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pbalau

939 karma · joined January 1, 2016

I want to build a snowman
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pbalau··on Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory
Perchance you mean: "non disclosure of salary is a dealbreaker"?
pbalau··on Britain to make salary disclosure in job ads mandatory
From GP:

> I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer.

pbalau··on Hackers hit French national blood bank
The main reason to remove control from the "boots on the ground" is to prevent errors. Not cost cutting.

The problem is not that the control is centralized, the problem is not enough security.

pbalau··on Hackers hit French national blood bank
And if you need to alter the initial settings, you do what? Also, your solution is negating one of the biggest benefits of remote control: less errors from tech on the ground.
pbalau··on Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
Are you sure?

> [...] and FWIW our *self-hosted* premium gitlab has about an hour a day downtime

pbalau··on Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
> Unreciprocated $100s of dollars spent [...]

See, that's your problem. You don't throw a house party because you want to go to other house parties. You do that because and only because, you want to throw a house party.

pbalau··on C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour
Is it hidden if it's explained in the standard?

I think Linus's complain was before there was a c++ standard. An updated version of the complaint would be "this shit is doing too much".

pbalau··on Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
> If you have formulas that actually match reality, what do you need the LLM for?

Because one could be in that state where they are trying to use a tech they know preciously little about to solve a problem they know nothing about.

This reminds me of a request we got from our "AI Department": if you build us a proper shares market simulator, we will build you an awesome agent that can trade shares. They seemed quite confused when I pointed out that if we could build such a simulator, we wouldn't need them anymore.

pbalau··on Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)
Zuk asked how the thing worked. Boz answered.

Might be a challenge to some, but one can find out things if they pay enough attention to data.

pbalau··on Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
Meanwhile, here I am posting this using Google Chrome, with Lightroom Classic, InDesign, Sublime Text, Steam bla bla all opened in the background.

You posted a 6 years old link.

pbalau··on UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions
> Union of European Football Associations
pbalau··on UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions
While I agree the extra CL games are not a great idea, they are not a very bad one either.

The Nations League is a good idea, for a number of reasons:

1. It gives smaller teams, like Gibraltar, Malta etc, a chance to play competitive football against teams their level and a chance to actually get better. In the old system, the only way for Gibraltar to play a competitive game, was to play in the Euro or WC qualifications, against the likes of Germany, Spain, England etc and get trashed. They can't get better if they have no chance to win.

2. Nations League brings money to the various FAs, a google search suggests anything between €750,000 to €10.5 million, as opposed to extracting money from the FAs.

3. The Nations League games replaced a bunch of friendlies. Now those games matter.

pbalau··on Some more things about Django I've been enjoying
If you divide a Path by another Path, you get a Path. If you compare two Paths, you get a Boolean. It is not really the same.
pbalau··on Some more things about Django I've been enjoying
If you change an operation that is meant to return a Boolean to return anything else, you are insta fired.
pbalau··on Some more things about Django I've been enjoying
if self._midnight(today) returns a datetime object, than:

   self.filter(end__gt=self._midnight(today))
will evaluate to:

   self.filter(end__gt=<some_datetime_object>)

While

    self.filter(Field.end > self._midnight(today))
will evaluate to:

   self.filter(<True/False>)
pbalau··on Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows
I disagree. I don't read because I like to read books, I don't listen to audiobooks because I like listening to audiobooks, I don't talk to people because I like talking with people, heck, I don't take pictures because I like taking pictures.

I like stories and all of the above are simply ways of hoarding more stories. The way I'm getting the story is not important, the story is.

pbalau··on A new era for software testing
Well, scenario contains the letters s, c and n, while behavior doesn't.
pbalau··on Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
The short and sad answer is that most people that work in web development do not understand how the web works or how web apps work.
pbalau··on Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs
That's my understanding, or, maybe a better word would be "guess". The CPU telling the GPU: this is your memory now.
pbalau··on Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs
What is the difference between unified memory and shared memory?

Shared memory existed since the first CPU with an embedded GPU came to market and you could set in BIOS how much memory goes to what component.

I do have an opinion about how unified memory could be different, but I want a proper explanation.

pbalau··on Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down
Story time.

Around 2005, I was hired by a company that was building software for USB drives, to build a porn site.

Turns out, they wanted me to build a poc for an authentication solution: some USB drives would have a fingerprint reader and they wanted to build this auth system based on that.

So I built that, but "perplexingly", they didn't get any finance or enough prospect customers, so the project got shelved.

Then, I was handed another project they had on the back burner, a sort of firewall for devices, meant to prevent exfiltration of company documents on unapproved USB drives.

I built the single user version, eg you had to be admin to allow devices and the product sold quite well, even winning some prizes iirc.

We started getting requests to have a centralized admin interface and a way to allow/disallow copying some file types. I started working on the centralized admin and the company hired a very talented engineer to build the file filtering thing. This last thing was based on a windows API that allowed for virtual file systems. Things were ticking along nicely and the company even hired a business manager to try to come up with other products we can build with our existing tech.

One afternoon, over a bunch of cold beers, to link with the hell on earth that happens right now in London, me and this person came up with a cunning plan! What if you sell an 1GB USB drive with an extra 1GB of space?

The plan was simple: plug in the device, you get a drive that's the regular USB drive, but also another drive, backed by the virtual file system thing and a version of my http auth thing, and you would read/write from a server on the Internet.

Big boss liked the idea and I started researching how to get servers and the like, while a third engineer was tasked to build the desktop app needed.

It all came crashing down, days later, when this engineer declared that is not possible to have a windows app minimize to sys tray and the project got cancelled. I left the company not long after that .

This was the story on how a small German-Romanian company could have beat Dropbox.

pbalau··on Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs
Android

https://imgbox.com/EiovsE5b https://imgbox.com/A4Fl9lE9

pbalau··on Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs
For some reason I though the GP was talking about browsing on mobile, where I have the issue:

https://imgbox.com/EiovsE5b https://imgbox.com/A4Fl9lE9

pbalau··on Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs
For some reason I though the GP was talking about browsing on mobile, where I have the issue:

https://imgbox.com/EiovsE5b https://imgbox.com/A4Fl9lE9

pbalau··on Don't put aria-label on generic elements like divs
> I’d say perhaps once per day I’ll encounter a website that has never had zoom in/out (ctl +/-) tested because if you zoom up even one level from 100%, everything breaks

Just tested, hn breaks if you zoom >110%.

pbalau··on Ferrari Luce
> this thing is never seeing seawater anyway

I can definitely see these used as lighting devices on luxury boats.

pbalau··on No way to parse integers in C (2022)
How do you know where the first string ends and the second starts? Did you miss the "stdin" part?

This is not

    ./program first_number second_number
pbalau··on Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users
Gimp will never be able to pull a Blender because they are operating on hugely different conditions.

Blender never had to play catch up with a proprietary file format. In Blender's world, fbx and any of the video formats are the way to interop with other studios.

In the Photoshop/Gimp world, the interop format is psd. Under full control of Adobe.

There is also the matter of price. Maya and 3dStudioMax are eye watering expensive, while Photoshop is dirt cheap. As a professional photographer, I can get the 300 GBP it costs me to have Lightroom and Photoshop for one year, in an afternoon.

pbalau··on Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?
Why do you need the AI to write a script? Why not have the AI do the work without a "script"?
pbalau··on From Supabase to Clerk to Better Auth
You are not supposed to offload your users table, you are supposed to offload your password field.
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