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throwaway8481

67 karma · joined February 9, 2024

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throwaway8481··on FTC Pushed to Crack Down on Companies That Ruin Hardware via Software Updates
I think the opposite side of this coin is that the company should clearly define the minimum lifetime of the product and it support, including what services they will provide upon its sunset (such as a partial refund and disposal if the product folds before that date). I want to make an informed decision, and like you I would shop for another product beyond this crap we subscribe to.
throwaway8481··on Exploiting CI / CD Pipelines for fun and profit
At my work, I often see these 2 things throughout the codebase:

- an identifier for an environment variable that gives us the azure key vault scope (another identifier) - an identifier for the token to pull from that scope

Then the scope name and token name are used to pull the token secret value using the secrets api.

I am not experienced in how this is "supposed to be". Would it make sense to make both of these environment variables so neither identifier appears directly in code? (scope name and token name)

Thank you for the insight :)

throwaway8481··on QUIC is not quick enough over fast internet
Generic Segmentation Offload

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/segmentati...

throwaway8481··on Why I self host my servers and what I've recently learned
Yep. California DMV. 1 in 10 Americans live in California and these companies have our data.
throwaway8481··on Show HN: Pulsar, micro creative coding playground
Obligatory side material that was a joy to read:

https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons-v2/pre-index.htm...

throwaway8481··on Why I self host my servers and what I've recently learned
Tangentially, I really dislike walking into the DMV and seeing ads from private companies. I heavily dislike that ID checking and document verification is done by ID.me and others for what is a public service I pay for through my taxes.

Maybe for a while I can avoid submitting my documents and information to partners-of-the-DMV, but just like airport security it's a convenience tax. They do not value your time, and they will demonstrate it by putting you through extra hoops to coerce you into giving them everything.

throwaway8481··on Why is it so hard to share links on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn was never perfect. It worked for some who had extensive people networks to bring to the platform, but the platform itself was always hot garbage. I still tell younger folk about the days when they would spam your entire address book. I'm still seen as the loony in my peer circle for having no LinkedIn presence. It's an industry standard of hot garbage.
throwaway8481··on Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again
> Model outputs are untrusted input.

I think the problem is they're trying to introduce nuance and a narrow path to allow this. They want an acceptable level of risk to using untrusted model output for the efficiency/productivity gains it will bring, notwithstanding hallucinations.

Generative AI would not have flown in the security theater of Yesteryear, but CTOs see productivity multipliers.

throwaway8481··on Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F
I believe in you.
throwaway8481··on Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers
I've struggled with ending my shift and mentally checking out of work. However, I wouldn't impose going back to the office on others who can do this effectively. I think the comment is about maintaining a work-from-some-office-space capability.
throwaway8481··on USB disk as /dev/sda on a not-rooted smartphone using Termux, QEMU, Alpine Linux
What is with the defeatism? It all starts somewhere. I moved on from desktop computers 10+ years ago. I've only owned laptops, and I've stayed on laptops because I cannot do "everything" to a reasonable practicality on smartphones. This is one of those pieces I need.

It's not fast today, but it's possible and portable.

throwaway8481··on Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P
I feel like I should say something about discord not being a suitable replacement for a forum or bugtracker.
throwaway8481··on Motion blur all the way down (2022)
I feel like motion blur should be used like mouse acceleration. Like you said: If I whip my head around quickly that image should present clearly and immediately. However, if I'm in a car or flying through the air (in a game) this may distort the image as I'm glancing. This is the kind of drag-as-you-accelerate blur I'm expecting, and it can really make a fast-paced moment look that much more exciting. Motion blur is poorly executed everywhere.
throwaway8481··on Ask HN: What AI assistants are already bundled for Linux?
Could they just package ollama and build a Python GTK interface around the CLI interface?
throwaway8481··on The KDE desktop gets an overhaul with Plasma 6
Okay, I am of course excited that KDE is making such fantastic strides forward. How-the-ever, GNOME is ahead of them because of the progress on high dynamic range color, non-fullscreen/partial scanouts, variable refresh rates, and the hidden work in GNOME extensions enabling things like PaperWM.

Both KDE and GNOME are accelerating at a fantastic pace, but 1 of these projects are prioritizing the less visible (and hugely important) stuff. That is GNOME. I apologize for capitalizing Gnome, but that's what's comfortable.

Once both DEs support these things, we can then recognize we're so far behind the curve with "spatial computing". As VR-enabled desktop environments become a thing, we need to view DEs like physics/sandbox simulators. A lot of the design specs that Apple puts out essentially mirror what you would expect in an environment with actual physics interactions. How light bounces between layered interface components. It's going to be hugely resource-intensive but someday we'll look back on 2D GUIs and DEs like something that pales in comparison to the amazing interfaces of a 3D environment where we can attach virtual surfaces to walls and ceilings and have them follow after us as we move around the office/house with our headsets.

(Someday: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula/issues/174)

PS: I'm loving how both KDE and GNOME are pushing a lot of DE behaviors into JS extensions. On a separate front, everything we interact with is like this close to being entirely within a web browser.

Nobody likes what I've said, but I'm prophesying now: DEs will need to go "spatial", and all of /this/ will be in a web browser by 2027.

throwaway8481··on Walmart buying TV-brand Vizio for its ad-fueling customer data
If it is internet-connected without the Apple TV, it's likely taking screen captures an identifying what you're watching.
throwaway8481··on OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvement
Our ServiceNow team literally believes use of the REST API is a security risk, because you can insert "bad data" into the incident table and others. I showed them different ways you can break the web GUI to do things like creating a ticket without a customer, or setting a ticket to On Hold without an On Hold Reason, etc. I actually created a dashboard called the "Gallery of Broken Tickets" because they didn't know how to make reports and dashboards, and then I presented this to them to show them bad data that currently exists in `incident`. I'm never getting hired to that team.

But yes, RPA is big at our org right now. In ServiceNow too.

throwaway8481··on OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvement
As an aside: I'm stunned how willing my own org is to train an RPA process that can break so easily, vs scripting the same actions in PowerShell and performing it against a REST interface in ServiceNow (our ticketing system). They scream and cry about proper authentication methods to ServiceNow (OAuth not username + password), and then they're happy to let an RPA process clunk around doing something recorded. They shot down the script that works, and are investing hundreds of hours in an RPA expert to do it with many less scripted validation steps. Just ugh.
throwaway8481··on Fedora Atomic Desktops
I liked Nix, because it worked very well to reproduce "the same system" every time. However, it became unmanageable and a huge time sink to constantly remake how I scripted together my nix flakes per the current/modern way of doing that. And then finding a repository of how someone else managed this on Github and rewriting my configuration again.

Nix ultimately made me feel like I was running Gentoo. Excellent build system, but I could not invest the time in learning ebuilds, and I could not invest the time in using Nix's language to manage its packages. It was just a huge time sink and baggage to maintain.

rpm-ostree is lowering the barrier to entry greatly to produce layered [open container] images that we can rebase off of. That is the future among all this atomic stuff. It would be entirely possible to /someday/ build a system with the nix toolset, then commit the image through rpm-ostree, and have others rebase from it. Best of both.

In the future, with immutable systems, it probably also means being able to have those very robust update systems in place like Chromebooks where you update and switch to partition B with the new image, while having the fallback on partition A. It would also probably make it easier to verify and sign these images for secure boot purposes so then enabling secure boot on Linux becomes easier/convenient, and the secure default.

I still think the Nix language is yet another language I don't see the value in. I'm not learning this, or becoming comfortable in this language, or convincing myself it's a comfortable language to use ...just to maintain my 2-3 laptops when I don't use Nix anywhere else.

Time sink. But a very solid system.

PS: I want them to layer everything on Fedora CoreOS. Make CoreOS the secure thin base, then create all these atomic "Spins" as a derivation of CoreOS.