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timtom39

229 karma · joined January 15, 2022

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timtom39··on RSS and why I believe most people should come back using them
> And you're missing on that whole important social aspect as well

My RSS reader links directly to HN comments hence how I arrived here. Other than HN most social discussions are not useful to me.

timtom39··on US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission
> I do wonder what percentage of Apple stock is owned by pension funds and the like, i.e. The Regular Person, once you unwind the levels of indirection (mutual funds, etc). It is surely a double digit percentage, but high, low? No idea.

Pretty high. The S&P 500 has ~7% apple stock which means many peoples retirement accounts have several percentage points of apple stock.

timtom39··on Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space
I would like to add that IPFS pretty much doesn't run on spinning rust or slow CPUs. A PI or other low end box can easily run torrents with an external harddrive. IPFS can't download large files at a reasonable speed on slow hardware.
timtom39··on Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space
In practice libgen uses torrents. The available seed nodes for IPFS are... few. This is largely due to the software/protocol being pretty bad compared to battle tested torrents.
timtom39··on Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space
Running IPFS at scale is horrible. Try to download a few dozen TBs of small files. Its garbage collection is rubbish (ended up nuking the ZFS dataset every couple of days instead), it is very CPU and IOPS hungry, and it has bad network throttling support.

I would claim it has failed the test of time as it has very little adoption.

timtom39··on Fossify – Open-source fork of Simple Mobile Tools
What did you find for a gallery? I never found an open one I liked other than simple gallery.
timtom39··on Fossify – Open-source fork of Simple Mobile Tools
I am happy about this fork. Simple Mobile Tools were some of the better non spying free android apps.
timtom39··on My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
and archive.ph on cloudflare (nothing but CAPTCHAs)
timtom39··on Korean Smartphones Have Mandatory Shutter Sounds, 8 in 10 Want It Muted
Good point. I am sure the US won't just think of another reason to go to war...
timtom39··on Ford is killing the Explorer hybrid because cops are buying all of them
It is not a feature it was forced down by the EPA :/ I have such an SUV and a $20 part wired into the fuse box fixes it.
timtom39··on California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses
You can already deduct many of these and should be. Talk to an accountant but deduction is usually ratio of usage for work vs personal. Also, keep your personal and work expenses very separate in case there is ever an audit.
timtom39··on California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses
My company is largely remote at this point and is moving away from CA for cost/tax reasons. For some portion of companies this is just one more reason to move headquarters.

That being said, I live in a pretty population dense area and my largest cost by far is dedicated home office space. It would be nice for my company to pay for that but it would have also been nice for them to pay for gas for my commute when I had one.

I think CA is likely overplaying their hand. They are not the place of choice for many remote employees (because of taxes) and are trying hard to not be the place of choice for remote companies.

timtom39··on Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
It might stop players like FB from releasing their new models open source...
timtom39··on Starlink's User Terminal Firmware
Yea, favorite place I found OpenWRT was in DJI phantom 2 Wi-Fi Extender module. Managed to SSH into it. Hardware was not particularly interesting just cool to see OpenWRT in a widely purchased product.
timtom39··on Short session expiration does not help security
In Latvia what happens if you lose your ID?
timtom39··on GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?
Love the tool. One of my favorite snippets adds parallel processing to jq

#!/bin/bash

cat - | parallel --line-buffer --pipe --roundrobin jq "$@"

timtom39··on Bots can complete CAPTCHAs quicker than humans
Yes and No. They used to be much harder to solve but modern AI has made them much easier to solve in the last couple of years.

Profitability. That is what it comes down to. The price of solving these have plummeted in last couple of years.

timtom39··on Bots can complete CAPTCHAs quicker than humans
The bots would just slow down then. Their time is ~free.

reCAPTCHA is one of the better captcha because they do a decent amount of browser fingerprinting and their captcha are interactive.

Still there are services for solving them. Fun thing is you only need to pay those services for first ~50K captcha and then you can train your own solver using the data you collected.

Ultimately, captchas only serve to increase the cost of running bots. If what ever your trying to protect is worth more you will fail.

timtom39··on Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/

Just read their blog. Latest three: - EU's AI Act - Fakespot school supplies? - Making trustworthy chatbots to support women plagued by violence and abuse

The first one might make sense? Second one WTF? And third is disgusting (I know people effected and the LAST thing they want is some chatbot).

None of these are related strongly to Firefox. I quit donating to them years ago after it was obvious they have their priorities messed up.

timtom39··on More Than 40% of Japanese Women May Never Have Children
To back this up because I was curious, 2.29% of Japan's population is immigrants vs 13.6% of US's population.
timtom39··on Swing VPN app is a DDoS botnet
FYI, Mozilla outsources its servers to Mullvad
timtom39··on PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model
> like any software, at some point in it's life need to be refactored.

This is simply not true for most software. Software has a product life cycle like everything else and major refactors/rewrites should be weighed carefully against cost/risk of the refactor. Many traditional engineering fields do much better at this analysis.

Although, because I run a contracting shop, I have personally profited greatly by clients thinking this is true and being unable to convince them otherwise.

timtom39··on Gov. DeSantis signs bill banning most direct-to-consumer auto sales
Automobile dealers are separate business entities with different motivations from the manufactures. In particular, they have historically demanded access to training, access to parts, ability to negotiate price, trade ins, etc.

IMO danger of them disappearing is what we see with tech and luxury brands who go through a ton of effort to enforce their MAP and are not particularly motivated to make things repairable.

That being said, they are middlemen and there is defiantly a balance.

timtom39··on Removing support for forwarded ports
Dam, really liked these guys but this makes it about useless for torrent seeding. I wish they would have considered alternatives like only allowing port forwarding for some of their IPs. I don't care about IP reputation.
timtom39··on Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available
Not been a .NET developer for a decade. C# was king. Has that changed? Is F# popular now?
timtom39··on Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
Home Assistant would be a lot more convincing if every upgrade did not completely break my install.

Flashed this on ESP I had laying around and did NOT have to upgrade HA (which would have made me not try the project).

timtom39··on Together’s $20M seed funding to build open-source AI and cloud platform
This is the org behind RedPajama. So, to date, they have been open.
timtom39··on Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla
Given their complete reliance on google for funding and biased political stance. I don't think they are in a great position to deliver content you can "trust".
timtom39··on Mozilla.ai: Investing in Trustworthy AI
Why is Mozilla qualified to have an opinion on this? Have they released anything significant in the field?
timtom39··on Ahrefs saved $400m in 3 years by not going to the cloud
The performance benefits of a real DB server with local NVME and a TB+ of ram can save TONS of engineering effort/time. I have ran 10TB+ PostgreSQL DBs in both the cloud and bare metal and TBH, in terms of time required to maintain, there isn't a huge difference once you move beyond what RDS can do.

That being said, if RDS can do what you need USE IT. You can always migrate later and it will save you the need to hire someone who really knows postgres.

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