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smodo

450 karma · joined June 21, 2022

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smodo··on Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption
There are some indications that make Russian saboteurs a very likely culprit. It would be unwise to look at every occurrence of sabotage as a singular incident in the context of the ongoing campaign against European political stability.

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025/01/research-e...

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/sabotage-deutschland-bka...

smodo··on Apple announces macOS 27 Golden Gate
So walking back some of the Liquid Glass insanity and better search. Okay, glad I skipped Tahoe.
smodo··on The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source
The kill switch is M365 account management. You take that offline, many SME’s and local governments just stop working. At least for a while.
smodo··on I built a faster Notion in Rust
Still baffles me that Outlook won’t let me tie together emails, calendar items and documents. It makes so much sense to combine these things. All my meetings are about documents and their related correspondence but you never have a coherent information space for them.
smodo··on Good riddance to Auth0 and social logins
Yes. For some people product owners don’t want to hear this. If having access to email means you can access the account then don’t prance around that with complicated recovery steps.
smodo··on I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
Well maybe you lose your ability to focus or your sanity or your privacy but yeah.
smodo··on Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks
It’s a notetaking app.
smodo··on Albania puts AI-created 'minister' in charge of public procurement
Well if we just store the inputs and outputs of the LLM on the blockchain we’ve just created a secure end to end AI-managed tender process. In fact we can automatically pay out the contractor in AlbaCoins now.

Click here to prebuy AlbaCoins and be ahead of the curve in money laun—- I mean AI governance.

smodo··on The F-35 is losing the trade war
Us Europeans are just baffled by the fact that this ‘administration’ wants this. The EU is a big economy that’s relatively easy to deal with. Why would you alienate us?

But yeah so far Trump has been relatively true to his word, as far as it goes. Not really practically but going further down the road of a dare I say fascist outlook. I think Europeans still can’t believe it’s happening, much less intentionally so.

smodo··on Enterprises are getting stuck in AI pilot hell, say Chatterbox Labs execs
My colleagues at the head of a company. I’m one of four bosses. One of us is pushing for AI every single meeting. The other is ignoring her. The last one is starting to ‘see her point.’ I’m considering quitting if this goes to far but unwilling to make that threat yet, as it’s a bridge I can only cross once.

Anyway. To me it just speaks to the disdain for semi-intellectual work. People seem to think producing text has some value of its own. They think they can shortcircuit the basic assumption that behind every text is an intention that can be relied upon. They think that if they substitute this intention with a prompt, they can create the same value. I expect there to be some kind of bureaucratic collapse because of this, with parties unable to figure out responsibility around these zombie-texts. After that begins cleaning up, legislating and capturing in policy what the status of a given text is etc. Altman &co will have cashed out by then.

smodo··on Kagi Reaches 50k Users
The recent blog post discusses moving into the email space and suggests some interesting uses of LLM’s for handling mail (sorting and labeling rather than writing). I’ve been quite pleasantly surprised with the Kagi products so far and would probably consider their e-mailservice if it’s as good. However the hassle of switching email providers is of course around 100x the hassle of switching search…
smodo··on Claude Opus 4 turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline
I’m still hurting from when I didn’t listen to Yamaha’s warnings about the dangers of piano music.
smodo··on Stargate and the AI Industrial Revolution
Prose like an adventure novel, content like a space opera. Lots of overconfident crystal ball gazing. Yep, must be a “future of AI” piece.
smodo··on Obsidian Bases
Looks good. I liked Notion but hated that I can’t migrate my data in the future.

Are there any good ways to attach files to notes? I often want to tie a memo or email to a note but have not found a convenient way.

smodo··on Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
Yeah and now people who can’t even write and never put in the effort to learn it are flooding the zone (my inbox) with useless 10 page memo’s.
smodo··on Makepad 1.0: Rust UI Framework
Thanks. Your team has been busy! :)
smodo··on Makepad 1.0: Rust UI Framework
Putting aside the GPT-vibe I get from this comment.

> Integrated Development System:* Makepad offers a unified environment encompassing a GUI framework, a development system, and an IDE, streamlining the development workflow.

What? There’s an IDE?

smodo··on Makepad 1.0: Rust UI Framework
Gaaf. I’ve written a piece of software using egui and while it let me iterate fast it has its limitations. There’s also gpui but that’s very Mac centric for now… I’ll give this a go in the near future. I’m a little curious about the DSL though. What is the advantage of a/this DSL over the builder pattern used by gpui? Does the fact that you can insert new code during runtime mean that there is in fact an interpreter between my code and the ui? How do you manage performance/efficiency in that case?
smodo··on Linux in Excel
Excel is not even Excel anymore. It’s different on Windows, Mac, web, mobile… And there’s different bugs across all them! My favorite ones have to do with regional defaults.
smodo··on Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges
3) Completely disconnect my printer from the web and live with this small discomfort. HP burned me too many times.
smodo··on The Reason Zelenskyy Doesn't Wear a Suit
The reason people fret over this war is not because they care for the poor people of Ukraine. They (we, Europeans) care because we have the Huns at the gate. Ukraine happens to be the gate.
smodo··on Effective Rust (2024)
The book isn’t free, its contents are published online by the author. Yes, nitpicking. But (1) I like a well formatted epub and (2) the author/publisher still hold copyright.
smodo··on Effective Rust
The Rust Programming Language does a great job imho. It got me up to speed by reading it before bed for a month. I’d never written C/C++ before, just a lot of Python. It starts out really simply by explaining the type system and the borrow checker. Take it from there and do a couple of side projects, I’d say.
smodo··on Warren Buffett sounds warning to Washington as Berkshire reports record profit
The uncertainty is there, for sure. Just look at the index YTD and then consider that the AI hype is in full swing and that Trump promises huge tax cuts to business. Stocks should be soaring but looks like not everyone buys the story.

It’s hard to price in an unknown quantity though. If the war in Europe spreads, who knows what happens? If Trump chokes on some novichok of just gives out from all the hard grifting he’s done all his life, who knows?

smodo··on All Kindles can now be jailbroken
It’s still the case in my opinion. Yes, you can fiddle to make it work. You can set sane defaults. The heuristics for applying styles etc apparently are not clever enough because sometimes you still get strange results. Comparing it to the default Kobo reader is like using a Mac vs a Linux DE. As I’ve gotten older I find I no longer enjoy tweaking every possible parameter :)
smodo··on U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts
How do you mean? Who upholds those codified freedoms? Many democratic countries have similar fundamental laws that are explicitly hard to change or bypass. In the end though all rules are either enforced by some authority or they are mere suggestions. The USA doesn’t seem like a special case to me?
smodo··on Books I Loved Reading in 2024
Imre Kertesz - Fatelessness

Easy to read but provides a profound understanding of the unique historical situation it describes. A famous and heartbreaking sentence: ‘(…) I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.’

smodo··on Kagi Teams
Kagi has been slowly positioning itself as the single point of entry for both search and AI. They offer some LLM integrations and are working on making the whole experience well integrated.

Not a bad idea, just quite hard to pull off when Microsoft starts pushing Bing and Copilot to their enterprise clients more aggressively.

smodo··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
Right. And the vacations are something you ‘give’ your kids too. You won’t lie on your deathbed and think: “I shouldn’t have taken my kids to Vienna that summer. Should’ve put it all in Vanguard ETFs. Man what a bummer.”

If your kids appreciate your money more than your time is when you know you screwed up.

smodo··on Diagram as Code
This is the only diagramming language I end up actually using. And even then I usually end up redoing everything in OmniGraffle after I’ve roughed out a draft.
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