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mootzville

55 karma · joined February 15, 2019

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mootzville··on EXP TV – endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera
This shit is amazing! Thanks.
mootzville··on The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
True, thought I didn't include the lookup first, it is how it happens in practice. Also, we use the mysql client, so semicolon is a must, and I would avoid anything that let you submit the statement without it...that's your safety net.
mootzville··on The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
I was taught to:

1. Write your WHERE clause first 2. Return to the beginning of the line to finish writing the statement 3. Check your statement 4. If it looks good, then -- and only then -- add your closing semicolon

Having said that, once during my second week at a new company, I plugged in an ethernet cable to an APC UPS, so I could set up networking on it. It shut down production. Why? APC makes (for that model at least) proprietary ethernet cables for networking, and if you plug in a regular cable it does an autoshutdown...an engineers attempt at marketing perhaps!? I did RTFM before, and after out of confusion, and there was no mention of this.

mootzville··on Ask HN: What prompts have you accidentally broken ChatGPT with?
Oh, if anyone does care about this, the browser console is throwing this out now: The resource <URL> was preloaded using link preload but not used within a few seconds from the window's load event. Please make sure it has an appropriate `as` value and it is preloaded intentionally.

But...I'm not sure if it was throwing that before as well. But it would seem that it gets triggered at the moment when you'd normally see the conversation get thrown into your conversations list...instead, get that in the console, and no conversations ever make it to the converation list.

mootzville··on Ask HN: What prompts have you accidentally broken ChatGPT with?
Also, as a side note, another interesting find is the idea of recursive prompting. I had it spitting out some interesting code in Javascript based on dental x-ray analysis, and once it did something I really liked I just kept sending, "Awesome! Continue." and it did really interesting things.
mootzville··on Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side (2016)
Having said that, I write a lot of JS / Node. When you npm (a package manager for NodeJS) install something there could very well be some curl commands piping to bash or sh.

Makes me think of an idea -- and maybe it exists -- create a npm package whose only purpose is to run checks on the code of the other packages being installed to ensure they are "safe".

mootzville··on Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side (2016)
Seems like the best solution is to not use this technique. Been touching linux servers for 10+ years, and have never had to use it. I definitely used it when learning linux though.

I curl to files for review when I need / want to run a remote script. A bonus is you still have to `chmod u+x some_remote.sh` before it can be run, so it would be extremely difficult to accidentally run.

mootzville··on Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
Look up the actual definition of "proprietary". If a company owns it, it's proprietary...even open source software.

Open source software can cost money, and still be open source...it currently exists.

mootzville··on Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
CentOS still exists, and is now owned by Red Hat. Originally, CentOS was meant to be the community ("free") version of RHEL, yet after Red Hat took it over it has since become a mid-point in the stream.

Before it was Fedora -> Red Hat

Now it is Fedora -> CentOS Stream -> Red Hat

mootzville··on Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
RHEL is not free, but the word "free" is loosely defined in open source world. RHEL is open source, yet it is also proprietary. Yes, if you wanted to build from source you can, for free, but you get no access to the repos or service and you have to strip out all references to Red Hat (trademark / copyright infringement) if you want to use it commercially. So, ya if you want to use it at home or to learn, it's free.
mootzville··on Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

You are kind of combining two things though: legacy systems, and proprietary systems.

There are modern proprietary systems as well. RHEL is a good example.

I'd argue it's not a "small number of entities" though. You'd be shocked by what legacy systems are running in the most important places on the planet...maybe scared. Unfortunately/Fortunately, nuclear facilities aren't running Linux Kernel 6.X

The fact is, a lot (probably most) problems solved with a computer don't need further updates. As long as the hardware continues to function, all is well.

Something you may have not considered is that when the time does come, and the hardware does fail, I'd guess most organizations will opt -- and even go out of their way -- to source those same legacy components they had before to keep things running exactly the same instead of upgrading to a more modern solution.

I've had to do this a number of times for clients. Not long ago, I had to source an old mainboard for a system that was 20+ years old...in doing so I did realize there is some good money to be made if you can source parts for systems about 20 years in the past because the board was like $300 (this was 2017, and the board had a 33mhz processor and like 8MB RAM)

If you don't have to touch these systems, count yourself lucky.

If you do touch these systems, thank you for your service.\

In regards to the modern proprietary systems, there are many, but if you consider RHEL for instance, there is a lot of value for large organizations. They can reduce the number on on-hand personnel whom probably would be less efficient at solving an OS issue than a RHEL engineer. As an example, the Federal Reserve runs modern RHEL...but I'd guess if you dig deep, they have some really old stuff too...

mootzville··on Granting Pardon for the Offense of Simple Possession of Marijuana
I'd argue this is one of the last things people will be thinking about in this election. No one is changing their vote over this...the economy and abortion will drive this cycle.
mootzville··on Epic Games Website Bug – Don't Buy V-Bucks for Nintendo Switch
You're probably thinking: If they can't transfer them, why did they show up the first time? That's a good question...
mootzville··on SL(1): Cure your bad habit of mistyping
Up the stakes and mount your home NAS
mootzville··on Advice needed for backing up and hosting large amount of files
We've been using fpsync (http://www.fpart.org/fpsync/) to backup our production NAS. It is basically a scheduler wrapped around rsync. We use some 10g NICs for internal backups...it's fast enough that the SSD's are the bottleneck, so we are probably going to switch over to m.2's at somepoint.

Having said that, external transfers across the net will end up being your bottleneck, so you'll have to decide how much compression is worthwhile to reduce the time on the wire.

Another option, if available, is dump it all to drives, and snail mail it, but I'm guessing you already thought of that.

Good luck.

mootzville··on How Google will spend $1M on the internet for you
Money talks. Google is not going to change. They are a public corporation whose ultimate motive is profit. Stop giving money to those corporations whose business model you disagree with. The question for the marketer is: Can you still be successful without Google Ads? If the answer is no, then you have already lost as you feel you are bound, and you are because you choose to be.

I say re-invent the marketing wheel. Grassroots, guerrilla-style advertising. What is that? I don't know, you're the marketer.

mootzville··on We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
There are now Quantum Random Number Generators on the market. I've seen hardware ones that use PCIe.

Here's a university that apparently is now providing a qrng service for free with live streaming: https://qrng.anu.edu.au/

mootzville··on We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it
I'd imagine it's hard to prove randomness. Yes, HHHHHHHHHH can be chosen randomly as equally as HHTHTHTTTH. I don't remember seeing anything in the article speaking to the statistical significance of the data...though, I'm not a scientist, so maybe it's inferred from the discussion of the results.
mootzville··on Human head transplant is contemplated using tiny graphene nanoribbon scaffolds
Sheesh, what we call science these days...

What ever happened to data, experimentation and rigor?

What is science without subscribing to the scientific method?

mootzville··on CSS's !important was added because of laws about font size for some text
That tweet is ridiculous. The World Wide Web was created for one purpose only...serve formatted documents across a network for scientists. Using !important beyond it's intended purpose is called hacking, and has been around since before there were computers. People found use beyond the main purpose of !important, and that's ok...it was a dead end, but that's beside the point.

Never use !important in your production css at all costs. In development, experiment with it all you want...maybe you'll uncover something amazing...in this case, probably not...but better to hack on things than accept what you're given.

mootzville··on Tell HN: Gnome on Wayland Is Amazing
Gnome comes stock with RHEL, so I'm not bothered to use other desktops as most of my time is spent in the terminal. I did get into some of the minimalist desktops at some point to see how little I could get away with. In that regard, OpenBox is pretty good, yet there are other more extreme minimalist desktops if you want.

Having said that, I have yet to have anything crash while running Gnome, but have had to limit a couple services provided by Gnome over time...sometimes -- maybe bugs in updates -- they can get resource hungry even while idle, but nothing beyond what an obsessive admin or power user might care about.

mootzville··on Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites
People will complain about your project, and then use SciHub next time they need to reference a paper. I like it!
mootzville··on Ask HN: Has Gmail stopped working for you with uBlock Origin on Chrome?
Use Brave, it's Chrome without the cruft, and you probably won't need ublock anymore as it has built-in ad blocking.
mootzville··on Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter?
Twitter...official government communications?

You would be better served accessing official government communications via .gov sites. This is their purpose.

If you want official bot communications from troll farms, then Twitter is the best!

mootzville··on Supersonic Trebuchet
That's pretty awesome. May have to give a whirl. Thanks!

I remember years ago seeing some show about weapons seized in jail, and one of them was a crossbow made out of underwear that could shoot a plastic fork through a steel filing cabinet.

mootzville··on M1 Pro 14“ MacBook Pro Running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM
Agreed, but who will better take advantage of the CPI's architecture to utilize those gains, the same people making the hardware and native OS, or a Linux distro? Just because a CPU can do something does not mean every OS / kernel is going to use it.

What I was getting at is if you want Linux, you can get a good Lenovo or Dell for about $1000-1200 that would seem / feel compararble to a $2000 macbook.

mootzville··on M1 Pro 14“ MacBook Pro Running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM
I don't understand why you'd want a Mac unless you intended to run it's provided OS.

With Linux you can get the same hardware for half the price from other manufacturers.

EDIT: By 'same hardware' I mean 'hardware with comparable / equivalent performance'

mootzville··on AI voice actors sound more human than ever–and are ready to hire
The first two audio clips in the article are the same text with different intentionality, so they have the 'intent' setting figured out already.
mootzville··on Sd: My Script Directory
I made a ~/bin folder to do something similar, so I don't have to mess with any of the PATH stuff, and can just call it like anything else found in a /bin dir.

EDIT: Oh, and autocomplete works with it by default. Just 'mkdir ~/bin' and you're good to go.

mootzville··on Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing
This makes all the hours (months really) I've wasted on HackerNews worth it. Thanks!

Edit: I should say, it's things like this that make up for the wasted time. I've seen several really interesting things on here over time.

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