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suvelx

402 karma · joined May 15, 2014

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suvelx··on New USB-C logos make picking USB cables, chargers less confusing
What's supported is indeed a mess...

I recently moved my desk between rooms. After setting everything up only one monitor seemed to work.

Tried multiple DP cables plugged things in and out with things in various state of power. Eventually gave up and chalked it up to karma and either having a dead monitor or dead dock.

Unplugged my laptop to go work in the lounge for a bit, came back later and plugged it in again amazingly both displays worked.

What changed? I plugged the dock into a different USB-C port. The one that actually supports DisplayPort Alt-mode.

suvelx··on Django 4.0 alpha 1 released
What makes you think it's the weak point? Imo the ORM is easily the best bit.

The request-handling and template rendering is in my mind the weakpoint.

suvelx··on Twilio blocked our account and with it hundreds of our customers [resolved]
Couldn't you not support SMS 2FA for noncompliant countries, and then check that it's not in an ITU registered premium range?
suvelx··on Computer tool spots deepfakes via tiny reflections in the eyes
For freely available and/or published detectors. Probably yes.

But you can hinder it's use quite easily if you have a private/commercial implementation by just not doing realtime detection.

suvelx··on Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies
Are there any plans for complete partitioning?

I'd like to see a point where browsing on two different websites are treated as a completely different user. Embeds, cookies, cookies in embeds, etc.

suvelx··on Grenfell Tower inquiry: key things we’ve learned this year
Mostly banks. Insurance has a part to play.

My understanding is:

In 2018 the government banned ACM cladding.

Shortly afterwards RICS (Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors) developed the "External Wall System" or "EWS-1" form. Which is a means of assessing the risk of cladding (external wall systems) to a building. This was not a legal requirement. It is merely a tool to assess risk. It does not even specify the credentials required to issue one, just "suitably experienced".

Surveyors carrying out an EWS-1 form would effectively be on the hook for any damages if they made the wrong call, This ended up being reflected in their insurance, so most if not all would perform a full top-to-toe inside-out fire-safety survey. These full surveys have resulted in other defects in most buildings being found. Combustible material used in balconies, insufficient fire and smoke barriers between dwellings, faulty or incorrectly installed fire doors. Note These 'defects' aren't necessarily illegal or against code, they just push the perceived risk of the building past the surveyors acceptable risk.

Banks, being horribly risk-adverse made an EWS-1 a requirement for loans on buildings over 18 meters.

Somebody in Parliament said something along the lines of "All buildings should be safe". Banks then started making the EWS-1 a requirement for all loans of multi-tenant dwellings.

But someone is always responsible for ensuring a building is 'safe'. A poor EWS-1 result means someone has to make it safe. This someone is generally the buildings Management Company, or the Freeholder (who is entitled to recover those costs from the leaseholders).

suvelx··on Grenfell Tower inquiry: key things we’ve learned this year
This doesn't change the fact that regardless of height, the residents in those buildings are having hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt forced onto them because of a retroactive law change.

And While Non-ACM cladding isn't illegal, it's still being treated as a risk for 'low-rise' buildings. It's still resulting in surveyors deeming the property unsafe, and it's still resulting in the leaseholders (not owners) of those buildings having to pay millions to 'remediate' it.

This coupled with decades of deregulation, poor construction and minimal oversight has resulted in over 5% of the market suffering from the same problems, ACM, Non-ACM, 50 meters tall, or 5 meters tall.

And nearly all of it is driven by the banks. The government has only banned ACM cladding, The banks have done the rest.

The banks don't give a shit that your odds of jump out your window are 50%. The banks just want to make sure the property they've given you a loan against doesn't burn down when you die from the fall.

suvelx··on Grenfell Tower inquiry: key things we’ve learned this year
> if its unclear who has to pay for something,

It'll fall to the person with the least clout.

suvelx··on Grenfell Tower inquiry: key things we’ve learned this year

  > The government have put together a fund of £1bn for non-ACM cladding remediation, expecting that to cover ~600 buildings, but already over 2,700 buildings have applied and the estimated cost UK-wide is upwards of £15bn.
Non-ACM over 18m tall. Shorter buildings (the majority) are up shits creek too.

There's also a 30M fund for waking-watch relief... Which at 150k per alarm, you can get 200 alarms.

  > The House of Lords has proposed an amendment to the bill stating that leaseholders won’t be made to pay (note: not forcing the tax payer to pay, just ensuring the leaseholders don’t) and the Housing Committee (namely MP Robert Jenrick) are rejecting this on the basis that the tax payer shouldn’t foot the bill.
AFAIK It was initially rejected because it was worded in such a way that would make freeholders liable for other fire-safety things such as failsafe latches. Prioritizing freeholders paying out hundreds of pounds every decade over bankrupting thousands if not millions of people.

It's a farce. The building has industry paid millions in donations to the Conservative party since Grenfell. And at every turn despite parroting "leaseholders should not pay" it has been obvious that they really meant "should pay".

Meanwhile, in a fit of hypocrisy, Jenrick has been campaigning for a (Labuor) council to fix a bridge "because they own it".

suvelx··on Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing
They probably meant the lifetime of the google service.

So anywhere from 15 minutes to two years.

suvelx··on Please stop using CDNs for external JavaScript libraries
If this just leads to people releasing their JS libraries on some random unidentifiable domain (e.g. dx3nxk1hjdhy3.cloudfront.com ) then I think we're going to be in a worse position.

I can presumably trust the code distributed by the 1st party, I can mostly trust code distributed by known CDNs, I cannot trust a randomized subdomain.

suvelx··on Amazon One – Palm recognition for Amazon Go
The only benefit I can think of, is that biometrics has no way of me loaning my credentials.

If my age verification was tied to my palm, I'd have to cut off my hand to let a teenager buy booze with it.

But I still don't feel this is a compelling argument.

suvelx··on Ventoy: A new bootable USB solution
The enclosures are in my experience, garbage and unreliable.

- They struggle with fragmentation

- sometimes, the UEFI/Bios just won't see the disk, not sure why, I'm guessing the enclosure doesn't boot fast enough?

- Sometimes the enclosure just wouldn't read the ISO list. Again, no idea why. Fragmentation maybe?

suvelx··on Woman treated by doctors after her blood turned blue
Homeopathy works!

/s

suvelx··on USB4 Specification
How many DisplayPort channels do each ports support?

How many PCI-E lanes does each port get?

Do the ports share the channels/lanes?

Do they both support Power Delivery? How many Watts does the thinkpad need to charge?

Even with 'clear' labelling, it can still be a crapshot as to the full capabilities of the device.

suvelx··on How to Bypass “Slider Captcha”
There are already companies out there doing 'biometric' analysis of user sessions to discern between authentic, fraudulent and automated sessions, and they're already being applied to things such as loss prevention in financial firms.

I had always assumed that this sort of analysis was already done on the 'slider captchas'. It wouldn't surprise me if this becomes a thing.

Humans are almost never going hit the exact centre of the box, and unless the browser does some smoothing I suspect they never swipe smoothly and horizontally.

suvelx··on Show HN: I built a service to discover rapidly growing Google search topics
Sounds great, I'll ping you an email sometime next week!
suvelx··on Show HN: I built a service to discover rapidly growing Google search topics
You seem to have done most of the hard work, collecting the data. I'm not sure they'd care what format the data was in. Providing it could be expanded to cover the topics their clients need.
suvelx··on Show HN: I built a service to discover rapidly growing Google search topics
Is there a plan to sell the data as an API?

I am currently working with a client who is exploring the options for building out a similar system.

suvelx··on To Revive the Mac, Apple Wants to Kill Electron
> yeah, no. Netflix makes “native” apps for a mind-boggling number of platforms, including set-top boxes and game consoles.

I think all of the STB platforms (at least in the UK) are HTML & JS now. I think they used to be flash.

suvelx··on Ring: Advanced cache interface for Python
I think there's two common situations that a 'compile time' configuration would not support.

- Loading configuration from `main()` e.g. a configuration in via sys.argv and processed by argparse. - Setting configuration within tests. Unless explicitly told otherwise, I'd expect all tests to be performed against an empty cache. Not to mention, there's no guarantee that I'll have access to a server use during tests.

suvelx··on Ring: Advanced cache interface for Python
Every example seems to follow this pattern

  client = pymemcache.client.Client(('127.0.0.1', 11211))  #2 create a client

  # save to memcache client, expire in 60 seconds.
  @ring.memcache(client, expire=60)  #3 lru -> memcache
  def get_url(url):
      return requests.get(url).content

How are you supposed to configure the client at 'runtime' instead of 'compile time' (when the code is executed and not when it's imported)?

Careful placement of imports in order to correctly configure something just introduces delicate pain points. It'll work now, but an absent minded import somewhere else later can easily lead to hours of debugging.

suvelx··on Facial Recognition for Pigs – China’s Tech Firms Are Mapping Pig Faces
But if I can enter stuff into the blockchain (And presumably I can, you can't breed pigs by consensus...), why would i care about double-spend?

If I acquire some stolen pigs, or some pigs from a less than ideal lineage, I'll just enter them into the blockchain and say they're the result of breeding.

Blockchain works because it's verifiable. Breeding pigs, digging carbon (in its many forms) out of the ground, turning these things into other things isn't.

suvelx··on Ocado's burning robotic warehouse
They're just trying to replicate the real UK supermarket experience, with the convenience of home delivery.

It's a feature, not a bug.

suvelx··on Many popular iPhone apps are recording user sessions without asking
Banks will also introduce imperfections into their UI, and correlate how you interact with it to determine if you're human.

Effectively an invisible captcha.

suvelx··on Most “ugly” produce gets turned into soups, sauces, salsa, jam
This is just bad produce management from the shops.

Longer-Expiry products at the back, newer at the front.

But I know at my local supermarkets nobody gives a shit, Frequently I'll buy the same product twice in a row, and the item on the second day expires before the one on the first.

All their staff just chucks the new shit at the front. The milk is even worse, as they just combine the half-empty early-date trollies and wheel out a fresh late-date one.

I'd say it all gets sold. But I have a /marvellous/ view of their bins. They throw so much stuff out.

suvelx··on Yellow vests knock out 60% of all speed cameras in France
This was intentional, the chief of police wanted to stop them being used as revenue generation, and actually used as a safety device.

As such, they're now bright yellow.

suvelx··on Plastic Water Bottles, Which Enabled a Drinks Boom, Now Threaten Industry
Unfortunately not.

The only evidence I can provide is I once knew the groundskeeper for a group of properties owned by the super rich. One of his responsibilities was accepting the deliveries.

These properties were in a built up residential area.

suvelx··on Plastic Water Bottles, Which Enabled a Drinks Boom, Now Threaten Industry
You joke.

But there are people that buy tankers of Evian and other 'high end' water to use through their plumbing.

It wouldn't surprise me if they run it all through a water softener too.

suvelx··on Free Hotel Wifi with Python and Selenium
What is it with Hotels and shitty, restricted wifi in the west?

I can't say I've stayed in a lot of hotels, but of the ones I have stayed in, it's only ever been an issue in the West.

Perhaps that's a part of the reason I enjoy holidays in East Asia. I get the feeling wifi there is a just a thing, you get access to it, it works. And nearly all the hotels I've stayed in also offer a free phone that you can take with you if you need data outside of the hotel.

Yet, in the west, you're lucky if you get some paltry free allowance. For a business who's aim is "make your stay enjoyable" they're doing a pretty shit job of it.

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