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dirkt

750 karma · joined May 28, 2015

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dirkt··on Mutool – all purpose tool for dealing with PDF files
You can decompress the streams with mutool and edit the Postscript-like code in any editor, if you want. (That doesn't help a lot with editing text, of course...)
dirkt··on Be Aware of the Makefile Effect
Same with programming: You just copy some old code and modify it, if you have something lying around.

Same with frameworks (Angular, Spring Boot, ...). The tools even come with templates to generate new boilerplate for people who don't have existing ones somewhere.

dirkt··on VW Group Collects Vehicle Movement Data
Don't forget that other manufacturers collect the same data, they just didn't have a collection of blunders that allowed access. No malicious intent this time, but it clearly highlights that companies need to learn to put policies in place to make double sure PII is actually protected to the degree the law already requires. We also need laws that force companies to make opting out of this kind of data collection much easier, or to make it opt-in in the first place.
dirkt··on 38c3 Talk: Volkswagen, we know where you parked your car [German]
Usually all the CCC talks get subtitled, give the hard working teams a few days, there's many talks...

Completed videos are here: https://media.ccc.de/c/38c3

dirkt··on How WhatsApp for business changed the world
But Facebook collects your interactions, adds them to your (shadow) profile, and sells this marketing data to advertisers.
dirkt··on Demystifying Git Submodules
I have used them for OpenAPI specs shared between frontend and backend, and database schemas together with values for a test database in the pipeline.

Yes, you can also solve this with a monorepo...

dirkt··on Ask HN: What are your most regretted tech purchases?
I don't know where you live, but here you can get LEDs in all kinds of color temperatures and brightnesses.
dirkt··on The size of BYD's factory
Though you can see the same alignment as the factory in town further to the west, with newer streets.

I guess it makes sense to align the factory to this grid, and not to the older grid that followed the fields.

dirkt··on Framework laptops get modular RISC-V main board
Why not an ARM main board?
dirkt··on Show HN: TypeSchema – A JSON specification to describe data models
I still have not found any way to use autogenerated code for Java/Spring that can handle updates to an external OpenAPI spec.

Any pointers?

(Serious question).

dirkt··on Lake Michigan Stonehenge – What have researchers learned?
Somehow reminds me of the face on mars...
dirkt··on Germans decry influence of English as 'idiot's apostrophe' gets approval
Define "proper usage". You can call it anything you want, but if you call it "Evas Blummenladen", people will wonder why you spelled "Blumen" wrong. Now sometimes people do that in names as a play on words etc., but here it just doesn't make sense.

In the same way, people will wonder why you spelled "Eva's" in "Eva's Blumenladen" wrong, if you spell it that way.

Yes, if enough people start doing a wrong thing, it'll eventually become "right", and I guess in 100 year's we can put apostrophy's where'ever we wa'nt, but currently it still looks odd, and like something that is foreign to German, and imported from English. Because unlike in English, in German this apostrophy doesn't stand for an omitted letter in the genitive singular ending.

dirkt··on The Origins of the Bloody Mary (2014)
They give the address in the paragraph above: "5 Rue Danou", so yes, badly mangled phonetic French (first word is "cinq").
dirkt··on Bundeskartellamt imposes fine against Fritz brand products manufacturer AVM
I've been using Fritzboxes my entire life, I am on a Fritzbox right now, I never had frequent internet drops, with none of the Fritzboxes I had.
dirkt··on The Origins of Yiddish (2014)
> I don't think there's any controversy among Yiddish speakers that Yiddish is primarily Germanic.

Ah, we had one Yiddish speaker in r/germany who ragequit after it was pointed out to him that Yiddish basically just sounds like an Eastern-European dialect of German to native speakers, with a number of Hebrew words thrown in, and German native speakers usually can understand it after being exposed to it for some time (like for all dialects, you need to adjust your hearing).

> Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yiddish is just broken German offensive, however.

Well, it's definitely not "broken" German, it follows the same pattern as other German dialects with influences from other languages. Phonetic shift plus imported words.

> Or similarly, that Yiddish's non-German components are somehow less desirable than its German ones

German has quite a number of words of Hebrew origin [1], and nobody finds them offensive, or somehow not desirable.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Wörter_aus_dem...

dirkt··on The case for not sanitising fairy tales
> But Andersen's story was itself a sanitized version of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's “Undine”

Now I got curious. Wikipedia actually has a summary of each chapter of "Undine" [1], and it's COMPLETELY DIFFERENT both in style and plot from Andersen's version [2]. Basically the only similarity is that it is about a mermaid and a prince/knight, and the (potential) death of the prince/knight at the end. For it to be a "sanitized version", it should be MUCH closer.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undine_(Friedrich_de_la_Motte_...

[2] https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/andersen/maerchen/chap127....

dirkt··on Second Boeing whistleblower dies after raising concerns about 737 MAX
Yes. Confirmation bias, conspiracy-theory buy in, and idiots on the internet combine.
dirkt··on A skeptic's take on beaming power to Earth from space
Which sort of leads itself to military usage...

And Wikipedia is only talking about humans, not about electronics, which are much more sensitive to microwaves. Want to fry the enemy's electronics? Just focus that "civilian" microwave transmitter with a few GW power tightly on where you want it to be.

I am really surprised nobody talks about this whenver space-based power transmission is mentioned.

dirkt··on A mostly complete guide to React rendering behavior (2020)
Though the TTY system is clearly historical accident: Hacks piled on hacks on early Unix system to make actual teletypes work, then enshrined in POSIX and need for compatibilities sake.

C++ always seems to me pretty absurd just because C++ people don't seem to know better ways, and seem to think to much about squeezing out the least little bit of performance instead of aiming for simple abstractions that are performant enough. Also, the last 40 years of programming language development seems to be unknown to them, or at least doesn't influence their decisions, or if they pick up a new idea, it's implemented in the most possible awkward way (because, again, performance).

dirkt··on Take a look at Traefik, even if you don't use containers
> I decided to migrate to Traefik mainly because of the automatic let's encrypt integration.

You probably already know and maybe it didn't work for you, but there's quite a few Docker companion containers that automate let's encrypt certs for an nginx Docker container.

dirkt··on Funeral Food
German even has a (very old-fashioned) word for it: Leichenschmaus = the "banquet" you hold in honor of the deceased.
dirkt··on Flow Field Pathfinding
In the early days of the World Wide Web I wrote a static site generator using makefiles. Because there was nothing ready-made for that.

As "make" is intended to track changes and only update when dependencies have changed, it was very fast on the computers at that time (that we'd call slow now).

dirkt··on Why does Windows use backslash as path separator? (2019)
And I am not sure if their argument holds water. CP/M is clearly influenced by DEC usage [1], and various DEC OS and tools had slashes for tool options as a standard. Those then got carried over to CP/M (e.g. PIP), so that was the standard way to define options everyone CP/M used would have known.

It's really really hard to imagine the usage for slashes as arguments was not a carry over. And for anyone old enough to actually remember the transition from CP/M to MS-DOS (like me), it felt very natural.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M

dirkt··on What it's like to run Htmx in Production
I see this in my job, so at least for me it's not a claim, it's reality.

I can only recommend everyone to learn both FE and BE programming, to avoid this situation and the overhead.

dirkt··on German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.

You don't want Google to have data that is used to govern a federal German state.

dirkt··on LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
Oh, I didn't know there are VSCode plug-ins for Lilypond.

Which one are you using?

dirkt··on LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
* I don't know "what type of person uses this" in general, but I use it whenever I need to typeset music, which happens when I need to sing something with others. This includes be re-creating sheet music I have for better readability. I've never done any composing.

* It's not very similar to the source code. Basically you put in note names (c d e f ...) and durations (c4 e8 g8 c2). The rest is commands and markup to deal with the remaining very complex needs music typesetting has. Think Latex for music.

* I've never seen any git repos for that, but there are sites like CPDL and IMSLP that sometimes also include Lilypond source (or other sources).

* "How expressive is sheet music": I guess the easiest way to find out is to actually play an instrument or sing? It's a bit like asking "how expressive is the written word, like books and these things".

dirkt··on After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff
And developer B inherits code from developer A who typed "import x", developer B curses and spends a few days implementing Y, which developer A should have done in the first place if he had listend to SO (and provided the context why he wanted to do X, which of course he didn't when asking the question).
dirkt··on Welcome Lemmy.world
Please do, a more condensed variant like old.reddit.com would be really appreciated by me and probably many other people.

I have also started looking at it, by $REAL_JOB doesn't leave that much time.

dirkt··on Hurl, a terrible (but cute) idea for a language
Also called "continuation monad", which can be proven to be universal.

So, no surprise.

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