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alias_neo

5,393 karma · joined September 16, 2016

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alias_neo··on Claude Fable 5
This isn't some random dipshit, this is Simon Willison[1]. He has a bit more cred than some "AI influencer".

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

alias_neo··on Ratty – A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics
I wonder if something like this could work for thumbnails in the terminal; I prefer to browse my filesystem from a terminal rather than the point and click file manager typically, and it would be really useful if I could have a grid-style `ls` with terminal based renders of the 3d models (thinking STL/STEP, 3D printing) in that directory. Bonus points if I could preview/rotate the model to inspect it.
alias_neo··on How to turn anything into a router
> Why not?

It seems like you weren't really asking, but I'll answer anyway.

It's bad security practice, and opens up your network to attack and/or compromise, you're massively increasing the attack surface, and a compromise of one of those components leaves the attacker sat on your edge router, at which point your entire network is fair game.

Generally speaking you shouldn't expose anything on your edge router / firewall, it's a safety barrier.

You can sit things behind it in a "DMZ" and port-forward and isolate them etc so that there's no packets terminating on the actual edge device itself.m, that lowers the risk of a full network level compromise.

Chances are you might be fine and never have a problem, but it's still recommended against.

alias_neo··on Stop Publishing Garbage Data, It's Embarrassing
I was looking at that RAC chart this morning. Given it's Sunday, and I was reading before my morning coffee, I'm not ashamed to say it took me a good few seconds of zooming in and out to realise they'd used a decimal point where a comma should have been.

Easy type to make, but seriously, does no one even take a cursory look at the charts when publishing articles like this? The chart looks _obviously_ wrong, so imagine how many are only slightly wrong and are missed.

The fuel prices one could surely be solved with a tiny bit of validation; are the coordinates even within a reasonable range? Fortunately, in the UK, it's really easy to tell which is latitude and which is longitude due to one of them being within a digit or two of zero on either side.

alias_neo··on AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip
Ouch, were you not willing to RMA for that ethernet port? I wouldn't be too pleased after only a week if parts of the board stopped working.

I don't really want to run my RAM that slow which is why I'll probably stick with two sticks.

alias_neo··on AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip
In January I upgraded my desktop, 9950X3D £600, 64GB DDR5-6000 £600, MSI MAG Tomahawk X870E £300, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB £350, Asus Prime 9070XT £580. I spent a another £250 on PSU and cooler and reused my case (Phanteks Evolv Enthoo TG, beautiful case but horrible cooling. Will cut some holes in it and if it doesnt work out look for something with more airflow).

The RAM price was already inflated at that time, and the same kit is now £800, but in October or earlier last year I'd have saved possibly the cost of the CPU/GPU on the whole thing, but now it's be about the cost of a CPU/GPU more expensive.

On a side note for anyone not aware, 9950X3D isn't the best choice for pure gaming, 9850X3D is cheaper and marginally better, also I went with 2 sticks of RAM kit, 4 sticks is much harder to run at the advertised speed (6000) which is actually an overclock.

Im a dev and a linux user/gamer hence my choice of CPU/GPU.

alias_neo··on Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive
I think I remember reading something about that at the time, the accelerometer thing, maybe it was in the manual.

Sounds quality was great and I loved the dock too.

alias_neo··on Chuck Norris has died
> are you really under the impression that Chuck Norris is the only man who can factually slam a revolving door? :)

Face palm I hadn't realised we weren't talking about _actual_ facts about him, this makes a lot more sense now.

alias_neo··on Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive
Nice! I loved that phone, was one of my favourites. One of the only, if not the only phone I ever owned that had a metal shell that I an recall.

I had most of the N range, and was particularly interested in music ones, N95 was love/hate because the music button/reverse slide was so slow sometimes, and generally it just wasn't as good as N91 for music listening with its proper headphone jack placement, and always accessible controls.

What kind of magic did that HDD have that it could be thrown around like a phone typically is without the issues we would see if we'd handled a laptop with HDD the same way?

alias_neo··on Chuck Norris has died
Interesting. I get the likeness thing, but surely one could publish jokes about anyone they wish and that would be satire or fair use or something?

Facts and copyright is an interesting one, because I'm surprised a fact can be copyrighted, unless it's the wording specifically.

alias_neo··on Chuck Norris has died
I'm pretty sure they were all the rage when _I_ was at school, but that was long before the iPhone.

I'm curious on what grounds they blocked the app.

alias_neo··on Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive
I remember my Nokia N91 which had a 4GB version of one of these tiny HDDs, blew my mind at the time.

Man do I miss the N-series, I had so many good phones in that era.

alias_neo··on My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
Do you know which HA integration I would use if I want to try out Qwen 3 ASR in HA? Some screenshots in the OP reference Qwen 3 ASR for STT but I can't seem to find any reference to which integration I'd use.
alias_neo··on I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services
I'm in the same boat as OP.

The question I'd ask myself is; who would _I_ trust to implement privacy preserving verification?

The only answer I can come up with right now is; myself. I would trust myself.

alias_neo··on Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal
Yeah, I went through it 3 times in the first decade of my career, two of them were just like yours, I was told "look, this has to go like this, so you're gonna have to go through the stuff, but don't worry, we're promoting you so you won't be affected". After the second one, I left because it just becomes a shitty place to work. The good people who weren't given a hint they're safe end up leaving because of the risk and hit to morale, then the morale for the rest of you drops.

The third one was a little different, they just said this entire country is redundant were moving operations abroad. So everyone was gone.

alias_neo··on Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal
It has legal implications, as others have expressed.

It means your position was made redundant, and it allows you to be terminated with little legal complication, but on the understanding that the same position can't be re-hired for within a period, I think it's 6 months.

Of course in reality it's not that simple, you get "made redundant" then they rephrase the job title a bit and hire someone else.

Redundancy in the real, proper form is a consultation process where they will try, if possible to relocate people into other positions, government does it all the time when there's cuts, and they'll often offer voluntary redundancy where they pay you X amount to quit, it's usually a reasonable sum and should leave you with more than enough cash in "normal" circumstances to find another job comfortably, or see you through to retirement if you're pretty close.

Sometimes it's just a way to get rid of people who are shit or you don't like.

If you're gonna lose your job, being made "redundant" is the way you want to do it.

alias_neo··on Samsung Upcycle Promise
I'm almost certain this was to win some sort of grant, award, subsidy, exemption, green credentials....something, and then once they had it, immediately forgotten.

I've seen this happen plenty where companies start campaigns for reasons and then ditch it as soon a they've achieved the thing from the list above.

alias_neo··on I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
I think you've pretty much summed it up.

As far as I'm aware, it has less functionality than the OEM, so you use it to _remove_ features (good and/or bad).

Aside from that, I suppose it means you can run a more up to date firmware if yours is no longer maintained, but I'm not sure what that means in practical terms.

There's also the "hyper paranoid" fork "canoeboot" which has no proprietary blobs, and presumably _even less_ functionality.

The short answer is; if you don't know why you want it or need it, you probably don't.

alias_neo··on I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
As far as I can tell, this is the only reason, you'll likely lose a bunch of functionality (that's been my experience); so "principle" is the only reason I'm aware of (or minimalism, but that's a principle too is it not?).

I suppose if nothing else, you can run a more up to date firmware if the vendor stopped supporting yours, but I have no idea what that means in a practical sense.

alias_neo··on Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme
They're also holding the photos that are left hostage; unless you pay them, you can't download the photos you have left there.
alias_neo··on I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
It replaces a proprietary component of your system with an open source one.

Reading https://libreboot.org/#why-use-libreboot might provide further enlightenment.

alias_neo··on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
"Forgejo was initially created in December 2022 as a fork of Gitea. The fork occurred after a for-profit limited corporation ran by the lead maintainer of the project, Lunny Xiao, silently transferred Gitea's trademarks and operations to the company and began to establish an open-core model."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgejo

Also see: https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/

EDIT: HN discussion on the latter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471

alias_neo··on Descent, ported to the web
One of the first PC games I ever played, I was single-digit years old when this released. Fond memories.

Will have to have a play of this web version and try out Overload, thanks.

alias_neo··on Faster Than Dijkstra?
Deja Vu.

I read this article a few days ago I'm sure, word-for-word, but it wasn't on this site in OP? It stood out because when it mentioned textbooks and said "including ours" I looked at the site and thought to myself "they do textbooks?".

alias_neo··on GLM-5: Targeting complex systems engineering and long-horizon agentic tasks
What's the use case for Zai/GLM? I'm currently on Claude Pro, and the Zai looks about 50% more expensive after the first 3 months and according to their chart GLM 4.7 is not quite as capable as Opus 4.5?

I'm looking to save on costs because I use it so infrequently, but PAYG seems like it'd cost me more in a single session per month than the monthly cost plan.

alias_neo··on The switch to Linux and the beginning of my self-hosting journey
Thanks for the heads up, that makes sense.
alias_neo··on The switch to Linux and the beginning of my self-hosting journey
You seem to have missed a couple of things that have caused you a bit of a headache here, I'm hoping I can encourage you to try again with a little bit of info. I've been using Linux for as long as it has existed, I'm also a backend-dev that works on a Linux machine and targets Linux-based platforms for deployment, even my kids use Linux. Windows went downhill for me after about Windows 2000 and Linux has only gotten better.

> yet it still is not there in usability

I want to wholeheartedly disagree with you. Nothing comes close to Linux in terms of usability for me, but a lot of it is about what you're used to, I've used Window's, I've used Mac, Mac I could live with, but I'll never intentionally use Windows again.

> To be specific what irked me today when I tested them was installing new programs. On Cachy, I wanted to test jetbrains IDE

Ok, let's begin; this one is partly JetBrains' fault, and partly yours.

You can open a terminal and type `paru jetbrains-toolbox`, hit enter a couple of times and it's installed. Don't know what `paru` is? I recommend reading the frankly excellent documentation from CachyOS[0].

> or extract(no option in dir manager or decompression program) the content in Cachy

You didn't specify which Desktop Environment you chose, this is important when helping newcomers because each comes with its own set of tools; but in Gnome's (what I use) the file manager, called Nautilus, I can right-click almost any archive type and will be presented with "Extract", "Extract to..." as well as a few other options. I just looked up how KDE does it, in case you're using that, the file manager is called Dolphin, and apparently you might need to install an archive tool first such as Ark and/or 7zip, gotta give you that one, I'm a little shocked, that's a pretty shitty OOBE in my opinion, but a quick search and you'll now probably be confused because the solution is here[1] but they say to use `apt install...` which you don't have on an Arch based distro. But once you know what the file managers you do have access to are, it should be easier.

> So I wanted to get 7zip but there was no linux version

There certainly _is_ a Linux version. `paru 7zip` and I get at least 3 legit options; the base package, an architecture optimised package, and a GUI for it, as well as a dozen or two community options. You can also try the standard arch package manager aptly named "pacman"; `sudo pacman -S 7zip` and it installs it for me after I hit enter to confirm, don't even need to choose the package. Wtf is `sudo`? That's how Administrator is typically done in Linux.

> Cachy has its own packages that can be opened(website) via its welcome screen(otherwise there is no program manager - no snaps, flatpacks

On Gnome there is "Software" which supports Flatpaks as well as other package types; don't worry about snaps, you don't want them, and there's Octopi from CachyOS. In KDE there's a GUI called "Discover". There are a bunch of others such as Bazaar which you mentioned.

Usability really isn't an issue in Linux once you know the way of your distro; If you're used to Windows, then it's _different_, sure, and in that case I'd suggest taking an hour to read the CachyOS docs; Arch Wiki (CachyOS is based on Arch) is also an amazing resource for all things Linux, and learn a little about how software management is different, we don't (usually) pull random crap from websites, we install from package managers, and sometimes compile the source ourselves.

If you didn't choose one of the two DEs I've mentioned (Gnome, KDE), I'd recommend giving them a go, they're both very mature and usable. If you're into Discord, I can suggest hitting up the CachyOS or another distro's Discord servers, there's lots of helpful people there willing to help, if you had any other questions give me a shout.

[0] https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_basic/navigation-guide/ [1] https://discuss.kde.org/t/how-to-add-extract-here-right-clic...

alias_neo··on Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Yes. The phone number is just for activation, once activated, you can swap the SIM and carry on. Or have the SIM that receives the activation text in another phone, or be virtual, or whatever.
alias_neo··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
You're implying some difference here that I don't see.

Both platforms need some way for the client to register to their respective push services, Apple needs an Apple account, Android needs google-services.json.

Both platforms require your app to generate a token which the platform's respective push service holds, and send it to your server which you then use to identify the client you're pushing to.

Apple also requires the Auth p8, Bundle ID, Team ID and Key ID, which are roughly equivalent to the contents of the google-services.json.

alias_neo··on Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
Haha yeah. It was mostly just fun for me as a nerdy child who spent way too much time on Astalavista forum.

Cracking and RE were just gateways into a career in (defensive) security for me.

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