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Molomby

35 karma · joined February 12, 2014

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/molomby; my proof: https://keybase.io/molomby/sigs/WCJ-VABcIGls24jSa-iZAGrPzLMp68mudUu-jQbCkrE ]
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Molomby··on PWAs wont replace native iOS apps
Side note but, man, I hate it when write ups like this refer to events in relative terms without including a published date...

> Last month [...]

> At the same time [...]

> That was over 6 months ago [...]

From when?!? What good is a relative timeline of events and your "current" thinking without a timestamp?

Digging though the source, it looks like this is from a few days ago.. "created_at":"2024-02-14T01:45:45.254Z"

/rant

Molomby··on "I used a pin to unlock the cable connected to the Apple Vision Pro battery"
The WSJ in fact https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-vision-pro-review-39f2d82e
Molomby··on Inflection AI launches pi chatbot
I pushed it on the subject and, to paraphrase, it claims to be similar to an LLM (in that it's trained on a large corpus and uses statistical models to determine which tokens to respond with) but that, unlike an LLM, it uses machine learning to continually learn from its interactions with people. According to Pi, that's the key differentiator between it and an LLM.
Molomby··on Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?
It's bad. I have a ASUS MB16AHP (claiming a brightness of 220cd/㎡, contrast ratio 700:1) and yeah, in a brightly lit room viewing can be difficult. It's ok under normal office lighting but you'll be out of luck if you have sunlight flooding in. I've been searching for a brighter option but most (all?) the current offerings seem to be based on the same or similar internals.

Still, it's a useful device while traveling – nice to be able to plop a decent multi-monitor setup out of a backpack. My model also has a micro HDMI port (and an internal battery) which can be handy if you need a temporary screen for a Raspberry Pi or a machine that usually runs headless.

Molomby··on AI's Jurassic Park Moment
Keep in mind that...

> The model is able to reference up to approximately 3000 words (or 4000 tokens) from the current conversation - any information beyond that is not stored. (https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6787051-does-chatgpt-rem...)

So if you overflow that it'll loose context.

Molomby··on Ask HN: Have you set up a procedure to disclose your passwords in case of death?
I'd be worried any secrets that had been printed would persisted on the internal printer storage, eg. https://www.bitraser.com/article/innocuous-printer-can-leak-...
Molomby··on Car Repos Are Exploding. That’s a Bad Omen
I thought it was a story about EVs bursting into flames after being repossessed. Pretty confusing headline without context.
Molomby··on Challenge: Pixel perfect design
There are reports that Apple has been exploring a foldable eInk device of some kind, so yeah.
Molomby··on Making macOS Behave Itself
Select multiple files with different extensions > hold [Control] and right click > Get Summary Info > Open with (select all) > click [Change All...].

The files don't need to be valid, just have the extension you want to associate, so you can do something like `touch _.mp3 _.mp4 _.m4a _.mkv` then select those files and set them all at once.

Molomby··on Ask HN: Website with worst UX or Registration experience
Related? https://github.com/duffn/dumb-password-rules
Molomby··on Ask HN: How do you use email aliases?
The script I use to wrap the Forward Email API.. https://gist.github.com/molomby/a862a0ee3c104090ebc8df8ce97f...

It has a lot of personal preferences baked in but you get the idea.

Molomby··on Ask HN: How do you use email aliases?
I used "+" aliasing with a Google mailbox for years but never really loved it. It leaks your actual address and, presumably, isn't even that good at tracking who you gave which address too. Either spammers or even the company you supplied the address to initially can drop the + part to strip the "alias" away so, if your data is going to be leaked, it's not clear how much a "+" alias helps. Plus, some sites have broken/overly strict address validation so you're forced to handing out your real address to the crappiest sites.

Last December I got serious about the problem and went looking for solutions. Specifically, I wanted to be able to route email to my existing mailbox, have unlimited aliases, operate the whole thing via and API and not pay much – this is for personal use after all.

There are stacks of businesses that will give you email forwarding on a domain but I found most of them either only relay messages using a webhook, rather than forwarding the actual email (SparkPost, SendGrid, Postmark, Mailchimp) or are expensive, often with the email forwarding service being a feature point of some premium plan or having arbitrary limits (Mailgun $35/mth, MailSlurp $21/mth, ImprovMX $9/mth for 100 domains x 100 aliases, MailerSend $25/mth).

The standout at the time was Forward Email (https://forwardemail.net) who offer unlimited domains/aliases/messages for $3/mth. They're privacy focused, open source and have some nice features like regex aliases with substitution in the forward address which is cool. (So you can have rules like `/^(domains|webmaster|admin|root)$/@example.com` forwarding to `$1@example.net` and `me+$1@example.com.au`)

I now have a bash script that wraps the Forward Email API. It takes the url of the page that's asking for an email (to be logged against the new alias) and an abbreviation for the service, and it spits out a new alias, with the abbreviation and a random component, that looks nothing like my real address. I registered a domain specifically for email which is short, easy to type, and a .com (so even the harshest/most broken form validation will accept my aliases). New aliases are immediately forward to my Google mailbox and still include the service abbreviation as a "+" alias, so I can still see at a glance who sent the message. (For example an alias for Hacker News might be `hn.u2la1@example.com` which would forward to my mailbox as `me+hn@example.net`). Any mail sent to a non-alias is silently black-holed.

I've been using this for all new accounts for a few months and it's working well for me. Forward Email isn't perfect but they're cheap and seem trustworthy. Support (which I used once) was great though I'm pretty sure the entire service is a one man band so arguably the bus factor is high. The docs aren't fantastic but has been working flawlessly since I got it running.

After I had this all setup I stumbled on another service, Hanami (https://hanami.run), which would also probably work for me ($2/month for 4 domains, unlimited aliases, regex routing). And now of course Cloudflare's solution is publicly available (https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing). If I was starting from scratch I'd definitely consider those options.

Molomby··on Ask HN: Where can I find the old internet's short stories/fiction?
I had a great experience recently on the scifi StackExchange, specifically with the `story-identification` tag. My description of an obscure short story was quickly identified as content posted on the (now-defunct) site Kuro5hin. The answer pointed me to the author's website and other stories which I've now purchased.

Apparently Google had delisted the authors site as duplicate content because the content was originally posted elsewhere, blocking me from finding the story when I'd searched previously.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-ident...

Molomby··on The state of external retina displays
If you're looking for a 5k display, I've found Wikipedia's list of 5k devices to be valuable reference point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5K_resolution#List_of_devices_...

Personally, I'm hanging out for a 5120x2880 display larger than 27". We've had 27" 5120x2880 displays for 6 or 7 years now, you'd think someone would have taken that res to a larger panel by now. But nope, still waiting.

Molomby··on Data seems to indicate omicron milder, more transmissible, hospitalizations low
Anthrax is bacterial
Molomby··on Adblock Stick
Ad blocking is fairly mainstream these days but I've never seen (or even really considered it could be done) it in this format. The marketing material is unsurprisingly light on technical details but, assuming this is real, possibly it installs itself as a network device and filters DNS queries similar to Pi-Hole..?

What confuses me is that, surely you could achieve the same outcome using software with very little overhead. Doing so saves all the manufacturing and distribution costs so you'd expect it would be a more profitable approach. So why the stick? Is the filtering overhead large enough to justify a dedicated co-processor or is the form factor used here really a placebo? In the way that a heavier wrist watch feels more valuable, does plugging a physical device into your computer to protect it/make it faster, _feel_ more effective than installing software that does the same job?

Molomby··on Ask HN: What diagrams do you use in software development?
If you have complex interactions sequence diagrams can be a hugely helpful communication tool. I use https://sequencediagram.org/ quite often. It's a free, in-browser tool that lets you create/edit/export diagrams using markup. Takes some getting used to but I much prefer it to dragging arrows around manually.
Molomby··on Introducing Cloudflare Registrar
This sounds great but i’m surprised more people aren’t recommending AWS as a modern “upsell free” alternative? Their prices are good, can be secured with TFA, solid APIs, etc. That specific part of the management console isn’t amazing but it’s powerful and if you’re using it a lot you should probably automate, right?
Molomby··on Collection of photographs of WannaCry infections from around the world
Nope, it's real too unfortunately. https://heatst.com/tech/russias-secret-weapon-against-ransom...
Molomby··on NIST’s new password rules – what you need to know
Real world example of this "limited input" problem: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/202143/i-included-e...

Pre-Touch Bar, of course...

Molomby··on A Linux botnet is launching crippling DDoS attacks in excess of 150Gbps
Totally agree with your sentiment but in this case I don't see how rate limiting helps, or at least not much.

If you're building a botnet you don't need to crack any specific machine so you can distribute your attempts across more hosts. Eg. rather than hitting one machines with 1,000 pwords/sec you target 1,000 machines at 1 pword/sec each (or whatever rate you're limited too). There's no shortage of badly configured routers.