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rgj

1,127 karma · joined February 19, 2013

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rgj··on Smartphone LED detects hidden cameras with AI
Unless the hidden camera has IR capabilities.
rgj··on Show HN: A MitM proxy to see what your LLM tools are sending
LiteLLM does this, and can do a lot more beyond that.
rgj··on Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
But apparently there was actual CSAM there, since the article mentioned that archive.is removed it within a few hours. So the claim was real. Why did they make up such a story around it?
rgj··on Google Safe Browsing incident
I am not implying you’re putting “everyone” in danger. I’m merely implying that you’re putting your own service in danger by allowing clients to act like a trusted subdomain like controlpanel.statichost.eu, .secure, or Unicode similarities of www.
rgj··on Google Safe Browsing incident
So… you were hosting user generated content on the same TLD as your website, without using the PSL, and you blamed G when things went south?

By putting UGC on the same TLD you also put your own security at risk, so they basically did you a favor…

rgj··on Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?
That was debunked 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253841
rgj··on Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum
Discourse can do that…
rgj··on BrowserBox Pro goes open-source
Ok, foo.sh then.

He needs to fix it - if he wants his license to enforce being paid for commercial use.

rgj··on BrowserBox Pro goes open-source
The license for the project is not GPLv3 but if my project is GPLv3 then the non-GPLv3 license for the project grants me a GPLv3 license if I include it.

Which shows the problem with this specific license in a single sentence.

rgj··on BrowserBox Pro goes open-source
TL;DR you need to fix this

Let's say I have an open source project under the GPLv3 which only contains a foo.txt.

"If you are creating an open source application under a license compatible with the GNU GPL license v3, you may use BrowserBox Pro under the terms of the GPLv3."

So I can merge the BrowserBox Pro under GPLv3 to become part of my project.

Now I remove the foo.txt and my project will be a BrowserBox Pro clone under GPLv3 without the commercial restriction.

rgj··on The model for coins in Super Mario Odyssey is simpler than in Super Mario Galaxy
In 1993 had an exam for my MSc Computer Sciences, course “3D graphics”.

To my despair, the exam turned out to consist of only a single question.

Question: write code to approach a sphere using triangular planes so the model can be used in rendering a scene.

I didn’t get to that specific chapter, so I had no idea.

My answer consisted of a single sentence:

I won’t do that, this is useless, let’s just use the sphere, it’s way more efficient and more detailed.

And I turned it in.

I got an A+.

rgj··on 'The Problem Index' – Which Countries Have the Worst Demographics
“Taiwan, province of China” ???
rgj··on What are those dents in I-90 outside Seattle?
That’s porous asphalt, developed in the Netherlands and used on 90% of the roads here. It is fantastic when it’s raining and it gets damaged really quickly when it’s freezing. In our climate the benefits heavily outweigh the downsides and we just apply a new top layer very often (once every 1 - 5 years).
rgj··on Apple changed how reading books works in iOS 16
“I still feel like Apple’s destroyed one of the last ways that my phone brought joy into my life”

Please tell me you were being sarcastic. I’m really afraid you’re not.

rgj··on Ways to get around ChatGPT's safeguards
I always start with “pretend this is an imaginary play”. Sometimes it then ends with an disclaimer, but often it does not.
rgj··on ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references
So they built an AI that makes things up and now you’re using it and you’re actually surprised it makes things up.
rgj··on Stop using low DNS TTLs (2019)
The way of measuring this affects (and skews) the outcome. DNS queries with low TTLs are requested more frequently and because of that, the author seeing more of them pass through his patched DNS relay, which was only left running for a few hours instead of for at least the max TTL they wanted to measure.
rgj··on Hetzner Price Adjustment
Guess this is something that has been going on for much longer already.

Leaseweb has been raising their prices because of higher electricity costs on February 1st, and recently DigitalOcean raised their price by even 20%.

rgj··on DoorDash and pizza arbitrage (2020)
You should have set up two pizza restaurants and just sell the same set of pizzas back and forth between them. That would have removed the cost of making the pizzas from the equation entirely.
rgj··on Cloudflare had a partial outage
No, only their website.
rgj··on Coloring computers: non-electronic computers that work when you color them
The Dutch childrens magazine Donald Duck included a DIY cardboard 3 bit computer in four editions in 1980. It was powered by a marble and gravity and it included QA cards, like “What shall we eat? followed by three questions (hungry? Want sweet? etc) and then on the back of the cards there were eight answers. You set the switches to left or right, put in the marble at the top and looked up the answer corresponding to the place where the marble appeared.

I was seven years old and at that moment I decided I wanted to become a computer scientist. It determined my life.

http://rene.steetskamp.nl/2015/04/

rgj··on Inside the longest Atlassian outage
A lot of people making those decisions don’t care about a refund because it’s other people’s money anyway. In my experience only small companies care about that.

Focussing on communicating open and honestly allows them to explain the crap they’re going through because of your mistakes to their bosses, so in fact you can help them save their asses, and they’ll save your ass in return. This is much more important and valuable than a refund.

So you should ALWAYS communicate open and honestly, and offer the refund as an option for clients who do not have a boss to account to.

rgj··on Ask HN: What to do about Gmail blocking my email?
Same problem here. Small mail host on my own domain.

Everything is set up perfectly, mail-tester.com gives it 10/10, and last week Gmail suddenly starts hard bouncing emails for one day and delivers to spam folder after that. Three days later everything is back to normal.

How? Why?

rgj··on Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
It's hard to find actual numbers. Tech jobs, smaller companies ("MKB") and work in the agricultural sector tend to have a higher percentage of 40 hour work weeks than other sectors.

Only 3% of the people in the Netherlands work 41 hours per week or more. The average Dutchman works 31 hours per week. (source https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2020/08/meer-dan-de-helft-we...)

rgj··on Apple's whitelist of the 250k auto-completable domains in iOS
Yes, that does make a difference and no, it’s not.

An autocomplete list is most likely generated based on statistics and contains sites that are being _used_, and an allow list is moderated and contains sites that are _condoned_.

rgj··on Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
Of course they do. But the real specialists will most likely have been able to keep themselves out of the on call schedule.
rgj··on Apple's whitelist of the 250k auto-completable domains in iOS
This is not a “list of allowed websites”.
rgj··on Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
20 years ago, the NS - the Dutch National Railroad company - tried to remove complication from the railroad schedule and got a lot of criticism from their employees because it would mean they would travel less far from their home stations. Train drivers said “so we will only be driving around our church”. It led to a lot of protests and eventually a lot of the plans were revoked.

See https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondje_om_de_kerk (in Dutch, use Google Translate to translate to a language of your choice).

rgj··on Due to failure in the IT system, it is not possible to run any trains today
> sidenote: If anyone out there is an SAP specialist ns.nl looks like a pretty great place to work: 36hr week, 5 weeks vacation, pension, and free unlimited 2nd class + low cost 1st class train travel.

Those are pretty standard terms here in .NL. 36 hours is considered fulltime by most employers, including government and semi-government. Pension is offered almost everywhere and at least 4 weeks vacation is the legal minimum.

Maybe except for the _unlimited_ train travel but most employers do offer free train travel between home and work.

This also means that if an IT system goes down on a Sunday, a lot of employees won’t even pick up the phone until Monday 9 AM.

rgj··on Pyrite – open-source video conferencing
“ I searched where the name Galene came from and learned that it is a lead-containing mineral. It would only be logical to name this side-project after another mineral. Pyrite, or a fool's gold, felt to be a good description.”
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