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fer

3,381 karma · joined September 2, 2013

Beware: these are just my Internet opinions

fer at fer dot ex why zee

https://www.fer.xyz

meet.hn/city/53.3493795,-6.2605593/Dublin

Socials: - github.com/fejiso

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submissionscomments
fer··on From VS Code to Helix
I really, really want to use Helix but I want to share bindings with VSCode/IntelliJ, and all the plugins that promise them have lots quirks, exceptions and various gaps. I know it's never gonna be 100%, but sometimes simple stuff is broken (x to select line in Helix, selected line+newline in the latest plugin I tried).
fer··on 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence
You can buy passes with a regular credit card
fer··on 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence
Off topic, thread moved to /bant/ >>420694069
fer··on Migrating from AWS to Hetzner
>I've found that it's almost impossible to even hire people who aren't terrified of the idea of self-hosting

Funny, I couldn't find a new job for a while because I had no cloud experience, finally and ironically I got hired at AWS. Every now and then these days I get headhunters unsure about my actual AWS experience because of my lack of certifications.

fer··on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
I'm stealing this!
fer··on NL Judge: Meta must respect user's choice of recommendation system
WhatsApp took off simply because SMS used to cost money, at least in the areas of Europe I'm familiar with.
fer··on Bcachefs removed from the mainline kernel
I have high hopes for bcachefs, but so far the benchmarks[0] are a quite disappointing. I understand it'll have overhead since it does many things, but I'd expect it to perform closer to btrfs or zfs, but it's consistently abysmal (which affects zfs at times, too).

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-617-filesystems

fer··on No reachable chess position with more than 218 moves
It'll take at most 218 comments on HN to figure out the meaning of the submission title
fer··on You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here
Soft real time systems often work like that. "Can't complete in time, best I can do is X".
fer··on FreeDroidWarn
I thought this applies to every app regardless the app store it comes from? Including side loading. The Play Store is already "sanitised".
fer··on The Synology End Game
>UnRAID

>It's also pretty damn stable

Not my experience. shfs crashes like crazy, tuning some things might alleviate it but it still fails. From the dozens of workarounds recommended, the only one that seems to help (for me and some others, not for everyone) is to disable NFS, which kinda defeats the point of a NAS for me.

Also while memtest is needed to rule out a memory issue, I found some tendency to disregard these issues as hardware related... if it's only shfs crashing and not the kernel nor any other app, chances are it's an shfs issue.

Currently I think they pin it on a libfuse bug.

https://forums.unraid.net/bug-reports/stable-releases/683-sh...

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/189449-shares-keep-disappear...

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/137653-share-disappeared-aga...

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/161179-unraid-unstable-freez...

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/151605-mnt-user-is-gone/

fer··on The Synology End Game
If you're fine losing the NVMe slots to NVMe-SATA, I recently found this: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1737570-thinknas-6x-hdd-nas...

Requires a bit of tinkering but the idea of plugging a 1L-format computer to turn it into a multi-disk NAS is quite attractive.

fer··on Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?
Not really, it wasn't the English Wikipedia and most references are in the original language. After my edit above, 2/3 LLMs know about it if you ask in the original language, which is pretty damning and gives an idea of the amount of mindless scraping they do.
fer··on Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?
A friend did an edit (though you could call it vandalism) of a Wikipedia 20 years back. He linked from several pages to a non-existing apportionment method, and created an article with a fairer version of d'Hondt for elections, quite ingenious and probably more fair than the popular alternatives in most cases. He named it after himself (he has an unusual last name and capitalised on that).

It didn't take long for the page to be dropped for being original research, and he didn't put it anywhere else.

To this day, you can still find pages and people referencing the method.

Edit: a quick check and Grok and ChatGPT have scraped it, Gemini hallucinates something unrelated.

fer··on Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?
Also related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
fer··on Git-Annex
While I understand why git-annex wouldn't work for you, what gaps did you find in boar?
fer··on EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google
> You can just query a wallet for that attribute, store it and replay it to some other website.

Uh, replay attacks are a solved problem in pretty much any industry standard challenge-response authentication, including OpenID. Am I missing something?

fer··on PSA: SQLite WAL checksums fail silently and may lose data
Exactly. I'd read it as

> I want to correct errors that the DB wizard who implemented SQLite chose not to

When there's a design decision in such a high profile project that you disagree with, it's either

1. You don't understand why it was done like this.

2. You can (and probably will) submit a change that would solve it.

If you find yourself in the situation of understanding, yet not doing anything about it, you're the Schrodinger's developer: you're right and wrong until you collapse the mouth function by putting money on it.

It's very rarely an easy to fix mistake.

fer··on “Dynamic programming” is not referring to “computer programming”
Sure, but the input might be bounded/finite, or the operations needed similarly constrained (e.g. trigonometry operations). Then you can offload lots of the computation to the compilation, sometimes all of it.
fer··on French villages have no more drinking water. The reason? PFAS pollution
Video in question, quality content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY
fer··on Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer
Since the last big movements of the front that's absolutely been the case, though you're right it doesn't apply if you account for the early captures. Once you remove them (Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdyansk), that's very easily verifiable.

Avdiivka had 30-32k pre-war population, estimated 40-47k Russian casualties. Bakhmut had 71k pre-war, Russia suffered an estimated 75k casualties from Wagner alone. Pokrovsk 61k pre-war, ongoing, 21k estimated casualties in January alone, and it's been ongoing for a year.

And beyond cities, the daily casualty rates at most obtain tiny settlements of a few dozen pre-war inhabitants. In the worst case you have the North Kharkiv front with 10s of thousands of casualties and basically a stalemate.

>It's hard to take the rest of your comments seriously.

"One thing is debatable so everything is debatable", I didn't expect this level on HN.

fer··on Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer
Russia has been a winner by basically no metric other than land and being a shit neighbor.

And even land cost them more in soldiers more than the pre-war population that lived there; it's literally a special grave digging operation. Soviet stockpiles of armor are basically depleted; now it's the buggy and moped meta. They've completely failed to support their supposed allies (i.e. Assad, Iran, Armenia). A good chunk of their strategic aviation fleet is gone. Car bombings of generals continue all over Russia and occupied territories, which brings the question, will it even stop if they "win"? They've finally been demoted from being an aircraft carrier operating nation. Their frozen assets are literally killing Russian soldiers. National wealth fund has ~20-30% of the prewar assets. Something similar in gold reserves. Interest rates are beyond effed, and recruits are largely joining for the money needed in the terrible economy caused by Putin himself. Who annexed 4 oblasts only to legally deploy the 18 year olds Putin promised not to deploy in Ukraine (as it's no longer Ukraine in Russian law). Non-military industrial output is on a steady decline. Price capping on bread. Fossil fuel output at minimums, and with low prices.

So what is Russia winning at?

fer··on Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface
I found it significantly less visual. As in, about as immersive, but somewhat lacking visual depth/detail to things. But everyone's different anyway.
fer··on Why LLMs Can't Write Q/Kdb+: Writing Code Right-to-Left
>Seems like it could easily be training data set size as well.

I'm convinced that's the case. On any major LLM I can carpet bomb Java/Python boilerplate without issue. For Rust, at least last time I checked, it comes up with non-existing traits, more frequent hallucinations and general struggle to use the context effectively. In agent mode it turns into a first fight with the compiler, often ending in credit destroying loops.

And don't get me started when using it for Nix...

So not surprised about something with orders of magnitude smaller public corpus.

fer··on I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models
> There's no way to stay ahead of the new language that people create.

Not even to match the current language. How would you censor LeBron James? It's French slang for jerking off[0].

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFrance/comments/1lpnoj6/is_lebro...

fer··on Poor Man's Back End-as-a-Service (BaaS), Similar to Firebase/Supabase/Pocketbase
> Just to be pedantic, SQLite is not really typed. I'd call them type-hints, like in Python

Someone already chimed in for SQLite, so worth mentioning that Python is hard typed, just dynamic. Everyone has seen TypeError; you'll get that even without hints. It becomes particularly obvious when using Cython, the dynamic part is gone and you have to type your stuff manually. Type hints are indeed hints, but for your IDE, or mypy, or you (for clarity).

It's a bit like saying C++ isn't typed because you can use "auto".

fer··on Show HN: Lstr – A modern, interactive tree command written in Rust
On interactive mode "ls tree" tools, an interesting one is broot.

https://github.com/Canop/broot

fer··on Maximizing Battery Storage Profits via High-Frequency Intraday Trading
Not all crypto mining requires dedicated hardware. I'm sure plenty of datacenters would jump. I know at least one instance where certain internal use autoscaling groups increase in size with lowering electricity prices (AI training, batch Hadoop jobs, and the like) to reap the benefits. With negative prices it'd just be bounded by the total capacity.
fer··on Start your own Internet Resiliency Club
Fun fact: At least one ham radio store ran out of walkie talkies during the power outage in Spain, also there was plenty of chatter on 446 when it's normally quite quiet.
fer··on Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination
>I really do just bail out whenever anyone uses the word slop.

I do when people try to pass slop around as organic content.

> Should run the same analysis against the word slop.

That sounds like tautology: the more slop, the more people tend to call slop slop.

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