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zdimensionon What's in my location history?

I actually tried it on a VM a few months back, it was broken in a multitude of fun ways. I think it would be interesting to try and make it work.

There is a very nice blog post about someone explaining how they modified their website's CSS to work with some old browser, maybe Netscape, maybe something else, it was well written and fun to follow, but I cannot for the life of me remember where it was from. Maybe someone will read this comment and know what blog post I'm talking about.

zdimensionon What's in my location history?

I mean, the choice would be nice. Allow people to turn on online sync, keep the data offline, or disable the location recording altogether.

zdimensionon What's in my location history?

Agree with you. I get the intention (a lot of people do find it troubling that all their location data is sent to Google, and appreciate this change), but I don't really care about that for my data, I just want to have everything available so I can analyze it!

zdimensionon What's in my location history?

Not being a native speaker I thought the "Kindly enough" conveyed the sarcasm (since I think most people don't associate Google with being kind). I'll try to find a better wording (or maybe make the "Kindly enough" a link pointing the GDPR?)

> One day, your insurance company may inquire if you have walked enough to be covered. [I think we're past that point.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...)

zdimensionon What's in my location history?

I'm sorry, I had completely misunderstood what Show HN means. I thought it was the prefix for indicating the post was made by the poster (what the fine folks at Reddit would call "OC"). Somehow I had missed the https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html page.

zdimensionon Show HN: SHAllenge – Compete to get the lowest hash

60 MH/s with parallel Rust code (rayon) on a 5900X. Got stuck on 8 zeroes, changed my nonce prefix and got lucky with 9 zeroes after 10 seconds! Currently sitting at #73 and pondering whether to write a GPU solution.

https://gist.github.com/zdimension/63d3aa5f04573267f423520e4...

zdimensionon Lynn Conway has died

Most would agree that a trans parent is better than a dead parent, though.

zdimensionon Hacking millions of modems and investigating who hacked my modem

At the same time, Cox is a commercial entity that makes money by providing services. Cyberattacks make them lose money, so it's only fair for them to financially award people that responsibly inform them of vulnerabilities instead of easily and anonymously selling those.

We're not talking about a grandma losing her wallet with 50 bucks in it and not giving money to the guy that found it and gave her back.

zdimensionon StackOverflow is banning accounts that delete answers in protest against OpenAI

Title is a little misleading. Regardless of one's opinion on StackOverflow's partnership with OpenAI, editing existing questions & answers to replace them with protest messages fully fits their rules' definition of defacing.

Editing the answers through SO's tools is not the right way to protest (since it's trivial for them to suspend you because you're clearly violating their rules); the GDPR is. Making a GDPR deletion request is quite easy.

zdimensionon Open Sourcing DOS 4

https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/blob/2d04cacc5322951f187...

> ; REV 2.15 7/13/83 ARR BECAUSE IBM IS FUNDAMENTALY BRAIN DAMAGED, AND

Someone was angry that day. Wonder if any IBM dev ever stumbled upon this when MS and IBM worked together.

zdimensionon RFC: Banning "AI"-backed (LLM/GPT/whatever) contributions to Gentoo

> learning

Therein lies the rub. Most of the discourse and debate around LLMs and copyright revolve around the central question of what it means to learn.

Virtually everyone agrees that a human learning from reading code doesn't violate copyright (by somehow copying the knowledge into one's brain), because the human brain is some kind of copyright laundering machine, maybe? I don't really know whether there is any argument for that apart that can't be reduced to an appeal to common sense.

On the other hand, a DL algorithm learning from processing tokens of code scraped from public sources such as GitHub doesn't present the same kind of obviousness. My personal belief is that it's also learning and shouldn't be forbidden, but I can't deny the negative consequences of that. We're already seeing a lot of bad things come out of the democratization of GPTs.

zdimensionon Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu to shut down, pay $2.4M to Nintendo

Very sad outcome, but not that surprising given Nintendo's track record of suing fan projects into oblivion.

The same had happened with the Skyline emulator some time back.

zdimensionon Antarctic English

I mean, most Swiss French accents share common characteristics (e.g. stress on the penultimate syllable and descending intonation on the last) but having grown up near the Swiss border people there really differentiate the Genevois, Vaud, Valais accents, etc

It's not the same scale as Swiss German accents that are sometimes completely unintelligible for German speakers, but I have to admit there have been a few times I've been unable to fully understand someone speaking a thick Swiss French accent

zdimensionon Tell HN: Mail app on Windows forces Outlook

- Outlook (forever-...)

- Windows Messaging (95-98?)

- Outlook Express (XP)

- Windows Mail (Vista)

- Windows Live Mail (7?)

- Outlook Web App (?)

- Windows 8 Mail (Metro)

- Windows 10 Mail (UWP)

- Outlook ("New Outlook")

- another one I missed?

zdimensionon Unexpected responses from ChatGPT: Incident Report

You can step-debug a Python program using Windbg but it won't tell you a lot about what's happening since every line is hundreds of CPython API calls.

Sure, you can "step through" a neural network but all you'll ever see are arrays of meaningless floats moving around.

zdimensionon GIMP 2.99.18: The last development preview before 3.0

I've read the whole thread of comments and I'm really confused. For context I'm a long time GIMP user and used Photoshop a few times at a very basic level.

Layers having boundaries feels... obvious to me? Like, when I scale a layer, the boundaries are what I'll be scaling. When I crop a layer, I'm cropping the boundaries. If I have a large image and insert a small icon in the middle, should the icon's layer take the full size of the canvas? What exactly is supposed to happen if I insert an image that's larger than the canvas?

A layer in GIMP having boundaries is equivalent, to me, to a shape in Inkscape having a size.

zdimensionon Gemma: New Open Models

Nice to see more open models. Props to the team for coming to the HN comment section to answer questions

zdimensionon Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

Alyssa Rosenzweig is a gift to the community that keeps on giving. Every one of her blog posts is a guarantee to learn something you didn't know about the internals of modern graphics hardware.

zdimensionon Stable-Audio-Demo

The few examples I was able to play are very promising, unfortunately the host seems to be getting some sort of HN-hug, because all the audio files are buffering every other second -- they seem to throttle at 32 KiB/s.

zdimensionon Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper

In France, "Licence" and "Master" (Bachelor's and Master's degree respectively) are protected diplomas that can only be delivered by universities (or by schools that depend on universities).

To circumvent this, private non-state-certified schools deliver things called "Bachelor", "MSc", "MBA" or "Mastère" that walk and quack like regular diplomas but since they're using those specific names, they're not actually state-recognized diplomas. Which means that if a company is hiring "people with a Licence" they can reasonably deny someone with a "Bachelor" because even though it's also a 3-year degree, there is no guarantee whatsoever that it's actually worth anything. Anybody can create a company and hand out sheets of paper with "MSc in Psychoceramics" written on it.

This is a big problem for high schoolers who usually don't know the difference and end up paying thousands of euros for private schools that deliver close-to-worthless degrees (not all are worthless, but their worth is mostly correlated to how well-known the school is, whereas if you get a real state-certified degree from a random university anywhere in France it'll be recognized by any company).

zdimensionon Plex Raises $40M

One major paint point for me is their policy concerning the mobile app. I paid for the lifetime pass for my account with the goal that Plex would work well for my users and myself.

This is not the case anymore since now users need to pay to be able to use the mobile app to stream from my server, otherwise they're limited to 5 minutes.

I ended up making a small web UI where they can log in, search for movies and episodes, and download them.

Why? Why do my users have to pay to stream from my server?

zdimensionon Why Zig When There Is Already C++, D, and Rust?

When reading code in a low level setting you may want to know whether one line calls a function or simply reads a field from memory. Not that it would matter that much, but it's a valid point for some. Reading a field is usually expected to not induce any control flow

zdimensionon ChatGPT does Advent of Code 2023

Do you have a link to that study? I'd be very interested in the full results!

zdimensionon Designing bridge trusses with Pytorch autograd

Probably something like Bridge Construction Set or Bridge Builder.

zdimensionon [dead]

Low effort aside, it's actually quite good.

zdimensionon GitUI

Working often with multi branch projects across repos (forks and upstream), using GitKraken simply makes me more productive. I don't think anymore about how I'm gonna merge or rebase stuff, it makes everything more intuitive. I still use the CLI for advanced stuff that the GUI doesn't handle, but for day to day operation, it's a panacea

zdimensionon Don't Say Velcro (2017)

One in France (or other European French-speaking countries) would say "des Legos" to refer to a bunch of Lego pieces or Lego sets. "Un Lego" would mean a single Lego brick.

zdimensionon Ask HN: What's your "it's not stupid if it works" story?

Nondeterministic finite automaton and deterministic finite automaton. The theory behind state machines.

zdimensionon What is a zero refractive index material?

I'm getting an SSL error when trying to load that URL

zdimensionon I think C++ is still a desirable coding platform compared to Rust

> 1. add two signed 64 but it's without overflowing

  fn f(x: i64, y: i64) -> Option<i64> {
    x.checked_add(y)
  }

Option<T> being the Rust equivalent for std::optional, but with all the nice ADT features so it's ergonomic to use. You can transform it to a Result<T, E> if you want, or even just panic and exit if it overflows. In any case, the overflow handling is built-in and doesn't use 128 bit ints.

> 2. Multiply two signed 64 bit ints without overflow

  x.checked_mul(y)

(https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.i64.html#method.chec..., https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.i64.html#method.chec...)