JonathanBeuys

Just my command line tool telling me "Now look at the following page" and open a browser window with a url.

I don't want "two instances".

I just want to trigger Firefox to open a new window. Just like it does when I press CTRL+n.

Gives me the exact same behavior:

    Firefox is already running, but is not responding.

Have you tried it?

For some reason, new Firefox windows can only be launched from the same environment from which the first window has been started. Even the same user who started FF cannot launch a new window from a new shell. That constantly interferes with my workflow.

Example: Say firefox has been started from the Destop already and now I want to start a new Firefox window from a root terminal:

    su desktopuser firefox

It does not work. It gives me "Firefox is already running, but is not responding.".

After a few decades of developing applications, I am convinced that frameworks are the wrong approach.

You gain development speed in the beginning, but you lose it later on when the framework introduces breaking changes and you have to keep working around a changing stack. Or the framework gets abandoned and it would be too much work to maintain it. Because it has so much bells and whistles you don't need. This one for example contains 1298 files without dependencies.

Both, coding everything yourself or using lean libraries are better. There are very few lean libraries unfortunately. Keeping code elegant and simple is a rare skill.

When there is a lean, well done library for my use case, I use it. Because if shit hits the fan, I can maintain the library myself.

Thanks for the tip! I will try bitcoin-cli. Is it in the Debian repos?

I don't have a wallet. I just want to feed a seed to the tool.

I now managed to do it with electrum like this:

    electrum --offline restore 'act act act act act act act act act act act act'

I don't use this for real transactions. Just to get to know how Bitcoin works. So the 'act act act ...' is simply the simplest one I came up with.

That creates some kind of wallet in ~/.electrum/wallets/default_wallet

I don't know what type of seed 'act act act ...' is though. Does Electrum interpret it as a BIP39 seed?

Paying for an escrow service for every small transaction seems darn expensive.

Are people really stumbling across random websites and enter their credit card?

The AI projects in the link all have some reputation behind them.

Im on HN quite a lot, but have not seen a discussion on what holds Bitcoin over Lightning back for online payments.

What is holding back Bitcoin adoption for small online payments? With Bitcoin, a payment is a payment. So this problem would never occur.

The two arguments I often hear are "losing keys", which would not be a big issue for small amounts, and "fees", but that is avoided via the Lightning Network these days.

Is it that every payment is a taxable event, so it is too cumbersome for the customer because of taxes?

I'm surprised the demo scene is still targeting the C64.

Why not the browser?

Would be a lot of fun to try the different demos then. Would be entertaining and educational to see different things you can actually do in the frontend these days.

Also, why not directly link the demos to a C64 emulator, so at least on can try them out?

The big question is if Google will be able to capitalize on their research. Or if publishing all those papers just plays into the hands of the competition.

When I want to try Bard, I still get "Bard isn’t currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!". While me and everyone around me already uses ChatGPT, FastGPT, Phind and Perplexity.

What are the best noise cancelling headphones to work in cafes?

Im using Bose Quiet Comfort II and I always wish they would cancel better.

A key is pretty similar to a password. "Avg users" use passwords all the time.

But my post wasn't even about average users. The majority of people never publish anything.

Post a couple of times that the account is not to be trusted anymore and that people should check your HN account / Twitter / FB / Website to see your new account.

In contrast to Twitter & Co, a compromised account does not mean you cannot post anymore.

I don't know anybody who has no data they care for.

Everybody has some data they never don't want to lose.

So the Nostr key would be just another piece of such data.

Also, losing it would not that much of a desaster. Use a new key, and let people know about it via other channels.

I just marked the key with my mouse, pressed ctrl+c, went to a text file, pressed ctrl+v and saved it.

If someone is not capable of doing that, I am not sure I want to read their articles.

Not sure what you are referring to with "pick a service to hold your private key". The whole point of Nostr is that you don't need any service to hold anything for you.

Since I recently tried Nostr, I am much less worried what goes on with Twitter and Co. Nostr is crazy cool and feels a lot like it could become the future of publishing.

I basically just started posting on the first random client I found on Google (iris.to) and ... it works:

https://iris.to/npub14cxhrehjln8r4fqgc8uvatkjv5dlwzxvua2ym93...

No signup, no decision to make which host to use, no nothing. Just save the private key (which iris.to creates for you) and you are good to go forever. The content you post gets relayed everywhere:

https://snort.social/p/npub14cxhrehjln8r4fqgc8uvatkjv5dlwzxv...

So it does not matter if the client you used changes their policies, their algorithm, deplatforms you, goes down or whatever. You can just use any other client and keep posting.

And since the protocol is using websockets, one can write a client in a static html page without any server backend. And it needs surprisingly little code to do so. I really enjoyed this video of a guy writing a Nostr client in a simple html file with like 50 lines of code or so:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbicnlCXg_Y

Which users have access to put files into .well-known/ of the root domain?

I am not aware of any service that allows that.

Can you give an example? What do you mean by "lots of people"?

That is fine for simple projects where all you have to do is automate cert updates for the root domain or a few subdomains. The problem is not to automate this process. It's easy to write a shellscript that regularly updates certs for a root domain or some subdomains.

The problem is that letsencrypt does not offer url based authentification for wildcard certs.

So you have to temper with your DNS infrastructure so that you can automate DNS updates for your domain.

HTTPS is still a pain in the ass.

If letsencrypt would offer wildcard certificates with their url based authentification as they offer for non-wildcard certificates, it would be annoying but bearable.

But having to tinker with the DNS infrastructure for each project which wants to use domain wide HTTPS is so much hassle.

Me:

ChatGPT, please write a story about a unique word that has never been used before. I want to see if it ends up in Google.

ChatGPT:

Once upon a time, there was a small town called Schmorgleville. The citizens of Schmorgleville were a strange bunch, and they had an even stranger custom. Every Saturday night, they would gather in the town square and dance the schmorgle.

No one knew exactly where the schmorgle originated from, but it was said to be a dance that had been passed down from generation to generation. It was an odd dance, full of twists and turns and hopping up and down. Everyone in the town seemed to love it, though, and would dance until the sun came up.

One day, a stranger came to town. He was an old man with a long white beard and he seemed to have a great knowledge of the schmorgle. He taught the citizens of Schmorgleville all the steps of the schmorgle and soon, they were all performing it with enthusiasm.

The old man stayed in town for a while and enjoyed watching the citizens of Schmorgleville dance the schmorgle. When he finally left, he told them to keep the schmorgle alive and to never forget the joy it brought them.

And so, the people of Schmorgleville still dance the schmorgle every Saturday night. They call it the 'Schmorgle Dance' and it is a reminder of the old man and the joy he brought to their lives.

    Microsoft has to put a halt to this project

Because you can make it output rude words and wrong infos?

Then we have to shut down the whole internet. You can find a lot of rude words and wrong infos out there.

Is there any indication that Berkshire performs better than selecting stocks randomly?

Somebody who bought a Nasaq 100 certificate 10 years ago and then bummed around and never did anything else to their portfolio gained 500%.

Buffett and Munger who showed up in the office every day, analyzed companies and worked on their stock picking gained 240%.

It's just fast.

I have not used a container today. Let's use one:

    $ time docker run --rm debian:11-slim echo hello
    hello

    real    0m0.528s
    user    0m0.015s
    sys     0m0.023s

Only when your application depends on optimizing your database to the max.

Most applications don't.

And even if the application I work on does - then only in production. Not on my laptop. So on my laptop I will simply chose a docker image that resembles production as closesly as possible. I will not use a VM.

You think they will let Bing become the default mode of user interaction with their phones?

Wouldn't that commoditize their product? If you have the same experience (talking to Bing) on any phone, why would people pay for the Apple brand?

It's not like they can buy and integrate another LLM any day just like that. There is nothing yet that has proven to be on par with ChatGPT. Google has something in the pipeline, but nobody has really compared it to ChatGPT yet.

If ChatGPT and (maybe) the new Google thing are the only players in town.. if I would be Apple, I would be worried.

Especially if one of them turns out to be clearly better than the other. Then Apple would depend on licensing that one.

    Is deploying a database binary and mounting
    a volume on a VM really the hard part?

The nice thing about containers is that you are independent of the underlying infrastructure. Be it a VM or bare metal.

I can easily spin up a Docker container on my laptop. Takes a second or so.

Spinning up VirtualBox or something is so much more hassle.

The article is a bit lightweight, and the title should be changed to just "Microft vs Google".

But anyhow, a good opportunity to discuss the super interesting situation around the new AI wars. IMHO the most interesting situation in tech since the dotcom area.

Are there any authors out ther (preferable in podcast or other audio form) who discuss the situation in depth?

What I currently wonder is where Apple stands. Every device (heck, every software!) will need a state of the art LLM to interact with its users. Will Apple develop their own, or will they be at the mercy of finding a supplier like Microsoft, OpenAI or Google who lets them use their LLM?

Page transitions are much faster for me on Wikipedia than on AirBnB.

Whatever I click on AirBnB, I get a white screen, then some placeholders, then the placeholders one after the other get replaced by the actual content.

Whatever I click on Wikipedia - its just there instantly.