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raffraffraff

4,410 karma · joined March 26, 2016

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raffraffraff··on Podman v6.0.0
Last time I tried rootless podman was about 6 months ago and it was a total mess. I was trying to use it to run a container as me (user 1000) and mount a directory from my home (owned by user 1000) and it drove me and Claude around the bend. It's not a podman vs docker thing per se, just rootless being a total pain. However I just enabled the docker service, ran the same command on docker and it worked. I think I just left docker running after that. I realised that on my home setup I don't care enough to fight with it. Sometimes you just want to do the thing you want to do and not turn it into a 4 hour learning session about some side shit.
raffraffraff··on Brave's latest browser release offers Containers for better and easier workflow
For me, they are completely essential and we're the killer feature that kept me on Firefox. That, and I never liked Chrome anyway.
raffraffraff··on We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
Try getting a Linux laptop to just go to fucking sleep and not drain it's battery flat within a few hours, and wake up without losing wifi.
raffraffraff··on Librepods: AirPods liberated
By "reward manufacturers that make good hardware" do you mean "purchase their hardware" or do you mean some other long term commitment to them? Or is this a jab at the person who suggested you not buy their "good hardware" for other reasons?

Personally, I will use whatever gear is good as long as there's no risk of it becoming a paperweight because the manufacturer aggressively gets in the way of using it with other operating systems. I'm not "all in" on Apple and never will be. I love certain apple hardware but I'll likely never buy an M series Macbook because one day they'll stop supporting it even though it still works perfectly, and it doesn't support Linux.

raffraffraff··on Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide
I installed opensuse tumbleweed on mine and the bastid won't hibernate. Or: it hibernates but refuses to resume. It loads the saved state from disk and then 30 seconds of black screen later, reboots and loses state. Two solid days with Claude, exhausting every avenue, and it's basically unfixable. Sleep=OK, Hibernate=Fucked.
raffraffraff··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
Right now mine isn't an app (yet) it's the backend service (api and web) so I just run it in a browser.

For now I'm letting that backend access my files directly. The front end can also play YouTube music (free, using the yt-dlp method).

None of this is public yet so right now I don't need anyone's approval.

raffraffraff··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
I'm working on a recommendation service (which, to me, it's the piece I'm missing when I play my local mp3 collection)

I collect song metadata from various places (genre, instruments, track credits, rating). I also scrape charts by year, genre etc.

Then I run an ETL job on the json data I have downloaded, pre-building queries for extremely fast lookup tables. This gets saved to Duckdb, which is used by my go web ui/api.

It's very early days, and I only spend one or two hours a week on it, but right now it's amazingly useful. It had roughly 80k song metadata. To preview the suggested songs I ended up building a very cut-down YouTube music player, except that the playing song has all the metadata right there, and everything is a link that can take you to the artist, composer, instrument, genre, album etc. It's a great way to "wander through your collection".

Unfortunately this is only useful to me, because I targeted the music I listen to.

Next step is to download lyrics and extract song meaning, keywords etc. Then use MusiCNN, (or CLAP,OpenL3, HTSAT) to extract embeddings. Finally train my own model for nearest-neighbor retrieval based on a mix of metadata, giving the user the ability to tune it on the fly.

raffraffraff··on Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps
Yep. This situation doesn't do the "cancellers" much good either. What they want to do is eliminate the 'evil person' from society. Wipe them from social media. Block them. Even get them fired. Make them disappear.

But here's the problem. This whole phenomenon is most prevalent in western style democracy. You cannot take that person's vote. You can engage with them and try to change their mind (but also be open to having your own mind changed too, otherwise it's a disingenuous enterprise). Or you can eject block and cancel. If anything, that just drives them further from your social/political group. Hence the person who you blocked and cancelled starts to look around at the other "so called evil people" outside the bubble, and realise that many of them might be refugees from pleasantville , just like you. You can only see your former bubble after your pushed or pulled out of it.

Bubbles can suck people in, but they can also push people out into the gravitational pull of other bubbles.

raffraffraff··on Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps
If his definition of woke mind virus is "identitarianism", then it's agree that it's fucking awful. But I wouldn't call it "woke mind virus".

Identitarianism is a cancer, that has been fed via social media algorithms. We seem to have invented a machine for rewarding all of the wrong incentives. Who would have thought that phenomena like audience capture & polarised thought bubbles would be in the palm of the hand, directing thoughts and forming unbreakable opinions on an array of issues that otherwise wouldn't even be on the radar?

I don't think that this is a left, right or in between thing. Identitarianism had infected the entire political spectrum.

BTW: Perhaps I'm wrong but I don't take the Wikipedia definition of "identitarian movement" and identitarianism. I'm thinking entirely about identity politics. "If you're associated with person X you must be Y", or "If you believe A you must be a B". Highly policed thought bubbles. Ostracism. Cancelling.

As a result, today, with technology that can enable mass communication of thought, there are important conversations that can no longer happen in society.

raffraffraff··on Archaeologists find Egyptian mummy buried with the 'Iliad'
Or universal
raffraffraff··on Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
Well, if space is expanding and earth is revolving and spinning around the sun which is spinning around the milkyway which is moving through space then.... Was it really close in space either?
raffraffraff··on Reviving old scanners with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP
I used a raspberry pi 3b+ and an ancient ipad to turn my Canon A3 scanner into a network scanner with an LCD interface (which also just points to the phpscan web page). I tuned to html / js / css to fit the ipad perfectly and only show options that worked with my specific scanner.
raffraffraff··on India's hottest district shuts at 10 am as mercury breaches 48 C mark
On a long enough timeline, a piano could fall on your head
raffraffraff··on I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
You think that you're complaining about IAM, but really you're complaining about the web ui. I rarely use the web console, I use terraform or the cli. I'd you're vibe coding your infra with Claude, point it at the cli / terraform. Skip the ui.
raffraffraff··on I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
I always smile at posts like this. They're right and wrong at the same time. Systems should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". And thinking that you can gloss over the detail is just going to create more hassle later on.

IAM is just complex. I can't think of any implementation of "users, groups, roles, policies, identity providers, oidc" that is truly simple.

I'm reminded of a guy I worked with, who fought against Kubernetes adoption because it was "too complex", only to slowly reinvent Kubernetes badly, adhoc, out of vault, consul, systemd, nomad, iscsi, ansible, jenkins, puppet, bash, spit, glue... making lots of mistakes along the way. You think you don't need to implement some feature until you do.

Another thing I'll say about AWS (having been the sole infra guy at a few startups) is that it's well within most people's abilities to learn it. And you can usually avoid the shitty stuff. You think lambdas stuck? Don't use them! You could use EKS, ECS or bare EC2.

raffraffraff··on K3sup – bootstrap K3s over SSH in < 60s
Well, for hobby purposes I terraformed a completely free cluster on OCI today. It's a "toy" of course, but k3s + OCI "Always free" tier includes Oracle Heatwave mysql which k3s can use in place of etcd. I'm deploying 2x (2 CPU / 12GB mem) VMs to run workloads. Also get an internal load balancer so nodes can find each other an external network load balancer for Traefik. It's quite usable.
raffraffraff··on Security through obscurity is not bad
Example: there are teenage gangs going around on high powered scooters in my city, carrying hammers and mini grinders. They pair up on a scooter, steal a bike and disappear.

I watched them. They don't want to hang around longer than necessary. They will only approach a bike rack that is clearly visible from the road. They will only steal a bike that has unobstructed access to the road (no tricky bollards or other bikes to get around). Even though they are full of bravado, and shout obscenities and threats at me when I tell them to fuck off, they still run away (even though the one approaching the bikes is carrying a weapon while his companion stays on the scooter ready to escape)

Anything that even mildly inconveniences these guys is enough to stop them attempting theft. The bikes they steal needs to be expensive, out in the open, with direct access to the road, and with a shitty lock. And believe it or not, those tumblers line up a lot.

Throwing a blanket over a bike is probably enough to stop them from even approaching it.

raffraffraff··on Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)
Would this ever affect me if I don't use many of MacOS built on tools? I brew install gnu equivalents make them all default. Just like how I also don't use most of their desktop environment stuff, and instead use rectangle, hammerspoon, karabiner to make it feel more like the Linux desktop I wish I could use at work.
raffraffraff··on Using a 1978 terminal in 2026 (DEC VT-100)
Yep. Either projector or rear projector or didn't happen. I think 70 was pretty big for a rear projection unit.
raffraffraff··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
Hmm.

"Acceptance of Iran's nuclear enrichment rights" (enrichment to what degree?)

"Termination of all International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors resolutions against Iran" (what does this actually mean, that they tear up previous reports and findings? Ignore undeclared nuclear facilities and unaccounted for uranium?)

I mean, are Iran basically asking that they be allowed build nuclear weapons unchecked? Or is there another way to read this?

raffraffraff··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
I'm thinking more like, when I run with a sweater and heavier sweatpants, but the time I'm at the 5km mark I'm seriously sweating. So, not just higher heart rate. I'm talking "feels like a fever" heat, for 20 minutes, a few times a week.

But I run with my heart rate low, I don't like exceeding 150 on these runs.

raffraffraff··on AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC
Yep, these models are all trash. They happily invent wrong detail. If you never knew anyone in the photograph, then knock yourself out, let it invent faces that didn't exist. But if you're doing anything with family photographs just stop. Unless you can tune a model on your own family photographs you can't magically add "correct" detail to a blurred, pixelated, grainy or unfocused photo. You can add colour, pretty reliably though.
raffraffraff··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
Hmm. So what about a 30 to 50 minute run wearing sweatpants / hoodie?
raffraffraff··on Trivy under attack again: Widespread GitHub Actions tag compromise secrets
This has always been my big "WTH?" whenever I see people using github actions. "You're literally taking someone else's script and ruining it against your codebase"
raffraffraff··on The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
On huge games produced by large game studios, I wonder if the idea of using a real world technical challenge as a "feature" within the game is considered genius? Consider a coder and a game designer who are on different teams and don't attend the same meetings.

But if you look at creative writing, story arcs are all about obstacles. A boring story is made interesting by an obstacle. It is what our protagonist needs to overcome. A one-man-band game dev who simultaneously holds the story and the technical challenge their head, might spot the opportunity to use a glitch or limitation as, I dunno, a mini game that riffs on the glitch.

raffraffraff··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
I bought a tiny lapel clip Bluetooth receiver that has buttons and a headphone socket. Charge over USB, pair with phone, turn any headphones into Bluetooth. If the battery runs out, plug the headphones straight into the phone.

However, the noise cancelling gap is real. I'd kill for wired IEMs with an inline battery + buttons, and noise cancelling mic & circuit in the earpieces.

Closest is the Sony cans, which have wired mode (ie: they have a tiny jack, so you can use them passively) but I don't think they cancel noise when using them that way

raffraffraff··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
A friend worked at sennheiser about 15 years ago and I took advantage of his cost-price deal on a pair of HD700. They are, without a doubt, the best sounding and most comforted cans I've ever used. Now, I treated them badly, throwing them into ruck sacks etc, and eventually one of the transducers failed. I contacted Sennheiser who charged me €140 to "repair" them... They sent me a brand new set with the thick silver core cable (I never sent mine back so now I have two, and those cost over 100 bucks by themselves)
raffraffraff··on MacBook Neo
Is Force Touch the thing that makes Macbook trackpad better than basically every other laptop trackpad? Because if so, that is actually "the" deal breaker.
raffraffraff··on MacBook Air with M5
Even though I'm done with apple, every time I use a non-apple laptop I think "this is a shit trackpad".
raffraffraff··on Rob Grant, creator of Red Dwarf, has died
> Working together under the name "Grant Naylor", the creators of the series collaboratively wrote two novels. The first, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, was published in November 1989, and it incorporates plot lines from several episodes of the show's first two series. The second novel, Better Than Life, followed in October 1990, and it is largely based on the second-series episode of the same name. Together, the two novels provide expanded backstory and development of the series' principal characters and themes.

If you haven't read the books, please do yourself a favour. They are far far better than the series, have much more depth and have not dated as badly. I loved Red Dwarf when it was on TV (jesus, I was 12 years old..) but I find it a little hard to watch now. Some parts are still great though.

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