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sersi

2,043 karma · joined February 25, 2017

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sersi··on Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates
I don't know why you're downvoted, any public wifi access point in a shop could be compromised and users would never notice.
sersi··on Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update
Entirely true, it's not true security, same as changing the ssh port. So, relying on it for any security is not useful but it's a good deterrent from automated scans that are not targeted towards you. Defense in depth means not necessarily discarding flawed defenses if they are in addition to proper defense.
sersi··on New iPad mini
Thanks for the link, checked it and well even side by side on my mbp, the difference is not that super obvious. 30 to 60 fps is very obvious and night and day. 60 fps and 120 fps, I only notice the difference side by side if I pay attention...

But maybe it's because I'm 40+ with relatively bad eye vision and 20 years earlier I'd be noticing the difference much more.. But I'd say going from 1080p to 4k was a lot more obvious than that...

sersi··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
My computer is jailbroken, I have sip disabled yet icloud and imessage work. So what makes my computer different from my phone?
sersi··on WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulator
I mean it is a bug, if they had been smart about it, they'd just have only added the instructions to the prompt or have their chatbot get a slightly different help page with the instructions embedded in there and not made it public.

Implementing it this way for their own chatbot is stupid. Now as to whether it's ethical or not that's something else.

sersi··on '500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds
Oh yes, didn't try cyberpunk yet but Witcher was great because even if long, it was rather tight. Problem is that when I stop playing for 2-3 months due to work, it's hard to remember where I was.
sersi··on '500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds
Exactly, until my 20s I enjoyed long games. Now, I have a family, I have other things competing with my time, I want something that is tight with barely any fillers that deliver a good story. My most memorable recent games all delivered on that: Forgotten City (8 hours to finish it completely), Carto, A Juggler's Tale, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, ...

While I do enjoy longer games like Yakuza, etc, I really enjoy being able to play through a game in 1 to 2 evenings.

sersi··on The Origin Story of Kid Pix
Yes, old dos games are perfect for young kids. The Castle of Dr Brain, the humongous games, Incredible Machines to just name a few.
sersi··on State of Devs 2026
I guess my comment was done a bit too quickly and comes across as muddled. I mostly agree with you, in the hand of competent people AI is a very powerful tool. I'm a bit of a misanthrope and I think that incompetent, stupid and malicious people vastly outnumber competent, well-intentioned people. This leads me to feel rather pessimistic about the impact of AI because it is a multiplier when the human constant is often less than great.

In a lot of big companies, you had a small majority of people who were incompetent but mostly harmless because their lack of competence prevented them from causing too many issues and another group of people who were competent and productive. Nowadays, with AI those incompetent people can be maximally effective at causing issues due to their incompetence.

The same happens with opensource projects who are now flooded with mostly useless PRs and bug reports from incompetent people directing LLMs to do so. etc...

So yes individually AI makes people productive but I'm not sure if that is true at the scale of a company nor do I think it's necessarily true with opensource projects.

sersi··on State of Devs 2026
One doesn't invalidate the other. Yes LLMs have been very successful at solving math problems when guided by mathematicians who know what they're doing. The same is true for emulating a PS5 or (insert cool new project of the week developed with LLM).

On the other hand, when I use LLMs, I regularly see them confidently claim information confidently that is false. So, I'd say productivity gains are true but there's also a cost of wrong information being used to make decisions due to AI.

sersi··on Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over
I like the definition of extrovert and introvert that says that extroverts are regain their energy by being in group whereas introverts regains there by being alone. According to that, I'm an introvert, I need my alone time so that I can recenter myself and recover my energy. I do feel drained when being in events with a lot of people.

But, that doesn't stop the fact that I do like people, I like organizing parties (or rather I don't particularly like the organizing but I like the result of having organized parties and having close friends) at my place and regularly invite friends. It's just that after that I'm exhausted and I need some alone time to recover. So being an introvert doesn't imply that you shouldn't make effort to reach out to people or that you won't enjoy being with others. It just means that having some alone time is necessary to recover.

sersi··on Pirating the Pirates
I hated Moana 2 but I didn't know about the context. Thanks for that, that now explains it. It's a pity because I much prefer Moana to Frozen but I have no plans to show my kid Moana 2.
sersi··on Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]
Well worth playing the remastered version. It makes the control a bit more bearable but otherwise feels like the original.
sersi··on The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire
Yes, co-fermented coffee tends to be lower quality coffee that is co-fermented with flavouring juice to cover the lack of quality. That's not the case of all co-ferments but it's a significant enough number of them that it's usually something to avoid unless you really trust the roaster and farm.
sersi··on JetKVM Mini
Likewise no issue, I also have the gl-inet which is nice because it supports audio but the interface is not as well designed as jetkvm
sersi··on The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac
An average user will not know that the site caused the issue. The first time after force turning off the computer, it will restart and reopen all windows causing the computer to crash again. The next time, they might click on the button to prevent reopening all windows and everything will be fine until they opens safari which will cause the same issue. At that point, they'll call whoever is their computer expert user to help them out.
sersi··on Who People Talk to When They're Struggling
I had a great experience when I was part of a lodge. I'm atheist and so could join a Droit Humain lodge in France (which does not require belief in a Great Architect of the Universe and is mixed). I'm now in Hong Kong but unfortunately have failed to find a lodge that doesn't require a belief in God and that is mixed (I refuse to go to a male only lodge).

It's a pity because I found freemasonry to be hugely beneficial in terms of friendship, interesting discussions and support.

sersi··on What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
Yup and even when they are credit cards, "cartes à débit différé", they behave more like automated charge cards. The amount is automatically taken out of your account at the end of the month, you are supposed to pay in full and don't have the option of making minimum payments. So the poor banks cannot make nearly as much money with interest rates and instead are forced to have relatively high account maintenance fees (that are published and much more transparent to the customer).

That said as a French person with a ssn living in Asia, I don't have a french credit card because it's so expensive and foreign conversion fees are very high, whereas I use a us card because the currency conversion rate is very close to the market rate and it costs a lot less to maintain the account.

sersi··on GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea
Because a lot of people will install whatever closed source magisk module or lsposed extension they can find to go around the bank jailbreak detection and end up actually weakening their security posture. Those modules are a prime target for trojan attacks.
sersi··on GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea
It's not a question of defending a corporation, it's that publishing a video that mixes true facts with facts that are not quite right weakens your argument and makes it easier for the corporation to control the narrative by pointing anything that's disingenuous.

And to be clear, I'm not defending LG here. Their terms and conditions are terrible, 'We know who's in the LG household… we own the glass' is not something that should be said by any appliance company and shows a clear lack of ethics. But if someone is going to make a video explaining what's happening it's better to stick to what LG is actually doing instead of listing potential issues without making it clear.

A rooted tv by definition has less security, if you show that you can record because you have full control over the device that only shows that there's no hardware block for the mic (which most devices in existence don't have, apple, Framework, pinephones are the exception there). It's not in anyway different from most phones and devices that people use in daily life.

sersi··on GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea
> I wouldn't say it's a solved problem. Just have to find an exploit that works with verified / attested boot

In general though on devices that are rootable, white-hat hackers are more inclined to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities instead of releasing them as a way to root said device. So having a rootable phone does increase security.

What doesn't increase security is when bank apps that are essential to daily life start detecting that a device has been rooted and force a lot of people into using closed source extensions to hide the fact that the devices is rooted.

sersi··on GamersNexus and LG: Or why rooting your TV is a bad idea
With streaming apps unfortunately you can run in compatibility issues if you do not update. So for people using the TV for streaming, it does make sense to at least update that part of the software.
sersi··on There's a new "Google Jail" for independent wikis
Personally I liked it 10 years ago when I searched for something and Google actually delivered useful results that were related to what I was searching. Nowadays, when I search for anything, I mostly get blogspam, ai slop and useless articles or in the very best scenario, good content on a page infested with ads (luckily there's ublock origin).

So yeah, when my goal is to search for content that would be in a wiki, I'm ecstatic when I get an independent wiki over fandom. The Google Jail is the opposite of what I'd want.

Nowadays, I use Kagi which is better than Google but it's still not to the level of Google in 2010.

sersi··on Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
That's something I struggle with, I try to get LLMs to output code I don't care much about and focus on the parts I do and it kind of works but the problem is that reading code written by the LLM is even worth than reading LLM generating text. It's nauseating and you still have to read what the LLM did if you want to really work on the parts that matter.
sersi··on The revolt of the reader
I have a tendency to switch between different languages when interacting with LLM depending on the language of the most likely sources the LLM will pull. It's interesting because the llm speech patterns vary from language to language. And I am much faster at noticing LLM generated text in English (which I use 70% of the time) than in French or Spanish.
sersi··on The Real Luxuries In Life
I've found that traveling and discovering new things make time seem to pass slower because I have a lot of memories of those new places. On the other hand when I'm in a routine and keep doing the same thing everyday, it feels that time passes slower at the moment (because I'm bored) but looking back then time seems to have flown by
sersi··on I Want a Wife (1971) [pdf]
Oh, now I get it. Thanks. For what it's worth, I agree with you about spending time getting to know each other before moving forward. I just believe that doing that doesn't reduce the necessity of not putting oneself in a situation with no alternatives or way out.
sersi··on I Want a Wife (1971) [pdf]
Then I'm confused by what you're trying to say. Reread it a few times, let me try to state how I understand your argument: - thinking about having a way out (so not being a stay at home wife for example) is a modern way of thinking about "committing".

- By thinking this way, you're not fully in the relation, so it's harmful to the relationship stability. (which I interpreted as divorce)

ok, I admit the last part, I'm not sure what you mean by front-loading the friction... I just focused on not keeping a hot standby.

Sorry for my confusion, not trying to be difficult here, I really don't get what you mean if not what I originally interpreted it as

sersi··on AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems
After 2 minutes of reading that article, I inspected and deleted the node. Very annoying.
sersi··on The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs
Yes and not only that, they translate lyrics so that it rhymes and preserve the connotations without doing literal translations. An example of that is Moana's French translation compared to original. The translation of the You're welcome song in Pour les Hommes (translate to For mankind) is a great example, the meaning of the song is kept while also keeping the same rhyme for the chorus.

Even something like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is very well translated. The Cantonese translation is very good and replaces "Hot Diggidy Dog" with something that works better for young Cantonese speakers...

Only criticism I'd make is that the subtitles tend to be more literal translations rather than transcribing the dubs.

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