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zetanor

912 karma · joined June 23, 2021

A conifer.
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zetanor··on Upload Your RAM
The real solution is even simpler than having everyone upload their RAM to him: Sam can ask Claude (or ChatGPT, if OpenAI takes diversity hires) to build him a DRAM fab, using ultrathinking, making no mistakes.
zetanor··on Download your favourite YouTube videos
I suppose you can distribute YouTube videos the same you distribute Linux ISOs. Something like IPFS (RIP(?)) would work even better for random videos than it ever did for Linux ISOs.
zetanor··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
Not your keys, not your coins, I suppose.
zetanor··on Ghostty 1.4
I've always found emojis in the terminal distracting, so it's actually quite a relief to learn that Konsole is guarding me against a whole other class of glyphs and logos.
zetanor··on Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior
>We know why it's different of course: scale

I think it's more about abstraction. If someone is standing on the street corner taking down your plate number, you know they're likely up to no good. If there's a camera on the street corner, it may bother me, but the vast majority of people just go "eh".

zetanor··on Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs
If you have tabs sitting there unused for days, isn't that just a bookmark?
zetanor··on Canadians are running out of time to oppose Bill C-22
Size is important (heh). Democracy in ancient Athens had a "demos" only two or three orders of magnitude larger than Dunbar's number.

Let's ignore the "massification" of democracy (by which I mean entrenched power gaining leverage over the "demos" by targeting propaganda at the low-agency portion of the population, but this may be controversial?). Population scale has changed but Dunbar's number hasn't, and if the 0.1% of the population that is deeply invested in a topic manages to organize, there's a high likelihood that they can get critical reach. However, population scale has changed and Dunbar's number hasn't, so the first step of actually organizing 0.1% of the total population becomes a lot more difficult with scale.

Arguably, my distrust of modern democracy doesn't help, but I have no idea how anyone could manage to find and fish out 20k specific individuals from a pool of 20M people. And that's what needs to be done, IMO, not signing petitions (and in Canada, there's already a little bit of debanking-based chilling effect re: out-of-band political organization).

zetanor··on Canadians are running out of time to oppose Bill C-22
I do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy. If this is true and POSIWID, then mass democracy only ever nullifies any real extent of democracy. As I see it, the only real solution is to replace power. I don't know how to do that. Do you?
zetanor··on British Airways: Filming Crew W Meta Glasses Could Get Your Tickets Cancelled
Social mores. The desire of individuals to farm social capital and the desire of corporations to monetize this drive completely displaced "is it okay if I film this?" for a decade or two, but it seems to be coming back somewhat. I'm not holding my breath, though.
zetanor··on Neural networks are clean
It pegs my i7-12700 before rendering anything if I don't block JS, so I'm quite curious to know what work of art I'm missing out on.
zetanor··on I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic
If advertising and tracking was less egregious, I wouldn't feel the need to use an ad blocker. But, here we are.
zetanor··on I guess I'm using WebP now?
When it comes to animations, is there much of a reason to use avif over webm? I suppose an avif fits into CSS and <img> without further code changes, but that's about it as far as I can think.
zetanor··on How big is a Git commit?
On the flip side, not everyone uses GNU coreutils (though I do on every machine that runs Git), and I wouldn't have been confident that "du -c" and "du --total" are fully interchangeable prior to reading the manual just now. For Git, he could have confidently used "git --message" instead of "git -m", but then again, I'm sure it would have surprised many Git users ("is that -m?").
zetanor··on Time Travel in Braid (2015)
Even if you're putting in 10-20 hours a week, you still have to pick what you play. When Backloggery was more popular, it was quite common to see profiles with dozens or hundreds of "I want to play this when I have the time".

Asserting that you will not play a game ever if you haven't played it in the 5 years following its release is ludicrous.

zetanor··on Time Travel in Braid (2015)
>It's old, I guess, which means either you've played it already or you haven't and never intend to.

Strange sentiment, which is well past the massification and gamesjournalismification of video games. By then, cover shooters were just a bad memory and most serious hobbyists had for a long time embraced both indies (Braid, in 2009) and older titles (Braid, in 2015, when the article was published).

zetanor··on Our approach to EU text provenance rules
It is indeed malicious compliance: https://european-union.europa.eu/cookies_en

I have to assume that this is the work of some contractor (Intracom?). Every cookie could be removed (analytics, etc.; and does europa.eu really need to embed a dozen of American services instead of just using <video>?), and the necessary ones could be consented to at the point of creation without any general interruption ("[ ] Remember Me (stores a 30-day cookie)" during the login flow).

zetanor··on Our approach to EU text provenance rules
The near-ubiquitous malicious compliance that took place during the implementation of GDPR (i.e., displaying consent modals instead of just not sending visitors' personal information to 93 third party services) at least had the benefit of bringing to light just how much web service providers view their users as things to be bought and sold. I doubt that text watermarking will result in much of anything at all, besides additional expense.
zetanor··on <input type="password" maxlength="20"> prevents me from logging into Vanguard
It had to be restricted after someone started using a complete Wikipedia database dump as a password.
zetanor··on Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?
The bottom quintile (of stock, not of class) has always been society's problem. What changed is how they're dealt with.
zetanor··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
So they don't view humans as fungible economic units? That's very backward.
zetanor··on I'm Tired of the AI Tone
I don't use LLMs a whole lot, mostly for research, but personally I'm more bothered by the prompting than by the responses. After years of randomly receiving (now less frequent) incorrect answers, I've gotten used to preempting obvious but wrong trains of thought: "I need X. It's not Y." When I forget to do this and the reply is incorrect, sometimes I'm too lazy to reprompt, so I'll just write back "It's not Y" and it'll answer "wow omg you're so absolutely right, Y is not X!!! here's X instead."

This wasn't great, but then I started catching myself writing "It's not Y" responses to colleagues on Teams. I'm pretty sure I've caught all of these and never actually sent them (I did go and review a few chat logs recently and found no such sent message), but my point is that despite my relatively light LLM usage, I am "LLM-conditioned." The abyss stares back. There could be a lot of deeply "LLM-brained" people out there.

zetanor··on AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
The Spring Fair is a lorem ipsum, here.
zetanor··on Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation
Government jobs attract all the wrong people.
zetanor··on CSS Curiosities of the Past
Besides vendor tricks, I'd like to see a showcase or article about the evolution of page layout patterns over time. That is, the underlying techniques, not the aesthetics; tables, fixed image sizes, float/clear, flex, etc. I'm finding https://code-literacy.medium.com/css-layout-evolution-detail... but it's quite skeletal and incomplete. Has anyone here come across a more complete write-up?
zetanor··on The Death of Shame Is Tearing Us Apart
Strange that this short article mostly focuses on the absence of shame in business and politics, which has been a constant for many times my lifetime. And we should blame social media for this, too? The only difference now is that everyone knows about backroom dealing. If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism, I feel like he'd be a step closer to an interesting observation.
zetanor··on deSEC – Free Secure DNS
Call me cynical, but I've long stopped taking the time to report minor edge case bugs if I can't also provide a solution or patch, as such reports usually get ignored or sit at the bottom of a bugtracker forever. I likely didn't realize that deSEC was a FOSS stack at the time, or I might have looked into the zone file parsing further.

As for the zone file based workflow requiring zone deletion/recreation, perhaps a report/discussion would have led to something, but I was in the middle of testing managed DNS providers to get rid of my BIND servers and I didn't have any investment in deSEC, so it didn't occur to me to take the time. My initial post on here was less lamentation and more conveying personal experience to (possibly) save someone else some time.

In any case, none of these things were showstoppers for me (I went to another (paid) provider because I need very short TTL on some records for testing purposes), but I'm glad you took the time to look into the parser; it almost certainly will benefit others.

zetanor··on Keep Our Servers Running
The COVID library wasn't even the first time they had book lending on the Archive. I remember at least a couple of different prior borrowing mechanisms. But besides books, JS/WASM emulators were added a long time ago to run game console ROMs directly in the browser on any collection that happens to contain them. There's probably other examples, but nothing else comes to mind right now.
zetanor··on Keep Our Servers Running
I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What's a lot harder to overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library".

I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history. It's not my call, but it seems strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism. What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?

zetanor··on deSEC – Free Secure DNS
A problem there is needing to temporarily delete the entire domain just to update using a zone file. I don't manage the DNS for anything remotely critical, but if I did, it would be unacceptable. Either way, the workflow feels deeply incorrect (though most users likely will use the record editor or the API instead; even I'd use the API through DNSControl, now).

Logging back into deSEC right now, it seems like the parser does work better than it used to, but TTL inheritance is still spotty. As an extreme example, the following input:

    @   7777 IN SOA  x. x. 1 9999 9999 9999 9999
                A    203.0.113.1
        4444    AAAA 2001:db8::1
    www         A 203.0.113.1
... correctly gets parsed by BIND (with the addition of a dummy NS record) as:

    @   7777 IN A    203.0.113.1
    @   4444 IN AAAA 2001:db8::1
    www 4444 IN A    203.0.113.1
... but deSEC parses:

    @   9999 IN A    203.0.113.1
    @   4444 IN AAAA 2001:db8::1
    www 9999 IN A    203.0.113.1
... where 9999 is a $TTL value from a different zone file, from a different domain, that I'd imported in a completely different session. The value is permanently (?) stuck to the entire account. This is ultimately almost a squabble since there's simple workarounds, but it did affect me when I used deSEC, and it's the sort of problem that I constantly run into with other managed DNS services too.

Hopefully this helps in some way.

zetanor··on deSEC – Free Secure DNS
When I last tried deSEC, the service was reliable and well worth the price of admission, but the web UI and API were both quite rough, and propagation tended to be quite slow. It was annoying to do an ACME DNS01 challenge on it, for example. IIRC, the API didn't have a complete set of replace/edit endpoints, so even DNSControl (https://github.com/DNSControl/dnscontrol) would leave records nonexistent for a while while during updates.

As an aside (though this certainly applies to deSEC) it's strange to me how so many DNS services (free or paid) struggle to import simple Bind zone files, often either giving a vague error ("one or more records could not be imported"), mangling records, or even just silently omitting records. Parsing a zone file has some gotchas, but it doesn't seem like it should be that hard.

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