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acka

401 karma · joined April 4, 2020

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acka··on Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr
s/lazy/poor/
acka··on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
I do not understand how anyone can be so naive as to think that any protocol that could have side effects on either end could not be abused, certainly not people who are PhDs or at least highly educated and possibly making six-figure salaries. This is why we have data diodes and air-gapped systems, people!

And remember: the only truly air-gapped system is a balloon or a plane that is actually up in the air ;-)

acka··on How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
I remember that in Dutch product catalogs, IKEA often used the name Gammelgaard (referring to Niels Gammelgaard, a Danish product designer). In Dutch, "gammel" means "rickety. "
acka··on Qwen 3.8 27B
While you probably have the audacity to check the commands and code that your favorite LLM generates to complete this task, i'm pretty much certain that at some point in time, due to this pervasive mindset of "just let an AI agent do it," we'll have a front page news story of someone who had their family photos on their NAS uploaded to some public space, their security cameras connected to a "live porn for lolz" webring, and perhaps even their crypto wallets and bank accounts pilfered, all because their favorite LLM got exploited by some prompt injection attack while trying to be helpful doing system administration tasks.

I remember there was a short story in BYTE Magazine about a similar kind of scenario way back when, I think at least 30 years ago, long before LLMs and AI agents became a reality.

acka··on Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest
Perhaps it is time to implement the lessons learned from Perl's taint checking[1], but this time for AI agent harnesses instead[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking

[2] https://arxiv.org/html/2607.03423v1

acka··on When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
Your framing assumes that because the hammer is there, its manufacturing cost vanishes. In reality, someone had to pay that cost, and a holistic view has to decide whether building and maintaining that entire tool chain is actually cheaper than just paying humans to do the job. Often, we still choose the tool even when it raises true total cost per unit, because we value convenience or speed. That’s exactly what’s happening with many AI deployments.
acka··on Meta caps internal AI token spending
Fact is that I can actually read TFA, while your link is paywalled.
acka··on U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6
This isn’t a random Nazi analogy, it’s a cautionary tale about how stepwise exclusions plus bystander apathy work. The whole point is to think about it before it’s too late.
acka··on To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
Studying how a processor running an operating system actually behaves by peeking right through the privilege barrier is the ultimate wall hack. Who needs noclip when we have Fractal?
acka··on Nvidia RTX Spark
Sorry, but when it comes to chipsets, they're not even close. The DGX Spark uses a GB10 with 128 GB unified LPDDR5X memory, while the DGX Station has a GB300 with 496 GB LPDDR5X (CPU) + 252 GB HBM3e (GPU) memory. It's like Little League versus Major League, which is why the latter costs about 20 times more than the former. The fact that both run Linux is just because they're part of the same DGX family.
acka··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
It's free, but not unlimited. Besides rate limits, new sign-ups get 1000 credits (requests), and once those are gone, they're gone for good. Only business accounts might get a couple of free refills.
acka··on Claude Opus 4.8
One shot: Taking a shot, just once.

Zero shot: Knowing you had a shot but choosing not to.

Minus one shot: Not even realizing there was a shot.

acka··on Run Linux containers on Android, no root required
Not everyone owns one of the limited range of devices that Linux Terminal is available for. For example, no Snapdragon chips currently in use support the "non-protected" virtual machines required by the Android Virtualization Framework. Also, it doesn't jive with Samsung Knox, so the few Samsung devices that this might work on (mostly international models with Exynos chips) will likely not be supported.
acka··on Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one
Two words: proprietary installers.

If an installer expects to be able to overwrite a file and fails to do so, it might crash, leaving the user with a borked installation.

Of course you can blame the installer, but resolution of the problem might take a long time, or might never happen, depending on the willingness of the vendor to fix it.

acka··on Copilot edited an ad into my PR
An originally macOS-only product, too.

Also, the documentation on Github, linked to by the ad, shows only Mac keyboard shortcuts for operating Raycast.

acka··on My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs
Moon implies there is a planet the moon is orbiting. So unless the planet and its moon are too close to the sun the long term result could also be: solar system.
acka··on Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only
Reading comprehension, my friend.

The article you linked to is about the dropped plan to require ID for permission to work in the UK.

The parent commenter is referring to age verification for accessing adult content using "highly effective age-assurance systems" (such as photo ID cards, biometrics, etc.) under the Online Safety Act 2023, which is still very much in effect.

acka··on Booting from a vinyl record (2020)
In the Netherlands they used to broadcast software as part of the Hobbyscoop radio show. It was generic BASIC code that could run on a variety of home computers, requiring a small loader program for conversion. The project was named BASICODE[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

acka··on So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?
Netflix has been checking accounts against public IP addresses and local networks for ages, at least in The Netherlands. if I use my Dad's account, I get flagged as being "not on the same home network" immediately. I think that using a VPN and Netflix detecting that would only make matters worse, like termination of service.
acka··on Report: Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet
Developers, developers, developers, developers[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fcSviC7cRM

acka··on Google is dead. Where do we go now?
> Why would it plunge instead of re-focusing on things that are intrinsically important?

Because a lot of the economy is focused on creating and maintaining a surplus[1]: make people buy things that they don't really need, make them discard and replace things that they've been convinced are no longer worth it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus%3A_Terrorized_into_Bei...

acka··on SoundCloud has banned VPN access
> Years on, our primary data source is literally holding dozens of subscriptions to every commercial provider we can find, and enumerating the exit node IP addresses they use.

Assuming your VPN identification service operates commercially, I trust that you are in full compliance with all contractual agreements and Terms of Service for the services you utilize. Many of these agreements specifically prohibit commercial use, which could encompass the harvesting of exit node IP addresses and the subsequent sale of such information.

acka··on Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
The stylus and cartridge needed to play the record were included on each spacecraft. The instructions to assemble the record player were included on a protective aluminum cover.
acka··on Pebble Watch software is now open source
This title is misleading. As explained in the comments, there are still non-free binary blobs in the firmware. Please reserve phrasing like "100% X" for things that are indeed "0% Not(X)."
acka··on AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem
Dongle-based license management or DRM isn't the same as product tying; each dongle just validates the license for the use of a piece of software. But forcing customers to only use ink cartridges from a specific brand, deliberately rejecting or invalidating third-party refill options? That is a form of product tying, and it is being deemed illegal in more and more countries.
acka··on Unexpected things that are people
I believe it would be redundant to explicitly grant freedom of speech to an organization such as a union, as its individual members inherently possess this right.
acka··on Unexpected things that are people
Corporations can be held criminally liable, but they can't go to prison. And while lots of countries have gotten rid of the death penalty, a corporation can actually be "executed" by getting dissolved.

I think these are some pretty big deals.

acka··on Google suspended my company's Google cloud account for the third time
Note that you need to be on a paid Google Workspace plan before pointing your DNS MX records at Gmail as provider, or else your emails will either be rejected at best or simply vanish into thin air in the worst case.
acka··on Some people can't see mental images
The Aphantasia Network has several interesting studies and a self-assessment test[2] that you can take.

[1] https://aphantasia.com

[2] https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq

acka··on Google flags Immich sites as dangerous
Maybe it's time to revive something like the uzbl[1] project, or start something similar.

[1] https://www.uzbl.org/

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