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tpxl

2,885 karma · joined January 25, 2017

smrkafc@gmail.com
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tpxl··on F-Droid 2.0
> And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............

The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use. This makes me sad, but it does have merit.

FWIW I still use the website to do all my payments. I find banking apps to be madness - you're entrusting all your money to what is essentially a toy.

tpxl··on F-Droid 2.0
Google is the one peddling the malware. Any changes to 'security' that don't start with them removing the oodles of malware from their store are not security but profit driven.
tpxl··on My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test
I disagree. There is a lot of boilerplate to write and mundane things to check, which AI can speed up a lot. I'm not talking about 'software engineering' here, but about 'programming', which consists of a lot of write DTO->write rest interface->write interface->write simple select query->map response. The good taste here comes from the architectural design and the UI design.

The amount of 'software engineers' who couldn't design a table to be readable or a flow to be intuitive is off the charts. AI neither helps nor harms here, it just makes implementing good and bad decisions faster.

tpxl··on My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test
The differentiator right now is taste. Most people have none (like the business partner in the OP), and some people have plenty (like you seem to have). These two sets of people will produce wildly different results with the same tools.

Two things you can do regarding programming here.

1. Be a consultant for a high wage, use AI, produce good results quickly - little to negative intellectual joy here. You still have the edge here due to good taste.

2. Produce 'artisanal' code in your spare time. Work 3 months for pay, then 9 months on whatever projects scratch your itch.

I still want to program and I don't think it's time to let go. Hit me up (email in bio) if you wanna chat, you sound like a really interesting bloke.

tpxl··on New EU-wide product repair rules come into force
The manufacturer/seller already employs people who deal with this, and it's not expensive. Getting my washing machine fixed for 10€ parts + labor instead of 300€ parts + labor sounds mighty nice to me.

> Manufacturers must also provide [...] access to spare parts at a reasonable price.

This is the important part. Stupid shit like 0.3€ soldering buttons to 200€ motherboards so the repair is expensive has got to go.

tpxl··on Mythos Attempted to Social Engineer Open Source Maintainer to Merge Malware
What, exactly, are the consequences of these companies doing cyberattacks against random people?

One person does it, they get bullied by the government into suicide, a company worth trillions does it and they get government contracts?

tpxl··on RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues
What options are those? Anything they do that makes ARM better/cheaper for consumers makes RISC-V a win, even if it never reaches mainstream adoption.
tpxl··on Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
Anti-union propaganda is where it comes from.
tpxl··on Resetting Xbox
For games like Starfield, the problem is the game is bad, it has nothing to do with politics or ESG.
tpxl··on Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union
Well companies can issue stock, which is more or less spawning resources, but that's not what I meant. When people with more money than they need want more of it, things get done, including fucking over the customers, the partners and the workers. When wageslaves want more money they get dragged through the media for their greed (as is happening now).
tpxl··on Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union
Resources have a way of spawning for CEOs, why not for minimum wage workers?
tpxl··on .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
I don't know; you can bit shift an output stream by a string (or char array) in C++ (std::cout << "Hello, world!"). That seems pretty mad to me.
tpxl··on France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech
Slay the Spire 1 (Java) and 2 (Godot). Ironically, StS1 ran better under wine than natively.

Anyhow, there are plenty of native games, we just don't notice, because running them tends to not be any harder than running Windows games these days.

tpxl··on FSF statement on copyright infringement lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic
> Generally speaking societies do better when knowledge is shared and not hoarded.

These companies do even better because we're not allowed to share the knowledge (read, illegally copy protected works) and they are.

tpxl··on Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games
Can you expand on how you do this? I've gotten into gamedev a couple of times, but never got around to completing anything. Something like this might just do the trick.
tpxl··on Two insider cases we've recently closed
Eh, betting houses have a vested interest in matches not being fixed, which actually fixes a huge problem in sports, so they have a use in that.

I used to work in odds prediction and the issue is all the shady shit surrounding betting, not actual betting itself. We very contractually forbidden from betting on any of our customers, but managers would go around encouraging to bet. This is obviously a huge problem when you know how the algorithms work, and more importantly, where all the errors are. I'd see odds on matches where you couldn't lose on a weekly basis (think 2 outcomes, average payout of >2x), open bets for things in the past (score 1:0, bets for first point still open, etc.).

The biggest issue though, was betting houses straight up banning winners. The more you won, the less you could bet, eventually leading to a ban. This is straight up illegal, but nobody cares. On the flip side, the more you lost, the more you could bet, you'd get better rewards (if you won, which you didn't) and the cheaper it would be.

You can't ban gambling, because you'll just get illegal gambling (much like prohibition/drugs). Proper regulation and enforcement is the solution here (much like drugs).

Edit: All this being said, I don't bet, nor do I endorse gambling with real money. I agree betting should mostly be between you and your buddy, but unfortunately the reality doesn't support that.

tpxl··on Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
When does steam require age verification?

It sometimes asks for my age for viewing a game and I can input any ol' date I want to. It doesn't even flinch if I input a different date every time.

I also don't recall them asking about my age when I was actually underage and paid using a PaySafeCard, but then again they didn't have porn on the platform at that point either.

tpxl··on Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV
Many more thousands have no issues with small cars or going to a closer sports club.

If the roads in cities are wide enough in cities for literal trucks, then they're wide enough for your car. Widening roads and making cars bigger makes pretty much everyone less safe.

Don't get me wrong, you're free to live in the boonies and drive 400km to your sports club, but don't call me narrow minded because I can load up 5 people in my VW passat and drive 500km for a 10 day vacation, or because I prefer not to get bulldozed by a car with a higher hood than me while walking to my local sports club.

tpxl··on Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Account creation is the first thing you gotta do when trying to join a server complete with a silly captcha. At least on the server I just tried.
tpxl··on I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
Well obviously, higher risks higher rewards.
tpxl··on I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
This is self employment only where your company assets == your assets. You can make an LLC and this isn't a problem.
tpxl··on I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
We have figured out how to get money to enforce paying taxes and GDPR compliance: Pay them with the taxes and fines. USA's IRS has a famously high ROI, and I'm willing to bet a single GDPR fine for Google/Facebook/Microsoft pays for a whole lot of GDPR enforcement.
tpxl··on I made 20 GDPR deletion requests. 12 were ignored
Why not make it 4%? Because the highest fine per GDPR is 4% of global revenue or 20 mil, whichever is higher.
tpxl··on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
> I noticed that often the people who switch to Linux, are more likely to send more time into finetuning their OS, tinkering around, etc... aka people with more time on their hands. But when you get a bit older, you simply want something that works and gives you no trouble.

> Yes, it has no adds but that is like 5 min work on a fresh install, a 2 min job of copy/past a cleanup script to remove the spyware and other crap and your good for year. So again, killer features?

First thing you do after you install windows is fine tune it lol. For what it's worth, I just installed the latest debian on a Minisforum mini PC and it was clean and easy. Everything works out of the box, including bluetooth and gaming (surprisingly well given only has an integrated GPU). Same experience with two of my wifes laptops.

Now I did have issues with my desktop due to running bleeding edge hardware, but those all got resolved within months on its own and a clean install is now no hassle at all.

In short, I'm now older and don't have time to tinker with my PCs. That includes reverting whatever bullshit Microsoft decided to foist upon me, so now I run base debian and won't be buying bleeding edge hardware anymore.

tpxl··on France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
What's wrong with SEPA instant?

A payment flow of 'scan code, confirm in banking app' is hard to beat and we're 95% there. And all you need is your own banking app, no shady payment processors required.

You lose some stuff like the credit part of the credit card (although virtually no one I know actually uses credit, only debit cards) and consumer protections (chargebacks), but I don't think those outweigh the extra costs at all.

tpxl··on AI Usage Policy
I agree with you that generative AI is clearly not fair use.

However, at this point, the economic impact of trying to de tangle this mess would be so large, the courts likely won't do anything about it. You and I don't get to infringe on copyright; Microsoft, Facebook and Google sure do though.

tpxl··on Rainbow Six Siege hacked as players get billions of credits and random bans
Valve maintains a 'Steam Runtime', which is similar to a docker container, to ensure it's easy to develop games that run on many distributions.
tpxl··on The gift card accountability sink
LLMs are excellent at automating this work away.
tpxl··on Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers
Create a few insecure implementations, parse them into an AST, then turn them back into code (basically compile/decompile) except rename the variables and reorder stuff where you can without affecting the result.
tpxl··on Ask HN: Should "I asked $AI, and it said" replies be forbidden in HN guidelines?
I think they should be banned, if there isnt a contribution besides what the llm answered. It's akin to 'I googled this', which is uninteresting.
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