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Flimm

3,484 karma · joined October 24, 2011

I use tildes to denote sarcasm, like this:

> We all realise that that would be ~so much better~.

If tildes are omitted, then I have not intended to be sarcastic.

If you're looking at my profile to see which gender you should use to refer to me, go ahead and use the male gender.

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Flimm··on MacWhisper: Transcribe audio files on your Mac
If you're looking for an alternative that runs on Linux, I just recently discovered Speech Note. It does speech to text, text to speech, and machine translation, all offline, with a GUI:

https://flathub.org/apps/net.mkiol.SpeechNote

https://github.com/mkiol/dsnote

Flimm··on Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
This particular project has raised seed funding. Textual's founder has written a blog post about it here, you may be interested in reading it:

https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/from-open-source-...

Flimm··on Why is Spotify not implementing this?
To me, it doesn't seem easy to do at all. How do you stop different speakers from being slightly out of sync with each other?
Flimm··on Systemd by Example
This looks like a neat website! I'm glad to dive in.

Can anyone recommend any other books or courses to learn systemd?

Flimm··on In the LLM space, "open source" is being used to mean "downloadable weights"
It doesn't need redefinition. We just need a new term for new media.
Flimm··on Keyboards and web apps, my post/rant for the year
Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea!
Flimm··on Bitwarden is the #1 password manager in G2 2023 Enterprise Grid
I just realised that my number feature request for BitWarden has been fulfilled! It's now possible to easily search the notes of entries. That's very handy when I want to list all my accounts that use a certain email address or phone number, which I do when I'm about to discontinue an email address or phone number.
Flimm··on Why Perl?
My apologies.
Flimm··on JPEG XL against AVIF tested on ImageEngine
I didn't know that about podcasts and audio formats. What format would you recommend? It would need to be well-supported by podcast players.
Flimm··on June 2023 Data Dump is missing
"Open" is a pretty vague word which could mean all sorts of things.

"Open source" is defined by the Open Source definition according to the OSI [1]. In saying that, I realize that every couple of years somebody tries to claim that their understanding of the term "open source" should trump the one the community has settled on. I personally am not ready to acquiesce to this semantic drift, at least, not yet.

[1] - https://opensource.org/osd/

Flimm··on Chrome still hasn't changed its opinion about dropping JPEG XL support
Chrome doesn't forcibly convert images to WebP.
Flimm··on StackOverflow petition to allow removing AI generated content
All content on Stack Overflow is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA. So, in theory, the community could create a new Q&A website and import all the questions and answers from Stack Overflow. But that doesn't overcome the network effect, I admit.
Flimm··on It's Not Survivorship Bias
He is trying to motivate people and give them hope, and he is trying to direct people to a path that is more profitable than just making art and hoping for the best. I think those are good goals, and I think his advice is worthwhile.

It sounds like you disagree with his advice. How would you motivate people to persevere instead? What advice would you give people so that they make enough money to live on?

Flimm··on Debian 12 'Bookworm' New Features and Release Date
Even after you add the Firefox repository, installing Firefox from APT is not as simple as "sudo apt install firefox". That command would still install the Snap version of Firefox. You have to figure out how to force APT to pick the "firefox" package from the new repository rather than from the default Ubuntu repositories.
Flimm··on Go with PHP
You do get XSS protection out of the box in most templating languages, though, and PHP is also a templating language.

Take this template:

  <h1>{{ title }}</h1>
In most templating languages, for a title of "<script>alert();</script>", the result will end up being:

  <h1>&lt;script&gt;alert();&lt;/script&gt;</h1>
In PHP, which is a templating language, the equivalent seems to be:

  <h1><?php echo $title; ?></h1>
But this will print the title unescaped, which is a security vulnerability, and incorrect. In reality, the equivalent is:

  <h1><?php echo htmlspecialchars($title); ?></h1>
Now, you could say, don't use PHP as a templating language! But if you're not supposed to use PHP as a templating language, why does it behave as one? This is one of PHP's footguns to be avoided. Personally, I recommend a linter like PHPCS to catch issues like this one.
Flimm··on Fulfilling a reader's request for my “dot files”
Interesting! I've been using "grc" to provide colours for commands like "ip", I didn't realise that "ip" had a "--color=auto" option.
Flimm··on Fulfilling a reader's request for my “dot files”
I found this blog post really helpful in explaining the difference:

https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/zshbash-startup-...

It references this blog post:

https://meta.ath0.com/2007/10/23/cleaning-up-bash-customizat...

Flimm··on NYPD urges citizens to buy AirTags to fight surge in car thefts
Just because most stolen cars are used, that does not necessarily mean that a used car is more likely to be stolen than a new car. You've got to consider the base rate, otherwise, you're committing the base rate fallacy. Since most cars are used, of course it's not surprising or meaningful that most stolen cars are used.
Flimm··on Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index
If you turn on "the Web Discovery Project" in the Brave browser, then a fraction of the web addresses you visit will be sent to Brave, even if the web pages weren't from a Brave Search SERP.

Source: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...

> If you opt-in to the Web Discovery Project, your browser will process the following data on your device, and securely send it to Brave’s servers:

> - A fraction of the addresses (URLs) of the web pages visited in the Brave Browser, along with engagement metrics (how much time is spent on the page)

> - [...]

Flimm··on Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index
This is about the Brave Search engine, which you can use in any browser:

https://search.brave.com/

Flimm··on Every web search result in Brave Search is now served by our own index
I've set Brave Search to be my default search engine for private windows (incognito mode). I've grown annoyed by the cookie consent dialogs and captchas that are presented to me by Google when I open Google's search engine in a private window. Brave Search doesn't have those annoyances.
Flimm··on Ban 1+N in Django
There is django-zen-queries[0], mentioned in another comment.

[0] https://github.com/dabapps/django-zen-queries

Flimm··on Little Snitch Mini
Privacy is not the only use-case. Some users need to monitor data usage to avoid bills they cannot afford.
Flimm··on PEP 704 – Require virtual environments by default for package installers
How would they be affected by this, either positively or negatively? The people who don't use virtual environments tend not to use pip either.
Flimm··on Multi-Account Containers
Also, the order of the containers isn't synced properly. When you have a few containers, it's helpful to have container configured in the same order on every device you use.
Flimm··on Opensnitch, application level interactive firewall, heading into Debian
This is great news! Thank you Petter Reinholdtsen for putting in the work to do this.
Flimm··on What's the right UX for an expired certificate?
Webmasters can ensure that browsers only load their websites over port 443 by submitting their domain to the HSTS Preload List.

Surprisingly, google.com is not on this list: https://hstspreload.org/?domain=google.com

Flimm··on Argdown: A simple syntax for complex argumentation
You're in for a treat: that library already exists and has been ported to multiple programming languages:

http://docopt.org

Flimm··on Python 2 removed from Debian
I like Python 3. It eliminated a whole category of encoding/decoding errors. Even Python 2 codebases benefited from it, as libraries were updated to handle Unicode better in an effort to achieve compatibility with Python 3. I didn't experience much pain migrating codebases to it, but I'm just speaking for myself here.

Congratulations to Debian on upgrading to Python 3!

Flimm··on What’s in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained
Migrating from LastPass to another password manager is actually a pretty easy process. Many password managers can import passwords from LastPass.
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