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heybrendan

241 karma · joined April 3, 2016

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heybrendan··on Show HN: Network Monitor – a GUI to spot anomalous connections on your Linux
I see that you're parsing `ss` output in 'src/services/network.rs' (L22-L31) [1]. I find this to be a rather shaky foundation as any future drift or deviation in the `ss` utility's output could potentially yield unforeseen consequences.

I'm vaguely aware that there are crates available in the Rust ecosystem for interrogating and manipulating sockets much more directly as well as high level abstractions for all things netlink (read: AF_NETLINK). Is wielding Rust's socket/netlink libraries unsuitable in some way, or was it merely deemed out of the design scope?

Very cool project, please keep going!

[1] https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor/blob/master/src/se...

heybrendan··on Bash Strict Mode (2014)
From 2014 [1].

This seems to be posted once per year (at least); however, hardly a complaint as the discussion tends to be high quality.

My personal mantra is if it's over 10~20 lines, I should arguably be using another language, like Python (and perhaps correspondingly, subprocess [2], if I'm in a hurry).

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140523002853/http://redsymbol....

[2] https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html

heybrendan··on AI slop security reports submitted to curl
I worked my way through about half the examples. What appalling behavior by several of the "submitters".

This comment [1] by icing (curl staff) sums up the risk:

> "This report and your other one seem like an attack on our resources to handle security issues."

Maintainers of widely deployed, popular software, including those whom have openly made a commitment to engineering excellence [2] and responsiveness [like the curl project AFAICT], can not afford to /not/ treat each submission with some level of preliminary attention and seriousness.

Submitting low quality, bogus reports generated by a hallucinating LLM, and then doubling down by being deliberately opaque and obtuse during the investigation and discussion, is disgraceful.

[1] https://hackerone.com/reports/3125832#activity-34389935

[2] https://curl.se/docs/bugs.html (Heading: "Who fixes the problems")

heybrendan··on Fossify – A suite of open-source, ad-free apps
How some of the developer community responded (in late 2023) when SMT was bought by ZipoApps--Fossify was a fork that emerged:

- https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...

heybrendan··on The first year of free-threaded Python
I am a Python user, but far from an expert. Occasionally, I've used 'concurrent.futures' to kick off running some very simple functions, at the same time.

How are 'concurrent.futures' users impacted? What will I need to change moving forward?

heybrendan··on Nation-scale Matrix deployments will fail using the community version of Synapse
Arathorn, should this message reach you, I want to voice my support of you and your team.

Notwithstanding the naysayers that surface with peculiar predictability any time Matrix is discussed here, know there are people like me that are happy Synapse users (and operators, nearly 5 years now!) that are in your corner, rooting for you [and Matrix]. Keep fighting the good fight.

heybrendan··on Hyprland 0.44
I had to go to the project's GitHub repo for a semblance of a description. For the uninitiated:

> Hyprland is an independent, highly customizable, dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that doesn't sacrifice on its looks. It provides the latest Wayland features, is highly customizable, has all the eyecandy, the most powerful plugins, easy IPC, much more QoL stuff than other compositors and more...

heybrendan··on Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Leaked Stanford Talk
Thanks for this guidance. In times like these, I find sunlight is always the best disinfectant.

The yt-dlp application functions better alongside ffmpeg, so I recommend installing that too. If on Linux, whatever is available via one's package manager /should/ do the trick.

Note, the project does make mention there are issues [1] with "standard ffmpeg", and is therefore minting custom builds [2][3] of ffmpeg, with additional patches applied.

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#dependencies

[2] https://github.com/yt-dlp/FFmpeg-Builds#ffmpeg-static-auto-b...

[3] https://github.com/yt-dlp/FFmpeg-Builds#patches-applied

heybrendan··on GameStop stock influencer Roaring Kitty may lose access to E-Trade, report says
Things are indeed heating up when a saga that's been unfolding for over four years begins to attract attention on HN.

A user or two have characterized Gill's activity as a pump-and-dump. From the article:

> A common form of this fraud is a pump-and-dump scheme, where fraudsters "make false and misleading statements to create a buying frenzy, and then sell shares at the pumped-up price."

Gill took a significant position in Gamestop beginning in June 2019 [1], and has been steadily increasing his position over the years (AFAICT without selling).

How is the belief in the long-term recovery and turn around of what was then, a dysfunctional (and unprofitable) American retailer, anything but rather prescient and patriotic?

Even if we were to concede that Gill is now in a position of influence, the suggestion that enforcement agencies should suddenly jump in and that litigation should /begin/ with him, rather than TV personalities and elected officials, strikes me as laughable.

Notwithstanding the ethical and security implications of a brokerage publicly broadcasting that a customer has an account on their platform (I would be livid if this happened to me), if E-Trade were to close Gill's account, would that not be a concrete admission that his position has them vulnerable, thereby strengthening and supporting the underlying thesis?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Gill#Position_on_GameSto...

heybrendan··on 'Dumb Money' Loses $13.1B in Latest GameStop Stock Mania
Good question. What that quote from the recent filing is describing is the result of investors using the "Direct Registration System" (DRS), which is a system for book-entry ownership [1][2].

Given the example of risk HN user /deified/ shared regarding suspicions of brokers clandestinely distributing IOUs without investor knowledge where they should, in fact, be purchasing real shares, DRS offers the ability to move shares from one's broker to the company's transfer agent.

In effect, what DRS seemingly provides is a far more robust chain of trust and custody, as well as a more concrete level of assurance that shares in one's account are, in fact, real (and not IOUs).

In this case, the 10-K filing provides direct evidence that investors are consistently moving their Gamestop shares out of their respective brokers, to Gamestop's transfer agent, a company called Computershare (or purchasing shares directly via Computershare).

A conclusion one could possibly draw from this is that hundreds of thousands of Gamestop investors have collectively agreed that they can no longer trust their brokers, they are fed up with the true reality [and limitations] of "beneficial ownership", and are instead registering their Gamestop shares with the transfer agent (Computershare). All to the tune now of 25% of the total outstanding shares. As far as I'm aware, behavior of this magnitude has never before occurred.

Should that percentage continue to climb, it will be interesting to see what effect (if any) it will have on Gamestop's share price, assuming true supply and demand and real price discovery is still a fundamental part of how our markets function.

Ian released a video [3] this past December 2023, related to this topic.

[1] https://www.computershare.com/ca/en/insync/summer-2016/about...

[2] https://content-assets.computershare.com/eh96rkuu9740/630fe9...

[3] https://x.com/Cancelcloco/status/1740515711775346762

heybrendan··on 'Dumb Money' Loses $13.1B in Latest GameStop Stock Mania
Quite interesting indeed. From Gamestop's recent Form 10-K (Q4 2023) SEC filing:

> "As of March 20, 2024 [...] approximately 75.3 million shares of our Class A common stock were held by registered holders with our transfer agent (or approximately 25% of our outstanding shares)."

I've never seen anything like this. It seems absolutely unprecedented.

Recently Ian Carroll posted an overview [2] on X where he attempts to untangle the mess of the chaos surrounding Gamestop and its stock. I'm not going to pretend to understand the (dys?)function of our financial markets or everything that he shared, but my eyes are peeled.

[1] https://news.gamestop.com/node/20376/html

[2] https://x.com/Cancelcloco/status/1790524969623175629

heybrendan··on Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative
This is an overreaction, almost to the point of absurdity.

Risks inherent to pipe installers are well understood by many. Using your logic, we should abandon Homebrew [1] (>38k stars on GitHub), PiHole [2] (>46k stars on GitHub), Chef [3], RVM [4], and countless other open source projects that use one-step automated installers (by piping to bash).

A more reasonable response would be to coordinate with the developers to update the docs to provide alternative installation methods (or better detail risks), rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[1] https://brew.sh/

[2] https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole

[3] https://docs.chef.io/chef_install_script/#run-the-install-sc...

[4] https://rvm.io/rvm/install

heybrendan··on I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)
While I appreciate you've disclosed your affiliations in your profile, can you claim complete objectivity on this topic?

Would your stake in VMware and AWS not be {threatened,weakened}, perhaps severely, should Google succeed in Cloud?

heybrendan··on Linux network performance parameters
You seem quite knowledgeable in this domain. Have you authored any blog posts to expand on this topic? I would welcome the chance to learn more from you.
heybrendan··on Duck DNS
+1 Would very much welcome you authoring something on this topic.
heybrendan··on Graphite: Open-source raster and vector 2D graphics editor
Impressive project, although not what I thought of when I saw the name [1][2].

[1] https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html

[2] https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/who-is-using.html

heybrendan··on Daniel Ellsberg has died
I'd like to learn more. Sources I can refer to?
heybrendan··on The Original AI Doomer: Dr. Norbert Wiener
I first learned of Wiener's work from Jaron Lanier's [1] Ted Talk years ago, entitled "How we need to remake the internet" [2]:

> And I suppose I could mention from one of the very earliest computer scientists, whose name was Norbert Wiener, and he wrote a book back in the '50s [...] called "The Human Use of Human Beings."

> And in the book, he described the potential to create a computer system that would be gathering data from people and providing feedback to those people in real time in order to put them kind of partially, statistically, in a Skinner box, in a behaviorist system, and he has this amazing line where he says one could imagine as a thought experiment, and I'm paraphrasing, this isn't a quote, a global computer system where everybody has devices on them all the time, and the devices are giving them feedback based on what they did, and the whole population is subject to a degree of behavior modification.

> Such a society would be insane, could not survive, could not face its problems. And then he says, but this is only a thought experiment, and such a future is "technologically infeasible". And yet, of course, it's what we have created, and it's what we must undo if we are to survive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ-PUXPVlos

heybrendan··on Tape Storage Trundles On, Increases Yearly Volume to 128 Exabytes
> Commence station security log, Stardate 47282.5 - At the request of Commander Sisko, I will hereafter be recording a daily log of law enforcement affairs. The reason for this exercise is beyond my comprehension, except perhaps that Humans have a compulsion to keep records and lists and files. So many in fact, that they have to invent new ways to store them microscopically. Otherwise their records would overrun all known civilization. My own very adequate memory not being good enough for Starfleet, I am pleased to put my voice to this official record of this day. Everything's under control. End log.

-Odo

Rest in peace René Auberjonois.

heybrendan··on Convos: A Persistent Self-Hosted Web Client for IRC
Note: Published at December 18, 2020
heybrendan··on Redditor took out $76,000 loans to trade meme stocks thanks to Wall Street Bets
You may be underestimating what r/SuperStonk has achieved thus far.

Direct Registration System (DRS) [1][2], a system for book-entry ownership, has been successfully popularized by r/SuperStonk, over the last few years.

From Gamestop's recent SEC filing, 10-K [3]:

> Our Class A Common Stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) under the symbol “GME”. As of March 22, 2023, there were 197,058 record holders of our Class A Common Stock. Excluding the approximately 228.7 million shares of our Class A Common Stock held by Cede & Co on behalf of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (or approximately 75% of our outstanding shares), approximately 76.0 million shares of our Class A Common Stock were held by record holders as of March 22, 2023 (or approximately 25% of our outstanding shares).

Let's let that sink in: visitors of r/SuperStonk collectively own 25% of GME (and registered via DRS), throwing down >$1.5B USD.

How can one not appreciate the magnitude of this accomplishment? It's absolutely unprecedented.

When we look back on this, I'd wager that education will be r/SuperStonk's crowning achievement. Hundreds of thousands of people have mobilized thus far, and are taking an active interest in financial literacy, learning about market structure, reading quarterly statements, joining earnings calls, and submitting commentary to regulators in both the United States and Europe.

When does a group of investors stop being a "cult" and effectively become a full-fledged movement?

[1] https://www.computershare.com/ca/en/insync/summer-2016/about...

[2] https://content-assets.computershare.com/eh96rkuu9740/630fe9...

[3] https://news.gamestop.com/node/19991/html

heybrendan··on Pursuing status will never bring true happiness
Thanks, updated the link.
heybrendan··on Pursuing status will never bring true happiness
https://archive.ph/qIted
heybrendan··on Little Snitch Mini
Thanks for sharing!

I suspect many of you are curious about CLI-only support (I was). I spotted this old, closed issue [1].

[1] https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/issues/511

heybrendan··on MySQL for Developers
Hi @aarondf, this is bloody phenomenal! Fantastic work.

Can we eventually expect something similar for PostgreSQL [for Developers]?

And does this course include ORM's, like SQLAlchemy?

heybrendan··on Amazon Corretto 20 is now generally available
> Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. Corretto is distributed by Amazon under an open source license.
heybrendan··on UBS agrees to buy Credit Suisse
Impressive. You managed to not answer any of my questions.

Reddit can and does create echo chambers. But that doesn't mean I wasn't willing to fully acknowledge and concede that this Reddit community was /right/ about this.

Dial back your sensitivity. We're on the same side.

heybrendan··on UBS agrees to buy Credit Suisse
So what happens to the Archegos bags CS was holding? Why would UBS willingly take on such deep exposure?

We're in a weird timeline when the investors on /r/SuperStonk begin accurately predicting the future.

heybrendan··on I spent a week without IPv4 to understand IPv6 transition mechanisms
This is super interesting. If you don't mind, can you expand on:

- What was involved with picking up the ASN and the IPv6 block of addresses (process, bureaucracy, initial and ongoing costs)?

- What networking plumbing is involved in being able to have homelab resources advertised to the internet?

I'm not an expert in this area, but I'd very much welcome the hard work that comes with reproducing such a setup. Thanks.

heybrendan··on Matrix 2.0: How we’re making Matrix go voom
@Arathorn, proud operator of Synapse (for 2+ years) chiming in! Another superb conference talk and thank you for all you do.

We're running an ancient build. Is your Synapse installation walk-through [1] still the latest/greatest guidance in getting started, for those looking to refresh their environment?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDddKmdLEdg

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