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slyall

8,574 karma · joined October 24, 2010

I'm a professional Sysadmin who lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Web: http://www.simonlyall.com

Blog: http://blog.darkmere.gen.nz

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/slyall.bsky.social

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slyall··on Getting hit with "Prove you are a human" at every other website
I'll ask it but what about your browsing setup is unusual?

Because often these reports are from people using weird browsers, privacy plugins, VPNs, javascript off, etc

It does happen to "normal" browsers but are you doing anything that look suspicious?

slyall··on AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them
The difference between a junior SRE and a dev is that during an outage the dev will take responsibility for their own code only[1]

While the SRE will follow the problem to the next layer or component and try understand what is going wrong there even though they never heard of the system 10 minutes ago.

[1] "I know I'm on call for this team but the guy who sits next to me wrote that code" is something I've heard way too many times.

slyall··on The 'Buy, Borrow and Die' Wealth Strategy Has Become a $5T Market
https://archive.ph/36hRo
slyall··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
The economic model was lots of advertising

Go find a newspaper from 2000 or earlier. It will have whole sections (20 pages or so each) of advertising for jobs, real-estate and other classifieds. In some places every government job had to be advertised in the newspaper.

All that paid for the newspaper. Usually before it was even printed.

Thats the source of cost you need to replace.

slyall··on Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you
I found out that a closed church I walk past regularly was called "St Chad's"
slyall··on Woman charged with computer fraud due to scam CashApp account being in her name
Free public transport takes away money that can be used to improve service for everyone. Someone on minimum wage would prefer a bus they can actually use to get to work rather than having to buy/maintain a car because the free bus only comes once an hour.

Have targeted low fares for the poor etc.

slyall··on If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?
Personally at home I use the free github copilot and then openrouter when that runs out. Last month I used $0.90 of openrouter. Zero so far this month. When my bill starts hitting double digits I'll consider options.

Different matter at work but even there we are paying for API costs and have a monthly allowance (starts at $200/month but increases fairly easy to get)

slyall··on The insider trading you're allowed to do
A founder at my company does this. Sells $$$ of shares every few weeks.

Amusing the press report the sales as if he's selling due to something that's happening to the company that week.

slyall··on Americans' social activity has steeply declined in the past 30 years
The meetup app costs money for organisers except for the smallest meetings (10 people or less)
slyall··on My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping
Well I guess where you live going 15km/h over the speed limit is accepted like in many parts of the USA.

However in general most 1st world countries have more strict enforcement of speeding than the US does. So the speeding laws are not a good example of unenforced.

slyall··on Leaving Tech
He's in a medium sized town (35,000 people) with no real IT jobs, hence the remote requirement.

However there will no doubt plenty of electrician jobs

slyall··on My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping
I'll guess you are from living in the USA

In other countries going over the speed limit a small amount will get you fined and your license suspended if you do it by enough or often.

People in countries like Australia have to warn US visitors that they have to keep below the speed limit

slyall··on HashiCorp archives the Boundary open source repo
It was using the Mozilla Public license until August 2023 so versions before then might be usable. Some parts are still under MPL

https://github.com/hashicorp/boundary/commit/29da0bcb923236b...

slyall··on ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons
That argument implicitly supports the charging Aaron Swartz
slyall··on What is the size of Yemen? (2024)
The author was one of the people involved in the wikipedia discussion

They knew the figure was wrong but needed a document with the correct figure they could reference.

slyall··on What It's Like to Work in One of America's Data Centers
We had to make our own cable. The boss had his own special way for us to order the wires when we did it. Worked okay for 10Mb/s and 100Mb/s on a good day.
slyall··on Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)
My impression was that FSP was when you had an account on a Unix server at a University and wanted to slowly move files without attracting attention

When people had their own internet connected machine other protocols were much better choices.

slyall··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
I'm doing some programs to use the API for my local bus company to show when buses are arriving at stops. Final step is making it output the data to an external display.

https://github.com/slyall/auckland-stop-display-simple

Some other projects doing similar stuff but I found they were hard to understand (and mostly used an old API that no longer exists) so I (well AI) made mine with small scripts and included curl examples.

slyall··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
There is also this video that dropped last week if people are interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC8zIESRyVs

" WordPress powers about 41% of the internet. It took Matt Mullenweg twenty years to build that. It took him about ninety days in 2024 to lose the trust of the community he built it with — the agencies, plugin developers, hosts, and translators who bet their businesses on the update button still working next Friday. This is the full timeline: how a blog fork in 2003 became a movement, how Automattic became a company, how WP Engine became the target, and how one keynote at WordCamp US turned into cease and desists, lawsuits, forked plugins, mass resignations, and a preliminary injunction "

slyall··on Balrogg: Demonically compacting (up to 15%) lossless Vorbis/Opus recompressor
Yes.

https://github.com/iczelia/bzip3

slyall··on PBS loses 70 years of TV history after cloud storage vendor goes defunct
From yesterday 100 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418

Also just one station not all of PBS

slyall··on New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it
NZ had very strong lockdown but once the country had zero covid there were months of no lockdowns at all.

Other countries had longer lockdowns or even when they didn't people were not going to concerts etc.

slyall··on Plug-in solar is coming. Plug-in batteries should follow
I guess you've never come across electric heaters or if you want to go into the bedroom electric blankets ( 5000 fires per year in the UK in 2011 )
slyall··on Japan legend Miura, 59, scores first goal since 2022
The "PGA Tour Champions" ( formally the Senior Tour ) has golf players over 50 and pretty much does what you suggest.
slyall··on Don't Take the Black Pill [video]
"who failed to live their faith" - ie if they had lived up to their faith would have been good. I'm saying that the practice of "faith" and being "good" are largely unconnected. There are plenty of faithful Christians in prison.

By "good" I mean nice, polite, not murdering people. Generally accepted moral behavior.

slyall··on Don't Take the Black Pill [video]
I was mainly replying to this sentence:

" Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. "

slyall··on Don't Take the Black Pill [video]
A thing you might want to consider is that how "good" a person is is largely independent from their level of religious faith.

It is common for religious people to assume they are linked and that a religious person does good deeds because they are faithful while somebody who does bad deeds has less faith.

Which leads to an assumption by some that atheists are have no morals and priest are exception good.

slyall··on $100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol
Good creator of AI music videos (with human editing etc) is "ALFfx Visual DJ"

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lWArXcsxYo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-4lIFhybA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kjUEan_fgM

Most of their videos have a similar retro-futurism look

slyall··on How we can reduce traffic congestion
Well just live somewhere that is so lacking in density there is no congestion.

Or a small town that is surrounded by farms.

Just avoid suburban housing as far as the eye can see with a limited number of roads everyone gets funneled on to.

slyall··on How to hide from killer drones
Remember you are only seeing a selection of the thousands of times this has happened. The drone operating side will release more of the ones where it didn't work.

It does work at least sometimes. If it didn't work at all soldiers would not bother carrying the shotguns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_shotguns_against_drones https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-soldiers-best-chance...

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