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mvac

223 karma · joined July 22, 2022

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mvac··on Potential third critical PHP CVE
PHP is having a really bad day today
mvac··on Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
Wow, I can see this type of service becoming a big hit these days. Similar to LP and analog photography comeback.
mvac··on East German cities offer free stays to fight depopulation
The town of Görlitz is truly charming. I visited after discovering that many scenes from my favorite movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, were filmed there (https://www.discovergoerlitz.com/grandbudapest/)
mvac··on Nanonets-OCR-s – OCR model that transforms documents into structured markdown
Correct link for Docext: https://github.com/NanoNets/docext/blob/main/PDF2MD_README.m...
mvac··on Nanonets-OCR-s – OCR model that transforms documents into structured markdown
How does it compare to Datalab/Marker https://github.com/datalab-to/marker ? We evaluated many PDF->MD converters and this one performed the best, though it is not perfect.
mvac··on Waymo rides cost more than Uber or Lyft and people are paying anyway
In my experience Uber/Lyft/Bolt in their race to the bottom started tolerating cars in bad shape and drivers that don’t care about driving safely. Really hoping to see Waymo or any other robo-taxi in Europe soon.
mvac··on Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
This exemption is only there for "reader apps"

" 3.1.3(a) “Reader” Apps: Apps may allow a user to access previously purchased content or content subscriptions (specifically: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video). ... Reader app developers may apply for the External Link Account Entitlement to provide an informational link in their app to a web site ...

mvac··on The blissful Zen of a good side project
It reminded me a part of the "The Tar Pit" esssay from The Mythical Man-month:

> Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? > First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design.

...

> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination.

mvac··on Mistral OCR
Yes, i have. The problem with using just an LLM is that while it reads and understands text, but it cannot reproduce it accurately. Additionaly the textbooks I've mentioned have many diagrams and illustrations in them (e.g. books on anatomy or biochemistry). I don't really care about extracting text from them, I just need them extracted as images alongside the text, and no LLM does that.
mvac··on Mistral OCR
Great progress, but unfortunately, for our use case (converting medical textbooks from PDF to MD), the results are not as good as those by MinerU/PDF-Extract-Kit [1].

Also the collab link in the article is broken, found a functional one [2] in the docs.

[1] https://github.com/opendatalab/MinerU [2] https://colab.research.google.com/github/mistralai/cookbook/...

mvac··on We're forking Flutter
Yes, it is. I was just thinking about what happened when other companies did something similar.
mvac··on We're forking Flutter
Very sad article to read. I just expect the original Flutter will now die a slow death. I applaud the effort and hope they will be able to find a monetization model that works to support the development. There have been similar projects based on technologies that Microsoft has killed (Silverlight -> OpenSilver and various .NET-based cross-platform technologies) that serve their customers well. Unfortunately, none of them are in any way "mainstream" like Flutter is today.
mvac··on Cloudflare employee posts layoff call with HR and goes viral [video]
Don't you think it's also a problem of the corporate-kindergarten culture, where everyone and everything is considered great, even though, as a salesperson, they haven't closed any deals in the last four months?
mvac··on How the first fourth-generation nuclear power plant works
Thiel was right (9y ago) with the west being leader in innovation in the world of bits, but not in the world of atoms.
mvac··on Infrastructure of a Migratory Bird [video]
The full infographic presented in the talk: https://latentspaces.zhdk.ch/imb/
mvac··on A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)
> ... quality happens only if somebody has the responsibility for it, and that "somebody" can be no more than one single person

So true, I've yet to see anything of quality produced by groupthink.

mvac··on Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js
The developer experience just sucks compared with regular project with build, hot reload, etc…

We have also tried this approach and I still think that it might be the future. But apart from using it on tiny projects and experiments, the DX is just subpar compared to any modern vite based “build-full” stack.

mvac··on Is the Living Computer Museum dead?
When I read about the museum closing, it made me quite sad. I was absolutely thrilled when I visited it 7 years ago. I didn’t have time to go through everything I wanted, thinking that next time I’ll make more time for it. Now I realize how even things like computer museums in IT cities backed by IT billionaires are ephemeral.
mvac··on Microsoft to support Windows 11 on M1 and M2 Macs through Parallels partnership
Do you find UTM to be “good enough” or lacking certain features? Tbh I find it quite amusing that Windows license costs less (in the EU) than Parallels for year.
mvac··on Microsoft to support Windows 11 on M1 and M2 Macs through Parallels partnership
I switched to Mac, but still sometimes need the full Visual Studio for work. VS for Mac is a joke and I don’t believe that even its developers use it.
mvac··on I'm starting a zero waste grocery delivery service in NYC. Anybody interested?
For some reason I always see zero waste stores to open with lot of fanfare and then close down after a few months. Even in hip areas, where demand for hipster cafes and vegan restarants seems to be infinite.

Not sure why, thought. Maybe zero waste store is one of those ideas that seem so nice, but don't work at all in reality?

mvac··on Microsoft to support Windows 11 on M1 and M2 Macs through Parallels partnership
Technically you can use any Windows 11 licence key (or even Win 10) to activate Windows 11 Arm in Parallels. Have been using it since last december and so far it has been much better experience than with any Windows PC...
mvac··on Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS
Web Push is probably the worst feature ever introduced to the web. I see way too many spammy notififications on PC's of my non-technical friends and parents. Glad that Apple has decided to only allow Web Push for websites added to the home screen.
mvac··on Swift Quit – Automatic App Quitting on Mac
I recommend adding Mail and Calendar to exclusions, as these app do not sync when not running.

Also there are few really annoying bugs that makes the app almost unusable: https://github.com/onebadidea/swiftquit/issues/1

mvac··on My bad habit of hoarding information
Safari on iOS lets you keep only 500 tabs open. After that a new tab replaces the oldest one. So I never overhoard.
mvac··on Croatia to switch to euro, enter passport-free Schengen zone
Strong CZK is partly due to FX interventions (sell EUR, buy CZK) done by the central bank (https://think.ing.com/articles/cnb-fx-intervention-september...). The idea is that interventions makes CZK stronger, which makes imports cheaper (think gas etc.. bought in EUR), which lowers inflation.
mvac··on Htmx in a Nutshell
What’s the story for modals? Or multiple modals, navigating in them etc… Do you plan to take inspiration from Unpoly Layers (https://unpoly.com/up.layer) or is it out of scope for htmx?
mvac··on How fast is ASP.NET Core?
> The interesting part is that this completely unoptimised fully fledged Java MVC framework ranks overall 12th in the Fortunes benchmark with an incredible 404k requests/sec.

wow, expected java performance to be really similar to .net