timwa

@timwa@lemmy.snowgoons.ro

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GrapheneOS refuses to comply with new age verification laws for operating systems — group says it will never require personal information⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Why the ever loving fuck does an init system even need a user database?

  Honest to God, if FIFA were giving out a World “Understanding UNIX” Prize, Poettering would be the inaugural, and only, winner. Never in the field of operating systems has one man driven so much enshittification through sheer force of cluelessness coupled with supreme arrogance. And in a world that Steve Ballmer still occupies, that’s one hell of an accolade.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sam Altman Thanks Programmers for Their Effort, Says Their Time Is Over⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’ve seen how badly specified, documented and behaved OpenAI’s APIs are, you’d guess this was already the case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Booklore is officially dead⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t see the pitchfork mob making that distinction. (And I think you are severely underestimating the capability of, say, the qwen-3.5 models locally hosted with a good CLI agent like Mistral Vibe.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Booklore is officially dead⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I run them on my own hardware, and am trying to learn to use and supervise them appropriately. The things they are good for they are amazing at. And yeah, they are also often mendacious and unreliable with the possibility of going rogue - but no more than any junior developer or intern. If you can’t manage an AI, you can’t manage hires either - which for a hobbyist is just fine of course, but if you’re a professional it’s not a good look.

  You either learn to ride the wave, or you let it drown you. Shaking your fists at the tsumani though is a sure fire route to involuntary early retirement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Booklore is officially dead⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re exactly right.

  I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.

  AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Password manager woes. How have you solved syncing on Android?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I ain’t reading all that… All I can say is, sync (both ways) with Keepass & Nextcloud on Android works just fine for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Password manager woes. How have you solved syncing on Android?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s the problem with Nextcloud? I use KeepassDX (on android, KeepassXC on desktop) with the database on Nextcloud and don’t have any problem syncing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  find . -name LICENSE.md -print

  There, arduous search complete.

  I thought it was well known/understood that the server component was how Joplin pays their wages, and thus being under a different license is hardly a big shock; it’s entirely optional, and the fact they’re still sharing the source seems like a good thing rather than bad.

  As for “they could just keep adding licenses!!!” Well, yeah, but so could any project. Apache could stick a proprietary license deep in a folder of httpd tomorrow and unless you were looking, you’d never know. Even a GPL project could incorporate a proprietary licensed component tomorrow provided it wasn’t linked into the binary/was a separate piece of software - like, say, the server component of Joplin. You just trust that they won’t, and/or properly check changes whenever you pull a new release like you were supposed to be doing anyway for security (hahaha, ok, no you weren’t,) or trust that if they did pull shenanigans it would be ‘news’ and you would hear about it.

  That Joplin is open about it, and they retain the original licenses of FOSS they have incorporated instead of deleting/hiding the original license is a good thing. I wish more did it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Phone is an Entire Computer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Actually it was Sequoia that was the last straw for me to get rid of most of my Macs (replaced them with Linux machines in the main - I was just so sick of Apple trying to turn the OS into a phone while not fixing basic known bugs that have been around for years - like forgetting external display layouts one in ten boots, not restarting external drives properly after sleep, and the finder being, well, everything about the finder…) And constantly having to fight with crappy “oh, today all your builds are going to fail because I’ve decided ld.so isn’t trusted any more” locked down platform nonsense. And creeping “you don’t need to know where your files are stored, they’re In The Cloud, stop asking for a file dialog (and that’s why we’ll never fix the finder btw)” type crap from the ever increasing number of un-uninstallable crapware applications wasting disk space with every update…

  But yeah, you’re right - the visual horrorshow that is Tahoe was the trigger to finally give Asahi a try on my last remaining Mac.

  Shame really; until a couple of years ago I’d had exclusively Macs for desktops & laptops since the late 90s (from the lovely Powerbook G3 Lombard on.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Phone is an Entire Computer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It would be quite nice if they added some MacOS features back to MacOS instead of trying desperately to turn it into a mobile phone OS.

  That said, Sequoia is so objectively awful it finally gave me the kick I needed to nuke my MacBook Air and install Asahi, and I’m genuinely really impressed. The only shame is having to waste 80gb of disk for a MacOS partition that I’ll never use, but otherwise it’s actually good enough to be a daily driver.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yann LeCun just raised $1bn to prove the AI industry has got it wrong⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Coding is a solved problem; people with zero understanding can do it by copypasta from stack overflow, and similarly skilled LLMs can do it right now, cheaper. If you’re a “coder”, you have a lovely hobby but no career. Sorry.

  If you’re a software engineer though, you have nothing to fear from current LLMs. But there is much more chance of LeCun’s models learning engineering - i.e. problem solving, in which writing code is just one of the tools, and not even the most important one - through physical experience and not just text. It is, after all, how all the software engineers today did the vast majority of their learning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Historic Chat Control Vote in the EU Parliament: MEPs Vote to End Untargeted Mass Scanning of Private Chats⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s definitely starting to feel like having your rights enshrined on unalterable tablets of stone, but which must be re-interpreted by a half dozen political appointees holding a seance with the founding fathers every few months, may not be the platonic ideal of governance that Americans are constantly telling the world it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BYD’s Second-Generation Blade Battery Makes Western EV Tech Look Ancient⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  China does not control the vast majority of rare earths because they’re only found in China (or even because they’re particularly rare, they’re not.)

  China controls the market because they were the only people who actually bothered to build extraction and refinement capabilities.

  If the US invested half the money it puts into “clean coal” or oil and gas extraction into rare earth extraction and processing, it would have its own supplies. But that would be woke, or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BYD’s Second-Generation Blade Battery Makes Western EV Tech Look Ancient⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The US is battling the environmental and human rights issues that so agitate them about China by promoting ‘clean coal’ and rounding up brown people in concentration camps without due process.

  It’s almost as if environmental and human rights issues weren’t their real concern 🤔.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Forced age verification is comming sooner than we thought.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I seem to recall that if the disk had copy protection you could also use this to simulate an earthquake as the 1541 threw its heads against the stops with all its might…

  Happy days!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Asus and Dell announce new mini PCs for Windows 365 | Goodbye local OS⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.

  I live in (Eastern) Europe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New sodium ion battery stores twice the energy and desalinates seawater⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s an incredibly longwinded way of saying “mahh Tezlur burns three times as much ‘clean coal’ per mile as a commie BMW, yee-haw”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The article is from a UK newspaper. What is and isn’t legal for them to regulate is decided by their Parliament and nobody else. No Kings, and all that.

  Meanwhile, you should know that the “free speech” lectures are getting pretty old from the country that checks social media history at the border to make sure you didn’t say anything bad about the Dear Leader, which shuts down TV shows it doesn’t like, and generally ensures the media toes the party line.

  (See also - lectures on why kids shooting up schools is a necessary price to pay for that well regulated militia that will be along to save you from tyrants, well, real soon now…)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Old Thin Clients - Which CPU is fine?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Advanced Vector Extensions instruction set; introduced with Sandy Bridge in 2011, but not included in Pentium/Celeron branded processors even after then for reasons best known only to Intel.

  Mongo is the application that has most irritated me by requiring it, but I doubt it’s the only one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Old Thin Clients - Which CPU is fine?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just throwing this in here as another thing to consider - instruction set. From a quick check (so I’m happy to be told I’m wrong) the Celeron & Pentium options don’t support AVX. That means some stuff - and I’m giving a hard stare at MongoDB here, but there will be others - is not going to run, or at best you’re going to be either stuck with old versions or recompiling yourself from source.

  (I don’t know if any of your apps require Mongo or AVX, but I was bitten by this in the past and it was one of the main reasons I eventually upgraded one of my small clusters.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica makes up quotes from Matplotlib maintainer("An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me"); pulls story⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Shutting down comments and banning everyone who calls them out is standard form for that place these days sadly; I deleted a 13 year old account there a few years back when they posted some godawful transphobic opinion peace and then they doubled down in the comments and started banning anyone who complained.

  Shame, it really was once a good site, but the writers who are left are the ones who got high on their own supply years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I worked for Philips Research 30 odd years ago (weeps)… It was a source of great amusement then that we could sell two pieces of equipment that were identical in every way except one had a Marantz label and cost twice as much as the Philips one, and the Marantz would get 5 stars in the audiophile magazines, and the Philips would get 3 or 4.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I just read the manual for the Euro version; basically, they assume you take the power strip/PDU with the computer.

  So, you plug the special UPS into a spare outlet on the PDU; it monitors the power supply, and as soon as power from the PDU drops it jumps in and starts supplying. So plug into an outlet, then unplug the PDU from power, and the UPS takes over. Since at this point the pins on the PDU plug are live, they provide a safety cap to put over the end of the cable. The computer itself is never unplugged.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unsealed Court Documents Show Teen Addiction Was Big Tech's "Top Priority"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah damn, I loved that book when I was a kid. I can probably blame it, at least in part, for my career…

  (I was a massive nerd and a FidoNet sysop back in the 80s & 90s, and got my first VMS and Unix experience hopping onto academic networks over dialup and X.25 gateways using, err, “unconventially obtained” credentials… This experience helped me convince my interviewer at Imperial College to overlook my less than stellar academic record to admit me to their Computing peogramme.

  That book - and the movie WarGames - were definitely inspiring, if not life-changing.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pro-Russian Narratives Target Wikipedia, Marking a Dangerous Trend for AI Chatbot Data⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Annnnnd that’s why I downloaded a snapshot of Wikipedia a few months ago and host it locally.

  Sad that it’s necessary, but with modern AI tooling, we have everything we need to destroy knowledge on an industrial scale.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 10's extended support ends in eight months, but users are still rejecting Windows 11, at least in Germany⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I gave up with MacOS a couple of years ago (after nearly a lifetime of using them - my first ‘own’ Mac was a Lombard PowerBook G3 - lovely machine,) because it became increasingly apparent that Apple had stopped caring about the desktop operating system and were intent on turning it into a mobile phone with a keyboard and bigger screen.

  Annoying desktop bugs - like constantly (and randomly) forgetting the resolution and position of second displays, not powering up external USB drives properly after sleep, and (as a developer) endlessly having to fight with “why is my build suddenly broken? oh, MacOS decided it doesn’t trust the linker again” type problems just wore me out. Every time they released some pointless new UI fluff but ignored the fact that the Finder had been essentially unusable since Mac OS X (because why should you be using the Finder anyway, you should just trust that your files are stored in Magic Apple Cloud Land…) just reminded me they really didn’t care about desktop users, they just want desktops as accessories to their mobile phones.

  So, I cut the cord and finally switched to Linux on the desktop. Which is a shame, because they do make some really nice hardware…

  (Although now that I’m actively trying to cut all US suppliers out of my life, it’s actually been a blessing.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube and other content sharing platforms will block New users in the UK starting next week(February 2)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  China’s VPN blocking is actually very, very effective, and the vast majority of people don’t go around it.

  And that’s kinda the point - the controls don’t have to be 100%, they just have to cover the majority. And for the few that do circumvent - well, that’s just one more easy crime for the authorities to charge you with if they ever feel the need.