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rkachowski

2,398 karma · joined February 9, 2012

it was me

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rkachowski; my proof: https://keybase.io/rkachowski/sigs/Hn0zuARTRYTZ3YD1eqM2eiawmrk6cfzIJOAg9r7_f-E ]

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rkachowski··on Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing
realistically a large corporation or concern
rkachowski··on Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing
Before knee jerk reacting to this

1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue

2. This only affects entities with 3000 or more apartments

rkachowski··on Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing
It's not from people, it's from corporations that rent out 3000 or more apartments.
rkachowski··on How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads
According to the article it's a static site served from cloudflare. That would be quite the compromise.
rkachowski··on Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader
They're just blocked from OTA updates, you can flash whatever you want on the sdcard and then unlock OTA. (I did this yesterday with an aliexpress version x4)
rkachowski··on Alibaba to ban Claude Code in workplace over alleged backdoor risks, source says
> The corollary is that there are no morals once the stakes are in the $ billions, let alone hundreds of billions.

terrifying

rkachowski··on Swedish court says Google is to pay $1.5B to Klarna in antitrust damages
Because this kind of behavior was rampant in the past - where one company owned everything and could leverage it's size and influence to crush competition across distinct market spaces. It prevented other companies from operating in the same space, which led to stagnation, outrageous human exploitation, inequality, and ultimately the great depression.

It is now illegal as laws have been introduced with the aim to prevent this from happening again. The effectiveness of these laws, with regards to how well they fit the current era, is a different matter.

rkachowski··on The cost YAGNI was never about
I don't know what happened to Kent Beck, a few of his recent articles seem to be devoid of substance.
rkachowski··on ESP32 Bit Pirate, a Hardware Hacking Tool with WebCLI That Speaks Every Protocol
This is super cool, I love the idea of just having a $5 wifi UART
rkachowski··on The worst job interview I ever had
It's wild to see so many advocates of "the inexperienced should have experience already". You're put in an awful situation but it's your own fault because you went through it, you should have known better than to take questions at face value as presented.
rkachowski··on Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
it's all marketing wank, but how can they "supercharge the value delivered to customers" through company restructuring? whether they hire 50k more people or fire everyone, the value delivered to the customer depends on the quality of the product and the price - irrelevant of cloudflare's margins.
rkachowski··on Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
wero is a european initiative set up by a consortium of banks that is built layered upon instant payments. it's not a private company like paypal or visa, its an attempt at making European payment infrastructure
rkachowski··on Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day
They are normal. They generally want to know if the ad spend resulted in an install. Health care data is radioactive and they would be fucking up very hard if sending this to an analytics service.
rkachowski··on Books are not too expensive
This seems really quite confused in its message.

> Yes, the original price of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tolkien’s Fellowship were just $3.95 and $5. But those are nominal values. When we factor inflation, the picture changes dramatically. In today’s dollars—and you can run this exercise yourself—those cover prices would look more like $43 and $54.

I mean, yeah that's too expensive...

> Now compare that to housing, healthcare, or admission to sporting events, movies, and concerts

that's a pretty wild set of things to compare to..

> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.

so they are _indeed_ too expensive, but it's not their fault?

> When people say they want cheap books, they forget there are many other interested players at the table: authors, agents, publishers, bookstores, book distributors, and so on.

I genuinely don't care about the middlemen and supply chain, the very expectation that a book purchase comes after careful and deliberate consideration of all the tertiary factors and relevant economic forces only reenforces the idea that *books are too expensive*

> I spent over a decade at Thomas Nelson Publishers.

There you go...

I would say I'm an avid reader and spend a lot more than the average person on books, but prices are absolutely wild. When you start comparing them to movies, sporting events and concerts (healthcare!?!) you're putting them appropriately in the category of big indulgence.

rkachowski··on Have a fucking website
Sometimes I get inspired to write something publicly, but then the fact that I'm providing another point of data to ChatGPTs training corpus which helps the american Department of War make shit memes about killing people - stifles that impulse pretty quickly.
rkachowski··on Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language
It's great for now

https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en&to=unhinged+elon+musk+ra...

rkachowski··on What does " 2>&1 " mean?
I've found recent claude code to be surprisingly good at dispelling false assumptions and incorrect framing. I say this as someone who experimented with it last summer and found it to be kinda stupid; since December last year it's turned the curve - it's not the sycophantic nonsense it used to be.
rkachowski··on What does " 2>&1 " mean?
> A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me.

Perhaps if there was no question already available you'd have had a different experience. Getting clearly written and specific questions promptly closed as duplicates of related, yet distinct issues, was part of the fun.

I find that AI hallucinates in the same way that someone can be very confident and wrong at the same time, with the difference that the feedback is almost instant and there are no difficult personalities to deal with.

rkachowski··on What does " 2>&1 " mean?
It's really jarring to see this wave of nostalgia for "the good old days" appear since ~2025. Suddenly these rose tinted glasses have dropped and everything before LLM usage became ubiquitous was a beautiful romantic era of human collaboration, understanding and craftsmanship.

I still acutely remember the gatekeeping and hostility of peak stack overflow, and the inanity of churning out jira tickets as fast as possible for misguided product initiatives. It's just wild yo

rkachowski··on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office
They're purposefully being vague, but this is Prince Andrew finally facing consequences in the face of the Epstein files (?)
rkachowski··on Microsoft's Azure Linux
Are you speaking on behalf of Microsoft?
rkachowski··on Why is there a tiny hole in the airplane window? (2023)
not with that attitude
rkachowski··on Recovering Anthony Bourdain's Li.st's
The idea that suffering will somehow make you noble is quite awful. Depression isn't some kind of cleansing fire that opens you to empathy. It affects good people and assholes and people in every phase of life.
rkachowski··on Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image
"Hello main office, I have seen a rumor on Instagram that a bridge has collapsed. Should I stop all traffic through this region due to this shitpost?"

"Hi please don't - we've had three different trains go through there already. There is no loss of signaling in the area, electrical and infrastructural connections are responding appropriately. We will be sure to contact other drivers and let them know about this"

rkachowski··on Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image
> Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images.

Perhaps Network Rail should have a system of asserting rail integrity that is independent of social media (?!!?)

for real, pick up the phone and ask someone (??)

rkachowski··on Fighting the age-gated internet
It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights.
rkachowski··on Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions
They are exactly the kind of mortgage broker mentioned in the parent comment.
rkachowski··on In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended
I'm born and raised in Scotland, we're keeping it.
rkachowski··on It’s been a very hard year
I don't think it matters. Whether it was a fault of incentives or some intrinsic nature of people given the environment, it was rarely a pleasant experience. And this is one of the reasons it's fallen to LLM usage.
rkachowski··on It’s been a very hard year
the gatekeeping, gaming the system, capricious moderation (e.g. flagged as duplicate), and general attitude led it to be quite an insufferable part of the internet. There was a meme about how the best way to get a response is to answer your own question in an obviously incorrect fashion, because people want to tell you why you're wrong rather than actively help.
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