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krick

5,715 karma · joined December 15, 2013

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krick··on Android Developer Verification
So, anyway, how do we make sure that our phones don't turn into a pumpkin on a set date? I suppose it's all shit long term, but at the very least I don't want to be forced to look for a solution before I need a new phone. So, what do you do? Can you just disable android updates somehow and it will solve the issue? Or it is already a ticking bomb that will be activated on the set date no matter what?
krick··on ISBN Visualization
I remember the story of it being made, and I seem to even remember there was some very generous bounty attached, but I never got the point of it. I mean, honestly, ISBN is a pretty problematic thing on its own, especially today, when self-publishing is common, and especially for a web-library that is collecting scans of everything somewhat notable that ever was out there. But even accepting it as a main entity, because that's what we've got right now, what does this visualization achieve? What does it show? You cannot really find a book using it, I mean, any more specifically than "some random book probably in a given language". I was kinda surprised when this visualization was declared a winner of that particular bounty/contest.
krick··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
It is not for you to decide what one should or shouldn't do. Plenty of people want to gamble, and don't give a fuck of what you think they should or shouldn't do. And they are right: it's none of your fucking business.

Kalshi and PolyMarket are doing something absolutely wonderful for those people (i.e. the only people who should care about these "prediction markets" at all): they actually make betting fair, which was impossible before. It is not impossible now, because in fact there are much better decentralized markets than these (basically all you need to make a completely decentralized betting platform are Ethereum contracts), but they are handier to use and hence more popular. But it was impossible with traditional gambling, where a bookmaker can set any odds and reject any bets.

krick··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
All this fearmongering about decision markets lately is really annoying. If you don't like gambling — just don't gamble and shut the fuck up. It's not for you to decide if gambling is good or bad for me. If I am stupid enough to bet anything on an outcome that clearly depends on a person who could, potentially, be betting as well — it's my problem, not yours.
krick··on Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
And if you want to ignore what you want rg to ignore, not what you want git to ignore? Can you do that?
krick··on Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
It's good if they can share syntax. You use the same English words to ask Alice and Bob questions, but when you say "So, tell me, Alice…" you don't want Bob to answer you instead. Using another tool's config by default, making it difficult/impossible to use the dedicated config is the most annoying thing I can imagine. If that's what rg does, I guess that must be the reason I couldn't switch.
krick··on Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
Totally agree with the author of rg here. Config names should be unambiguous. Anyway, must have been something else, then. As I've said, I cannot remember what was the specific problem, only that it wasn't quite compatible with the workflow I was used to, and now it'd take another full-in attempt to switch to figure out what was so annoying to me back then.
krick··on Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)
I don't remember why I didn't switch from ag, but I remember it was a conscious decision. I think it had something to do with configuration, rg using implicit '.ignore' file (a super-generic name instead of a proper tool-specific config) or even .gitignore, or something else very much unwarranted, that made it annoying to use. Cannot remember, really, only remember that I spent too much time trying to make it behave and decided it isn't worth it. Anyway, faster is nice, but somehow I don't ever feel that ag is too slow for anything. The switch from the previous one (what was it? ack?) felt like a drastic improvement, but ag vs. rg wasn't much difference to me in practice.
krick··on France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app
You don't need to confirm anything. You just configure it once to upload your runs that you record on a Garmin watch or whatever, and forget. It's not impossible to use Garmin watch without any online accounts and uploading your data anywhere, but as it is with all wearables today, they intentionally make your life harder for it. Not to mention that most people who run regularly use Strava or something equivalent to track your workouts anyway, so one really wouldn't think much about it, unless explicitly forced by officers to disconnect everything. And, honestly, given how easy it is to find an aircraft carrier (for god's sake, even a civilian can do that!), I doubt that it even worth it. Le Monde is just making cheap scandal out of nothing. As always.
krick··on Chuck Norris dies at age 86
Honestly, he kinda is a meme. I wouldn't recommend any of the movies. It's not like you've missed some grand piece of cinema that you have to be ashamed of and must fix it ASAP. It's the sheer volume of mediocre movies and the very distinct role of a guy who always kicks bad guy's asses using karate in all these movies. I mean, the fact that you've never seen something like Walker, Texas Ranger probably just means that you are under 30 years old, but by no means it's good TV series that everyone must see.
krick··on ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
I am of the same opinion, and ultimately ArXiv becoming a journal that can prevent one from publishing a paper — no matter how junk it is — would pretty much kill its purpose. But I suppose that now when flooding the interned with LLM-generated garbage is almost endorsed by some satanic people, it is pretty much a security issue to have some sort of filter on uploads.

Now, honestly, I have no idea why would one spend resources on uploading terabytes of LLM garbage to arXiv, but they sure can. Even if some crazy person is publishing like 2 nonsense papers daily, it is no harm and, if anything, valid data for psychology research. But if somebody actually floods it with non-human-generated content, well, I suppose it isn't even that expensive to make ArXiv totally unusable (and perhaps even unfeasible to host). So there has to be some filtering. But only to prevent the abuse.

Otherwise, I indeed think that proper ranking, linking and user-driven moderation (again, not to prevent anybody from posting anything, but to label papers as more interesting for the specific community) is the only right way to go.

krick··on ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
It's not that hard to make a mirror or arXiv. Basically, anybody who can pay for hosting (which, I suppose, isn't very cheap now when the whole world uses it). It's a problem to make users switch, because academia seems to have this weird tradition of resisting all practices that, god forbid, might improve global research capabilities and move forward the scientific progress. But then, if arXiv actually becomes unusable, I suppose they won't really have much choice than to switch?

And, FWIW, I do think that arXiv truly has a vast potential to be improved. It is currently in the position to change the whole process of how the research results are shared, yet it is still, as others have said, only a PDF hosting. And since the universities couldn't break out of the whole Elsevier & co. scam despite the internet existing for the 30 years, to me, breaking free from the university affiliation sounds like a good thing.

But, of course, I am talking only about the possibilities being out there. I know nothing about the people in charge of the whole endeavor, and ultimately in depends on them only, if it sails or sinks.

krick··on Astral to Join OpenAI
Tested the "Kagi LinkedIn Speak" translator[0] from a couple of days ago[1] on this. Works pretty great! If you translate it back and forth a number of times, it pretty much distills it to the essence.

[0] https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408703

krick··on Astral to Join OpenAI
Nothing. I was very much aware of their prospects. Well, best-case scenario I could imagine them being acquired by Google or Microsoft, that would have looked like a prettier death, to be honest. Anyway, knowing that people eventually die doesn't mean you are immune to being sad when somebody dear actually dies. Especially when they die so young and full of potential.
krick··on Astral to Join OpenAI
Sure, I don't think anybody disagrees, I sure don't. You never know, and all. It's just that we (the imaginary crowd you are arguing with) are not hopeful. And your "but wait, guys, I think they are good people!" is some quite pitiful attempt to console us. Sure, good, brilliant and caring, that's why we are upset in the first place. Always more sad when it's somebody you liked that dies.

And framing it as "sell-outs" is cheap rhetoric that means nothing. The fact is, they were the company who never really had a solid business model, but provide a lot of value for the community. Being acquired by some infinite-money company was always the best outcome they could hope for. Well, they did. Probably got a ton of money. Will it require some sacrifice? Well, some people would say that working for a company who makes products for the Department of War of the USA on conditions that even Anthropic found too ugly to satisfy, is enough of a sacrifice on its own. I am pretty sure though that most people would be willing to make this sacrifice for the right amount of money (with "right amount" being a variable part). So calling someone a sell-out is usually just bitterness about the fact that it wasn't you who managed to sell out. I mean, not judging someone for a sacrifice they make isn't the same thing as pretending they didn't make a sacrifice. Sometimes we (the world, they were trying to make better) are a sacrifice. That's all.

krick··on Astral to Join OpenAI
Yeah, well, the fact is that every person who ever touches Python needed uv, but only Astral folks created it. So, nope, there's no one capable of filling the void, just accept that it's fucked now. The best die first.
krick··on Astral to Join OpenAI
I think, it may be the first time I am actually upset by acquire announcement. I am usually like "well, it is what it is", but this time it just feels like betrayal.
krick··on Forget Flags and Scripts: Just Rename the File
Bonus points for originality, but that's really just some crackpot idea.
krick··on JPEG Compression
Awesome. It would be interesting to learn why they even thought it is a good idea. Content-agnostic containers may make sense for video, but for the vast majority of use-cases a "video" is in fact a complex bundle of (several) video, audio, metadata tracks, so the "container" does much heavier lifting than specifying codec details and some metadata.
krick··on JPEG Compression
On your last point: I find it super annoying when both lossy and lossless codecs have the same name, and, more importantly, file extension. I get it that internally they are "almost the same thing", just with one extra step of discarding low-impact values, but when I see a PNG/FLAC file I know, that if the file was handled properly and wasn't produced by Windows clipboard or something, it is supposed to represent exactly the original data. When I see JPEG/MP3, I know that whatever it went through, it is not the original data for sure. When I see WEBP, I assume it's lossy, because it's just how it's used, and I cannot just convert all my PNG files to a newer format, because after that I won't be able to tell (easily) which is the original and which is not.
krick··on Hammerspoon
Is there something for Xfce?
krick··on U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth
That's great and all, but the point is that there still isn't a single known (to the community of people trying to find the origins of that symbol, so, safe to say, the vast majority of people in general) appearance of the character in the actual text (i.e. used for its purpose), so if you have an example of a map/book/anything where this character was used, providing the link/scan/photo would be very appreciated.
krick··on U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth
I am a bit surprised a unicode character could be a mistery at all. The unicode process is quite bureaucratic, so how comes there wasn't any justification given when the character was submitted for inclusion? After all, I know plenty of symbols that definitely are used routinely in some domains, but that are not a part of Unicode, and it appears that going through the process to actually get them included would be a bit of a chore.
krick··on No leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2026
Huh, that's an interesting point. Not sure I agree though. I always was irritated by the complaint that leap seconds are complicated and must be eliminated, and I am convinced that eliminating them in UTC is the most idiotic decision ever made, and I sincerely hate the idiots who made it, but, indeed, the idea that UTC time is just a time-zone representation of linear TAI time on Earth does make a lot of sense. On the other hand, we still can convert between UTC and TAI, so treating TAI as primary only makes sense if it clearly would make things simpler. And it's very unclear if it would. It really seems like the "correct" abstraction, but the problem is that currently my main hack for avoiding time complexity is always using datetimes in UTC+0 internally, thus ignoring time zones until I need to display something for user. This way I know that 14:00 today + one month is still 14:00 in my "internal" time format, even if in the user TZ one is DST and the other one is not. And a hundred of other ugly things I am willing to ignore in practice. And in 99.999% of cases I don't even care how many days are in that month, let alone seconds.

Now, if I cannot really add a month anymore (and I cannot in TAI, because months don't even really exist in TAI, since TAI isn't a solar year) in my internal time format, all that convenience goes away. I now must always worry about leap seconds and timezones and all the stuff I don't really need to think about in the vast majority of cases.

…Yeah, well, I'm really not sure. I am not convinced, and am honestly kinda relieved by the fact I won't have to find out. But it's an interesting point nevertheless. And, no, UTC w/o leap seconds is not the same thing. In fact, UTC w/o leap seconds is kinda the polar opposite: it's clearly the wrong abstraction, because it ignores the (not even so hard) problem somebody doesn't want to deal with, which doesn't really go away, but is very practical.

krick··on Setting up phones is a nightmare
Wow, thanks, didn't know about that. I am actually surprised how broad the list is. I was even about to say that it appears to cover everything I care about right now, but then it occurred to me, that Revolut (unlike some other banking apps) doesn't have its own NFC interface implementation and relies on Google Pay for that anyway, so it's a huge "fuck you". Because it's pretty much the primary reason to have a banking app installed at all for me.
krick··on Setting up phones is a nightmare
Surely, it depends on your particular vendors, but don't you have any problems with banking apps and such? I honestly just don't know, didn't try messing with firmware in a while. Do you use Revolut or something similar?
krick··on Setting up phones is a nightmare
Honestly, I would say that even in the latter case the painfulness of the process is a bit overstated. Sure, it's not great. But if you treat it just as a new device and don't expect to just continue from where you've left it on the previous phone, you'll make it under 30 minutes anyway. Half of it is playing with the UI of the new version of the OS and getting annoyed at the fact that the apps are not the same anyway, because on the previous device you refused to update an app after they fucked up it's UI, and now you must to get an old apk which won't even work anyway on the brand new Androip v99 or whatever.
krick··on Setting up phones is a nightmare
Exactly what I was going to say. I don't use iPhone because, well, it's iPhone. And until, like, this year, it was strictly more prohibitive than Android. Also, it was honestly just worse of a device than some Android flagships, and the tradeoff is only worth it if you are a lazy USA-ian, who doesn't use any "sketchier" non-mainstream apps, has an Apple account and owns a bunch of Apple devices anyway. Oh, and all your friends use iPhone Messages app. Then iPhone is the default. But outside of USA it was always more of a gimmick than a natural choice.

That being said, even if you wouldn't have said it before me, I probably shouldn't have said it too anyway, because I suspect that globally speaking the GP is right. Most people don't buy flagships, yet everybody has a phone. And Apple doesn't even try to compete in "non-premium" market, it's strictly impossible to buy a new iPhone for the price of some Redmi or whatever, which isn't even noticeably worse than an iPhone, practically speaking.

krick··on IDF killed Gaza aid workers at point blank range in 2025 massacre: Report
I would like to know: is there even a single person here, who actually changed his opinion regarding this whole matter upon seeing this report? Not confirmed anything, but actually was forced to re-evaluate his opinion. Like, previously you thought that IDF are good guys, and all Israel does is justified self-defense measures, and now you see this as genocide of Palestinians?

Of course, I assume, the answer is — no one. (And I'm hoping somebody will tell me I'm wrong.) So, what's the point? Is somebody gonna be held accountable? Will Israel be treated differently as a country from now on? If no, what's the point?

krick··on Why the KeePass format should be based on SQLite
Well, yes, this is what OP is saying, and I'm not arguing against that. However, this is not what *.kdbx was designed for. And I am only talking about what cryptographically changes for the intended use case if we encrypt every page separately.
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