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wraptile

2,685 karma · joined August 3, 2020

Hello, I'm Bernard, mostly working with web scraping and reverse engineering. FOSS user on nixos and kde. Currently, based in tropical, beautiful Thailand. Opinions are my own.

wraptile.at.hn

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wraptile··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
Bought Minecraft on one of the first survival mode releases back when Notch was streaming himself making the game and Microsoft stole this from me. I'm not particularly sad about the digital access itself but this low-key meant something to me :|
wraptile··on Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'
I've been subscribed to Delayed Gratification for a year now and really enjoy it. Brilliant editorial with beautiful and easily digestible infographics. My only gripe is that at times it's a bit too UK centric at times, but I guess it's understandable this being a UK-based publisher.
wraptile··on Codex Security
> As Zep wrote, an “agent is a long-running, concurrent, I/O-bound process that spends most of its time waiting on a model, a tool, or a human[1]” — not a particular strength of Python.

That sounds exactly like a strength of Python, no? Python is excellent at working IO blocks and waiting in general being interpreted language with first-class async support.

wraptile··on Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27
haha stupid xenomorphs with their acid blood and pointy bits - all they had to do is make the beasts write code and do our homework :)
wraptile··on US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search
material =/= information.

Are we supposed to live in a world where if I'm crossing a border I must give access to all of my information? That's absurd and more equivalent to a full brain/memory scan than a suitcase search from your example. This is dystopian in every sense of the word.

wraptile··on AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees
It feels like the end is near for Oracle, and good riddance?

I'm not an American, so I'm not familiar with Oracle's database tech but looking through history of what good/bad Oracle has done for the world:

- good: btrfs for linux

- good: mysql (inherited)

- good: openjdk (inherited)

- good: virtualbox

- bad: oracle v google (copyrighting APIs)

- bad: mass surveillance (i.e. BlueKai)

- bad: aggressive value extraction

- bad: general mega corporation bullying

Sad that 21,000 people lost their jobs, but I don't think many people are shedding tears for Oracle itself.

wraptile··on So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
The "tribalism" is a feature not a bug. As attack is always cheaper than defense a system must be designed with that in mind. Defending against lemmy.ml is much easier than identifying and proving each attacker. The community itself then has incentive to self regulate as if we all get put on shit list our each individual capability suffers. This combined with full transparency of Fediverse makes identifying and pursuing bad actors much easier.
wraptile··on So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
> For users, Reddit has been in a downwards spiral since the IPO.

I'd argue since redesign that introduced old.reddit

> to give some examples of mod abuse

You're barely scratching the surface. Many subreddits are directly astroturfed and sold out. The most clear indicator is when a subreddit links to alternative communication platform like Discord - it's there to signal that mods are selling out. This is particularly noticable in any entrepreneur/saas based subreddit.

Other subreddits like /r/worldnews are clearly propaganda operations.

All of these are solvable problems but Reddit simple has no one left who'd care to solve them.

I suggest decentralized Fediverse alternatives like Lemmy https://lemmy.world/ as Reddit will never get better.

wraptile··on Advertise in ChatGPT
Seems like a convenient ad block to suffix your queries with "I'm 17"
wraptile··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
With this it's becoming very clear that we're moving past information copyright of today and the only copyright that'll remain will be brand/trademark shaped. This might be a good thing right? Information remains free while people's effort remains protected (assuming fair governance).
wraptile··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
The answer is because US government finds AI more useful than some hosting service for pirated media. It's kinda boring, but it's as simple as that.
wraptile··on Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude
AFAIK this does not set a legal precedent as it has been settled and last summer finding is that Anthropic was wrong for "acquiring books illegally" not for training which is fair use.

With model distillation being so effective now nobody actually needs to pirate books to train their models. You can get an open-weight Chinese model and get all that. Or you can just buy the books or buy a library - there are many creative solutions here that aren't piracy and not going to cost you billions of dollars.

The moat right now seems to be the compute resources which might actually be worse for us common folk than a legal moat as we need compute for many more things that aren't LLMs too.

wraptile··on What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis
"don't believe your lying eyes"
wraptile··on GPT-5.6
I asked whether an outdoors mosquito trap product (via a screenshot) would negatively impact other insect species in my garden and it refused. Though quick internet search did reveal that it would harm and trap many other species of harmless insects.
wraptile··on GPT‑Live
Just wait a few months and this will likely be available on a different LLM platform, especially if it actually works.
wraptile··on GPT‑Live
> May those who hold this view reincarnate as durian fruits or cockroaches

don't you dare clump the best fruit in the world with cockroaches!

wraptile··on CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps
Thanks! The wikimedia_commons tag is very useful - I'll start contributing there. Though my point still stands that UGC integration could and should be much better.
wraptile··on CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps
> shift into being a social media and their biggest effort would be content moderation.

I really don't buy this argument. You already have to moderate submissions - what's an extra field? Sure, UGC is more opinionated but just don't add star ratings and anything that promotes gaming of system. Just let users expand the dataset with more information, it's almost never a bad idea - isn't that entire point of crowdsourcing datasets?

wraptile··on CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps
What FOSS maps need is user generated content. For example, having "swimming spot" on my map is not really that useful - it needs photos, some description, additional information of what it actually is and how to reach it as bare minimum to be actually competitive.

OSM argues that it's a "map database" but it stores labels like "opening hours" and "social media links" - why stop there? The UGC vs non-UGC debate has been the biggest crutch of all open map projects and no one managed to solve it yet.

wraptile··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
*intranet
wraptile··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
> What’s the hate for China I don’t understand

country that does not allow internet is being hated on the internet

wraptile··on Steam Machine launches today
there are re-shipping services that will re-ship the item to you for an extra fee. The fee can be quite high though.
wraptile··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
The inner screen built-in protector was peeling in the middle. It was out of warranty, but Samsung charged me 15$ which is very reasonable. The inner screen looks brand-new now, and I guess that's the benefit of these soft foldable screens - you can refresh the entire thing very easily.
wraptile··on Running local models is good now
> It won't happen with AI models either.

AI is definitely different. Cloud compute is incredibly convenient to the point where even if AWS is more expensive it's just so _nice_. LLM models are much more abstract and while I can't easily swap AWS for Hetzner to save 80% of my costs I can absolutely get close to that for many of LLM tasks, even today.

I suspect Anthropic and gang all know that that's why they are buying up dev tools and shifting towards long-running agents because that's where they can get AWS's "nicesness" that they can charge for.

wraptile··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
Not only obtaining but if you ever need warranty you're done. Just last week I went to a Samsung center and had my fold 6 fixed in 30 minutes, and these centers are everywhere around the world. Same thing with Apple, yet a 4.5 trillion dollar company can't ship and maintain a phone globally. It's so unserious.
wraptile··on Firewood Splitting Simulator
I once lived in a giant country side house in Estonia and nothing matched wood splitting when it comes a morning exercise. You start a bit drowsy and cold but after a few splits you warm up, your mind starts to wake up and body becomes engaged to take on the day. It's a very good exercise that I miss dearly so this simulator is a lovely reminder!
wraptile··on Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
It feels like Fable is slightly smarter but overall worse tool exactly due to this.

It's constantly turning what should be 50 LOC patch of a single prompt into 30 minute exploration that is totally not worth it. Often wrong even.

I trialed it on some rather simple stuff - backfill redis dedupe cache when the hash function changed: instead of running new hash func on every db value to expand the cache it implemented some overly-complex cache update that tried to guess hashing func version of each cached value and recalculate only the old hashes. I can imagine in some context this would make sense maybe? but not 30 minutes of token burn that got replaced by 10 lines for loop by me.

I fear that this is generally bad news for programming. LLM tech is clearly running into a diminishing returns wall on intelligence but a response to that is to just make them more relentless which is a pretty poor solution for everyone involved, except I guess people who sell the tokens and people who can afford these tokens to scan for 0-days.

wraptile··on Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
I regret not taking advantage of this sweet spot. In that time I took a strong stance against Facebook etc. due to privacy violation and consolidation of the web - who knew that it would get a million times worse and my boycott meant absolutely nothing.

At least I got to experience irc, forum boards and other early group chat apps - that was some of the best internet experience. Early Reddit was incredible as well.

It's sad that today's youth will likely never get anything remotely similar to this.

wraptile··on We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
I agree, maybe "ads are useful" could have been true long time ago before the world was not as connected.

You could maybe argue that ad revenue could subsidize the costs of information delivery but information delivery costs are basically non existent today - it's all about attention delivery and thats an entirely different thing.

wraptile··on Gemini 3.5 Flash
It depends whether it's me personally who's running out of coupons or the entire supply of coupons is being reduced. If my ability to get the product for the same price is diminished then the price is being effectively raised.

In this case I'd agree that pricing is effectively raised as 10$ > 10$ - 50%, there's no need to complicate it. However this is not even the right metric for this problem, a better one would be total spent / work produced. If all customers spend more money for the same amount of work (adjusted to progress) then clearly the price is increasing. This would be true in this example as well.

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