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quesera

7,537 karma · joined March 13, 2010

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quesera··on Ask HN: Is it impossible to disable Siri on macOS 27?
FWIW it's entirely possible (and not uncommon) for a single executable to behave differently depending on the name it was launched under.

I have no idea in this case, but it's possible that "Siri" and "Siri AI" are genuinely different in behaviours and interfaces and dependencies, even if they are the same binary.

quesera··on macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review
I'm sure you've considered and rejected tmux, but is this only because it has a different UI than a native OS app?
quesera··on America's Driver's License Breach Is a National Security Disaster
In some states, until the early 1990s, SSNs were also used as drivers license numbers.
quesera··on Show HN: Alien – Self-hosting with remote management (written in Rust)
> The situation is tragically optimal--we've achieved some kind of multiobjective local maximum on a rock in the sewer at the bottom of a picturesque alpine valley and declared victory. We should do better.

But it's a very comfortable rock. pointy in all the right places.

quesera··on Show HN: Alien – Self-hosting with remote management (written in Rust)
Well, in the early days of infrastructure growth, when designing bespoke monitoring systems and protocols would be relatively low-cost, it's still nowhere near the highest-ROI way to spend your tech team's time and energy.

And to do it right (i.e. low-risk of of having it blow up with negative effects on the larger business goals), you need someone fairly experienced or maybe even specialized in that area. If you have that person, they are on the team because of their other skills, which you need more urgently.

SaaS, COTS, and open source monitoring tools have to cater to the existing customers. The sales pitch is "easy to integrate". So even they are not incentivized to build something new.

It boils down to the fact that stream-of-bytes is extremely well-understood, and almost always good enough. Infinitely flexible, low-ceremony, no patents, and comes preinstalled on everything (emitters and consumers). It's like HTTP in that way.

And the evolution is similar too. It'll always be stream-of-bytes, but you can emit in JSON or protobuf etc, if it's worth the cognitive overhead to do so. All the hyperscalers do this, even when the original emitter (web servers, etc) is just blindly spewing atrocious CLF/quirky-SSV text.

quesera··on All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027
I struggle to see the difference between "bringing an extra battery" and "bringing a power bank".

Except that the latter has more functionality than the former, and should be prefereable.

quesera··on Show HN: Alien – Self-hosting with remote management (written in Rust)
Grand solutions require broad coordination, and they often devolve back into a modified-but-equivalent version of the previous problem. :(

Stream-of-bytes is classically difficult model to escape. Many have tried.

quesera··on Kimi K2.6: Advancing open-source coding
This reads like satire, but I've been feeling that a lot lately.
quesera··on Kimi K2.6: Advancing open-source coding
All China has to do here is stay in the game and wait patiently while the US and EU press pause on data centers. See also: solar panels.

We're making this way too easy. The rationale and logic are reasonable, but ultimately irrelevant.

quesera··on At long last, InfoWars is ours
If benefitting the victims is a goal, then clearly sending them money now is more valuable than sending them interest-borne money later.

If the victims don't benefit from the money now, they can bear their own interest. Time-value, etc.

quesera··on Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept
I think you're wrong, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't operate on the fringes of fraudulent behaviour, so I might be miscalibrated.

But my premise is that there is benefit derived from the lie, either financial or otherwise. I believe this is clearly fraud and risks civil penalties if pursued by the party who used the information to extend the benefit.

An interesting case is if you lie about previous salary to a prospective employer who does not have the ability to confirm the data. In that context, with no formal pre-employment agreements or contracts, the lie is probably just negotiation strategy with no civil liabilities. I repeat that I am not a lawyer. :)

quesera··on I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok
Similar situation here.

My take on it is that frequent users perceive apps as desktop launchers/shortcuts.

They don't care about the difference between app and web, per se, but the bookmarking situation in mobile browsers is awful (desktop too, honestly), and an app presents a convenient launcher for the service/site/data they want.

Adding a springboard launcher for a PWA is easy but still apparently more frictional than installing an app.

quesera··on I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok
Android and iOS both require user permission for apps to access contacts or location.

Are there other platforms that can't even manage this basic level of user protection?

quesera··on I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok
In the time it took you to write this comment, you've thought more about the abstraction than most of the people who are confused by it -- and it will never succeed to coax them out of their confusion with such logic. :)
quesera··on Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept
Credit agencies do not report income to the IRS, so there's no tax relevance. Credit agencies are not party to your obligations to the IRS at all. You can lie to credit agencies all day long if you like.

However, if you do so for the purpose of some kind of benefit, financial or otherwise, it's clearly fraud.

It's hard to remember that that's still illegal these days -- but it is, for you and for me, at least.

quesera··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
In the US, I regularly see bathrooms and kitchens without GFCI.

I looked up the history:

  1961 GFCI invented by a professor at UC Berkeley
  1971 Added to NEC code for outdoor outlets
  1981 … bathrooms
  1987 … kitchens
  2005 … laundry rooms and unfinished basements
  2014 … crawlspaces, around pools and hot tubs
Lots of bathrooms haven't been renovated (or at least not with permits) in the last 45 years, apparently!
quesera··on What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?
A great deal of pop music, performed by teens-20yos, is written and produced by seasoned professionals who are in their 30s-40s-50s.

The exceptions to that pattern are remarkable.

quesera··on I decompiled the White House's new app
If an app can make an HTTP request, the app can know the user's public IP address and the geolocation derived from that.

This data has well-known limitations, but I think it is the fallback people are talking about here.

quesera··on I decompiled the White House's new app
No one is trying to go that far down the path.

https (specifically the CA chain of trust) is imperfect, and can be compromised by well-placed parties.

quesera··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
LEGO does it too, with "mystery minifigure" packages.

I watch kids squeezing the polybags trying to find an identifying bump or edge, hoping to either get the one they want, or at least not get one they already have.

And yeah, baseball cards are/were no different, going back decades.

But at least the financial loss here is constrained to a few dollars. I don't think these are the gateway drugs to gambling problems, but they are definitely exploitative.

quesera··on Goodbye to Sora
3. A Memorial Wall for those who have mistaken ChatGPT for a therapist
quesera··on Box of Secrets: Discreetly modding an apartment intercom to work with Apple Home
In the US states that I know well, a residential tenant may perform necessary repairs to bring the space up to health and safety codes, and may deduct the cost from their rent. They have an obligation to notify the property manager, in advance in the case of non-emergency repairs, or after the fact otherwise. There are additional details to consider as well.

I don't know if this would apply to a commercial tenant.

But it would definitely not apply to non-violating conditions like the OP's case.

quesera··on Chest Fridge (2009)
When we've had "too many" hens, we've had multiple large salad bowls full of eggs on the countertops. And that's after overwhelming our friends and neighbors.

They will easily last 4-6 weeks with no major degradation (i.e. still good for omelets, but use the freshest ones for poaching).

The forest predators eventually help moderate our egg surplus. Free range comes with risks, alas.

Interesting point about ridge-cracking. I'd never thought about it, but it makes sense and I will mend my ways! :)

quesera··on Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
Fair point, and totally agreed.

I literally LOLed at the idea that purchasing a consumer product, at retail, could include stipulations on my future employment. And at the hubris of any manufacturer for imagining they could get away with such an absurd idea.

quesera··on Teaching Claude to QA a mobile app
That's a bit anthropomorphic though.

When LLMs become able to reflectively examine their own premises and weight paths, they will exceed the self-awareness of ordinary humans.

quesera··on Migrating the American express payment network, twice
Apple Card has the same features, currently issued and operated by Goldman Sachs but to be transferred to Chase within the next two years. Hopefully the features and functionality will survive. I don't think Chase has them today, so I wonder.

It's atrocious how bad most bank and card apps are. I'm planning a switch to a new bank, and mobile app quality is a huge criterion. Bank of America and Wells Fargo get zero points from me.

quesera··on Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids
This is laughably unenforceable, and all the more ridiculous for it.
quesera··on Chest Fridge (2009)
It's true. The bloom on the eggs protects them from whatever nastiness is on the outside.

This includes salmonella, which may be present if your flock is infected in the poop on the outside of the shell (remember hens only have one egress port), plus any other sources of environmental pathogens, of which there are many.

When the bloom is washed off the egg, pathogens have an easier time penetrating the shell and consuming the nutritious yummy bits inside. At room temperature, they can multiply rapidly. Refrigeration slows the rate of growth.

An unwashed egg retains the barrier, and stays fresh longer without refrigeration.

YMMV on household acceptance of dirty eggs on countertops, but they are cleaner than many other items within arms' reach that we are conditioned to not think about. :)

quesera··on $ teebot.dev – from terminal to tee in 6 seconds
Curious. I always prefer 100% cotton, and nothing ever shrinks noticeably. I thought shrinking clothes were a historical oddity from my childhood, honestly.

A couple things that might make the difference:

  - Conference swag shirts might be a lower quality/more shrinkable weave? I don't buy anything special.
  - I wash on medium or cold temp, never hot (except full loads of towels), and dry on medium. Everything always comes clean.
quesera··on How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel
If today's LLMs could shake their annoying verbal tics, they might be indistinguishable from Malcolm Gladwell.

Turing didn't go far enough. The next level is the Gladwell Test: Indistinguishable from a human who is persuasively confused.

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