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Hackbraten

3,606 karma · joined June 3, 2017

Pronouns: she/her

Socials:

- github.com/claui

Interests:

Open source, packaging, CLI, digital inclusion, device neutrality

submissionscomments
Hackbraten··on Germany's far-right AfD projected to win
Misleading title. The correct title is: Germany’s far-right AfD projected to win eastern state but unclear if it will be able to govern

Please fix.

Hackbraten··on Creepy Crawlies
Good luck enforcing the law against a company whose entire business model is to piggyback residential-proxy-as-a-service over the shitty FNQQOIIWKNURQB brand $60 projectors they flip on Amazon. You call them out, they’ll just say they stopped doing it and go on with business as usual.
Hackbraten··on Creepy Crawlies
What I find remarkable is that for at least a decade, i.e., long before LLM scrapers were a thing, GitHub engineers have been reaching out to popular package manager projects, asking them to do away with shallow clones [0] [1]. They basically used the same reasoning as your comment did.

[0]: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/pull/9383

[1]: https://github.com/CocoaPods/CocoaPods/issues/4989#issuecomm...

Hackbraten··on Creepy Crawlies
All anti-bot measures are inherently flawed, and if you overdo it, your false positives cause real harm by excluding actual people from using your services.

Not as in “1 out of 1000 legit requests get blocked” but “you’re going to block 100% of some person’s requests.”

Hackbraten··on StemDeck, a free, open-source and local AI stem separator
A pirate ship amusement ride called Scream Deck.
Hackbraten··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
He did. I live in a legislation where pledges aren’t a thing, so TIL that a pledge is equivalent to a conviction.
Hackbraten··on CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO
Isn’t it good practice to call them an alleged victim as long as the suspect, Luigi Nicholas Mangione, hasn’t been convicted?
Hackbraten··on My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes
No literature list on MLM scams can be complete without Bridget Read's meticulously researched 2025 book "Little Bosses Everywhere".
Hackbraten··on How to disable or avoid intrusive AI
There are several. I’ve been daily driving one for three years.
Hackbraten··on Europe's scorched landscapes seen from space after summer heatwaves
This narrative is dangerous. If everyone points to their own limited influence and points fingers at the rest of the world, no one is going to act.
Hackbraten··on Europe's scorched landscapes seen from space after summer heatwaves
We don't need AI to figure it out. It's been researched to death already. Go vegetarian, abolish fossil fuels, buy less.

The problem is that way too few are willing to change their habits, and legislators have near-zero incentive to enact unpopular rules to help mitigate the problems. AI isn't going to change any of that.

Hackbraten··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
I’ve used Wego [0] for roughly a decade. It’s been good enough for me.

Six years in, I had to edit the configuration file once (to switch weather backends because the default backend shut down). In January, it’ll be 10 years.

[0]: https://github.com/schachmat/wego

Hackbraten··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
> There’s very minimal state for a weather app.

Except when it uses some kind of browser engine to render its UI?

Hackbraten··on TheoremDB – A public workspace for machine mathematics
Hasn’t this been the case for human-made proofs too?

For example, Andrew Wiles’s famous proof touched a number of different, barely-related mathematical fields that no single person could allegedly peer-review it on their own. That was in the 1990s.

Hackbraten··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
> What diminished the day-to-day difficulty for you? Is it because the ecosystem became more mature, or did you "crack the code" for how to interface with everything you needed from your phone?

Neither! I just got accustomed to doing without stuff. That’s an effect I wildly underestimated.

Many things are still difficult (looking at you, CloudFlare [0] and DataDome [1]!) but I think I’ll manage.

> Is your use-case for a phone wildly different from that of a typical user?

Not really, I guess.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816826

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921224

Hackbraten··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
Taking photos is one of the things I got accustomed to not having. The picture quality on my Librem 5 is just too disappointing [0].

In the past I used Bluetooth for keyboard and mouse when I connected the phone to a monitor. (I no longer do because the USB port on my L5 has broken down so badly that it can no longer maintain a DisplayPort Alt mode connection.)

I’ve never used Bluetooth for music or similar, it keeps stuttering horribly on my L5. No idea why it does that!

I’ve never used multimedia SMS either. Almost no one uses SMS or MMS in Germany. Signal barely works via the Electron app (and signal-cli), so that’s what I use for messaging. WhatsApp doesn’t work because I have no iOS or Android to tether it to.

I can’t use public transport apps, which is a shame because I live in a city center where I depend on public transport. I download my public transport ticket from a private API once a month via curl.

For file transfer, I mostly use rsync, Git, or Unison.

Banking only works thanks to a dedicated bank card reader. [1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45321901

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33418431

Hackbraten··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
I've been daily driving a Linux phone for three years. The suffering was real. It's mostly gone now, I love it and will definitely never go back.
Hackbraten··on AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
Aside from the fact that this would be a despicable crime, how would you even go about identifying where a given scammer operation has its office buildings?
Hackbraten··on AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
The problem is that many scammers now groom your brain into trusting them before they even mention money. This is a psychological thing where you can’t necessarily just tell yourself “I’m not going to fall for that.” There are reports from professional scambaiters who, after engaging with a phone scammer for a while, found themselves inexplicably clinging to the belief the scheme was real.

This is possibly due to how our brains are wired to trust an already-established narrative and due to the effect that repeated interactions have on trust. When the scammer eventually steers the topic towards money, phenomena such as the Semmelweis reflex [0] may have already kicked in, which can make it super difficult to re-frame the person as a scammer.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex

Hackbraten··on Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
No.
Hackbraten··on How old is Ann?
> When Mary had a little lamb, she was twice as old as Ann was when Ann was as old as Mary now claims to be. How old is the sheep? —James Barton Adams.

I love this response so much.

Hackbraten··on NPM publish-time malware scanning and dual-use metadata
> a package may be published as […] held for manual review

Manual review by whom?

Hackbraten··on A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
Sounds like confirmation bias to me.
Hackbraten··on JEP 540: Simple JSON API (Now in Incubator)
Good point for parsing. However, the example is about serialization. What mapping ambiguity do you see there?
Hackbraten··on New Framework Desktop Option with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 and 192GB Memory
> Seize the means of computation

Feels like they blatantly ripped that off the title of a Cory Doctorow book [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_Con

Hackbraten··on Back to Kagi
I think that ship has sailed [0].

If Microsoft hasn’t managed to build a meaningful search index after 17 years of sinking billions in it, there’s a good chance that no one ever will.

[0]: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search (cf. section _The problem: A search monopoly_)

Hackbraten··on Codeberg: ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions
Many jurisdictions aren’t built around case law, and judges tend to focus on their own personal interpretation of written legislation instead of focusing on precedents. It can therefore take many more years until legal consensus forms on a given issue.

So I can see why e.g. a German institution would choose act more conservatively than one from countries with a background in common law.

Hackbraten··on Codeberg: ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions
The terms in question don't even mention quality issues. The argument is about the unclear copyright status of generated code. Also malware risk.
Hackbraten··on NPM's release cooldown is security theater
What happens after a couple of players have obtained marketshare and the market has consolidated?

I think there are diminishing returns to be had.

Hackbraten··on NPM's release cooldown is security theater
How is that sustainable?

Are security researchers going to be doing free labor for you indefinitely for exposure?

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