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raffraffraff

4,443 karma · joined March 26, 2016

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raffraffraff··on Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)
Would this ever affect me if I don't use many of MacOS built on tools? I brew install gnu equivalents make them all default. Just like how I also don't use most of their desktop environment stuff, and instead use rectangle, hammerspoon, karabiner to make it feel more like the Linux desktop I wish I could use at work.
raffraffraff··on Using a 1978 terminal in 2026 (DEC VT-100)
Yep. Either projector or rear projector or didn't happen. I think 70 was pretty big for a rear projection unit.
raffraffraff··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
Hmm.

"Acceptance of Iran's nuclear enrichment rights" (enrichment to what degree?)

"Termination of all International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors resolutions against Iran" (what does this actually mean, that they tear up previous reports and findings? Ignore undeclared nuclear facilities and unaccounted for uranium?)

I mean, are Iran basically asking that they be allowed build nuclear weapons unchecked? Or is there another way to read this?

raffraffraff··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
I'm thinking more like, when I run with a sweater and heavier sweatpants, but the time I'm at the 5km mark I'm seriously sweating. So, not just higher heart rate. I'm talking "feels like a fever" heat, for 20 minutes, a few times a week.

But I run with my heart rate low, I don't like exceeding 150 on these runs.

raffraffraff··on AI helps add 10k more photos to OldNYC
Yep, these models are all trash. They happily invent wrong detail. If you never knew anyone in the photograph, then knock yourself out, let it invent faces that didn't exist. But if you're doing anything with family photographs just stop. Unless you can tune a model on your own family photographs you can't magically add "correct" detail to a blurred, pixelated, grainy or unfocused photo. You can add colour, pretty reliably though.
raffraffraff··on Finnish sauna heat exposure induces stronger immune cell than cytokine responses
Hmm. So what about a 30 to 50 minute run wearing sweatpants / hoodie?
raffraffraff··on Trivy under attack again: Widespread GitHub Actions tag compromise secrets
This has always been my big "WTH?" whenever I see people using github actions. "You're literally taking someone else's script and ruining it against your codebase"
raffraffraff··on The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
On huge games produced by large game studios, I wonder if the idea of using a real world technical challenge as a "feature" within the game is considered genius? Consider a coder and a game designer who are on different teams and don't attend the same meetings.

But if you look at creative writing, story arcs are all about obstacles. A boring story is made interesting by an obstacle. It is what our protagonist needs to overcome. A one-man-band game dev who simultaneously holds the story and the technical challenge their head, might spot the opportunity to use a glitch or limitation as, I dunno, a mini game that riffs on the glitch.

raffraffraff··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
I bought a tiny lapel clip Bluetooth receiver that has buttons and a headphone socket. Charge over USB, pair with phone, turn any headphones into Bluetooth. If the battery runs out, plug the headphones straight into the phone.

However, the noise cancelling gap is real. I'd kill for wired IEMs with an inline battery + buttons, and noise cancelling mic & circuit in the earpieces.

Closest is the Sony cans, which have wired mode (ie: they have a tiny jack, so you can use them passively) but I don't think they cancel noise when using them that way

raffraffraff··on Wired headphone sales are exploding
A friend worked at sennheiser about 15 years ago and I took advantage of his cost-price deal on a pair of HD700. They are, without a doubt, the best sounding and most comforted cans I've ever used. Now, I treated them badly, throwing them into ruck sacks etc, and eventually one of the transducers failed. I contacted Sennheiser who charged me €140 to "repair" them... They sent me a brand new set with the thick silver core cable (I never sent mine back so now I have two, and those cost over 100 bucks by themselves)
raffraffraff··on MacBook Neo
Is Force Touch the thing that makes Macbook trackpad better than basically every other laptop trackpad? Because if so, that is actually "the" deal breaker.
raffraffraff··on MacBook Air with M5
Even though I'm done with apple, every time I use a non-apple laptop I think "this is a shit trackpad".
raffraffraff··on Rob Grant, creator of Red Dwarf, has died
> Working together under the name "Grant Naylor", the creators of the series collaboratively wrote two novels. The first, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, was published in November 1989, and it incorporates plot lines from several episodes of the show's first two series. The second novel, Better Than Life, followed in October 1990, and it is largely based on the second-series episode of the same name. Together, the two novels provide expanded backstory and development of the series' principal characters and themes.

If you haven't read the books, please do yourself a favour. They are far far better than the series, have much more depth and have not dated as badly. I loved Red Dwarf when it was on TV (jesus, I was 12 years old..) but I find it a little hard to watch now. Some parts are still great though.

raffraffraff··on Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better
Everything is a dogwhistle.
raffraffraff··on Docker Swarm vs. Kubernetes in 2026
K3s + FluxCD. There's something nice about using git to add a helm repo, a helm release with a few values, then 'git push'. Shortly afterwards there's a new DNS record, TLS cert and I can hit https://mynewservice.example.com
raffraffraff··on Flashpoint Archive – Over 200k web games and animations preserved
I'm feel old.. My library of childhood games in my head are from the 80s, for the Spectrum. Dizzy, Jet Set Willy, Operation Wolf, R-Type, and original movie/game conversations for Robocop, Batman etc.

What's odd is the apparent chasm between those games and the earliest flash games, but really it's just a few years. That's just a trick of the mind. When you're a kid, turning into a young adult, a few short years feel like a lifetime. Man, it speeds up after that...

raffraffraff··on Flashpoint Archive – Over 200k web games and animations preserved
I sometimes watch (in horror) as my nephew uses his Dad's phone to play whatever shallow, glossy muck he finds in the play store. He spends as much time swatting ads, refusing to upgrade to the pro version and hitting 'back' to get out of the play store than playing the games. It's amazing to watch a 6 year old develop muscle memory on these things. I see him swat away an ad almost before I've even noticed that it wasn't part of the game. He has effectively learned to be an ad / upgrade swatting machine. That is the game. Because he has absolutely no "sticking power" with any game. It's the play store / game / ad version of doomscrolling.

I've realised that giving him a reduced hand-picked library of games, with no ads, no automatic prompts to try another game, might be a good idea. These flash games are easily as good as most of the junk I see him play anyway.

raffraffraff··on Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists
Ask her if she would prefer the government actually spend the money in ways that make it easier for arts / crafts people to actually make their own living. You know, instead of a handout. My wife doesn't think her self esteem would improve if she could only survive on a handout.

Ask her how much it costs for a stall at Showcase every year. Why does the RDS have this whole area sewn up? Why don't the government sponsor events like this? Why is the craft council absolutely useless? They can't organise anything, they just wait for gougers to set up ultra expensive events and then tag along.

Ask her if she'd prefer subsidised rent for her business in a decent location, in a city or town? Remember before Templebar got gentrified, it was an absolute shithole, decaying buildings that should have been condemned and torn down, and yet because it was cheap, it became the place for artists, designers, jewellery makers, cooks to set up, and became the most interesting part of Dublin. Sky High rent drove away all but the big chains, and now it's soulless. What do the small makers have now? Nothing.

What about subsidised shipping? Right now An Post are massively increasing the cost of their flat rate small parcel shipping within the country. Why invest in that, and make it easier for makers to ship their products at a reasonable, predictable price?

What about actual help with the "running a business" part, that many artists suck at?

I dunno. Giving free money to a few people, without even checking whether or not they need it, strikes me as unfair, lazy and short sighted. Why bother doing anything at all if you're getting free money? But reduce the cost and difficulty of running a business... That actually encourages it.

Teach a man to fish vs give him a fish.

raffraffraff··on Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists
My wife is an artist and she absolutely hates this.

For a start, it's a lottery. 2000 randomers who call themselves artists will get no-questions-asked income regardless of their skill or importance as artists. We have people who are full time carers for family members who get less money in their allowance, and it's means-tested.

So you can be a millionaire heir / heiress, independently wealthy and still be eligible for it. One artist on Twitter bragged about getting it, and has been using the "extra money" to go on long holidays. It's basically free world travel for her.

Also, what is an artist? There's one guy on twitter who gets this income and really, he just seems to take bad semi pornographic photos. Like the world really needs more of that.

Another lady my wife knows personally is a terrible artist, never had any talent and doesn't make money. No sense of colour, no line skills, just paints awful blobs in awful colours. She's 100% in favour of this scheme and won't shut up about it on twitter.

My wife has been struggling to make an income from her art for decades, but has created a small business around it, wedding stationery, other print fits. Guess what? She probably doesn't qualify as "an artist" she "runs a small print business". She also thinks that the government could do a lot of practically things to make life easier for artists but it's easier to take your budget and just give it to random artists. No effort, no real benefit. It's laziness and incompetence.

I know exactly one "real" artist whose paintings will genuinely be hanging on walls for hundreds of years. He has no business around his art, he literally paints and holds exhibitions to sell his work. His name is famous in art circles and you can instantly recognise his style whenever you see it. His work is truly amazing. He has a wife and two kids and struggles sometimes. The long gaps between exhibitions, the worry that an exhibition won't go well. Anxiety, depression. Did he get this magic lottery? Did he fuck.

raffraffraff··on Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun
> Creating a viable alternative to Visa and Mastercard requires “several billion euros” in investment, according to EPI’s own estimates. Low interchange fees under EU regulation make profitability difficult.

I think it's absolutely amazing that "crypto" (from bitcoins to shitcoins) have turned out to be no more useful as a currency than chips from the local casino. This has damaged their ability to function as a simple currency that can be used to pay for goods and services. And they have damaged the reputation of the whole distributed ledger technology to the point where, in 2026, banks aren't even considering implementing a closed circuit inter-bank distributed ledger as a way to send euro from one bank account to another. If the digital currency in this closed system was actual euro, there would be no reason to speculate on its value and turn the whole thing into a circus.

I'm sure I'm missing something (a lot actually)

raffraffraff··on The RCE that AMD won't fix
How the hell is it possible that they're still using the ATI domain and HTTP 2026? They acquired ATI 20 fucking years ago.

It really makes you wonder what level of dysfunction is actually possible inside a company. 30k employees and they can't get one of them to hook up certbot, and add an 's' to the software.

raffraffraff··on In Tehran
Their own people too
raffraffraff··on Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed
I don't know why these aren't used more in building fabric. There's a youtuber who makes these phase change solutions out of various salt mixes aiming for the correct change temperature for a specific application. Eg he made panels for his shed roof (keeps it cooler in sun, warmer at night). Obviously this works better to smooth out large, reliable daily temperature swings, and offers little to someone in a constantly hot or constantly cold place.

I live in Ireland where night/day temperature swings are small. To cool my attic on a hot summer day I'd need to move that heat into a large water tank that gets used for laundry, cleaning, showers etc and is refilled from cold mains water. But fitting an air to water heat exchanger inside my attic would be a big expense and I would have to make sure I didn't freeze the attic.

Regular air to water heat pump could be hooked into my existing tank I suppose?

raffraffraff··on Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon
So if you had a pension mostly in all world indexed funds, you'd switch them over to "boring" investments like cash.
raffraffraff··on Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
The next stage in all of this shit is to turn what you have into a service. What's the phrase? I don't want to talk to the monkey, I want to talk to the organ grinder. So when you kick things off it should be a tough interview with the manager and program manager. Once they're on board and know what you want, they start cracking. Then they just call you in to give demos and updates. Lol
raffraffraff··on The tech monoculture is finally breaking
If you're going running with your Walkman I think 30 hours on a single AA would be fine
raffraffraff··on Why Does Destroying Resources via TF Suck?
There is the code, the recorded state of the infra when you applied the code and the actual state at some point in the future (which may have drifted) . You store the code in git, the recorded state (which contains unique IDs, ARNs etc) in a bucket and you read the "actual state" next time you run a plan, and you detect drift.

These days people store the state in terraform cloud or spaceliftor env0 or whatever. Doesn't have to be the same infra you deployed.

If you were a lunatic you could not use a state backend and just let it create state files in the terraform code directory, check the file into git with all those secrets and unique ids etc.

raffraffraff··on The tech monoculture is finally breaking
Generally, across most DAP manufacturers, the android devices are all of those things that I don't want, and the non-android devices tend to be cheaper, lighter, with better battery life. I don't specifically choose non-android, I specifically chose those other parameters and have simply noticed a pattern. I don't doubt you, but you haven't given any examples and I'm not going to spend my life searching for the exception that proves the rule.
raffraffraff··on The tech monoculture is finally breaking
Well, I had something like this back in the late 90s (can't recall the year exactly)

https://walkman.land/aiwa/hs-px297

    Battery: 1AA gets 30h
    Dimensions: 111.4 x 29.1 x 80.7 mm
    Weight: 132g
Ok, so you were limited to 90 minute tapes with slow seek. But aside from that compare it to the specs I posted for the android vs non-android mp3 players. Remember, this cassette player has some seriously impressive clockwork inside that case and it's still smaller and much lighter than the android.

Also remember you can just buy another AA battery, and keep a few spares in your bag.

raffraffraff··on The tech monoculture is finally breaking
Never mind mp3 players, I'd love a small phone again also. It's ridiculous that there isn't a single decent android phone
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