-sonic aircraft) when trying to rehire retired engineers for this new secret project.
pwg··on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart
For military planes, every bit of weight you can shed up front increases some operational capability of the plane. In this case, not carrying an extra 200-300kg of weight for starters meant 200-300kg more spy equipment /could/ be carried along on the mission.
pwg··on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart
The SR-71 on display at the Udvar-Hazy branch of the Air and Space Museum located near Dulles Airport in Virginia does not have its engines in the nacelles. The rest of the exterior looks complete, but other internals could very well also be missing and the exterior would still look identical.
pwg··on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart
The official public reason for NASA having an SR-71 back when they were still flying one was for extreme high altitude atmospheric tests/experiments. No other plane (at least at the time) could fly at the altitudes the SR-71 could.

Whether that was a cover story for additional spying by the NASA SR-71 is unknown to those of us without the necessary security clearances.

pwg··on Firefox's chief on why he hopes a redesign will help win users from Chrome
Rather than playing "copy Apple" how about fixing the memory leaks?
pwg··on Oracle cites 'force majeure' to shield itself on controversial data center
> I really don't get who keeps using Oracle

"Enterprise" is still very much in the camp of "using Oracle". Which is likely how they survive despite being so customer unfriendly. "Enterprise" users are simply using what "the enterprise" purchased and have little choice in the matter.

pwg··on Ask HN: Familiar with California SB-122? (sales and use tax on digital products)
You should be consulting with a tax advisor/accountant/attorney, not HN, for this question.
pwg··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
> without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to

That is directly the result of the evil pull of advertising. "Logged in" users are more valuable than "non-logged in" users to advertisers (because logged in ones are identified) and so what you are seeing as "nagging" is Shitter (formerly X, formerly Twitter) desperately trying to increase its ad revenue at your expense. You are watching enshittification right before your eyes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

pwg··on The case against JPEG XL
> If JPEG XL doesn’t become useful on the web, is it really likely to become popular with camera manufacturers, professional image editing tools, etc?

I suspect that eventually, the browser makers that are reluctant to add JpegXL support will do so, even if reluctantly, and so it will eventually "become useful on the web".

The reason why is Adobe added JpegXL as a compression format for PDF's, and as every browser maker wants their browser to also be a "PDF viewer", this means they must include a JpegXL decoder to be able to support PDF's going forward. If they must have a JpegXL decoder anyway, it is not that difficult to also add it as another supported format for the <img> tag.

pwg··on Americans Hate Data Centers. Why?
My the "Times" has fallen. This op-ed writer totally missed the forest for the trees.

Not six months or so ago we had multiple different AI CEO's, and other big company CEO's, publicly exclaiming how many jobs AI was going to replace in short order. What did they expect when they told the masses (i.e., the voters) that a majority of them were going to be unemployed soon because of AI? This is simply the folks they told they were going to lay off fighting back to prevent those layoffs from happening.

Couple that with the electricity bill price increases because of the load from the AI data centers and you have a perfect storm that crosses party lines and aligns the vast majority squarely in the "opposed to AI" camp.

pwg··on China rejected a container of Argentine beef. Here's what the US did next
Sadly, the whole article reads as AI generated slop.
pwg··on Meta reaches $16.68B settlement over social media harms to children
> Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly.

So long as the changes produced (to their belief) increases in advertising revenue, they didn't care. More ad money was all that mattered.

pwg··on Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown
It is, but you'd be surprised at the number of folks who will DIY stuff, but won't DIY anything electrical.
pwg··on Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown
For the home inspections I've been a "walkthrough witness" to, the "electrical inspection" portion involved the inspector opening the normal access door to the breaker panel levers, and plugging in one of those $5 Home Depot wiring fault detectors into a few random plugs here and there to verify no wiring faults appear.

But they do not remove the panel cover to look inside, nor do they open up any receptacle box anywhere to look at any of the wiring inside. So they wouldn't know (nor discover) if the wiring job was done well or done in a shoddy manner.

pwg··on Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown
Unless your state is very unusual that is the requirement for installing them for other people as a tradesman. In most states if you are DIY for yourself all you legally need are the electrical permits for the wiring hookup (which for DIY don't require that "apprenticeship").
pwg··on TreasuryDirect: Prepare for ID.me – Your New Way to Log In
With Firefox you can set to false the about:config setting "dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled" and websites can no longer block paste.
pwg··on The Dutch community where people live on strips of land in a lake
With UblockOrigin blocking all Javascript by default there was no cookie banner, just the article and photographs.
pwg··on Show HN: Tamron Lens Utility Alternative on Linux
> However that still doesn't explain who would want things like auto-focus fine tuning or assignable buttons in the lens rather than the camera body where it already exists.

1) not all camera bodies include those fine tuning options in the camera firmware;

2) lenses that include additional buttons beyond that which the camera maker programmed the body to understand can't be tweaked by a body that was never programmed to know the button exists;

3) in the specific case of some Tamron zooms, the Tamron focus fine tuning is at up to five different distance figures, while most camera body focus fine tuning is a single global setting for that one lens;

4) for camera bodies that do include focus tuning in their firmware, they also usually have a limited number of slots for a limited number of lenses. For professionals they very well may own more lenses than the camera has slots, so being able to "tune the lens" via "the lens itself" means each can be fine tuned, even if the camera body cannot store that many different adjustments;

5) an adjustment the camera maker never thought to include (i.e., one example quoted in the repo where the focus ring direction can be reversed) can not be tweaked by the camera body. This is useful to photographers who mix lenses from different makers on the same body as Canon builds their focus rings to rotate one way when focusing towards infinity while Nikon builds their focus rings to rotate in the opposite direction towards infinity.

pwg··on Show HN: Tamron Lens Utility Alternative on Linux
Modern DSLR camera lenses are full blown embedded computers controlling mechanical actuators (focus motor, aperture blades, etc.) and communicating lens information to the camera's CPU (aberration corrections, vignetting corrections, etc.). The days of lenses just being collections of mechanical cams for moving glass elements back and forth disappeared a great many years ago.
pwg··on France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls
The problem is not that the originator can be found. The current, existing, legacy, phone system already can find the exact originator.

The problem is that enforcement of breaking the regulation is so non-existent that the criminals just place millions of calls knowing, at most, they might get a minor slap on the wrist that can be budgeted for as a "cost of doing business".

Every single call carried across the phone network is billed, and every hop along the path knows who to bill for their part of carrying the call. The billing system is the method to trace back to the originators, and then apply a fine sufficiently large enough to no longer be a cost of doing business.

But the regulators seem to have no idea that the billing system provides the traceability to find the criminals and then go after them. Instead we get things like stir/shaken that are trying to patch "authenticity" on top of a network never designed with that in mind.

pwg··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
These bills all suddenly appeared, as if by magic, in multiple state houses only a very short time after Zuck was on the stand in the Facebook trial early in the year testifying that "the right place to do age verification is in the operating system".

Now, granted, correlation is not always causation. But it sure stinks of something Meta had their lobbyists push just after Zuck's testimony so as to shift the liability risk of handling age appropriate material away from Meta properties and onto operating systems (Microsoft, Apple, Google (Android)).

pwg··on Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification
> Content providers, like MPAA films, should have to identify what sort of content they are providing. Then I can give my kids a device configured to allow some or all of that at my discretion.

If the intent were to actually protect children, then this would be what was done.

"Protect the children" is just a subterfuge to get electorate support for voting for the foundation for a "1984 thought crime" style monitoring of the internet.

pwg··on You don't know what DevOps means
> These days I see people throwing around the term DevOps in contexts that strike me as odd.

> Maybe the term has evolved to the point where I’ve been left behind, but I think it’s more likely that the term has been adopted by people who don’t know the history behind it.

The marketing team picked it up as the latest fad to fan, and once marketing picks up a term to use it to advertise, that term is lost forever as to its actual original meaning.

pwg··on Elixir-lang.org has a new design
It also does not load if Javascript is blocked.
pwg··on More Bounce to the Ounce
And set the stage for "Space 1999"'s lunar escape from earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_1999

pwg··on Panel meter calculator with floating point
For the old mechanical machines (whether powered by a crank or powered by an electric motor) yes, the term "adding machine" was because, for most, all they could do is add:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adding_machine

"Subtraction was impossible, except by adding the complement of a number (for instance, subtract 2.50 by adding 9,997.50)."

A few fancier ones could multiply, but they would do so by repeating an addition some number of repetitions. Nearly all output their results on a paper tape much like "store receipts" today, only printed in ink instead of via thermal transfer paper.

pwg··on Ask HN: A DC Powered Home?
Then, after researching amperage and wire gauge, pay attention to the fact that power losses in wires from the inherent resistance thereof is proportional to the square of the current passing through those wires:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power#Resistive_circu...

pwg··on Google deleting all recently inactive accounts without phone number
> This is a very shady dark pattern by Alphabet corporation.

Advertising company (Doubleclick [1]) wants phone numbers to better target ads. No surprise there.

[1] The company currently calling itself Google is not the same Google as yesteryear. In 2008 Google purchased Doubleclick, and what happened is that the advertising rot from Doubleclick ate Google from the inside out. What we have now calling itself Google is actually all the evil that was Doubleclick, only calling itself Google. That's why the Google motto no longer includes "Don't be evil".

pwg··on Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera
> which can pose a significant (and growing, as standards improve) obstacle for older cars.

At least for my state, the emissions test a car has to pass is whatever it was supposed to have passed when it was fresh off the assembly line. So older cars do not have to pass stricter newer standards that newer cars have to pass.

Now, granted, wear and tear will eventually result in an older car not passing its original standard, but at least the standard it has to pass is fixed, rather than a moving target.

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