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tgsovlerkhgsel

17,123 karma · joined December 26, 2015

all opinions are my own
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tgsovlerkhgsel··on What Adobe v ArtCraft teaches us
Interesting point, overlooking the biggest part:

"It built a machine that turns valuable things into free things, and then pointed it at the businesses it needed to stay alive. That isn’t a revolution."

It is a revolution. Free models are out there. The "toll booths" (software companies) might not survive, but if that's the case, that is the revolution: Because something that you had to pay a massive "toll" for is now essentially free. That might not help the AI companies but it will be a revolution for everyone else that had to pay the tolls, likely making everything cheaper and everyone better off.

(Yes, everyone. Even a very poor person in a highly developed European country lives better than a mildly rich person before the industrial revolution, and I'd say the average person lives at the levels even royalty could barely dream of.)

Even if this bites the AI labs and they don't survive, building software is not going to become significantly more expensive than it currently is with free models that are being sold at cost (barring something major like a global nuclear war), mainly because you can always continue to run the existing models on existing hardware even if progress were to magically stop.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Your MCU likely escaped the eMudhra intermediate CA compromise
TL;DR: Your MCU likely doesn't have enough space to dedicate so much of it to a full CA store, so it is unlikely to trust those CAs (claims the post).

So many words for such a simple point/claim...

tgsovlerkhgsel··on eMudhra intermediate CA compromise
From what I've seen Mozilla is only banning one root, not the other: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c18
tgsovlerkhgsel··on eMudhra intermediate CA compromise
But only by browsers. curl, autoupdaters etc. would still all accept them.
tgsovlerkhgsel··on Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe
They have been shocklingly competent for international transfers. Most things just work through the app, and the few cases where I had to deal with support it went so smoothly that I assumed the support agent was bullshitting me and I'd hit a wall later (I didn't). Exactly the opposite experience of what I'd expect from a "neobank" and much better than "real" banks.

Even the KYC process the first time I was making a larger transfer was surprisingly smooth.

Currency exchange fees/spread with "classical" banks are absolutely prohibitive.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly Report GLP-1 Signals of Slowed Biological Aging at ARDD
I've seen semi-hidden advertising for GLP-1 drugs in the form of "you wouldn't blame people for being sick, so don't blame them for being obese and start treating obesity like any other illness".

I don't know why this sits so wrong with me - the message itself is legit but it's clearly GLP-1 advertising (the campaign isn't hiding that it's run by one of the GLP-1 companies). Maybe because overt advertising would be illegal in the countries where I saw this?

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Gold is now the top U.S. export
That would be a very convenient way to fix the trade balance that Trump is so obsessed about...
tgsovlerkhgsel··on AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
Install uBlock Origin and don't whitelist any sites. The default filter lists break almost nothing, only once you start including the "annoyances" lists etc. do you start running into significant breakage.

Without an ad blocker, they will be exposed to such an amount of social engineering (ranging from dropshipping sites, to subscription scams, to scam shops that don't ship at all but steal your CC data, to fake sites for government services, to attempts to trick you into installing malware) that you can't expect them to resist it. If installing uBO seems hard, resisting this or cleaning up the consequences is harder.

The amount of "hey have you heard of this great new product I saw" <photo of a handwritten note of the content of a scam site> went down from weekly to near zero once I got a relative to use an ad blocking browser.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
1) Of course, although you probably aren't worth a zero day.

2) Adblockers

tgsovlerkhgsel··on AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
Also, society/law is willing to let them do it/get away with it, rather than holding them responsible.
tgsovlerkhgsel··on AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware
> It completely upsets the economics of content management

Exactly. It moves the economic incentives from "serve the ads from the highest bidder and turn a blind eye to the fact that that's a scammer/malware" to "drop an ad platform that can't or won't keep the scammers/malware out".

Or even better, refusing to use ad platforms that let the ads serve arbitrary code. There is no strict reason why an ad can't be an image (re-rendered by the platform) and a link. Slapping scripts all over the place just makes it easier to collect data (among other things to verify that all the companies involved in serving your ad aren't cheating you, because the ecosystem is full of scammers in all directions).

The deterrent here would be prosecuting the accomplices involved in, and directly getting paid for, the crime.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999)
At least the versions I remember had a really bad UX for marking keys as trusted.

The correct operation for (even locally) marking "this key belongs to person X" is signing the key. Marking it as "trusted" indicates "this key is a CA that can create statements who other keys belong to", but it's easier to find/"understand".

So if you haven't first studied the details of the security model and terminology, you just start increasing the trust level on the key of your communication partner until the warnings go away, not realizing that by doing this, you've made that key a CA and the reason the warnings disappeared is because you now trust the self-signature (in addition to all other signatures the key issued).

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
Most of the world isn't perfect, and trying to be perfect means you get nowhere. In most places, excessive perfection is implicitly avoided through resource constraints.

In the end, what matters is whether something fulfills its purpose, not how it does it. Code quality, understanding code, etc. are just a means to this goal.

Some level of poor quality is acceptable, and I assume they are hoping that model development (i.e. its capability to fix and clean up an increasingly convoluted mess) will outpace the tangledness of the code.

So far, it seems like they are winning. Yes, the UI is often broken (e.g. for a long time switching away from an ongoing conversation lost it), but it wasn't broken enough for people to switch to other companies that may have had a better UI but in exchange for that a less developed product. If Anthropic instead spent its resources on making the UI not janky and code reviewing everything, the overall product would have likely been worse because they couldn't build and improve features as quickly.

I've seen the flip side where "code quality" becomes its own independent goal and more time is spent gratifying various linters than writing the code, and the inability to get anything done in such an environment is a lot more depressing than janky UX that can probably be fixed by prompting the next generation model to clean it up.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome
The distraction hiding feature is interesting. Does it work automatically or is it essentially just a way to create a custom adblock list?
tgsovlerkhgsel··on Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe
What would help is not Interet-of-shittifying things that don't need to be.

There may be a sensible argument to connect these to the Internet in read-only mode (and from there, poor engineering choices leading to unintended ways to remotely control it). But there are a lot of devices where there is no good reason but everyone tries to cram WiFi and Apps just because they can or because they hope that they'll be able to abuse their users later to make an extra buck. At least those cases need to be discouraged (e.g. by making the companies liable and very publicly bankrupting a number of them).

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Device detection and occupancy monitoring for Airbnb hosts
Of course, but most AirBnB hosts want a product, not a project.
tgsovlerkhgsel··on Backblaze drive stats for Q2 2026
I'm surprised Backblaze doesn't use host-managed SMR. I would expect that they'd already write data sequentially for speed and have different storage tiers (for "hot" data likely to be changed/deleted soon vs. data expected to stay for a long time). At least for large files in the cold tier SMR would make a lot of sense.
tgsovlerkhgsel··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mar'inka,+Donetsk+Oblast,+...
tgsovlerkhgsel··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
It doesn't seem to have that many negative consequences for Israel though, and Oct 7 gave them enough justification for what they're doing in Gaza that they can get away with it internationally, and it has likely also limited the backlash they're getting for the escalating settlements in the West Bank.
tgsovlerkhgsel··on Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah
Looks the same in Ukraine, and at least there it's most likely not primarily because Russians wanted flatten the city (I'm sure they'd have preferred taking it in one piece) but rather because fighting happens from buildings resulting in the buildings getting targeted.

Doesn't mean that here the targeting couldn't have been done with the primary goal of displacing the population, but the buildings being destroyed doesn't prove the motive.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock
> After much soul-searching, deliberation, and gnashing of teeth, my attorneys and I concluded that the statute of limitations was against us. Because of the thirty-odd years that had passed while I “sat on my rights,” it seemed unlikely we’d make it past a motion to dismiss.

That was my first thought as well.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026
What is so energy consuming around fabs? The light source? I always thought of these as high-precision, not-too-high-volume processes and would have expected energy requirements to be lower than e.g. a car factory (or similar to e.g. a mall) and completely negligible on a national grid scale or compared to something like a smelter or lignite mine.

Edit: AI claims HVAC and air filtering/handling can be 40-50% of energy usage. Plus a megawatt per EUV scanner (ok, the latter matches what I would have guessed, but compared to the 16 MW of a single large bucket wheel excavator or estimates I've seen for large shopping malls, that's not that insane either).

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Factorio that you can touch
I think the C (?) mechanic in Shapez to manually fix a corner is really neat. I haven't tried the Factorio R-while-dragging mechanic, it might be the same or close enough.
tgsovlerkhgsel··on Factorio that you can touch
No, this is just about the UX of drawing a long belt in a 2D grid. I think part of the problem is that they can't easily change the existing UX without breaking muscle memory for all existing players, and maybe they might not want to make it "too easy" to avoid throwing off timing or encouraging certain mechanics like blueprints or trains?

Although now that I'm looking at some tutorials, it's also possible that I just missed that they introduced a very similar feature.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Factorio that you can touch
> brimming with QoL features.

I'm surprised they didn't find a way to further improve the belt system. I thought they had it solved pretty well but e.g. Shapez is leagues better (talking about belt placement only here).

tgsovlerkhgsel··on GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
Lack of moderation is an issue everywhere, because there are few consequences for the platforms.

Booking.com kept a clearly fraudulent listing (images clearly stolen from another Booking.com listing with mirroring + some filters) fully online for at least two days (I got distracted and stopped taking daily screenshots after that). I just got a response that they've taken it down almost 10 days after I had initially reported it (although I think they marked it as not bookable some time before that).

tgsovlerkhgsel··on F-Droid 2.0
I only use it to install the apps that aren't available on the Play store (e.g. Öffi, an excellent public transit app that gave up on dealing with the Play store after one too many arbitrary removals, Termux, and NewPipe).

The user experience was just too broken for too long to consider it usable (didn't support background updates for about two years after Google made it available, and generally just too much jank and random errors/failures). I might look into it the next time I'm setting up a device, but I think for the majority of apps I'll still go through the Play store - I don't trust F-Droid to be stable/reliable enough yet.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Transit rewards
> But an "AV lane" will very quickly converge on the traffic characteristics of a regular road.

A regular road loses capacity with increased speed due to increased distances between cars, braking ripple effects etc.

At 75 mph/120 km/h, two seconds distance is 33 meters, likely enough to fit three more autonomous cars into the same lane.

tgsovlerkhgsel··on Transit rewards
Cost, presumably?
tgsovlerkhgsel··on Transit rewards
I assume Visa is paying some of this from their marketing budget.

I've seen Visa branded ads for some e-payment solution in a South-East Asian country. The solution worked with any credit card, but the flyers were clearly Visa marketing material.

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