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rixrax

1,523 karma · joined December 24, 2016

Throwaway acct. sort of. Not so much anymore. More like pseudonymous. Because of privacy. Trying to offend equally.

My northstars: without privacy, there cannot be freedom; affordable access to quality education should be available to everyone ; baseline healthcare should be available for everyone, without insurance, at an affordable cost. These are or should be civil rights issues.

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rixrax··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
And surely cannot trust credit card details alone. Instead let's do age verification on top of CC just in case.
rixrax··on Stop Making TUIs
"Q: Son, what is window manager needed for? A: Running multiple terminals on one display."
rixrax··on Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years
I hope next up is the performance and bloat that the LLMs can try and improve.

Especially on perf side I would wager LLMs can go from meat sacks what ever works to how do I solve this with best available algorithm and architecture (that also follows some best practises).

rixrax··on FFmpeg 8.1
Is there a 'HW' guide to show the expected performance of Vulkan compute codecs anywhere?
rixrax··on Cloudflare crawl endpoint
And while at it, ability to mount the resulting archives at some virtual root in nginx|apache. E.g. serve site-archive.extension at /somepath/site. And standalone simple webserver that can take one or more archives from command line and servers them.
rixrax··on The Brand Age
Although PG isn't wrong here, people also have larger wrists nowadays that are able to comfortably support larger watches compared to ~50 years a go, never mind at the 1940s or 1950s.
rixrax··on LineageOS 23.2
Why is this?
rixrax··on Swedish Alecta has sold off an estimated $8B of US Treasury Bonds
Canada?
rixrax··on Show HN: Tommy – Turn ESP32 devices into through-wall motion sensors
Any reason it couldn't run on Raspberry Pi? Also, I have some ZHA sensors that I believe are also on 2.4GHz band - will this interfere with them?
rixrax··on IKEA Catalogs 1951-2021
This is awesome! I wish Omega, Zenith, Seiko and other watch manufacturers would do the same and publish their historic catalogs online! And auto manufacturers, and really everyone who is in the kind of business where catalogs like this exists.
rixrax··on An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
I think models will also become snapshots or time capsules (with obvious and non-obvious biases) that archaeologists of tomorrow (like in 500 years) will use to understand us and the change in society (e.g. how the models themselves change over timefrom encyclopaedic standpoint).
rixrax··on GPT-5
What is the current hypothesis on if the context windows would be substantially larger, what would this enable LLMs to do that is beyond capabilities of current models (other than the obvious the now getting forgetful/confused when you’ve exhausted the context)?
rixrax··on Some things to expect in 2025
Essentially you're paying human to be a proxy between the requirements, LLM and codebase. Some people I'm talking to lament having to pay top dollar to their junior (and other kinds I'm sure) devs for this, but I think this is and will be the new reality and new normal. And instead we should start thinking how to make best of it, and how to help maximize success for these devs.

Few decades down the road though we are likely to be viewing this current situation similar to how we're looking at 'human computers'[0] of yesteryear.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing

rixrax··on JSON5 – JSON for Humans
This should have been named NOTjson-somethingv5. Or similar. Now it is far from obvious for the uninitiated that this might not be the 'latest' version of JSON. And then they end up using this incompatible format by accident, when in all likelihood standard JSON would serve equally well or better in 95% of the use cases.
rixrax··on Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke
At the Baltic Sea the cables and such break mostly because of one reason only: russia. [0]

[0] https://www.csce.gov/briefings/russias-genocide-in-ukraine/

rixrax··on Official Raspberry Pi NVMe SSD Review
But what about the heat sinks / fan when you mount the m2 on top? Especially /w Pi 5, to get more perf out of it, it presumably should have a sizeable heat sink complete with the fan?
rixrax··on Llms.txt
Rolls sleeves up to start working on custom GPT and training my own LLM to offer service to produce llms.txt for a website by letting them process the website... ;-)
rixrax··on AI is growing faster than companies can secure it, warn industry leaders
You're probably not wrong. But I think we should recognize that what is humanity is rather fluid. If you were to talk to the 15th century clergymen, I think they would tell the horrors of printing press and how it has/will break humanity. And they wouldn't be wrong either. Humanity evolves, and, well, that's it. And overall, hopefully, and this is where we hopefully can effect positive change, we can steer the change to more humane, and moral direction.
rixrax··on Home Assistant Presence Simulation
Sir. You Win teh Internets today. This has been my gripe with HA for the longest time. That YAML / GUI-only / etc. approach is just atrocious.

Unfortunately it works well enough, and there are little or no alternatives to it as far as I can tell. Were there a reasonable alternative, with a configuration as an actual code (YAML isn't), I would dump HA in a heartbeat. I mean I could even live without the GUI - just configuration as a code, and stable support for Zigbee (and BLE etc devices). But then again HA mostly works. And if it works, then...shrug.

My use case is mostly to be able to 1) monitor/understand our electricity consumption, 2) be able to turn off all/selected electrical devices when leaving house etc., 3) automatically lower/raise outside shutters based on weather/where sun is(!) to keep house cooler, 4) and as a bonus, have leak detectors send me a text if there is a leak. My setup is some 30 zigbee smart switches / sockets, couple of IKEA badring leak sensors, solar inverter and something zigbee in main electric panel to get total electric consumption. And five door/window sensors (that aren't really used for anything, but you know how one goes down the rabbit hole with these things...).

How I've made it somewhat manageable is that I run it in a following manner (first in Pi5, now in N100 -- no difference between those observed regarding HA):

- have /opt/homeassistant/config mounted to zram

- on boot unpack /opt/homeassistant/backup/latest.tar.zst -> /opt/homeassistant/config

- run HA from docker (where /opt/homeassistant/config is now on zram)

- cron will make a backup of /opt/homeassistant/config weekly (or I can run backup manually if I've made changes/addedd devices) and then these are backed up 'offsite'.

So now whenever HA goes bonkers, or more likely I've messed something up with it, end result being the same, I simply roll back to some earlier known good configuration. Docker is wonderful in this regard. Really, I don't know how else people live with the HA, other than backing up their entire config, and then re-installing.

rixrax··on Please don't mention AI again
I wholeheartedly agree (that first ask from ChatGPT, then double check with whatever, and that Google results have become junk - mostly). Alas, I can totally see how AI companies will monetize this by allowing advertisers to influence the answers. And not in a add-in-a-sidebar fashion, but baking the advertisers product etc. into the answers. Personally, I find this somewhat disturbing.

Indeed, I think this is a key area where regulation is needed. If answer from AI is influenced by 'something unexpected' - what ever that might be, then it has to be clearly highlighted in the answer.

rixrax··on ASCII Silhouettify
On stock rPi5 running this takes > 3 seconds. Three seconds to render 370 x 370, 8-bit/color RGBA image to ASCII on a 2.4GHz CPU. And this is my lead-in to rant about neofetch, which takes about 0.2 seconds to run on the same Pi (see below), which would also be the time it would slow down opening a shell should I put neofetch into my .profile. Lastly, it takes cat to cat output of neofetch to /dev/null about ~0.01 seconds, which also is the time that neofetch should probably take to run (and really, this tool too).

  $ time ascii-silhouettify -i neofetch-1.png > /dev/null
  real 0m1.817s
  user 0m3.541s
  sys 0m0.273s
  $ time neofetch > out.txt
  real 0m0.192s
  user 0m0.118s
  sys 0m0.079s
  $ time cat out.txt > time
  real 0m0.001s
  user 0m0.001s
  sys 0m0.000s
rixrax··on Show HN: LogsQL – opinionated query language for logs
>> just send them to /dev/null instead

I wish. But 'regulatory compliance'. And 'we might need them' - just not sure for what - but we'll try another data analyst next quarter. Thankfully because of the GDPR (and maybe other reasons) there is a healthy pressure to also cleanse us from the logs we've collected.

That said, I agree, based on my trials (and mostly errors), Splunk seems one of the better ones. Not considering the cost anyway. My trouble is that I am not a data analyst, but I get asked more than I would like about these things.

rixrax··on Show HN: LogsQL – opinionated query language for logs
Am I the only one that feels that EVERYTHING is wrong in this ELK, Splunk, etc. Grafana world? The user interfaces that these monstrosities present us with are barely useable, everyone has their own query language, they force us to install their own agents own our hosts and servers, when I upload logs, many can't even take random JSON logs and input them in a structured way without defining pipeline rules or what now. And did I say that the Logstashes and Promtails and Vectors and what not pipeline tools with their Grok etc. filters feel like somebody wanted to really make busywork cool.

I am happy that in my day to day work I can dump my mostly Linux logs to rsyslog, and eventually forward them to S3 glacier for a few years.

So I am guessing the question I am asking is that what in the world are you doing with these observability or SIEM platforms and is anyone actually deriving some REAL value from using them?

rixrax··on 4K 1000Hz Monitor Exhibited
This is what I am wondering every time I am updating my TV (to a larger model, better HDR, etc. ]). I almost exclusively use the TV to watch movies. Movies that have been shot at 24fps, or 29.97 or 48fps. So this being my use case, all I need is that the player chain and the TV can change refresh rate to the actual movie refresh rate/fps.

For my use case, is there anything I am missing here? Or have I been in the wrong all these years to brush off the TV sales guys at the store trying to push me 240Hz etc. latest fads?

rixrax··on Sweden Is a NATO Member
>> He goes as far as justifying Hitler's attack on Poland

And why wouldn't he. We should not forget that it was russians and nazi's that started the world war 2[0][1]. It's just that the rusians got lucky, and Germany bore all the guilt.

Since then, russians of course have been actively trying to rewrite history.

My grandfather fought russia and later its ideology in battles across the world. I did forget for a while, but his words now shine brightly in front of me: NEVER trust a russian.

[0] https://www.annefrank.org/en/timeline/60/germany-and-the-sov... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact_negoti...

rixrax··on The Dumber Side of Smart People
The trouble with the very smart people is that even when wrong, they can come up with very elaborate and convincing reasoning why they in fact are not in the wrong, and indeed convince themselves (and then others in the process) that what they are preaching indeed is the correct solution or answer to a problem.
rixrax··on Singapore Airlines Concorde
Given russias current trajectory with their war of genocide against Ukraine[0], it is not foreseeable that any western commercial airlines would be able to fly in their airspace for years to come[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_inva... [1]https://www.npr.org/2023/03/18/1162659715/russian-53rd-anti-...

rixrax··on Apple Orders 'Neuromancer' Series
While I want to be really excited about this, I am already terrified they'll give it a 'Foundation' treatment. E.g. take a great book, and then sort of re-write it while re-using some names and elements from the original. Or the Sho-Gun treatment, where you take another great book, and turn it into visually beautiful, but soulless pseudo-reproduction of the book that lacks exactly the depth that made the book great.

So please Apple, give it a Lord of the Rings treatment. Or even Hobbit. Pretty please!

rixrax··on Juno – A YouTube Client for Vision Pro
I can't even begin to describe how excited I am about the Vision Pro and how much I want it to be everything it claims to be! Are there any info available from people who have received their headsets that are 'standard' production versions, and not Apple supplied early access versions? I want to hit that order button, but the rational me tells me to wait for some initial real life reviews to roll in.
rixrax··on ExifTool CVE-2021-22204 – Arbitrary Code Execution (2021)
So how do I know if there is bug bounty available for vulnerabilities in exiftool? Or ghostscript? Or ffmpeg, openssl, gnutls, sox, or any number of other packages I may be using?
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