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blablabla123

2,067 karma · joined May 24, 2012

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blablabla123··on I built a 10 inch mini rack from aluminium extrusions
Have you taken grounding into consideration?
blablabla123··on Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice
> If you want a GmbH quickly there are specialized lawyers that maintain a pool of freshly founded GmbH's for you to buy.

That. It's possible to go even simpler if no limited liability is needed.

Just Gewerbeanmeldung costs maybe 30€ and takes less than a month normally. Large cities even have online forms for this.

Also the reporting duties are much simplified. ChatGPT and some accounting software are very helpful. Although a tax consultant and probably a liability insurance are recommended to avoid bad surprises.

blablabla123··on Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem
I was once on a job interview there, in the Train/Station Wifi branch, mostly web programming related though IIRC. It wasn't so much of a quiz format but the interviewers wanted to know what I worked on before, why I wanted to change etc. What really stuck with me was how the department CTO insisted how superior and privacy conforming their logging system is. Not saving anything, not even for a micro second. I didn't dare to ask how they debugged anything. But in the end I was rejected and the reason was: more questions than answers.
blablabla123··on Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users
On every boot I see the sha hash of the image plus there's the attestation App. I've never seen either before and I used both stock Android and LineageOS. Also every App gets granular permission control and there's an automatic reminder to remove permissions for unused Apps. Classic example of Enterprise thinking on VW's side.
blablabla123··on A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer
Similar for me. One was for an overly very well paid position. I always run (p)npm audit before running npm repos, so lots of issues were found. I tried to fix them but I would have gone over the time limit. So I asked the recruiter about it and if it makes sense to run it in an isolated VM. No answer...

The other was for a DevEx crypto service. While I was very suspicious the code looked okay but the recruiter was strange and changed their profile to a different person eventually. I think this was a crypto stealing scam though since it required connecting to a wallet. I don't have any crypto though, so I might be okay for now. Although reinstalling my system clean would be the only sure way in theory...

blablabla123··on Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time
> Carpet bombing of cities, towns, villages or other areas containing a concentration of protected civilians has been considered a war crime since 1977, through Article 51 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing

Autonomous weapons have hardly been deployed yet, maybe at the Inner Korean border or some lunatic's backyard. Therefore I don't think there is any legislation for it yet. But it seems a very cruel way of killing, also considering in this particular case they didn't even send footage back. What kind of experiment was this? Maybe they didn't like to see the brutality, perhaps people begging for mercy not to be killed, giving up and showing a white flag. Indeed this isn't possible with carpet-bombing.

blablabla123··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
Thanks, I was interested at this point ;) Yeah I don't know, the other PR is from April. Not saying AI cannot be useful. On the other hand this is a "well studied" problem. Last year I worked on a project where I mostly stopped using draft PRs because the team lead (or his AI) was stealing my code all the time :D
blablabla123··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
It's the cache, I pin-pointed the main problem correctly without ADB access, any closer details and just google.

> // Unpack into no_backup storage rather than the cache dir. Android may

> // delete files from getCacheDir() at any time to reclaim space, which

Looking further into the issue disk space is a huge problem with Kodi discussed plenty of times. In fact even the Wiki dedicates 2 pages to it:

https://kodi.wiki/view/Archive:Reduce_disk_space_usage

https://kodi.wiki/view/Texture_Cache_Maintenance_utility

I realize from your perspective this may seem still a very convincing example in the sense of it works.

A non-programmatic solution might have been possible though:

> It's likely your thumbnail cache. That's typically the biggest piece stored locally (you also have the database). You can clear the cache (short term fix) or move it to another drive (long term fix).

> Also recommend not downloading actor thumbnails. Lot of extra images.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShieldAndroidTV/comments/1f7xfwn/ko...

I also recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging

blablabla123··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
So I'm scrolling through this Ask HN and this is now the 3rd similar problem. Would you mind adding more details as well as the patch? Perhaps as a gist if it's unfinished?

I mean just googled https://www.google.com/search?q=kodi+crash+chromecast+4k I'm getting really a lot of issues such as https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=381239

It seems to be a quite common problem. Are you sure it was the rube goldberg fix and not a more mundane solution? Such as pulling in someone's fork from GitHub or just clearing the cache on a loop?

blablabla123··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
Being from Europe as well I've also been hearing similar advice plenty of times. With time I heard stories about people from all walks of lives having been help up by TSA, from people on business travel to kids of US senators...
blablabla123··on The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid
It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this.

On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.

That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...

blablabla123··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
I used to work with a small Aviation-related software company. There it was really not like this, the boss made jokes about it. On the other hand engineering-wise things were done really differently: no branches, fail fast, only e2e tests etc. Probably the rift between small companies and corporate culture also applies here.
blablabla123··on Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
It's a German website but zeit.de. At least the last time I checked. Looking into Firefox reveals almost 8 MB for loading the front page. One could easily skip this as an exception but it's one of the 2 large weekly news magazines in Germany. Also since it's part of a publishing house, I assume other publications of them might be using the same system.
blablabla123··on Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
The modern web very much goes by the Pareto principle. But what's almost impossible to digest without full-fledged machinery are some News websites. The complexity of running ads and gdpr flows is just out of this world. It even dwarfs social media websites in that regard.
blablabla123··on News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism
I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier and genuinely curious why. Decades ago the first time for me to see a redundant server setup was within a local newspaper's office. So it's likely not because people aren't tech-savvy or anything.
blablabla123··on Get your passwords out of Bitwarden while you still can
The last months didn't make Bitwarden look very good. On the other hand, what about the competition? Sure there's KeePassXC but that's essentially local. Bitwarden even has Send to quickly share with anyone.

I might self-host something at some point. But even choosing something seems a menial task, not to speak of setting it actually up...

blablabla123··on Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
There's a thing called Hacker ethic which used to be referenced quite frequently in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

Probably it's worth reminding of also considering we're on HN here... ;)

blablabla123··on Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images
The Hacker ethos is mainly about how things work: sharing, openness.

I'm not entirely sure how hiding that something is GenAI fits in here. It surely doesn't have anything to do with Privacy though.

blablabla123··on Ghostty is leaving GitHub
GitHub indeed used to be a undisputably good entity. Now I whenever I push something non-trivial I wonder if some AI will take my code without credit.

I don’t mind the lower availability to be honest but I also noticed it.

To be fair I don’t add new code on GitHub for my own private projects anymore. Public projects of course profit from the network effect but there must be a better way. Before GitHub people also did well, Linux, many well known GNU projects etc. were created without GitHub.

blablabla123··on SI Units for Request Rate (2024)
Physicist here: usually bin size is adjusted to change the interval over which you average. Also rpm is the unit if you want to pin it down to a single number

If writing rpm is too long, there's also a trick: write "requests/rpm:"

That means: requests measured in rpm. Thus afterwards you can write single numbers which is even shorter

blablabla123··on AI companies are buying the Slack data of failed startups
This makes me wonder...do AI companies actually train their public models also on their own code?
blablabla123··on Ask HN: Is there any interest in a native Qt/C++ Discord client?
Would be nice. I used Swiftcord while I was still on Mac. It missed vital features but still better than another Electron monstrosity...
blablabla123··on AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice
I think this may be selection bias. People asking anonymously (edit: for relationship advice) on Reddit perhaps even with a throwaway account are likely in a desperate situation. So hardly to be compared with the _average_ real life situation. Thus 1. chances are running is a good option and 2. also considering even in 2026 AI still essentially is a statistical machine that doesn’t handle corner-cases at the tails well.

Anecdotally as I’ve thoroughly worked and used AI myself. It performs best with google-able stuff that is needle-in-the-haystick like and worst with personal and work advice. The main problem I see is that it’s tempting to use it for that.

blablabla123··on The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection
I think it's quite embarrassing that the WWW exists since more than 3 decades and still there's no mechanism for privacy friendly approval for adults apart from sending over the whole ID. Of course this is a huge failure of governments but probably also of W3C which rather suggests the 100,000th JavaScript API. Especially in times of ubiquitous SSO, passkeys etc. The even bigger problem is that the average person needs accounts at dozens if not hundreds of services for "normal" Internet usage.

That being said, this is a 1 bit information, adult in current legislation yes/no.

blablabla123··on FreeCAD
I don’t know, I tried FreeCAD a few months ago and it was buggy as hell. I did some really basic extrusions and distance constraints. But ended up with non-perpendicular entities despite not constructing it like this.
blablabla123··on ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants
From what I've read is that they are not a product company. But they rather have a zoo of solutions. And they are hired by governments desperate to improve their IT, probably after the n-th issue going public. I highly doubt this would be legal in many states but who will (and can) check this anyway?

Of course it's tempting to throw everything into one huge database. But Jesus, this is like interns writing the Software...

blablabla123··on Erich von Däniken has died
I remember him from 90s TV shows among other similar people. It seemed more like an obscurity but it was interesting to watch. Obviously he highlighted things which just hadn't been fully understood yet. To me it seems that was a time when society still had a healthy relationship to conspiracies, para sciences etc. (Maybe it's true but very much probably not...)
blablabla123··on Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files
Yes I‘m also watching with disbelief. Even more so since media attention in the EU about it seems higher than in the US. Although the recent trove I found especially disturbing.

I recently watched a documentary where elites from beginning of the 20th century were also portrayed. Self-portrayed as Philanthropists. Moral bankruptcy became obvious, although in other manifestations such as shooting members of worker unions. And the US government did something in form of the New Deal, splitting monopolies and other policies.

In an optimistic scenario I’d expect something similar. New ways to hold elites accountable and keeping extreme differences in wealth in check.

blablabla123··on Problems with D-Bus on the Linux desktop
This is the first time I hear that anyone hates D-Bus. I always saw it as a global API Bus that Apps can register to and which enables some sort of interoperability and automation. After all it can even be used from Bash. What is bad about this?

The security aspect seems also a bit funny to me. After all the average Desktop has most data in the home directory, so every application can read everything. That's not the fault of D-Bus.

Also I'm puzzled that Polkit hasn't been mentioned even once.

blablabla123··on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off
Google recently announced to double AI data center capacity every 6 month. While both unfortunately deal with exponential growth, we are talking about 1% growth CO2 which is bad enough vs 300% effectively per year according to Google
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