kirb

On displaying control characters, as of now, at least VSCode and Sublime Text do show them clearly. VSCode uses Unicode control pictures “␄” with a red background, while Sublime shows plain-text “<EOT>” in grey. You can also copy-paste - the real control character lands on your clipboard. Otherwise the rest of it stands, especially for a non-developer using Notepad or TextEdit.

This is trading off ongoing usability for one-time developer convenience. The example given in the post would also struggle with a large file as it loads the entire contents into memory, while having Python feed you lines allows it to read in chunks. Plenty of accurate, unit-tested CSV parsers exist in every language, it’s fine to use one and be done with it. Tabular data formats are a solved problem.

It’s hard to trust StatCounter, or anyone presenting web traffic stats at this point, after they showed a large spike in Windows 7 users for a few months, before it suddenly disappeared. (Even better: the blogs reporting on it with a made-up conclusion that users were revolting against Windows 11.) Bots want to act like humans, they run client-side JS, and they use residential proxies.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/02/no-windows-7-isnt-g...

`which claude && touch CLAUDE.md` is feature detection, not telemetry/analytics.

My eyes rolled almost out of my skull when this current stunt first got published, as I’m sure yours and a lot of other people’s did, but it did still happen as far as we know, and HN shouldn’t be editorialising a post title to say the opposite of the linked headline.

I’ve been using GitHub with TOTP since they added it in 2013, and other non-SMS methods since then. No phone number on my account.

These features are enabled by default, and in the case of iOS/macOS, desktop Chrome, probably also Copilot+ PCs, download 4 - 7 GB local models without properly explaining this to users. This doesn’t confirm any demand because if you just don’t use the features and don’t fill up your device, you may never notice.

I think this API is probably fine, but only if the user already has a model downloaded and wants these features. Naturally, case in point, Chrome quietly downloads Gemini Nano without any opt-out except through group policy. Things like this and Microsoft’s recent admission that they’ve overindexed on Copilot features in Windows make it increasingly difficult to trust that users actually want more than a few killer AI features, most of which are just ChatGPT.

Anecdotally, non-technical friends and family members know about ChatGPT and increasingly Gemini, get frustrated by Copilot, and don’t know Apple Intelligence exists.

https://superuser.com/questions/1930445/can-i-delete-the-chr...

The official statement from Apple (emailed to developers 10 days ago) is that macOS 27 is the “final release to support Rosetta”, so the title is a bit off.

They also say:

> Please note that Rosetta functionality for older, unmaintained gaming titles that rely on Intel-based frameworks will continue to be supported.

I interpret that to mean just enough of Rosetta and Intel frameworks will continue to be around, at least for macOS 28. Not specified which ones, or whether it stays any longer than that.

I’m pretty curious of what that will look like exactly, because there’s a fair amount of system frameworks/libraries needed to get to a bare minimum “hello world” AppKit app. Add on top any number of other frameworks that might be used by “older, unmaintained” games that Apple sees fit to keep supporting. Does this ensure OpenGL is kept on life support? Will they consider Wine important enough to support, perhaps even after they drop native Intel games?

To my knowledge, PayPal does not hold funds “forever”. They penalise the account holder by locking it away for 180 days. At that point, they can withdraw the balance to a bank account. I have multiple friends and clients who had this happen to them, but in all cases, they were exposed to higher risk by accepting payments through donation forms, or a marketplace where they sell directly to customers. (Despite what feels like an anecdotal high failure rate, somehow I’ve never had an issue running my own marketplace for the past decade.)

Legacy Update is my project, appreciate the thoughts. I’ll look at both. OpenCollective would be a great idea going forward for better transparency, as much as it requires more paperwork.

I do consolidate most of the expenses with my other projects, and ads cover most of the costs, but we’re planning some future projects such as hosting of custom Windows updates (opt-in) that will get expensive. So this will matter a lot more soon enough.

Thanks for spreading the word John, it means a lot. In my teen years I discovered PortableApps and would read through the forum threads, fascinated by the ways the community tricked apps into being portable. Another incredible resource, and I really respect that it’s stayed around so long.

It’s hard to teach people it’s worth their time to double-check these things of course, but I try to show a chain of trust:

1. Files come from Wayback Machine, which is trusted to serve legitimate snapshots

2. There is a sha1 and size listed for most files (though these come from Wayback)

3. Checking signature is easy enough from Explorer

Perhaps a page on “how to know this is legit” is a good idea to help educate about this. The goal of the project is to have legitimate downloads with good SEO, without having to cut through ads/spam/sketchy redirects (still has a few ads but intentionally non-obtrusive), so people aren’t blindly downloading from sketchy sites.

Our data for 2020 comes from this. (The remainder comes from other snapshots on Wayback Machine from various times)

> Then, how could native apps have much better performance on the same hardware, on both Android and iOS?

Web engines were honestly not great back then. WebKit was ok but JavaScriptCore was very slow, and of course that’s what iOS, Android, and BB10 were all running on that slow hardware. I have distinct (bad) memories that even “GPU-accelerated” CSS animations were barely 15fps, while native apps reliably got 60fps unless they really messed up. That’s on top of the infamous 300ms issue, where every tap took 300ms to fire off because it was waiting to see if you were trying to double-tap.

So I really think some of the blame is still shared with Apple, although it’s hard to say if that’s because of any malicious intent to prop up the App Store, or just because they were under pressure to build out the iOS platform that there wasn’t enough time to optimise. I suspect it was both.

Note: A Microsoft account isn’t required to download free apps from the Store, it works fully without extra prompts on a local account. (I like that it works this way, because it means you can install Firefox on a fresh install of Windows without even once opening Edge.)

No - one dev evangelist accidentally diverged from the marketing language for Windows 10, and now his words in a conference talk nobody previously cared about are being used as “proof” Microsoft lied. It’s like if Bob from accounting accidentally mentioned future plans on his LinkedIn years ago, then years later it’s being used as proof of the company going back on their words, despite them issuing a statement back then distancing from it. At some point, someone in a big company will say the wrong thing out loud and it needs to be carefully retracted without confirming or denying future plans.

Note: This appears to be a fork of Sam Henri Gold’s recent lid-angle sensor project, with the wav file changed. The readme does give credit, though the license has been changed from Apache to MIT for some reason.

Original: https://github.com/samhenrigold/LidAngleSensor

Demos (no farts, sorry): https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/115159295473019599 https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/115159854830332329

On the Pro tier, it’s a fixed monthly price with fixed quota per 5 hour window.

That said, every time I’ve tried it, it’s spent ages writing code that barely works, where it keeps writing over-engineered workarounds to obvious errors. Eventually, it gives up and decides broken is good enough, and returns to the prompt. So you still have a point…

That’s indeed what it is. It sends an automatic email to the List-Unsubscribe address, which if implemented correctly per the spec/regulations, authorises an immediate unsubscribe. More secure too because your email address is confirmed by SPF/DKIM. Nobody else with a copy of the email can unsubscribe you via List-Unsubscribe, like how just anyone can click the unsubscribe footer link if you forward it.

Don’t do this on a repository with 35+ years of history! That’s all valuable information you want to keep.

There are some strange passages in this, such as here where it suddenly decides to bring up the man page and how to exit man:

> There's an NFS app for macOS called NFS Manager from Germany's Marcel Bresink.

> On pre-15.5 Macs, see the Terminal AFP command mount_afp by opening Terminal and typing:

> man mount_afp and pressing Return on your keyboard. To exit the man system, press Control-Z or the q key.

> Several third-party NAS vendors, such as Synology and others, include AFP support in their products, but that's likely to come to an end soon too.

(Not clear why it would be coming to an end if they’re based on Linux!)

The cached headline I saw on Mastodon also called it “depreciated”.

Losing AFP sucks, because macOS’s SMB support continues to be abysmally slow, and really needs Apple’s undocumented proprietary SMB extensions to work halfway decent. Lately I’ve been accessing my SMB shares (from both Samba and Windows 11) through Cyberduck, because Finder is just unbearably slow and gets tripped up on file permissions for no reason. Deprecated or not, Netatalk will be more important than ever if users need a protocol that just works.

I was calling out the $1,000 specifically because that’s what the poster above me mentioned, and I remember that coming up very often back when his CEO stint happened. But, yes, not the only donation he’s made.

And I’m sure Mozilla is furiously looking around for new funding sources right now, governments could be of interest, but I expect them to be very careful about letting money influence the product. They know their independence is a key feature, and Google has so far allowed them to remain independent aside from default search engine choice.

The arc of him resigning from Mozilla and founding Brave definitely is context that needs to be mentioned. Personally, I feel $1,000 isn’t much to be donating, especially as he would have been decently wealthy going from Netscape pre-IPO and pre-AOL, through to co-founding Mozilla and staying on for 15 years. But Mozilla employees saw it differently, he was forced out, and that’s all part of the story of why Brave exists.

The ways they’ve acted a bit on the sketchy side are perfectly reasonable to call out, even if the writing here is a bit thin. Some are sloppy bugs that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen (.onion DNS leakage), but the rest were intentional decisions (replacing ads, soliciting donations in creators’ names, affiliate injection).

I feel it’s quite difficult to recommend anyone ever use a browser other than the main 4 (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari), because of things like this. All of those have had between 16 and 30 years of experience poured into them, full-time engineers working deep in the JS/layout/etc engines, and they have a fat budget to keep it all going. Startups like Brave, Browser Company, etc. don’t quite have such resources, are very reliant on the benevolence of Google/Mozilla/Apple, and need to keep watching their back to make sure they’re still profitable. Completely FOSS community projects like Ungoogled Chromium, Librewolf, and Zen don’t tend to have any security experience on the team, or any auditing going on, nor the funding to hire for any of those skills. It doesn’t feel responsible to tell someone to download one of these browsers and then go and log into their email, bank, government accounts, etc. on it. As much as we want projects like this to succeed and beat the Google/Apple-centric monoculture we’re stuck with.

I think Mozilla’s past decade would have been very different if he were able to stay as CEO. He’s clearly managed Brave as a startup well enough that it’s still in operation - now imagine what he could have done with those Google billions. There wouldn’t be any need for BAT or new tab sponsored links or injection of affiliate links (this all may change soon of course). But in the current situation, there are some legitimate concerns with how Brave operates or did so in the past, which aren’t likely to be fixed because they require it to work this way to be profitable.

It’s not creators’ fault the platform does this. YouTube just isn’t going away anytime soon, whether we like that or not, so it makes plenty of sense to spend a bit and give those creators a little bit more revenue from my view. It also feels maybe a bit more ethical that the revenue generated from my view comes from my pocket, rather than a scammer’s stolen funds. Or, well, just declaring for yourself that creators don’t need to be paid. (Yes, there are alternative ways of paying creators like Patreon that you should also consider using, but you also aren’t going to subscribe to the Patreon of every channel you watch.)

Any idea why there hasn’t been much if any enforcement from the FTC and co about the sketchy VPN review blogs? Seems like especially Lina Khan’s FTC would be interested to find a way, because giving the impression of an independent review and then adding a little “actually we’re extremely biased” disclaimer somewhere doesn’t seem like it should be acceptable. They might be offshore, but they do plenty of business with US creators.

The “USB-C invented by Apple” legend was even presented as fact on Wikipedia for a good while. Someone fixed it a few months ago. The source, of course, was Gruber and some “little birdies”. Ironically, the referenced 9to5mac article goes on to look at specs/press releases and conclude that there’s no evidence to his claim, in fact, the credit mostly goes to Intel and TI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1232511036&oldid=1... https://9to5mac.com/2015/03/14/apple-invent-usb-type-c/

Is that not the point of a README? This one seems very reasonable, and a few sponsor ads seems fine for a very actively maintained free passion project.

"Lemonade?" "Please!"

Indeed, I knew it was an important resource many people would need, but also that I had to make clear that getting fully patched up on XP or 7 is of course nowhere near the same as running a current OS with 10-20 more years of security innovation baked in. Although I do try to assume most of the target audience have this level of understanding about security already.

I feel YouTube is on the up and up in terms of high quality content, but the site is terrible at surfacing that content, because the ones that play the algorithm will always win the game of getting their content in front of more eyeballs. There are more channels than ever producing content that’s super interesting, informative, straight to the point, with at least bare minimum production values (i.e. they at least appear to be trying to do more than hit record on their phone/webcam, even if they have a long way to go on framing, lighting, editing, and all that). Some examples of channels that have risen into producing solid content in the tech space only very recently include Adrian’s Digital Basement, DankPods, and Dave’s Garage. I’m also fond of Tech Tangents and Cathode Ray Dude who aren’t as new but still have that smaller channel vibe.

The issue I feel is more to do with the algorithms that push content to you via homepage, related sidebar, and search, and the incentives this naturally pushes upon creators. Sometime recently Linus mentioned in a WAN Show that the goal of YouTube now seems to be entirely on having the algorithm figure out what you want to watch, rather than using straightforward signals such as the channel you’re currently watching, your subscriptions list, or the most relevant search results. You constantly hear creators complaining about videos being buried by the algorithm, which is why “click the bell” is part of everyone’s outros now. Loyalty from their follower base has become more important than ever so YouTube has all the positive signals to decide the video is worthy of being pushed outside of that small sphere - that is, it decides whether you’ll be allowed or denied growth on a video-by-video basis by pure luck you can’t control. This is an absolute shame, because creators who deserve views aren’t getting them even from their own subscribers, and those of us who really don’t give a care for the type of content that feeds the algorithm what it wants can’t escape it because the algorithm is begging us to please click on those videos. I noticed if you play any video in an incognito window, it will always display completely unrelated clickbait in every position of the related videos sidebar, probably because it hasn’t figured out your interests yet.

Plus, when VPNs and oddball mobile games see your success, they’re not going to snooze capitalising on it, and let’s be real, it’s hard for many people to say no to easy money for mindlessly reading a 30 second script. In some cases I’ve seen creators post about the business proposals they turn down and they can be absolute junk such as factories trying to move some random Amazon sludge. Luckily it seems these ones are being consistently turned down as just too far below any creator’s morals. I don’t enjoy it but I’ll sit through being introduced to Squarespace for the millionth time or a highly misleading VPN ad read that ticks me off if it means a creator of integrity can quit their job and work full-time on producing top quality content. But YouTube sure could help not make it so high-stakes to find where that sweet spot of quality vs profitability is, and should work out why so many SEO spam videos keep making it past the filters.

Just as a sidenote on the Reddit point, you can force old Reddit from your settings after you log in. That setting seems to stick even if you log out/your session times out, and you can go back to new Reddit with new.reddit.com.

Not caring at time of purchase doesn’t mean they don’t grumble and curse the brand later on after an experience where the phone breaks and the options are limited to a costly manufacturer repair. I consider myself an iPhone person, my current phone is an iPhone 12 Pro Max so I paid a pretty penny to Apple for it, it’s also insured, but it still doesn’t mean I won’t condemn Apple for making dubious decisions that hurt repair options. Not all that different from getting your car repaired at a mechanic rather than the dealer.