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rgovostes

5,986 karma · joined January 19, 2011

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rgovostes··on Running local LLMs offline on a ten-hour flight
And was this written by a local model or a frontier cloud one?
rgovostes··on A 3D Body from Eight Questions – No Photo, No GPU
It takes more like 10 seconds. For a large range of height and weight inputs crossed with all option combinations, you could precompute ~10M measurements and return results basically instantly.
rgovostes··on Another Day Has Come
> The iPad remains my favorite form factor to use in lots of my day but Apple never invested in killer app software optimized for it.

Apple doesn't received much credit for making iPhoto for iPad back in 2012 (https://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/07/apple-launches-iphoto-f...), or more recently Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. I think they really have invested in building pro software for iPads, probably on the order of millions of dollars, less for the vanishingly small segments of their user base but to make the case that the platform can be used for serious work.

The problem though is that the platform itself creates friction compared to macOS that, even at the best of times, makes the user at least slightly less productive. So I can't imagine myself picking up an iPad to do any actual creative work.

Not to mention the best-in-class keyboard cases, over-engineered stylus, mouse support, multitasking support, and on and on. It almost seems desperate that they keep trying to find "the thing" to crack this problem.

rgovostes··on CrabTrap: An LLM-as-a-judge HTTP proxy to secure agents in production
Curiously, the accounts whose comments/articles I'm most confident about being AI-written tend to focus heavily on AI, yet deny using it themselves.

I prompted Claude 5 times with a simple "What do you think about <blog link>?" and the text it generated was remarkably similar. In fact in every response it used the adjective "genuinely", as in your "genuinely novel", which is the LLM glazing that initially struck me.

Claude goes on to hit several of the same notes, in the same tone, basically summarizing bits of the article (using `HTTP_PROXY/HTTPS_PROXY` as a compound; referencing iptables for containers, structured JSON escaping, request size caps). It used the phrase "blast radius" and a similar three-point attack sequence in one response.

I am confident you are using LLMs to write—the Grith.ai blog is basically entirely LLM slop. Please stop posting it here.

rgovostes··on CrabTrap: An LLM-as-a-judge HTTP proxy to secure agents in production
I'm willing to wager that your comment was generated from the body of the article plus a prompt to work in an advertisement for your product, which gets a mention in nearly every comment you make (and every submission you make, sometimes on a daily basis).
rgovostes··on Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th
A number of comments are along the lines of "people will just pirate books from Library Genesis / Anna's Archive". It seems obvious the motivation is cutting off the supply of new books to those sites.
rgovostes··on My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
If you read the transcript it repeatedly made the incorrect assertion (hallucinated) that it’s totally normal for Claude Code to use Base64 armoring.

It’s not surprising it can “read” Base64 though; such was demonstrated back in GPT-3 days. Nontrivial obfuscation might not be one-shotted, but Claude has access to a code interpreter and can certainly extract and step through the decoder routine itself as a malware analyst would.

nftables is a different problem though. It’s apparent that if something isn’t well understood—i.e, there are tons of badly-formed examples on StackExchange—LLMs will fail to learn it too. I’ve seen this with things as “simple” as Bash string interpolation rules like ${var:+blah}. More often than not I’m humbled when I think I’ll learn it better and then find myself swearing at poorly-written documentation and patently false Q&A advice.

rgovostes··on Our commitment to Windows quality
To demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment to Windows quality, you can now move the taskbar to the left side of the screen. No no, it's not vaporware, they even included four screenshots. Everyone can rest assured now.
rgovostes··on Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
I'll admit ignorance here, but I've been skeptical of the claim that new construction drives rents down. What I actually see is: a luxury apartment building goes up, surveys the market, and sets its rents 30% higher for the privilege of living in a new building with a gym for dogs or ball pit or whatever. Then the older buildings say, "Well, we can raise our rents 20% and still be the best deal in town," and so on.

Maybe if you flood the market with 30% more housing units like Austin you get the Econ 101 effect. On the other hand, apartment owners realized intentional vacancy is a profitable strategy, which alone seems to defy that basic interpretation.

rgovostes··on Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold
It is a fantastic book. The author was a spectator for much of the treasure hunt. The adulation of Thompson is amusing in light of the fact that, 15 years after publication, he was arrested for defrauding his investors.

Thompson himself published a coffee table book about the find, "America's Lost Treasure."

rgovostes··on Exploring the ocean with Raspberry Pi–powered marine robots
CUREE, the Curious Robot for Ecosystem Exploration, is another autonomous underwater vehicle built around the Raspberry Pi 4: https://warp.whoi.edu/curee/
rgovostes··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
It's hard to find any fault with the M1 models released 5 years ago. According to second-hand listings on Swappa, US$1200 would get you a capable M1 Max; the equivalent M5 Max is US$3600.
rgovostes··on iPhone 17e
I can't believe Apple expected the 13 mini to be a hot seller; most people holding out for a small phone probably would have already bought the 12 mini just a year prior. The 13 mini was an incremental update -- basically just alleged camera improvements that I could not discern myself in a few minutes of testing.
rgovostes··on Layoffs at Block
My recent experience with Cash App made it apparent that something is really going awry at Block: My decade-old account was suspended, despite no suspicious activity and being in my full legal name and address and connected to the same checking account I've always used. I appealed, but of course they upheld their opaque decision, which is now permanent. I'm not surprised they're struggling if this is how they treat users who have plenty of alternative options.
rgovostes··on Pipelined Relational Query Language, Pronounced "Prequel"
> I wrote SQLite, and I think it should be pronounced "S-Q-L-ite". Like a mineral. But I'm cool with y'all pronouncing it any way you want. :-)

— D. Richard Hipp

rgovostes··on Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986
Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes.

Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.

rgovostes··on FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson Issues Warning Letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook
Always try to consume a balanced news diet of The New Yorker and The New York Post.
rgovostes··on Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish (2005)
Not to be overlooked: The "Related Artifacts" section at the bottom has 8 drafts written between January and June 2005. https://stevejobsarchive.com/artifact/steves-drafts
rgovostes··on Bugs Apple loves
And if you use it long enough you'll get reminders to celebrate grandpa's 113th birthday because the only way to remove entries from that calendar is to delete useful data from your contacts.
rgovostes··on Bugs Apple loves
I had eSIMs get screwed up on my iPhone a year or two ago when I deleted an expired eSIM. It asked me "Do you want to update contacts to use <the SIM I just deleted>?" and I knew I was in trouble.

I did successfully use a backup editor, iMazing, to exclude the telephony data from a backup in order to fix it, but it cost me $30 and hours (transferring my Signal data to a second device and back). For 99.999% of their customers this would require a total erase-install. All because Apple has an off-by-one error somewhere.

rgovostes··on Replacing Protobuf with Rust
What the hell happened to Protobuf anyway? Go look at their repo; it’s positively byzantine. There are two or three different Python backends.
rgovostes··on Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones
Sadly it is true. It’s called Flex Lock or US Carrier Flex Policy: https://www.usmobile.com/blog/what-is-flex-lock/

The gist is that it allows a third-party seller to stock a bunch of identical, not-yet-locked phones and offer a choice of carrier plans. The phone binds to whichever carrier the user first activated on.

So if you’re buying a phone, verify it is not one of these units.

rgovostes··on Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results
I have a few app subscriptions that are under $5/yr, like Parcel, and always purchase the latest release of Acorn for around $20/yr. I use those apps frequently and hope those rates are supporting the independent developers who make them. I would gladly pay more for tools I use to make a living.

A few other apps that are only occasionally used support short-term paid activations, like Flighty and Oceanic+. I think that's a respectable business model, too.

On the less-reasonable end of the spectrum though are the $10/mo apps. Apple used to charge that much for the entire operating system.

I am pretty sure that if I tried to load up my phone with a handful of the kinds of apps I used to use (a word game, a third-party Twitter client, an SSH terminal, a calculator or to-do app with a trendy minimalist design) I would easily cross $100/mo for some marginally-useful features.

rgovostes··on Show HN: A creative coding library for making art with desktop windows
In the classic MacOS days you could use the included Script Editor to record your interactions with applications like the Finder, generating AppleScript to replay the actions you took like resizing windows or creating new folders on the desktop. Then you could have fun making some procedural art wrapping the code in "repeat 100 times ... end repeat". Your parents would really love how you rearranged their documents.

Script Editor still exists in modern macOS but sadly Apple never made the Record feature work particularly well on Mac OS X and hardly any developers prioritize AppleEvent support.

rgovostes··on Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results
This makes no difference, because I can’t remember the last time I installed an app other than for the occasional airline.

From 2008-12 it was genuinely exciting to see what new apps were being released every day. Mobile games from that era had cultural impact. I bought $2 apps without a thought.

But Apple incentivized monetization above all else and killed that excitement. Now you can’t find a tip calculator that doesn’t charge a monthly subscription. A popular flight tracker is $60/year (or a $300 purchase). A flash card app costs the same. Apple’s curated list of “essential utilities” includes a birthday countdown that costs $5/wk.

I know every app will cost me hundreds over the span of just a few years for marginal utility so I simply stopped buying them. And I wonder if Apple’s push for more ad revenue is a symptom of that trend.

rgovostes··on iCloud Photos Downloader
I reinstalled my system and attempted for weeks to get Time Machine to complete a first backup. Every time I started it, the progress bar would fill up about 60% and then stall, and eventually kernel panic if the system was left idle for hours. Never happened before I reinstalled, though I have had it randomly decide the backup is corrupt and it has to start over. macOS deserves a better first-party backup feature.
rgovostes··on iCloud Photos Downloader
I have a 1.2T photo library. Carrying that around on my MacBook requires an $800 upgrade to the SSD.

Time Machine's job is to back up my data, it's not strictly to make a 1:1 copy of local storage. It should back up my cloud data too.

rgovostes··on iCloud Photos Downloader
> Slow motion videos are also not proprietary, they’re just a plain video file.

I haven't looked into the implementation details, but Photos lets you adjust the section of the video that is played back in slow motion. I thought if you share a slow-mo video, it gets re-encoded to bake this in (i.e., one second at 240fps gets exported as four seconds at 60fps).

rgovostes··on iCloud Photos Downloader
My concern with backing up iCloud Photos with anything but Apple Photos is that there are some proprietary formats like Live Photos and slow mo video for which exports are lossy. Also, Apple Photos stores all edits non-destructively, so 'flattening' the edits into a single file for export is also a lossy operation.

It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized storage on the primary system.

rgovostes··on SQL Studio
Ah, I guess not then. I revised my comment. Maybe it was DBeaver, after all.
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