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koalaman

531 karma · joined August 6, 2011

I'm a boilerplate engineer.
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koalaman··on eMudhra intermediate CA compromise
On the bright side, you can now mitm those devices.
koalaman··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
I use Gemini to make sense of things Claude says to me.
koalaman··on The dead economy theory
Is it a secret you can't share with us?

I see this transition as more like what would happen to livestock if they banned eating meat.

koalaman··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
This is a really horrible policy and I personally know a fair few people and families that are going to have their lives upended by this.

On the other hand I've always wondered if most of America's competitive advantage at driving tech innovation hasn't simply been through capturing the ROI of other more social minded countries investing in public education. It could be a massive long term benefit to Europe and Asia especially if they get to keep the talent they created, and more globally distributed innovation seems like it could have some benefits to global welfare.

koalaman··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
nice! Thanks! I had no idea USB4 and Thunderbolt were equivalent.
koalaman··on Framework Laptop 13 Pro
I'm struggling to understand if this supports usb-c based thunderbolt
koalaman··on A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
One of the best reasons to use Golang is that it removes a huge amount of software supply chain risk. It's the only big language that has an end-to-end integrity story where you can be sure that the dependencies you've imported are what you think they are.
koalaman··on Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw
"You can't be a functional member of society without them."

could you elaborate on why this is true? I can't think of any.

koalaman··on Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal
Iran and North Korea are evidence that with modern technology, and a ruthless enough autocracy, there is possibly no way out from under it. Technological progress only makes this problem worse. It should highlight the urgency for anybody who loves freedom, human rights, and democracy, to fight the swing towards authoritarianism in the 'free world', before there is no way back.
koalaman··on Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology
Another way of looking at it, is that when you put the responsibility of protecting a child from harmful content on the parent, you're deciding to only protect the children with the right kind of parent.
koalaman··on Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet
I'm not sure reCAPTCHA is really trying to detect automated vs human interaction with a browser. The primary use-case is to detect abusive use. The distinction here is if I automate my own browser to do things for me on sites using my personal account may not be a problem for site owners, while a spam operation or reselling operation which generates thousands of false accounts using automation is a big problem that they'd want to be able to block. I think reCAPTCHA is tailored towards the latter, and for it not to block the former might be more of a feature than a bug.
koalaman··on All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding
You could not watch Netflix on Linux until Chrome came along.

You also didn't have very good security from browser exploits until Chrome.

Chrome also made the web significantly faster to use.

Chrome was critical in unblocking the use of Linux on desktop.

koalaman··on Google is a monopoly – the fix isn't obvious
I don't see how a Google breakup can be operationalized. There's just no way the company's stack can support it without decades of work. It'd be like dismembering a person and expecting all the pieces to go off and thrive.
koalaman··on A chemist explains the chemistry behind decaf coffee
It could be the drink's affect on your stomach. I believe there's lots of evidence that anxiety can be caused by what's going on in the digestive track as much as what's happening in the brain.
koalaman··on Nearly 2M metric tons of wild fish used to feed Norwegian farmed salmon annually
They placed farms right in front of my house on a pristine part of bantry bay. Nobody wanted them and now the water on the shore is covered in orange scum. I don't dare swim anymore. They never should have been allowed because the flow of water is inadequate to clean the waste out into the open ocean, but they're very influential with the politicians. It's a disgrace.
koalaman··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
Yeah agreed to both of you. I had the same thought.
koalaman··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
I recently left a long career in FANG to roll the dice on an early startup. I was pretty surprised by the uneven terms between founders and early employees. From what I could tell the early employees takes more risk than the founders because they don't get that magic token dollar turning into their share of the founding equity event and have to pay the fictional valuation of the seed to convert their options. Depending on how hot your startup is that can be a lot of money.

Anyway that ended in tears, but I got what I was looking for from it. A look under the covers of the hot VC backed startup roller coaster. I may be getting old and cynical, but it looked considerably more exploitative than what I saw at Google. Obviously depends on the character of the founders and leaders, but the structure seems to be setup for toxicity.

koalaman··on Google releases smart watch for kids
I really just want a dumb kids watch with very long battery life that is trackable using the Apple and Google find my device network.
koalaman··on The push to ban ransom payments is gaining momentum
Does anybody wonder if these attacks aren't performing a public good in the long run by hardening our tech infrastructure in the West? It seems like hostilities with Russia, China, et al are likely to just get worse over time, and the long term high threat environment that these gangs have created for Western companies and utilities could give them a comparative advantage over time. That is assuming the same attacks aren't happening in China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc.
koalaman··on Book people think they know why 9-year-olds stop reading for fun
My daughter stopped reading when her school forced an ipad on us with no way for us to administer our own screen time controls. Now I never know if she's doing homework or trapped down some YouTube shorts rabbit hole.
koalaman··on New 13- and 15‑inch MacBook Air with M3 chip
The hardware is so great but mac os is so far from my liking. It's such a shame that the OS options are so limited on these machines. (I'm aware of asahi)
koalaman··on Greedflation: Corporate profiteering 'significantly' boosted global prices,study
Bingo.
koalaman··on The FTC sues to break up Amazon over an economy-wide “hidden tax”
This has been pretty obvious for a while. Whenever I do product searches on Amazon the prime eligible results are more expensive by exactly the shipping costs of the non prime vendors.

The only reason I keep it is for the video service which I'm guessing is the same for a lot of people.

koalaman··on Is consciousness more like chess or the weather?
Sorry I didn't know about /s. I don't judge one way or another. Subject hallucinating the material world, or object hallucinating a subjective experience. I love you all.
koalaman··on Is consciousness more like chess or the weather?
Bahaha! I always suspected hackernews was all bots and this comment thread confirms it. Just because you don't have a subjective experience doesn't mean us real humans don't! my chatgpt powered pal!
koalaman··on Setting up my new laptop: Nix style
It's possible there was something wrong with my flake config as it was a cargo culted hack job. I tried updating using unstable and it made no difference. I looked at nixpkgs head for chromium and I didn't see any update PRs landed or incoming. I asked on the community chat and whoever was the knowledgeable person answering questions at the time did confirm that it looked out of date.

I'm sure I could have found a way if I persevered and ramped up properly. I just don't have that kind of time. Maybe after I retire I can pick up where I left off. I do suspect there's a big opportunity to build a shallower ramp onto nixos.

koalaman··on Setting up my new laptop: Nix style
I really like nixos. I didn't get fluent with it, but I was learning and declarative environments is just so incredibly satisfying. I never had to do anything twice. I had to reinstall to change my HD layout and immediately I was back to the environment I had before. So happy. The language doesn't seem that bad to me either. Ultimately the biggest problem was package management. You'll eventually hit a dependency you need for work but doesn't exist or isn't kept up to date. Doing the work myself if just not something I have time for. I left the platform when I had to look at the Google Chrome update warning for two weeks without any updates. I get that these are all volunteers and I'm not mad. Until you have the marketshare that package owners are going to start ensuring your platform gets updates promptly you have no choice but provide best community effort. I just can't live in that kind of platform. For folks with motivation and lots of spare time to fix that problem with elbow grease, nixos is the best platform out there. I can't afford to wait on security updates for weeks to my browser and I don't have the time to maintain my own packages for common things I need fresh.
koalaman··on Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?
After having spent a fair amount of time using various different tools to attempt to control their screen time, my conclusion is that it was a mistake to have any screens in the house in the first place.

A library of great books, good games, craft and art materials, and a collection of musical instruments would have been the best thing for my kids I'm thinking. Screens just make them addicted and miserable.

koalaman··on Study: Alcohol is never good for people under 40
Perhaps a study of the health of societies that drink vs those that don't would be in order.
koalaman··on Sigstore - A new standard for signing, verifying and protecting software
I only started digging into this space last week, but I think cosign, rekor, and fulcio are not related projects but rather critical components of sigstore. Cosign is the cli for signing and verifying artifacts, Rekor is the transparency log, and Fulcio is the certificate authority.
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