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kees99

1,024 karma · joined July 3, 2016

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kees99··on I'm Done with Ubuntu
..or zypper install, or emerge. For other tasks though, exact arguments might differ a bit:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman_Rosetta

kees99··on Introducing deep research
"Occasional nonsense" doesn't sound great, but would be tolerable.

Problem is - LLMs pull answers from their behind, just like a lazy student on the exam. "Halucinations" is the word people use to describe this.

Those are extremely hard to spot - unless you happen to know the right answer already, at which point - why ask? And those are everywhere.

One example - recently there was quite a discussion about llm being able to understand (and answer) base16 (aka "hex") encoding on the fly, so I went on to try base64, gzipped base64, zstd-compressed base64, etc...

To my surprise, LLM got most of those encoding/compressions right, decoded/uncompressed the question, and answered it flawlessly.

But with few encodings, LLM detected base64 correctly, got compression algorithm correctly, and then... instead of decompressing, made up a completely different payload, and proceeded to answer that. Without any hint of anything sinister going.

We really need LLMs to reliably calculate and express confidence. Otherwise they will remain mere toys.

kees99··on Google Pixel 4a's old firmware is gone, trapping users on buggy battery update
Problem with pretty much every modern battery-powered device is that battery is flogged to near death at every charge. From @marcan's mastodon post, Pixel 4a's battery is charged to 4.45V:

  qcom,max-voltage-uv = <0x43e6d0>;
This is completely insane, and it's a small miracle that this phone didn't follow Note7's fate.

As for charge limiting... limit at 80% is an okay workaround (certainly better than no limit at all!), but it's far from perfect. Namely, with this approach, charge controller chip doesn't know cut-off is coming, and will shove several amperes into the battery until last second, thus overshooting safe voltage level. This wears the battery (less so than with no limit, but still more than necessary).

Battery charging limiting should be done by voltage: this way, controller chip knows where to stop, so it makes soft taper-off at the end of charge cycle, by gradually nudging current down to stay within voltage envelope.

Charging profile could be observed from a rooted adb console:

  grep NOW <$(find /sys/devices/platform \
  | grep battery/uevent$ | head -1)
(depending on phone model and firmware, some tweaking might be required to find/grep to get the right battery status file)
kees99··on We got hit by an alarmingly well-prepared phish spammer
Plus-tag stripping sounds like a no-brainer for spammers to do, but I've never come across this behavior yet.

I always give out myname+tag@... to places that ask for email, and have an incoming message rule that puts bare myname@ straight into spam folder.

So far, the only messages to bare address were service updates from my email provider itself.

kees99··on Rsync vulnerabilities
> you are safe if your rsync is only via secure connections

Not quite. If server has "command=rsync ..." in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file, for some ssh key (to allow rsync access, but deny shell access), this vulnerability will allow attacker in possession of that ssh key to go around that restriction, and get shell nonetheless.

kees99··on Right to root access
You are 100% spot-on with the "local" thing here.

People living in "bad neighborhoods" have to spend more energy and money on locks, fences, security cameras, self-policing as to not go out alone after dark, etc.

Problem is, Internet (and international phone system, to a lesser degree) makes everything so much closer, that scammers from half-way around the globe are "local" for all intents as purposes. Thus, online, every neighborhood is a "bad neighborhood".

kees99··on Britannica Didn’t Just Survive. It’s an A.I. Company Now.
This is the way. Thank you.

I mean, audience of this site should be better-then-average fit for message of:

- Found a problem with crowd-sourced/open-source piece? Don't complain. Make a quality contribution where you can. Otherwise - see if there is a bug report already, maybe submit one if there is none. On wikipedia, that's via "Talk" section.

kees99··on Debian’s “secret” sauce
It's mostly down to what endianness was in use by stock firmware.

Switching it, is a fair amount of pain, as you can no longer run binaries from stock under your new mipsel FW.

kees99··on Show HN: X11 tool to share a screen area in any video meeting
Neat trick. Another, similar one, is possible with "xrandr --setmonitor". That doesn't require starting a separate X server & WM instance:

https://askubuntu.com/q/150066#998435

However, both Xephyr/Xnest and "xrandr --setmonitor" create separate non-overlapping screen(s), which means sharing part of a window (say, browser sans chrome [1]) can't be done here, but is possible with OP's tool.

[1] EDIT: "chrome", as in - parts of browser's window other than webpage itself: tabs, URL bar, bookmarks, etc...

kees99··on Why does FM sound better than AM?
> (...) use AM where you can hear both overlapping transmissions at once

Yes. Assuming signal strengths for both are comparable. Say, within 20 dB of each other.

> (possibly garbled if carrier wave was off)

Nah. If both stations have sufficient energy fall into receiver's bandwidth window (IF filter for analog receiver), no garbling. If one of stations has carrier sufficiently off to fall entirely outside IF, only other will be audible.

You are probably thinking about SSB, where two stations with carrier offset indeed produce weird sounding interference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation

kees99··on Pirates of the Caribbean hijacked America's metric system (2017)
Same in the Netherlands. Metric pound, "pond" = 500 g.

Rarely used, yet pretty much universally understood.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pond_(massa)

kees99··on Apple Adopts 6 of OWA's Browser Choice Architecture Recommendations
Strong agree. This whining behavior is out of control.

E.g., I don't have xdg on one of my systems, so "default browser" is not a meaningful concept there. Still, the only browser I have, keeps showing me the sad-face "Firefox is not your default" prompt.

kees99··on RP2350 PicoDVI Preview
> switch time is long and the monitor doesn't reliably wake up

In my personal experience, obtuse monitor's firmware is often to blame.

Using a switch with one extra input port, where all data pins are connected to ground (via series resistors), and switching to that port for a brief moment, before switching again to the real intended input, usually helps some.

kees99··on It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
Nexus 6 (late 2014), as well as rare Nexus 5X (2015), where owner enabled "OEM unlock" option.

Obscure Chinese brands made such android phones for few more years.

All Google Pixels (2016 and later), and virtually any android phone made after circa 2018 are safe from naive bootloader attack: user data is encrypted, plus you have to "OEM unlock" to even get the recovery to run.

kees99··on For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default
Also, for some software vendors, frequent/automatic upgrades are a great place to hide silent reconfiguration.

Mozilla has been repeatedly resetting "Always check if Firefox is your default browser" option to "yes" with upgrades. I don't see why "private-attribution submission enabled" wouldn't be reset in future in the same way.

kees99··on Preserving a floppy disk with a logic analyzer and a serial cable
Very cheap knock-offs have same CY7C68013 usb interface chip, but lack an FPGA that original Saleae has, so can't capture quite as fast.

Plenty fast enough for a floppy bit-stream, of course.

kees99··on Writing GUI applications on the Raspberry Pi without a desktop environment (2019)
No WM at all is less nice, but can work. A bit over a decade ago, we shipped a kiosk/appliance that software-wise only had kernel, X, and firefox. All starting directly from /etc/inittab, something like this:

  id:5:initdefault:
  x1:5:respawn:/etc/rc-x11
  ff:5:respawn:/etc/rc-firefox
...where /etc/rc-∗ are few lines of shell that set up environment variables, and end with "exec chroot --userspec=... / /bin/firefox ..." - this way X and firefox run under same PIDs that sysvinit knows about, so they get restarted after a crash.
kees99··on Fire at South Korea lithium battery plant kills at least 16 people
Primary, non-rechargeable lithium batteries typically contain metal lithium [0], and are actually more likely to catch fire when mishandled, compared to Li-ion stuff.

Specifically, most common Li-ion fires start when overcharged (especially with high current and in cold), and from short-circuits (e.g. when pierced). But only have a very small chance of spontaneously igniting from just disassembly alone [1]. Still non-zero chance, don't open them!

Primary/metal lithium batteries, on the other hand, are much more likely to burst into flames when opened. Notably, lithium-iron disulfide (AA/AAA "alkaline replacement") cells are notorious to do that just from air exposure, even if one is very careful to not short/pierce anything.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_metal_batteries

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI1eRy0uBI8

kees99··on Please don't mention AI again
Not GP, but I would imagine "another checker to scan the results" would be another NN classifier.

Thinking being that you'd compare outputs of the two, and under assumption of the results being statistically independent from each other and of similar quality, say 1% difference between the two in said comparison, would suggest ~ 0.5% error rate from "ground truth".

kees99··on Optical PCIe 7.0 connection hits 128 GT/s
Also, very sparse on technical details. Even basics are missing, like - what's optical signal like? CWDM? multiple polarizations? QAM? How many fibers?

I mean - one can build a 16-fiber, CWDM16 monstrosity that would transport an 8x 128GT/s PCIe using mere 8 Gbit/s per channel - all of which is technology that was "groundbreaking" circa 2005.

kees99··on BYD aims to replace Routemaster with 400-mile EV London bus
500kW charger has non-trivial size and cost.

Even a 60kW unit [0] looks to be pretty large and listed as "call us for price".

[0] https://www.heliox-energy.com/us-products/60-kw-dc-charger

kees99··on Apple Silicon MacBook batteries can't be replaced under warranty by third party
Shouldn't employer also pay for the the mandated equipment and upkeep thereof?
kees99··on Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu
Citation is sorely needed for both "transition" and "BSL XP be good for wine" claims above.

Specifically, supposed inevitability of BSL->OSI transition is dubious. If anything, there are examples of the opposite - terraform itself being prime one.

kees99··on Protecting your email address via SVG instead of JavaScript
Not only "protecting your email" is pointless like others have already pointed out, it's actively harmful.

There are a fair few sites, where most all content is perfectly readable without JS, except things like "1920x1080@60Hz" are displayed as literal "[email protected]" text.

kees99··on NetBSD 10: Proper old-school Unix, not like those lazy, decadent Linux types
> Intel Atom (...) NetBSD (and a number of other OSes) would (...) refuse to boot

Was it one of those cheap tablets/netbooks that shipped with fully-64-bit-capable CPU (Atom Z3735F) but with dreaded 32-bit-only UEFI firmware?

GRUB can boot NetBSD there, although it's a bit of a hassle to set up.

kees99··on IPv6 for the remotely interested
> brings complexity for network operators

> I just wish DNS would follow suit

Technically, this is super-easy. Just select an anycast IP that would always go user's ISP's DNS - just like any other anycast DNS front-end IPs (1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, et al.) go to a nearest PoP of CF/google/etc.

Just to reiterate - there is no reason why an anycast IP has to be held by the same entity globally. "Federated" anycast IP, where each user reaches their local ISP would work just as well. Then make it an internet standard. Once that standard gets implemented in end-devices, there no longer any need to negotiate DNS server IP, same one works across different ISPs, always going to the nearest one. Still complex, but all the complexity is now on ISP side.

Practically, this is overwhelmingly unlikely to happen. There is a significant momentum among internet users to actively distrust their ISP, and mechanisms to cloak DNS traffic from user's ISP (DoH, DoT, ...) are somewhat popular, based on that exact motivation, in part.

kees99··on 250M-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released
...and about that part:

> advocate for yoinking the v4 space that e.g. the DoD, Daimler, Ford or Apple doesn’t use

Isn't it a travesty that owning a sizeable chunk of limited-supply IP addresses doesn't cost much, but exact same number of (nearly-)unlimited-supply domains does cost dearly per-domain to own?

We don't hear horror stories how somebody is hoarding 16 millions .com domains, right? Too expensive to do so.

kees99··on 250M-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released
> problem where your services are sitting on 240.0.0.0/4, but some customers have routers that just drop the packets to that destination.

On the other hand, as an ISP, you can pull some of those addresses for your CGNAT's external address pool. Your customers' gear will never see those. Server side will, though. But then, troubleshooting cloud/server front-end to reliably let those through sounds like a more doable chore?

kees99··on AWS charge for using IPv4 expected to bring $1B/year and speed up IPv6 adoption
IMHO, best way to measure IPv6 adoption would be - what percentage of your website's visitors are able to reach your IPv6-only site.

That percentage should be well above 99% for a popular website operator to even consider going IPv6-only; needless to say, in most markets, this figure is way lower, with no clear path to improving.

kees99··on Nordic is getting involved in RISC-V
Not every...

Ikea, for example, ships tons of "smart lightbulbs" with silabs/EFR32.

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