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cycomanic

12,469 karma · joined March 27, 2019

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cycomanic··on Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
By now I am not sure if these posts can stil be given the benefit of the doubt or are just dishonest. Who were the developers pushing wayland because of their employers? Kristian Høgsberg (who was a significant xorg developer, because people always deny that wayland was written by xorg guys) originally developed wayland in his free time, it then became a freedesktop project (I would argue not a group run by corporates).

The most active implementation (particularly in the early days) is probably wlroots, started by Drew deVault (again in his free time), who is often quite vocal against corporate control.

In fact the large desktop environments, which are much more under "corporate control", were comparitavely slow to adapt wayland IIRC.

So instead of repeating this accusation, maybe actually give some evidence?

cycomanic··on I'm returning my Framework 16
I don't understand the author, on the one hand he complains about the repairability of the thinkpads (which is weird in itself, they are still the most repairable laptops bar framework, especially because it's trivial to find resellers for pretty much all the parts. If finding all the screws is a problem, then you can just look at the repair manuals which are freely available. But after complaining about repairability he the looks at apples as alternative, which are like orders of magnitude less repairable than thinkpads.
cycomanic··on I'm returning my Framework 16
> IMHO I think its not helpful to be comparing Framework's price to whats currently on the market. You are paying for sustainability.

But is it really more sustainable to have a poor quality but easily repairable/swappable laptop where you had to exchange multiple parts over e.g. 10 years, compared to a high quality laptop that lasted the full 10 years and didn't need any repairs? And that is not unusual, my 10 year old X1 carbon is still going strong, I just had to take change the battery at some point, but that was not very difficult.

cycomanic··on Unifi Travel Router
But you don't need to configure wireguard on the individual devices just on the openwrt router. That's one device and you can keep that on permanently.
cycomanic··on Unifi Travel Router
In Europe you have free roaming so it (almost?) never makes sense to get a new sim per country.
cycomanic··on Unifi Travel Router
Why do you think this would be difficult to do using openwrt? Wouldn't you just set up the travel router to have the same ssid and password as your home network and configure a wireguard tunnel from the travel router to your home network (that is if you want to be in your home network)
cycomanic··on The Coffee Warehouse
I find fascinating how the efficiency of local coffee shops differs based on country. If you go to a place with good/excellent coffee in e.g. the US or Sweden they typically have the latest and fanciest equipment, and the coffee making seems like a ritual taking forever. In contrast go to a cafe in Italy or Sydney or Melbourne and the baristas pump out coffees and a ridiculous speed all often at a quality better than those artisanal places elsewhere. I think it's mainly a function of the number and type (i.e. demanding a good coffee not Starbucks slop) of customers you serve. It really does not require ridiculous warehouse style efficiency optimisations.

Incidentally in countries like Australia or Italy Starbucks has not made significant inroads apart from some tourist areas.

cycomanic··on The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?
This is such a funny take, I remember all throughout the 90s and 00s (and maybe even 10s, not playing much then anymore) you often could new games on acceptable settings with a 1-2 year old high spec machine, in fact to play at highest settings you often needed ridiculously spec'ed machines. Now you can play the biggest titles (CP77, BG3 ...) on 5-10 year old hardware (not even top spec), with non or minimal performance/quality impact. I mean I've been playing BG3 and CP77 on highest settings on a PC that I bought 2 years ago used for $600 (BG3 I was playing when it had just come out).
cycomanic··on The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?
What I don't really understand is why the big data centre operators destroy their old cards instead of selling them off. What are the downsides for them? Apart from the obvious, i.e. it would bring in money, would it not also drive down the cost for brand new cards? I.e. Nvidia can currently overcharge dramatically because there is such a shortage. If the data centre operators would dump large numbers of used cards on the market would that not increase supply and drive down cost?
cycomanic··on Things I learnt about passkeys when building passkeybot
Thank you, you have been the first person to articulate why passkeys are actually an advantage. Everyone else I've read from was focusing on the client side and there I really don't see a significant advantage. In fact it seems it's a downgrade from MFA, so I never understood the push for passkeys.
cycomanic··on Things I learnt about passkeys when building passkeybot
That's what I still don't understand. Why is "something you have" deemed more secure than "something you know". For a while everyone was harping on MFA, but suddenly passkeys came along and now SFA is fine as long as it's a passkey?
cycomanic··on CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
The distance is likely calculated based on the stored volume and the area you cover until the height is significantly below head height (because as you point out CO2 settles to the bottom). Regarding the little house 15m from the bubble, they are not planning to build this in residential areas, so it's very unlikely that there would be a house within 15m just for operational purposes already.
cycomanic··on CO2 batteries that store grid energy take off globally
It's unlikely that the thing will burst and disperse all CO2 immediately. It's just slightly higher pressure than the outside (that's the whole principle). So you have a slow leak of CO2 to the outside. You don't have to run that fast (or run at all).

The way I understood the quote, the safety distance is when they have to do an emergency deflate (e.g. due to wind). The way they calculate the 70 m is probably based on the volume and how large of a area you cover until the height is low enough that you can still breath.

Generally, because it's leaking to the outside, where there is going to be wind it will not stick around for long time I suspect.

cycomanic··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
But the quote "Here's how not to get banned next time" is rather factitious. It's in fact "we will not even tell you why you got banned".

I don't know what you mean by "tipping off" laws mean, but certainly if you get given a penalty in law (e.g. you get judged in court), you will be told what you have done wrong, and shown proof of it.

cycomanic··on Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
So I assume you like your manager constantly checking on your jiras, how much code you have written and calling you in to meetings where you need to justify in detail what you have done over the last week?

If not, why not? Those checks are just there because you are expected to earn a profit for the company.

cycomanic··on Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
It's funny how so many posters seem to attribute it to just "free money, yeah".

There are plenty of complaints on HN how increased buerocratic burdens/tasks, in particular when they seem pointless or unrelated, leads to low job satisfaction, burn out and mental health issues. But somehow when it comes to the unemployed the same thing does not apply?

I certainly can relate that the more tasks pile up the more stressed I become (and being unemployed certainly can feel stressful). Adding some pointless administrative tasks that don't help with my actual goals can often be enough to push me over the edge so I just want to quit.

cycomanic··on Finland gave two groups identical payments – one saw better mental health
> I am also not sure how to extrapolate study results from Finnish people to people in other cultures.

Well the article points out similar (and sometimes even stronger) effects on mental health for experiments in Malawi and Germany. So seems that it does extrapolate.

cycomanic··on The most banned books in U.S. schools
Well I certainly don't want school boards to determine the curriculum.
cycomanic··on The most banned books in U.S. schools
Your quotes around the missing do a lot of work here. From the FAQ:

> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished. Diminished access is a form of censorship and has educational implications that extend beyond a title’s removal. Accessibility forms the core of PEN America’s definition of a school book ban and emphasizes the multiple ways book bans infringe on the rights of students, professional educators, and authors. It is important to recognize that books available in schools, whether in a school or classroom library, or as part of a curriculum, were selected by librarians and educators as part of the educational offerings to students. Book bans occur when those choices are overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers, or politicians, on the basis of a particular book’s content.

In particular it's when the decisions of the professionals are being overruled for political purposes.

It is particularly clear when reading the list, many of these books are children/young adults books which have won highest national and international awards, but somehow they are "age inappropriate"?

cycomanic··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
> I previously worked in fraud/risk at a major ecommerce platform. On my biggest day I closed 60,000 accounts. In one day. I knew other agents who'd done 10x that.

> The scale of this work is unfathomable to those who have only been on the consumer side of it.

> #1 is doable but would destroy our ability to combat fraud. "Here's how not to get banned next time" is not an email anyone in this space would consider sending.

Just imagine laws would work that way.

> #2 is simply impossible. Fraudsters consume every available resource you can put into the appeals process. This is their full time job, they can afford to call repeatedly, all day long, until they find an agent they can trick. Regular users won't benefit.

That argument doesn't pass the smell test. Apple makes more profits than the scammers whole revenue, so just from a resources standpoint Apple could starve them. You just need to make the process so it can't be easily automated (e.g. require going into an apple store with your ID)

> #3 is what small claims court is already for. We should make this easier, I agree.

So in #2 you say it would overwhelm the process and now your argument is that essentially the public should pay for the process?

If small claims courts can deal with the issues than why can't a trillion dollar company.

cycomanic··on Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem?
Apple made 100 billion profit last year. They can surely afford to make this. Just because it would cost them profit does not mean we shouldn't require it.
cycomanic··on 8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions
What sort of argument is that? Just because I need to eat (also let's be real the developers/owners behind this app are not struggling to get food on the table), does excuse me doing unethical/illegal things (and this behaviour is almost certainly illegal in the EU at least).
cycomanic··on Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres
Like the other poster said, this is a problem with default values not encoding the birthday into the personnummer.

I think it also is important to remember the purpose of specific numbers. For instance I would argue a PN without the birthday would be strictly worse. With the current system (I only know the Swedish one, but assume it's the same) I only have to remember a 4 digit (because the number is bdate + unique 4 digits). If we would instead use completely random numbers I would have to remember at least an 8 digit number (and likely to be future proof you'd want at least 9 digits). Sure that's fine for myself (although I suspect some people already struggle with it), but then I also have to remember the numbers for my 2 kids and my partner and things become quickly annoying. Especially, because one doesn't use the numbers often enough that it becomes easy, but still often enough that it becomes annoying to look up, especially when one doesn't always cary their phone with them.

cycomanic··on Do dyslexia fonts work? (2022)
> maybe it is just more comfortable to read, not necessarily faster?

The article says that participants in the studies preferred the traditional fonts over the dyslexia fonts. I would argue that this contradicts the thesis that they would be more comfortable to read. Moreover, the way I read the article, it wasn't just reading speed but accuracy that was tested as well.

> There are more and more cases where my personal experience seems to contradict with science. And I am not sure what to make of that.

I find that I often have to question my preconceptions when I encounter this issue. In other words, I have invested e.g. time, effort and thought into something which I thought works and it is difficult to not fall into a kind of sunken cost fallacy, i.e. my brain doesn't want me to believe it does not work, because I have invested effort into it.

cycomanic··on EFF launches Age Verification Hub
I somewhat understand your argument about how to prevent misuse, but I'd say one could do that by embedding the key in an ID card and someone will have to connect the ID card to the phone/computer (e.g. via NFC). So obviously you can pretend you lost your ID card and get a new one, but I would say that you can only do that so often until someone will get suspicious, just as if you would ask for a new passport every couple of months someone would start asking you some serious questions.

Regarding using the document to buy beer, that's already done, you need to provide ID. I also hope you being asked to provide ID for buying guns, but then again I'm not from the US, so I have quite a different opinion on gun ownership.

All that said though, we are currently watching some of the most significant civil rights abuses by authorities, all without any ID system and people are worried about age verification? If the government wants to abuse their power they don't need an ID system, they just look at your social media profile at the border.

cycomanic··on EFF launches Age Verification Hub
The first question is how would the insurance find out that you are doing lots of things requiring age verification? The only body that could tell them is the government, while a distrust in the government can be healthy, I think this is the least thing to worry about, the government typically knows already much more damaging things than how often you ask for age verification.

Moreover, that would only work if there are relatively few things that require age verification and it needs more than just being looked down upon, i.e. while alcohol buying might be interesting information for insurances, watching porn is likely less interesting. Even worse, if the insurance can't distinguish between porn and alcohol (which they can't by design even if the government would give them the information about how often you ask for age verification).

cycomanic··on Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content
So where are your definition of capitalism and fascism from? Because seems to me you just made up your own definitions. To me your definition of fascism resembles much more a difinition of general authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
cycomanic··on The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void
I suspect these sort of differences, which exist not only between Chinese and English, but also between different western cultures/languages (and I assume similarly eastern ones as well, although I'm not so familiar with them), is one of the reason why multi-lingual children typically test higher on empathy and adaptability. They learn through language the inherent different perspectives/thinking processes.
cycomanic··on Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content
> but it does not feature the particular structure and features that defines capitalism as a system rather than a feature of other systems;

What do you mean? The defining feature of capitalism is private/corporate ownership of the means of production which is a core part of fascism as well.

cycomanic··on Scientists create ultra fast memory using light
> > showing that fundamentally digital computing with optical photons will be immensely power hungry > > > they really are completely unrealistic > > Unrealistic only because they're power hungry? That sounds like a temporary problem, kind of like when we come up with a bunch of ML approaches we couldn't actually do in the 80s/90s because of the hardware resources required, but today work fine. > > Maybe even if the solution aren't useful today, they could be useful in the future? Or maybe with these results, there are more people being inspired to create solutions specifically about the power usage? >

No they are fundamentally power hungry because you essentially need a nonlinear response, i.e. photons need to interact with each other. However photons are bosons and really dislike interacting with each other.

Same thing about the size of the circuits they are determined by the wavelength of light, so fundamentally they are much larger than electronic circuits.

> "we don't need to resort to this sort of stuff" makes it sound like this is all so beneath you and not deserving of attention, but why are you then paying attention to it?

That's not what I said, in fact they deserve my attention because they need to be called out, as the article clearly does not highlight the limitations.

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