binaryturtle

Some of us still use OS X and haven't made the unnecessary switch to any of the macOS that followed it. :)

I remember visiting a computer exhibition (CeBIT) in the very early 90s. In one booth they had some of the big Amiga systems (2000, I think) and at some point on of the booth's staff did the 3 finger salute (press 3 specific keys on the keyboard to force a reboot) on one of the machines. The machine was back up in what felt like an instant. I was amazed by that. They probably had setup the whole boot process via RAM (see "RAD" disk on the Amiga), but I hadn't any idea about that back in the days.

Still to this day I think this is how it should be. You want to switch ON your computer and it should be ready for use.

But what do we get? What feels like minutes of random waiting time. My Raspberry PI with Linux which probably eats 10 of those Amiga 2Ks for breakfast shifts through through a few 1000 lines of initialising output… my Mac which probably eats like 50 of those Amiga 2Ks for lunch… showing a slowly growing bar doing whatever… Why didn't this improve at all in the last 30 years?

AFAIR I only hat to put a bit of duct tape over that silly extra hole to make a proper (Amiga) 880KiB DD (Double Density) out of those weird "PC" HD (High Density) disks… — oh wait… I think I went the other way around than you! :-)

I guess that's that acceptable software bloat the site probably is talking about. :) (I have not clicked. I first read comments to find out if it's worth clicking.)

I bought V2 a while ago too when it was offered extra cheap. The problem it doesn't run on my rusty machine. I bought it to have it as reserve once I upgrade my machine someday (who knows if my V1 stuff still runs then?). I learned about this weird activation server stuff afterwards, so ultimately I had to ask for my money back. There was no way to "activate" the software and store the key/keyfile in a backup. In no way this is future proof in my view.

I want to use my software w/o depending on the availability of some random 3rd party server. I guess it just got worse with this new app here. I'm not enthusiastic about it at all. This has nothing to do with a price point at all (I was happy to pay for all my 3 V1 apps separately).

I simply add "0.0.0.0 youtube.com" to the (network wide) hosts file on my router. Problem solved. I'm simply do understand why the problem is just with "shorts", most of the "longs" are not worth wasting time with either. :-)

Isn't D supported by the GNU compiler collection? I personally would prefer this type of tooling over what Rust and Go do (I can't even get their compilers to run on my old platform anymore; not to mention all this dependencies on remote resources typical Rust/Go projects seem to have: which seems to be enforced by the ecosystem?)

But is that a problem of the language itself, or is it just a problem of available toolchains? E.g. if the gcc compiler collection would come with BASIC support and you just could type something like "gbasic -O3 foobar.bas -o foobar" to get a properly optimised executable out of your BASIC source code file then some may would still use BASIC today, I guess?

I started with BASIC too. Also enjoyed BlitzBasic2 for a long time on the Amiga. That's where I learned programming… back then when programming was still fun.

For example there's also something called "ghost leeching" (side channel entirely bypassing tracker reporting) which can lead to other peers reporting upload for which there's no opposite account of download on the tracker. Making it look like peers over-reported upload and cheated when they are in fact entirely innocent. There's no way for a private tracker to be really sure about stats. The most the moderators can do is to check for repeating suspicious usage patterns across many torrents of a particular peer under scrutiny.

In Safari I get "Too Many Requests" error; in Firefox ESR I get a straight "403 Forbidden". What the heck is going on with gnu.org?

Edit, with cURL it's OK… 200.

That makes no sense.

I definitely try to avoid any public statement of political nature online. You never know how the tide will turn at some point and who gets into power. And then you do not want to have a record of having said the wrong thing about the new guy(s) at the top in your past.

What is that? Like 32x >100MB junk overhead per app? ~4GiB gone from the disk just to hold the same broken copy of some framework/library? It's quite the insanity, isn't it?

If there was one copy of that electron (e.g. installed to /Library somewhere) which all apps would simply use then you only would need to update one copy. Less disk space wasted. All apps fixed in one go.

Back in the old days on the Commodore Amiga we would just do that… install some .library to SYS:Libs/ first if a program required it. It's not like this process was so complicated nobody could do it, right?

I read that announcement and I have zero idea what this "immich" app (?) is. How about adding some short introduction text explaining what the thing is for folks just discovering this thing via a HN link (w/o forcing them to click further or digging the information from somewhere else)?

I agree that this text in its current style is very hard to read. Feels like the text was ballooned up to 3 or 4 times its original length with pointless "side content"? Lots of distracting noise basically. AI or not AI, this is not very good.

… and so I'll continue to stick with AVC, thanks! :-)

I check by sampling a piece. If you chew on it and it sticks to your teeth then it's not done yet and can cook a bit longer. No need to make a science out of it. :)

It should mention the bug only exists after some arbitrary "patch" was introduced. As the current title makes it sounds like the actual zlib has a security issue.

I noticed it yesterday and I have to say I hate it. The "Peoples" section seems to be entirely gone (it's now intermingled with rooms in the "Home" section). You no longer can see favorite/ normal/ low priority DMs or rooms in proper order at once. E.g. in Spaces I had my one or two favourite rooms at the top in a separate section; now it's somewhere messed up in the middle with the normal priority stuff. You constantly have to fiddle with the space-wasting bubble buttons to find stuff.

No idea how that is supposed to improve things really. Why is it always necessary to break user's muscle memory with this types if extreme "improvements"?

I'm still trying to find out where to manage my Sessions in the newer Element versions (I have to keep a very old one around to do that).

Tried this: "yt-dlp -f 'bestvideo*[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best' -S vcodec:h264 -other_options …" ? I'm still getting proper h264 with that (my Raspberry PI 3 only wants a proper codec too… none of that mushy new-era codec stuff. ;) )

Can't get past level 2 with Firefox 78 ESR. "Select all the squares with a Stop Sign", but no squares for selecting show up, so there's nothing to select. Unless I miss a joke somewhere in there?

Worth checking the browser console. If you use a content blocker (e.g. uBlock Origin) it may block things the site really, really "wants". It then goes into an extreme busy loop and throws exceptions to the console like a berserker on a nightly rampage.

Once you carefully whitelist the resource it wants the CPU usage goes down again. At least that fixed it for me (I was mistakenly checking various codec related settings in Firefox first too to find a solution.)

I would claim "Your" doesn't belong either. :) UI should be entirely passively describing things to the user only. Same for technical documentation. E.g. just describe what an option does, don't tell the user what they can or not can do.

This is clean, until something goes catastrophically wrong.

(Which eventually it will. The more reactors, the more chances for it to happen.)

Why would the mouse polling speed mess up the circle drawing itself? You record the start position point (center) and then get the new mouse position and calculate the delta to the start position to get the radius, then draw the circle with the values. Same algorithm.

Yes, sadly Little Snitch (or a similar app) is required to tame Firefox. It's a real shame since they use "Privacy" as selling point, but for me that starts with being transparent about what they do behind the users' backs with very clear ways to disable any nonsense (no about:config or policy BS, but proper GUI exposed options), or even better with a proper opt-in to those "security" and comfort features.

It pretty much eroded any trust I had in this browser and Mozilla (they are no more better than Google, Meta, Apple in that regard.) If it wasn't for uBlock Origin and availability for older OSX versions I would ditch it (the Dynasty build is the only option I have for a recent browser on my old Mac.)

I visited this station ~3 years ago myself. There's nothing creepy about it at all. It's just unique and in that sense pretty interesting.

There's a draft/wind going through the tunnel… that perhaps can sound a bit spooky for folks with lively imagination?

I always thought the Amiga APIs with the tag lists were cool. You easily could extend the API/ABI w/o breaking anything at the binary level (assuming you made the calls accept tag lists as parameters to begin with, of course).

I just take a hot bath… best ideas happen in the bathtub for me.

With OpenWRT we can increase the limit, if needed. But it's a delicate process you need to balance out carefully depending on your router. I doubled my slots and it works fine:

It's done via /etc/sysctl.conf

> net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_max=32768

Afterwards "sysctl -p" to apply/ reload the config file. But increasing blindly is a bad idea… it needs to be done with ip_conntrack_buckets in sync for proper balance (memory use, CPU usage). Best to read upon it.

But just going from 16K to 32K shouldn't be any problem for most routers these days.

How do you de-google yourself properly when every 3rd website stops working entirely unless you whitelist some google stuff in your content blocker?

I'm on an older system here, and both Cloudflare and Anubis entirely block me out of sites. Once you start blocking actual users out of your sites, it simply has gone too far. At least provide an alternative method to enter your site (e.g. via login) that's not hampered by erroneous human checks. Same for the captchas where you help train AIs by choosing out of a set of tiny/ noisy pictures. I often struggle for 5 to 10 minutes to get past that nonsense. I heard bots have less trouble.

Basically we're already past the point where the web is made for actual humans, now it's made for bots.