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deanc

5,002 karma · joined December 18, 2012

Full-stack software engineer

Email me at https://deanclatworthy.com

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deanc··on Gemini 4 Carbon
I’m not a big fan of their trend of talking about having released a model and then it being unavailable for paid AI plus subscribers for months.
deanc··on Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology
Another mindless comment grouping all Europeans into the same bucket. Europe has incredibly poor countries where developers are paid pitance (within Europe) and then developed countries paying high salaries (relative to the cost of living).

If you are a software engineer doing a relatively good job, it really doesn't matter which country you live in Europe - you will have a comfortable life. That said, of course if you take a Romanian sweng salary and try and live in Switzerland off that - you might live a little less comfortably. Similarly if you take a Swiss sweng salary and live in Romania - you will live extremely comfortably.

deanc··on Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier
There is nothing for that on iOS at least. And there are extensions for desktop that do stuff like this, but facebook has banned the author and some users of said extension. So make of that what you will...
deanc··on Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier
You live in a bubble. There is a huge amount of the population who are happy to get their brain rot (of all ages by the way, even pensioners) interspersed with ads. And it works. I recently saw my mother's facebook feed and it completely explains all the random shit she's bought off sketchy dropshipping sites lately. I tried to hide a bunch of it but the problem is as soon as she interacts with anything ever again it'll pop back up. She doesn't see the harm, doesn't want to stop and enjoys it.
deanc··on PHP 8.2.35
I think there's a lot to learn from the last twenty four hour's events. An absolute nuclear bomb of an exploit affecting every version of PHP back to 2012 (which nobody should be using of course, but I've worked in plenty of environments that are not up to date).

The thing that's annoyed me the most is the speculation and misinformation, filling in the gaps. Folks looked into the php-src and figured out one of the vulnerabilities, starting saying you should disable certain php settings and then core PHP developers on obscure mailing lists hinting this isn't enough.

Given how inexpensive it is for agents to scan popular OSS projects, disclosure needs to be more discrete and you cannot publish fixes to OSS before disclosure. People will be and are watching for this kind of thing already.

deanc··on An ad-free Android TV
That filmmakermode.com site is useless. It tells you to click the logos to find out how and takes you to the homepage of the brands. No information at all.
deanc··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
I think this rings true for many people, but the mind works in mysterious ways. There are folks who have nothing who are mentally well, and folks who have everything they ever wanted who are severely ill.
deanc··on Who Is Planting Backdoors in Ledger Crypto Wallets?
Depending on who is responsible for this, do you not think these people would have the ability to circumvent physical anti-tampering measures?
deanc··on Yandex bot traffic down 99% after data center attack
There's a lot of ancedotes "I've seen hatespeech drop" etc. This is measurable and there are people measuring this kind of thing. Let's wait for some real data.
deanc··on Talorys – A self-hosted personal AI agent on Cloudflare's free tier
This is the first I’m hearing about Cloudflare’s worker AI product. I see they provide 10,000 neurons a day on the free tier. What on earth is that?
deanc··on Zerobrew: A faster alternative to Homebrew
I don't agree with everything that Homebrew does, but the primary maintainers are visible, vocal and very opinionated. They have shown credibility and earnt my trust over the years given it is a crucial entry point to potential malware to my system.

Homebrew has continued to improve performance each major version. It's certainly a lot quicker nowadays than 5 years ago. I want reliability and safety in a package manager, speed is nice to have.

I applaud competition, but something like this starts with trust zero as far as I'm concerned. If there is one place that I want human input over LLM it's here. It needs to scream: smart humans are in control and overseeing the project. I don't see that here.

deanc··on Denmark data breach exposes 8.8M people's personal data
Kind of. It's advised to keep it secret but I'd be astonished if most people haven't had it leaked whether they realise it or not. Usually when identifying with e.g. a telecoms provider you would give your SSN and then some additional piece of meta-data such as address. Chances are everyone has a combination of SSN + address + phone leaked.
deanc··on Denmark data breach exposes 8.8M people's personal data
In Finland, this would be enough to get you through the security checks at pretty much any institute via phone, possibly excluding banks.
deanc··on Gemini 4 Argon
At this point I just think they are benchmaxxing and all talk and no action. I pay for AI plus because I wanted more storage, and when I go to gemini.google.com the most recent model I can use is 3.6-flash-lite. Two revisions have been released since then and they still can't put these things in the hands of customers. Why is it that other providers can get the models into the hands of customers right away? Google is meant to be the bigger tech company in the world.

I don't _want_ to use aistudio. The UX is confusing and I don't really know where it fits. Yet I can open codex or claude code apps or CLI and get real work done today with the latest models (even on the cheapest plans).

deanc··on Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
That's all well and good, but what happens if you drop off the face of the earth due to personal issues, health issues or worse and your domain expires?
deanc··on Tells of a Slop UI
I have seen folks here complaining about design trends long before AI slop. Maybe those folks who work in tech long for originality but the reality is designers in all aspects of life follow trends and originality is rare.

The reality is that users enjoy familiarity and find familiar interfaces and design trends comfortable and easier to use.

deanc··on MiMo-v2.6-Pro: Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
Feels a little pointless and disingenuous to present it this way (as default) unless you specifically filter it as such
deanc··on MiMo-v2.6-Pro: Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
Why is it labelled as #1/114 for artificial intelligence (at the top of the page) but if you scroll down and look at the graphs it's obviously not?
deanc··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
With all due respect, I don't have any of this nonsense with multiple products with different models with OpenAI. Anything I want to do, I just load up the ChatGPT app and I'm off to the races.
deanc··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
The app is up to date :)
deanc··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
What stage of the roll out are we where I don’t even see 3.7-flash which was released 2-3 weeks ago?
deanc··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
And yet again another failed launch from Google. I pay for their AI plus Google one package to get more cloud storage (have no interest in their AI bundle but you have to pay). and all I see in the Gemini app is 3.6-flash
deanc··on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity
Take a look around [1]. This is what every neighbourhood built looks like now.

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/bMYANpDU2AGDKVQN7

deanc··on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity
I'm not talking about historic buildings that are hundreds of years old. I live in Finland - we don't have many of these. Almost all apartments are built after the 60s outside the downtown and look like concrete boxes.
deanc··on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity
I think you're under-estimating how hot it gets inside well-insulated European homes. Your mileage may vary across European countries, but in the north where it gets cold in the winter our homes are built to trap heat. Opening windows won't get you very far as the temperature radiates through the windows and traps in the walls. Closing blinds will help, but not by much. It got over 40c in my office this summer. This is not livable conditions with a fan.
deanc··on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity
Agreed, new builds should be mandatory, but this is not easy to retrofit to existing apartment buildings in a country where labour and parts are notoriously expensive and have to be split with the residents.
deanc··on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity
Wasn't it the case in Germany it's only fixed installations? Meaning you could put the Midea split system there? This'd be a big no-no in Finland.
deanc··on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity
Of course not, there are numerous ways to make things look nicer.
deanc··on Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity
We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building. I've heard stories of residents being scalded for putting flowers on their balcony railings that face outwards as it ruins the "look". Given almost all apartment buildings are built consistently between every floor they could ensure consistent placement of condensers across all floors and it wouldn't even look that bad.

What makes the situation much worse here is we have insanely good insulation on the buildings. They trap heat for the cold winters, but the walls just maintain all the heat during the summers. A new approach is needed to make it livable here.

In my own apartment I am not able to create a cross-breeze through strategic window opening to try and bring in cooler air from outside, so I've resorted to opening a window on one side of the apartment and using a Vornado fan to push air out the window on another side of the apartment - creating a pressurized system.

deanc··on Pnpm 12.0
It doesn't matter. I work with people who aren't native speakers (in a country where English-education is a very high standard) but are mostly fluent in day to day conversation and meetings and they are not comfortable writing long-form texts - and it shows. Your expectations are unrealistic.
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