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thedanbob

2,027 karma · joined March 12, 2018

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thedanbob··on Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign
I once encountered an intersection with a big "NO ENTRY" sign on the other side. I turned but google maps wouldn't give me another route, so I did a u-turn and came back to it from the side. Which meant I was close enough to read the small text underneath that said "vehicles under 10 tons excepted". I don't think I've ever been so angry at a road sign.
thedanbob··on Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law
> Why did NYC release it in the first place? Did they not QA it?

Considering Louis Rossmann's videos on his adventures with NYC bureaucracy (e.g. [0]), the QAers might not have known the laws any better than the chat bot.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok

thedanbob··on Backseat Software
> Ask me for some random information you shouldn't need? Get bogus answers.

I've never understood software that's free but you have to fill out a form of personal information to download it. Even if I was willing to share, what possible use is my full mailing address to some random software company? It's data collection for the sake of data collection.

thedanbob··on Microsoft mishandling example.com
Yeah, Spark. Shame because I really liked their client, but I refused to use it anymore after I realized what they were doing.
thedanbob··on Microsoft mishandling example.com
It's more common than you might think. I know of at least one popular email client that stores your credentials on their servers to enable features like multi-account sync and scheduled sending.
thedanbob··on Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsofts cloud app that steals and deletes files
> MS made it that much worse by wrapping these in dark patterns that may change without notice

> It's truly dangerous if it can and does act against your wishes, interests, and reasonable expectations.

Do you really not consider the first to be an example of the second?

> Shift+Del and rm -rf don't have any guardrails around them.

Shift+Del asks for confirmation. I would expect OneDrive to do at least that much before deleting files off the local machine, even if they're recoverable.

thedanbob··on 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11
> I could also write the same article about this website, how it was so full of bloat and ads that nobody wants I could barely get it to scroll, and it eventually crashed before getting to the end of TFA due to general resource exhaustion on mobile.

I found it ironic that after reading an article about all the stuff in Windows 11 that no one asked for, the site hijacked my back button to show me more articles I might want to read.

thedanbob··on Still using Firefox – but not because of its vision
Same. I tried LibreWolf for a while but as TA mentioned, it required too much tuning. (It also isn't signed on macOS so installing has extra hoops.) I'm on Waterfox now and it's just about right for me.
thedanbob··on Swapping SIM cards used to be easy, and then came eSIM
As a counter-anecdote, I've had far more trouble over the years swapping physical SIMs than eSIMs. You'd think that going between two phones that use the same size card would just work, but in practice that isn't (wasn't?) always the case.
thedanbob··on The Whole App is a Blob
I haven't tried since that one attempt. I've picked up a few words from learning German songs as part of my voice training, but otherwise it's not useful enough to me to take the time and effort.
thedanbob··on The Whole App is a Blob
It's been almost 10 years so maybe they do it differently now. I just remember they made a big deal about the gendered nouns but nothing about the fact that sentences weren't even close to correctly structured. And too be fair, maybe that was coming later and they didn't want to overwhelm people, but a quick explanation would have been nice.
thedanbob··on The Whole App is a Blob
> "A friend who had been learning some language in Duolinguo and then couldn't say a sentence to a native", should be proverbial nowadays.

I tried picking up some German via Duolingo once. I thought it was going great, pretty soon I was up to full sentences. Then one day I realized (because my voice teacher sometimes makes me translate the foreign language songs) that I wasn't learning German sentences, I was learning English sentences substituted with German words. German grammar is completely different. I haven't touched Duolingo since.

thedanbob··on Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright
> And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

Animals, specifically deer. That said, you can use brights when no other cars are nearby, and when there is a car coming its worth a few seconds of extra risk to not blind the other guy and put him at risk.

thedanbob··on A change of address led to our Wise accounts being shut down
That was my first thought as I was reading. Of course, I imagine almost every serious business would be extremely uncomfortable doing something like that. On the other hand, if the alternative is getting your account closed anyway, there's not much to lose.
thedanbob··on FocusTube: A Chrome extension that hides YouTube Shorts
It seems like Shorts keep getting worse, at least the Shorts that I get presented with. For a while the most popular format was a clip from a movie or TV show with annoying royalty-free music slapped on top and a badly chosen title. Now I'm seeing clips shrunk down into a tiny content box within the Short while the background is some guy watching you watch the clip. Why is that popular?!
thedanbob··on Dark patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn
Don't worry, some of us got it. That part made me chuckle.
thedanbob··on I uncovered an ACPI bug in my Dell Inspiron 5567. It was plaguing me for 8 years
I was trying to help a friend recently with a bizarre issue with a Dell laptop: the 2 key (and only the 2 key) is unreliable. Normally I'd say "hardware problem" but it acted more like a software bug. Among other signs, it's unreliable in Windows and the BIOS but not in Linux.

Unfortunately, I don't have the skills to even diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. And my friend isn't willing to put Linux on it since he wants to sell it.

thedanbob··on Disk Utility still can't check and repair APFS volumes and containers (2021)
File systems seem to be a particular weakness of Apple. HFS+ is pretty terrible. APFS is better, until something goes wrong and then it's just as terrible. Add "network" and the situation is 10x worse. I recently gave up on Time Machine (via Samba) entirely because it would regularly corrupt itself and destroy all my existing backups.
thedanbob··on Setting up a home VPN server with WireGuard (2019)
Those lines are only needed on the VPN server, not the client(s).
thedanbob··on Setting up a home VPN server with WireGuard (2019)
I wrote a script that runs periodically on my home server to update DNS (Cloudflare) if my IP changes. In practice, it almost never changes and my ISP's general flakiness is far more of a problem.
thedanbob··on Serverless Horrors
A number of the titles appear to have 69 or 420 cents added to the amount that appears in the story.
thedanbob··on My Own DNS Server at Home – Part 1: IPv4
I set up authoritative nameservers at home using unbound, which appears to be considerably easier than configuring BIND, but I still can't say that I fully understand it. DNS (and networking in general) is a bit of a dark art.
thedanbob··on 37signals Dev – Lexxy: A new rich text editor for Rails
Interesting! I just got done creating my own Tiptap-based editor but I might still check this one out. Last time I looked it wasn't really possible to swap out the Trix editor in ActionText, so if they've fixed that I should at least be able to integrate my own.
thedanbob··on Aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with
I didn't realize that nesting is official now, last time I checked it was still a proposal. Nice!

CSS has a lot of weirdness but I feel like it's been following the trajectory of Javascript toward becoming decent language. Flexbox and the :has selector, and now nesting, cover a lot of the pain points I've had over the years.

thedanbob··on Vaultwarden commit introduces SSO using OpenID Connect
Adding another +1 to Pocket ID. I looked at a couple of the ones you mentioned but they looked too heavy and complex for what I wanted. Pocket ID does one thing and does it well.
thedanbob··on PYX: The next step in Python packaging
Bundler has always been the best package manager of any language that I've used, but dealing with gem extensions can still be a pain. I've had lots of fun bugs where an extension worked in dev but not prod because of differences in library versions. I ended up creating a docker image for development that matched our production environment and that pretty much solved those problems.
thedanbob··on Objects should shut up
I rented a car in the UK a few years ago and by the end of the trip I was ready to set it on fire.

- Adaptive cruise control would randomly slam on the brakes on the motorway (just passed a 30 kph exit, the speed limit must be 30 now!), or match speed with a car in the next lane that was I trying to pass

- Emergency braking would trigger if I got too close to a car that was turning out of my lane, or a shrub while parking

- Lane assist reenabled itself every time I started the car

- Radar system would fail every ~3 starts, which would disable adaptive cruise control (ok) and blast a warning sound (bad)

At least now I know that if I'm shopping for a car in the future, one of my criteria needs to be "won't actively try to kill me".

thedanbob··on Irrelevant facts about cats added to math problems increase LLM errors by 300%
To be fair, the AI probably hallucinates more efficiently than the human.
thedanbob··on Firefox-patch-bin, librewolf-fix-bin AUR packages contain malware
> But, maybe it would be best not to have “yay” available. Using something like AUR without reading the package build files is… pretty bad, right? And it is bad for the community, because if there is a convention of doing that sort of thing, it makes the AUR a good target for attacking.

I don't remember how yay works but paru (another AUR package manager) displays the pkgbuild file before it will install.

thedanbob··on NINA: Rebuilding the original AIM, AOL Desktop, Yahoo and ICQ platforms
Yup, they can probably rebuild ICQ the way it was when I was 16 but they can't make me 16 again.
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