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WhyNotHugo

6,896 karma · joined November 26, 2017

https://whynothugo.nl
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WhyNotHugo··on Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils
This isn't portable though, it's a GNU-specific "smart" things. Elsewhere, this overwrites the target device file.
WhyNotHugo··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
It might not be about banning minors and just an excuse to get government ID / biometric face scan.
WhyNotHugo··on DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro
A dice roll is non-deterministic.

Replacing a six-sided die for an eight-sided die also keeps rolls non-deterministic.

That doesn't mean it's fine to just replace the dice mid-game.

WhyNotHugo··on Boot a Virtual iPhone via Apple's Virtualization.framework
The requirements for the third party app-stores are completely ridiculous and unreachable by 99% of the individuals and organisations out there. In practice, only vetted partners with huge resources can operate one.
WhyNotHugo··on I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer
You can get the same result by appending to your prompt "Avoid verbosity. Assume ADHD.".
WhyNotHugo··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
Some brands have TVs share Wi-Fi with each other, so even if you don't connect it to Wi-Fi, your neighbour's TV will silently share with yours.
WhyNotHugo··on Asahi Linux on M3
https://hister.org/ sounds like something you'd appreciate.
WhyNotHugo··on deSEC – Free Secure DNS
I wrote a little cli to import a zone file into deSEC: https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/zone2desec

I can also show a delta when you've made changes and asks for confirmation before applying.

WhyNotHugo··on Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them
I see it differently: as a teen, I could remember the exact word for lots of things, I could recall numbers and data with high precision. Nowadays, I'm pretty bad at all those things, but I can very well understand metaphors and connects concepts from wildly different topics — which I couldn't back then.

I see this kind of "interconnecting ideas" of my current years as somewhat connected with "fuzzy memory". It's like, when I retrieve data, it's not as precise, and sometimes I get neighbouring data, but that can actually of use.

WhyNotHugo··on A browser-based viewer for Office Open XML documents
This renders OOXML (Office Open XML), not to be confused with OpenOffice.org XML, standardised by ISO as OpenDocument Format.
WhyNotHugo··on Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
I can't fathom why it's so common to run docker as root instead of as an unprivileged user.

Docker has supported running rootless mode for years. I packaged the docker-rootless into Arch/AUR over 4 years ago, so it's been around and stable that long.

Sure, on a server dedicated to running docker containers, maybe it makes sense for the marginal improvements to network latency. But otherwise, rootless should always be the default.

WhyNotHugo··on Rubio Uses Terrorism Law to Ban Secure Email Service
It doesn't technically have a parliament, it's a presidential system, not a parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system, it's parliament who appoints the head of state. Their congress does not appoint their President, and the President does not answer to congress.
WhyNotHugo··on GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
This is true in other fields too. Wheel-chair ramps are used by people with baby strollers. Subtitles work for deaf people, those who can't understand the spoken language, or simple folks in situations where someone is sleeping next to them. Pretty much every accessibility-oriented feature ends up helping out people beyond the original audience.
WhyNotHugo··on Rubio Uses Terrorism Law to Ban Secure Email Service
The outstanding thing about these sanctions is that there's no due process: the accuser is the jury and judge. You don't need to be found guilty, or even charged to be sanction. The impact is deep, and global.

Each of these sanctions is sending a really strong signal to the world: "stop relying on anything US".

WhyNotHugo··on Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak
A lot of Flatpak's design is a great prototype, but it's somewhat worrying (for the ecosystem in general) that this was taken as a final design and being pushed out in all directions.

Portals are just a terrible design for a security boundary: all interfaces clobbered up into one huge daemon, which also deals with a lot of the internals of Flatpak/Snap. If you want your sandbox to use portals, you can't, because it relies on internals of both of these sandboxing mechanisms. The devs have confirmed they won't implement an API for other sandboxing engines to integrate with them.

The whole system also deeply intermixes the package manager and sandboxing engine — to the point where you can't use the sandboxing engine with your favourite package manager, and you can't use the package manager without the sandboxing engine.

It seems that the mentality is: all other distributions are irrelevant, all other sandboxing engines are unsupported.

And then desktop applications start having first-class integration with Flatpak, and start having issues everywhere else.

You already need to set up Flatpak's daemons for using some features in Firefox (like screen sharing, where the native interfaces aren't supported), and it seems that the plan is to do the same for other features.

WhyNotHugo··on Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak
Permissions being granted implicitly is awful for security.

During installation they're _mentioned_ but the you can't pick which permissions to grant. If the developer requested it, its granted by default.

There are third party tools to tinker with permissions, but even those tools follow a "implicit grant first, revoke later" model, mostly because of how Flatpak implicitly grants permissions.

WhyNotHugo··on US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati
And, of note, online payments across EU countries is most often done with American payment methods. Most Chinese companies only take US-based payment methods.

Such a sanction really narrows down where they can buy online — it's not just the US that becomes off-limits.

WhyNotHugo··on It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
One of my main reasons for writing notes is that I learn while writing: the act of dumping information into textual format lets me re-think though all of it. Sometimes I pause and realise that I need to better understand something in order to put it into words. To explain a certain amount, I need to understand a wee bit more than that.

Having an AI write notes would only produce text, but the actual notes are mostly a side effect — an important one, but not the most important one in note taking.

I think hard about related notes, and peek at them when linking, sometimes finding interesting one-off connections. This makes me think further and sometimes expand the topics. Automated linking would not make me think, it wouldn't make me learn. It would just produce yet another pile of information that's already available online anyway.

WhyNotHugo··on VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents
> But then how do you access the LLM provider? Etc.

You can expose an HTTP proxy over a vsock into the VM.

WhyNotHugo··on Polishing Cloth
Anyone know if I can use this to wipe a OnePlus 6 device?
WhyNotHugo··on The "File" menu isn't about files
The example you're giving is for an application that operates on files. In that case, naming the menu "Files" obviously makes sense.

But the obvious example of what op is talking about is Pidgin, an instant messenger. The first menu is called "Conversations". It has actions for operating on conversations. The application can't open files, or save files. At least not in the same sense as Notepad, Paint, Audacity, etc.

WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
Qt is fully of bugs on Wayland, some of which are unfixable because the API makes guarantees that are impossible to uphold. I've reported a few issues upstream where there's no apparent path to fixing them (after years), and have reported countless bugs to applications which are just a bug/incoherency in Qt that can't be fixed.

Flutter is an absolute nightmare to install and work with. Even now the few bleeding-edge distributions where it's available are lagging behind many releases because of the pain that it is to maintain it. I don't want that level of pain as a pre-condition to building my software.

WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
Keyboard-driven GUIs belong in the realm of a lost art called "accessibility", which enabled people with motor issues (amongst many others) to use applications without a mouse.

FWIW, most of Windows XP's utilities and included software was perfectly usable with a keyboard alone.

WhyNotHugo··on Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed
Agree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits.

I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.

WhyNotHugo··on Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is
Not necessarily rebuild llama from scratch, build attempting to build it without cmake and manually invoking all the build commands would be quite in character.
WhyNotHugo··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
The "social media" platform aspect is really offputting. That's really one of the aspects where it's obvious that GitHub lost perspective of its purpose.

And atproto isn't really something I'd want to be around; it's really associated with the wrong crowds.

WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
TUI developers could implement the same kind of anti-features. This isn't a trait of GUI vs TUI.
WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
What you're comparing is really "keyboard-driven" via "mouse-drive".

A GUI can be keyboard-driven and as fast as a TUI. The sad truth is that the status quo for GUIs is absolutely terrible, and most were rushed out and not properly tested to check if they're really usable without a mouse.

WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
Maybe on macOS you have great APIs, libraries and toolkits for making high quality GUIs, but if you're wanting to write open source software or target open source platforms, your options are limited and poor.

On the Linux/BSD side, most toolkits are of not great quality, you'll inherit all sorts of subtle bugs and quirky behaviours. Most of the software that's of _great_ quality doesn't use the toolkit, but interfaces with the compositor directly. The effort for developing GUIs under such circumstances is dramatically higher than a TUI, and a TUI is usually "good enough".

I really would prefer GUIs for a lot of things. But when a TUI takes a few weeks to make, the equivalent GUI would take a few months to make.

WhyNotHugo··on We Rebuilt the Linux MicroVM Stack on Apple Silicon
This kind of AI-generated articles are always weird on details. Hyper-focusing on weird details while missing one higher level ones.

E.g., they use Firecracker, they build and deploy backend applications, but they needed to run the stack on macOS. Why? If you're using Firecracker to run backend applications, isn't Linux the obvious choice?

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