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WhyNotHugo

6,896 karma · joined November 26, 2017

https://whynothugo.nl
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WhyNotHugo··on Multiple Mouse Cursors in Wayland
While op uses systemd/udev's internal property mutation mechanism to configure seats, not that sway (and likely other compositors) allow you to just configure the device-to-seat assignment in your configuration or even at runtime.
WhyNotHugo··on Multiple Mouse Cursors in Wayland
Yup, and it's quite non-trivial.

The typical GTK application out there can't handle multi-touch and can rarely even handle several mouse events (e.g.: mouse-wheel scroll while dragging), so I doubt they have full blow support for multiple seats.

WhyNotHugo··on Multiple Mouse Cursors in Wayland
In fact, you can also have a different touch input devices per seat!

I'm not aware of actual hardware that would make this feasible, but if you invent a touchscreen which recognises between two people's different fingers, you could have a client which tracks who clicks where without any protocol changes.

WhyNotHugo··on Our position on open-weights models
TLDR: "we're not in favour of banning our competitor's products, but we do advocate banning hardware exports to foreign countries where competitors are located".

There's also a very strong implicit double-standard in the discourse, along the lines of "it's dangerous if non-US uses this in military fields, but it's fine if the US does so".

WhyNotHugo··on Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%
You're forgetting about ASML, which is European and makes the actual machines to produce a huge portion of the world's high-end chips.
WhyNotHugo··on Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files
Perhaps it was a niri-specific thing (although they claim it's KDL), but it rejected simple strings without quotes.
WhyNotHugo··on Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files
I wouldn't call KDL "established"; it's honestly pretty niche. It looks _similar_ to pre-existing configuration formats, but KDL is very picky about syntax. I.e.: single word string MUST be quoted.

In this same space, https://codeberg.org/emersion/scfg/ is pretty widely used. The curious thing about scfg is that it's not really a "new" format: the syntax described has been in use by different tools for decades. They just didn't call it scfg, and it's mostly the name itself that's new.

WhyNotHugo··on Hyprland 0.55 announced the switch to Lua for its config files
Python went from setup.py to pyproject.toml, but pyproject.toml declares a build-system, which is another package which all the complex logic from setup.py.

Granted, it's a "simpler" config syntax, but the total system complexity has not decreased.

WhyNotHugo··on Kimi Work
> Entertainment and culture exports are still effectively zero (like, what, three blockbuster films?) where the US, Japan and Korea define pop across the globe.

And this is really sad, because they have thousands of years of cultural heritage and also plenty of great films. Somehow, they've failed at exporting this completely.

WhyNotHugo··on The Kimi K3 Moment
Pricing is actually far cheaper than that. There's two tiers of pricing: Chinese and US.

If you sign up with non-Chinese phone number, you're bucketed into US, you get US prices, can pay only in USD and with American credit card network.

Chinese prices are about 9x cheaper than the US prices, which are already far cheaper than Claude or other American provider. If you can somehow get hold of a Chinese phone number, keep in mind that you can save ~90% of the bill.

WhyNotHugo··on Texas wins court order to suspend domain name for violating age-verification law
> I won’t lose any sleep at the loss of such scum but the general principle seems a bit strange.

That's generally key in making a precedent. The first case is someone nobody really cares for, but it's built a precedent where the next case must follow suit.

WhyNotHugo··on Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them
> Gaming PCs also require specialized knowledge, more maintenance, etc etc.

If you want to build it yourself: sure. But less technically inclined folks can just buy one pre-assembled from a computer shop.

WhyNotHugo··on What `for x in y` hides from you – From Scratch Code
'for' loops in Rust do the same: they create an iterator and then iterate over that.

You can write the exact same loop with `let mut iter = v.iter(); while Some(x) = iter.next()`.

'for' loops in Rust are purely syntax sugar, and I somewhat wish they didn't exist. They provide you two ways of doing the same thing, but one of them hides the details from you. Having 'for' as a keyword is nice for folks coming from other languages, but then it hides the possibility of other interesting usages, like cloning an iterator inside a loop.

WhyNotHugo··on I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets
> There isn't a straightforward way using standard POSIX tools to share a directory with another user.

* chmod lets you share with everyone

* addgroup and chown let you share with a specific group of users.

WhyNotHugo··on Nokia’s years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon
We had Linux phones. I learnt Python+Qt coding on a Nokia N900 (the N9's predecessor). I must emphasise on the "coding on" part. I would ssh into the phone and use it as a regular Linux box.

Something which the article omits is that Nokia changed it CEO to an ex-boardmember of MSFT. Comments in Slashdot that week were "this guy's gonna tank Nokia, kill their Linux research and sell out to MS". They were 100% accurate.

Make no mistake, Nokia didn't make "a mistake" or a simple bad call. Someone was placed at the top to sabotage and destroy it.

WhyNotHugo··on Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS
Quick Alpine container with the current directory mounted as the current directory:

    docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/src -w /src alpine sh
Replace alpine with your favourite Linux distro or image.

Note entirely perfect, but will be enough against anyone not actively exploiting kernel privilege escalation bugs.

WhyNotHugo··on Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS
> And most Linux distributions make it really hard to disable external device access for individual users...

For any distro that relies on the traditional plugdev group, just don't add those users to the plugdev group. Which would be the default when creating a user anyway.

WhyNotHugo··on Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS
> Trying to use markdown files to limit access should never be treated as a security guarantee at all.

This is akin to politely asking guests to to steal your jewels. If your jewels are in the living room, and your guests have unfettered access to the living room, this technique will only work for the most trustworthy of guests.

WhyNotHugo··on Why Vanilla JavaScript
I appreciate the sentiment, but can't agree fully. I used vanilla JS for many years before AngularJS even existed (and I also tried AngulasJS when it was the new thing).

Vue is just a huge convenience over raw JavaScript for large, complex view. Sure, I don't get to do direct DOM manipulation, but when I write C code I also don't get to pick which variable goes in which CPU register. I accept giving up control that ASM would give me, for all the improvements that C brings on top of it, even if C just compiles to ASM and is an abstraction on top of it.

WhyNotHugo··on What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis
The first item is "a file in the repository which contains secrets was read by the model".

Well yeah, obviously, that's pretty much intended behaviour. The LLM can't determine that there are secrets in your file before reading them.

The real issue here is that you're giving an LLM access to a file with plain-text secrets and then surprised that it reads that file.

The fact that the whole repo is automatically uploaded is crazy though, especially for multi-gigabyte repositories. This could take a long time on some connections, and seems generally pointless ­— unless there's some ulterior motive for uploading all this data.

WhyNotHugo··on Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k
> My opinion is that claude code uses more tokens simply because Anthropic makes more money that way and forces people into their subscriptions.

OTOH, this makes typical subscriptions usages consume more tokens, which are included in their flat fee.

This sounds more like incompetence than malice.

WhyNotHugo··on Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media
I move into a neighbourhood of new houses in 2007. One of the guys there worked IT at a university and set up a mailing list of the neighbourhood. It was used successfully for all sorts of coordination, neighbourhood watch, internal news, etc.

There's always someone mis-using it, and the same applies to every other platform. There's always someone hijacking forum threads, or asking questions in comments instead of starting a new topic. None of this is exclusive to email.

WhyNotHugo··on Modern decor may be straining people's brains
The grass proves that it's actually fertile lands, and that there's resources for keeping it growing.

Historically, using land with such properties for grass instead of crops was as sign of wealth, especially for large estates.

WhyNotHugo··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
> the US president is allowed to bypass Congress.

This is the key difference between presidential system and parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system, the head of state answers to the parliament. In a presidential system, the presidents answers to no-one (technically they answer to the people, but in practice that's inconsequential).

WhyNotHugo··on Unified Memory, Explained: Why Mini PCs Can Run 70B Models a Big GPU Can't
I think it's mostly the ramp-up time, but ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is basically aspiring to do just this.
WhyNotHugo··on Opinionated and easy Pi.dev configuration
I made my own subagent implementation in a couple of hours using Pi itself. It aligns with my needs better than any existing plugin, none of which seems to be what I was looking for.

You don't _need_ to use someone else's plugin if you don't want to, and for simple functionality, you can get pretty good resulting rolling your own.

WhyNotHugo··on Opinionated and easy Pi.dev configuration
Pi is perfectly usable in its "raw" state (except perhaps an extension for your specific provider, if not built in).

Configuring it isn't really overwhelming: you use it for a while and then find that you'd want to extend it with some particular functionality.

WhyNotHugo··on TLS certificates for internal services done right
Yeah, adding CAs to the store sucks. On Linux it needs to be in /etc/ssl/certs (this varies slighly per distribution), which is only writable by root. A single user can't trivially trust a CA, and a great deal of applications/libraries don't support overriding the store's path.
WhyNotHugo··on TLS certificates for internal services done right
Personally, I use a custom local CA with name constraints so that it can only sign domains for The .internal TLD. This is the most important bit: because if the cert is ever leaked, it cannot be used to MITM connections to other domains.

I have to secure the CA's key, but I also have to secure all the keys for the certificate it signs, both being a similar level of challenge.

For personal use, or for very small organisations, using a passphrase-protected Yubikey as a "cheap HSM" should suffice.

WhyNotHugo··on Rewriting Bun in Rust
> around $165,000 at API pricing

This is the bit I was really curious about. Definitely not something within reach for us mortals.

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