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morbusfonticuli

41 karma · joined November 29, 2017

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morbusfonticuli··on Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard
I love it! Every click on the title will also change its bastard font :-)
morbusfonticuli··on Protect your shed
Really cool project! Bookmarked for further inspection and future inspiration :-)
morbusfonticuli··on Willingness to look stupid
Well, now I went down that rabbit hole. Thanks, I guess :-)
morbusfonticuli··on Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
This reminded of the YouTube guy of "Smarter Every Day" who tried to manufacture a a grill brush completely in USA and still be competitive in the marketplace (i.e. China) [0].

It turned out that USA / "the west" lost the engineering knowledge to manufacture "stuff" (in this case injection molding and other procedures): Nowadays, we simply create the plans and schematics (e.g. CAD files) and let the Chinese do the building.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

morbusfonticuli··on Show HN: An API that takes a URL and returns a file with browser screenshots
Similar project: gowitness [1].

A really cool tool i recently discovered. Next to scraping and performing screenshots of websites and saving it in multiple formats (including sqlite3), it can grab and save the headers, console logs & cookies and has a super cool web GUI to access all data and compare e.g the different records.

I'm planning to build my personal archive.org/waybackmachine-like web-log tool via gowitness in the not-so-distant future.

[1] https://github.com/sensepost/gowitness

morbusfonticuli··on Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets.htm#anchor1
morbusfonticuli··on Audiobox: Meta's new foundation research model for audio generation
Germany? :-)
morbusfonticuli··on Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation
I've been using Debian Testing on my personal Notebooks since ~10yrs: throughout university, and the subsequent work life.

During that time, I oftened wondered whether I should "play"/experiment more with other distros; after all I loved tinkering with my vim config and network setups etc.

However, I've been just satisfied with the status quo, and more importantly: I just wanted to get shit done.

Apt, dpkg, systemd. If I want to get bleeding-edge SW I'll build the upstream source manually. No big deal - won't happen too often.

Getting older, I'm beginning to despise fixing the os more and more ... I just want the machine to work. This results perhaps from my day job, which involves openbsd-developing/tweaking ... And general a lot of cursing.

Granted: I'm not a gamer or graphics-enthusiast, and use my computer primarily for development, writing, watching movies/pictures ... Your typical senior resident trapped in the body of a 30ish guy.

I'm often wondering whether I'm just lazy and/or whether my attitude is the norm or rather the exception respective to Unix/Linux (power)users.

Edit: forgot to say "big thank you" to the arch community! Over the years I consulted the archwiki endless times! Almost everytime really helpful (in contrast to the debian wiki, lol)

morbusfonticuli··on Evidence for a mouse origin of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant
I do think that you have a point there. However it's complicated.

Money quote from your cited paper: "Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts."

However, despite the small odds of a population bottleneck, mutations naturally happen and with "[...] more than a million new infections occurring every day and billions of people still unvaccinated, susceptible hosts are rarely in short supply. So, natural selection will favor mutations that can exploit all these unvaccinated people and make the coronavirus more transmissible." [0].

This [1] nature article from 2020 has a different view on the relation of leaky vaccines, spread control and disease severity; money quote: "Bailey et al. performed transmission experiments using Marek disease virus in chickens and found that the herpesvirus of turkeys vaccine significantly reduced feather viral load in both vaccinated birds and unvaccinated contact individuals. The authors found that contact birds were less likely to develop disease and die, and that they displayed milder symptoms and shed less virus, when infected by vaccinated birds, potentially because of a lower infectious dose"

The article based on current research [2] _also_ examining Marek disease.

So there you are: one probem, multiple views by experts and a bunch of hackernews readers, unable to evaluate the papers.

[0] https://scitechdaily.com/what-is-causing-all-these-new-coron...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-0358-3

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

morbusfonticuli··on I no longer build software
This made me chuckle and then suddenly realizing that you caught me: often enough, this is how i(t) work(s) . E.g. "i don't understand (crypto) algorithm $XYZ, fuk it, i'll write my own crypto!"

*in not-so-serious side projects

morbusfonticuli··on Who still needs the office? U.S. companies start cutting space
If I'd be in your position (lacking social contacts outside of the work environment), I'd take the time to reflect my life and would try to determine what makes me happy.

For example: Do you miss interactions with others? Join local clubs that fit your hobbies and meet new people. This is how life works IMO.

Personally speaking, joining different local orchestras/bands in the city im currently living in (since ~1 year) helped me a lot. I decided to let my work be only work and search "purpose/fulfilling" in other aspects of life.

morbusfonticuli··on String tokenization in C
> Strtok is not thread safe and can’t be made thread safe without changing the API. You should not use it.

Well, there is already a thread-safe variant [0]: > The strtok() function uses a static buffer while parsing, so it's not thread safe. Use strtok_r() if this matters to you.

[0] https://linux.die.net/man/3/strtok_r

morbusfonticuli··on Ex-Valve employee describes internal politics at 'self-organizing' companies
> At self-organizing firms you might be placed into a huge open office and given massive monitors. This is to normalize all communications and for more effective surveillance. Everything will be monitored either directly by a corporate arm employee, one of their barons or friends.

This. I'm a compsci master-student and currently (since 2017/03) work at a big german tax-software company.

This company is not a self-organizing firm, but has a clear hierarchy (from small groups of 5 ppl to several divisions with up to ~300 ppl. Nevertheless, they tried to adapt some aspects of thr american work big players - such as the open office concept.

The situation there is even worse, as students/interns have to dynamically choose a random workplace every day.

In the open office -filled with ~100 ppl in total- I felt surveillanced and could not concentrate on my current projects as every now and then someone passed my desk and glanced into my code etc.

Lucky for me: I do have a pretty exotic status&job at this company and was able to get a company laptop that enabled me to wander from place to place within the company until I found a pretty isolated room for ~20 ppl (full with software testers). I managed to get access rights for this room and am officially allowed to work there.

Although the ambient noise is worse than in open workplace (those software testers are chatty as shit :-) ...), I'm generally more concentrated and prefer wearing hearing protection now and then, instead of working in an panopticon.

Conclusion: after my graduation I'm looking for a small/middle sized company and consider buzzwords like 'flat hierarchy', open office, free fruit, etc. as red flags.

morbusfonticuli··on ATMs in India Could Be Hacked Because Banks Haven't Updated Windows Since 2014
I'm surprised of banks putting the ATMs into the same network as the computers of the banks' employees. I mean: is there any(!) need for the normal banker to have network access to the ATM? And if a separate network is too expensive, one could at least put them in vlans / vpns.
morbusfonticuli··on America’s Teens Are Choosing YouTube Over Facebook
Although this might not add any value to the general discussion, i feel the urge to break my lurker-silence and share my latest epiphany: end-twenties german compsci-student here. in retrospective, my act of leaving facebook and (obviously in contrast to a lot of other users here) not replacing it with any substitute "social media" account might have had a bigger impact on my life as i would have guessed. Since years, i have been using Telegram, signal, SMS, the gold old phonecalls, email and IRC (my jabber contacts also moved to signal, etc.) and i can guarantee you to have a pretty reduced social life. In a more active phase of my life (a couple of years ago) i still went frequently to concerts with 2-3 friends who would send me routinely emails containing facebook-screenshots etc. ... Nowadays i lead a life most separated from the rest of the "social" world. Of course i still have friends and visit Them from time to time, etc. ... But on facebook i realized my self-consuming habit of constantly checking what other ppl i rarely knew thought or did or "liked". I have to admit that despite this time consuming social media habits i could really lead a reflected and productive life, but to be honest i still put feel time into passively(!) surfing the net, reading and watching a lot of news, journals, trivia, etc. Through other eyes this comment might seem bitter, but i actually enjoy my life without this burden of social media platforms on myself. Are here some other 'conscientious objectors'?