dada78641

The piracy will continue until morale improves.

If this happened to me I would take it to the grave with me.

I was once asked to install surveillance software on my personal PC, as a remote freelance worker. The person responsible on Slack told me "let me know when you've installed it". So I decided to just wait 15 minutes and then say "yeah I installed it" to see if they would notice that I didn't... and they didn't, they just said "OK, thanks" and I never heard anything about it ever again.

I realize this doesn't really help this conversation but that's all I can think of whenever this kind of subject comes up.

Two crypto thieves decided to settle an argument over who was wealthier by screensharing as they transferred crypto between wallets to prove ownership. In doing so, one of them — known online as "Lick" — revealed a wallet address that crypto sleuth zachxbt quickly tied to the theft of around $90 million from US government wallets containing seized crypto assets

Rapp snitches.

It has also really accelerated the army of hustlers who can't actually code but want to get a contributor badge on major repos to put on their resume.

It's not like this sort of hustling didn't exist prior to LLMs but the volume has ballooned massively.

The thing that really offends me about Windows 11 is that new right click menu that takes like 500 ms to appear each time you use it and is less useful than the old one.

Recently I've been experimenting with Atlas, Revi and Ghost Spectre, which are custom stripped versions of Windows, and it's such a breath of fresh air. It really makes me feel like if only they'd just ruthlessly pull out all the new garbage without regard for "but we just made and shipped this", Windows would actually be pretty good.

Say what you want about Apple and their slow descent into a fully walled garden where independent software development is slowly eroded and sabotaged, but even their most reviled update in years (macOS 26) is still miles ahead of Windows 11 in terms of cohesion and polish.

It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.

I get what you're saying, but thinking about it, I'd be very surprised if the personal computing world ends up seeing anything like a paradigm shift that is so unprecedented it will catch the likes of Apple unprepared. And I realize it might sound arrogant or even ludditic to say this, but we'd need some sort of shocking new concept that no one ever came up with even in sci-fi. It's no longer really a matter of being able to technically implement something, but more about coming up with a human interface that is both totally novel and more convenient and practical than what we have now.

The qwerty layout comes from 19th century typewriters and we're still using it. The mouse was conceived of in the 1960s. Tiny computers that fit in the hand and voice operated devices have been utilized in early sci-fi works. And there's obviously VR, even though I think that's more of a toy than anything.

The only thing that is potentially in that same league of usefulness that I can think of is a brain-computer interface of some sort but those are currently so far away from having competitive practicality that there's a huge amount of runway.

It really is kind of incredible. I just saw the clip and there really is absolutely nothing there. This is not even 10% as poignant of what Jon Stewart would say in his day. He doesn't even say anything about Kirk himself, or even about the murder—he just talks about the reaction to it.

I already thought it was very suspicious that Sinclair's official press release just talks about how the remarks were "inappropriate and deeply insensitive" without describing anything about the actual remarks. And it even calls for the FCC to get involved?

What this really says is: you should be very afraid, because we will completely demolish if it suits us and we don't need a pretext.

This is a 100x better explanation than what's in the blog post. The blog post is practically a tweet.

Reading that set of quotes, it really is incredible how little Musk knows about even extremely basic things. He doesn't understand there are different problem spaces in tech, and that different problem spaces require completely different approaches and skill sets. To him, something like World of Warcraft is very impressive, so if you build Paypal on the same technology it will be impressive too. Like, honestly it's shocking that this guy is allowed near anything that has a button.

I hate to be this person, but... it's scraping, not scrapping. You're scraping the information off the page regardless of what its structure is.

"The uploader has not made this video available in your country."

First video on the page. I'm guessing this is probably a news report, right?

Back in 1999 I was the technical lead for the Mac OS X Finder at Apple. At that time the Finder code base was some 8 years old and had reached the end of its useful life. Making any changes to it require huge engineering effort, and any changes usually broke two or three seemingly unrelated features. For Mac OS X we decided to rewrite the Finder from scratch.

Not that I don't appreciate your work from back then, but as a longtime daily Mac user I cannot wait for the day that this is done once again. The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing. Not to mention it's actually capable of locking up waiting for network access in some circumstances.

I don't know what the Finder source code looks like today but I bet it's a similar kind of hell project as the Classic Finder was back then when they first rewrote it, considering how reluctant they are to do anything to it.

I have a command set up that basically does this:

    yt-dlp -i --format "bestaudio" -x --convert-thumbnail jpg --add-metadata --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail --audio-format "best" -o "%(autonumber)02d %(title)s (%(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s) [%(id)s].%(ext)s" "https:// ... youtube URL ..."

I just hope this appeal cannot make it worse than it is

It cannot. The IA already basically got the worst possible judgment.

This is also not an existential threat to the IA, and payment has already been agreed upon. The reporting on this is extremely sensationalist.

Because if they can force (or try to) Amazon to fork over comms records, they can do the same to me or to you.

Since when am I a trillion dollar company?

While I agree that CSS is sometimes difficult and obtuse, and getting things working in it is more of an art than a science, it's actually shockingly easy to get basic layouts working in it these days even as a total beginner. CSS is very powerful and you can learn the basics very quickly.

It's also worth keeping in mind that CSS is sometimes more complicated than it seems like it should be due to accessibility concerns and flexibility. That's why you can take some HTML produced by some part of your system and use it in completely different contexts with totally different designs, entirely as is, just by adding a few different rules.

I've been doing HTML dev since the late 90s and things were infinitely more difficult back in the old days. CSS might have been simpler, but doing complex things required tons of bizarre hacks that also made your design more frail and less accessible. These days CSS has improved to the point where you can do just about anything, and even very complicated effects can fairly easily be deconstructed just by looking at the devtools and poking around until you get it.

CSS isn't perfect, but all things considered I'm not complaining.

It's good to take off the nostalgia glasses and to be honest about how things were far from perfect in the past, but I feel like people sometimes overcompensate when doing so. Frankly, things weren't that bad most of the time.

I don't know what chatrooms you were in, but I've been on IRC for many years and there were always plenty of moderators. And if there weren't, people would just move on someplace else. It's not like the concept of moderation hadn't been invented yet. File sharing might actually have been easier in the past than today due to DCC transfers and fserves on IRC (and torrents already existed since the early 2000s). Sure there were pitfalls, especially on networks like Kazaa, but you can't really expect to be pirating content on the open internet and not have some basic smarts to avoid getting taken advantage of. It's not like that's meaningfully different today.

Either way, I think it's sort of beside the point. Nobody is denying that a lot of things have vastly improved today, especially in QOL -- it should be better, as we've had years to develop the tech -- but the point is that the internet has also gotten extremely commercialized, filled with spam and low quality generated content, and neutered to the point where individuality has mostly been lost.

You can talk all day long about how the modern internet is technically far superior to the old internet, and how we don't have dialup anymore -- sure, I get that, and you're right. But this article is about how the joy of being part of a great new frontier has been lost. Everything is owned by some big faceless company now, everything is being curated according to some algorithm designed to maximize profit, and you're not allowed to touch anything anymore. That's a shame! And we can legitimately look back and say it wasn't always like this.

My personal experience is that Windows 11 for ARM runs extremely well on Parallels. It includes an emulation layer for x86 apps that's completely invisible and just works. I can even still run Cakewalk, a program originally from the 90s, on my M1 Mac to edit midi files.

With that being said, this is just my view as someone who uses simple consumer oriented programs, and I'm not sure how well it'll work for more serious purposes.

It's always a good thing for technical information about incidents like this to be made accessible to the public. NASA is a publicly funded organization and as such they do have a responsibility towards us.

Of course there are operational details that we don't need to be made aware of, but for an incident as big as this there's no reason to at least know how it happened and what could be changed to prevent it from happening again.

It's actually funny how exactly it went how everybody expected. It's like watching a movie that's setting up an incredibly obvious ending, and so the whole time you're waiting for a last minute plot twist to happen because it's just way too simplistic if they don't.

But no, it went exactly as anyone could've predicted, no notes.

1. they didn't budge an inch

2. spez is a fucking jerk as always

3. it was over after only a small handful of questions, some of which may have been preplanned

4. we learned nothing new.

It's exactly what everyone saw coming. gg.

This most definitely seems to me like it was more of a "how dare they question me" spur of the moment decision by spez than a legitimate PR effort. At the same time it just reinforces the obvious conclusion that third party app devs were lied to and set up to fail.

I know very little about certificates and online security, but I'm also kind of baffled by the expiration time of the iniLINE certificate (2018-10-10 to 2099-12-31). I feel that's also a poor practice, right? What should a regular expiration time be for a proper root certificate?

Thanks for your work on Starcraft. It's given me a ton of fun over the years and I'm actually playing a tournament game in Remastered this weekend.

I actually really wish we had our hands on some of the earliest builds, even the "orcs in space" ones. I've been playing this game for so long that I'm curious how exactly the final version of it was beaten into shape over time, and how different it feels to play over its development period.

I've never seen whatever code this is, so correct me if I'm saying something stupid, but do they really use uint256 for their number variables? Like a number that goes from 0 to 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639935? Are they trying to keep track of the number of atoms in the universe or something?

Frankly, despite being in r/emulation, most of these people seem like they're new to the emulation scene with how dismissive they're being about this statement. It's as if they're unaware of just how much drama can happen behind the scenes and how it's sometimes useful to just clearly and unambiguously state "this is what happened from our perspective."

Having the wrong scope can be very detrimental to a project in general, and although I'm not an emulator developer I feel this is probably especially true in this case.

I like VueScan just fine, but as far as I can tell you can't do this: https://i.imgur.com/mjt6ruf.png - of course, correct me if I'm wrong.

Being able to freely rotate the section you're scanning is an absolute killer feature if you're scanning things that you can't easily line up perfectly, like anything smaller than A4. Most of my scanning is for archival purposes, and I need them to be as high quality as possible, and I definitely couldn't do without this feature.

Why is an alternative to vaccination a bad thing exactly? I'm vaccinated and I'm certainly not against vaccines per se, but when they're talking about 4th booster shot then to me it only indicates that maybe vaccines wasn't the right way to treat this pandemic.

You do not understand vaccines. It's incredible to me that we still have to be explaining this more than two years into the pandemic, but vaccines are not magical fixes. The COVID-19 vaccine exists to strongly reduce your symptoms in case of infection. The effect does not stay at full efficacy forever and as new strains develop over time they may become less protective still.

Almost make me feel like they're scared of someone finding a better way out of this.

Yeah, obviously there's a giant conspiracy going on to prevent you from finding out about the magical solution to COVID-19. Can't possibly be that your understanding of how stuff works is lacking.

This is what I always found difficult to reconcile with the idea of it being a lab leak. We know what viruses the lab was working with, and SARS-CoV-2 wasn't one of them. If the outbreak came from their lab, why was the virus completely unknown to them? It's a science institute that was openly publishing its findings like any other.

It couldn't have been pre-emptively covered up either, unless they knew ahead of time this virus was going to leak (that is to say, they leaked it intentionally) and then we're no longer in reality.

Maybe there's something I'm missing, and please explain it to me if you can, but with that in mind I never quite got how the lab leak idea can add up.

I think this is the correct way of doing it. Anyone can start their own instance and their own federation.

It'd actually be a massive breach of freedom if you were somehow not allowed to shut out servers from your Mastodon federation—kind of like not having the freedom to block someone on Twitter.

I don't think this signal becomes useless the moment an attacker knows about it. It's one thing to prevent your victim from speaking to anyone unattended, but it's hard to imagine there never being a moment for them to make a quick hand gesture to the outside world. At some point an attacker has to take their eyes off their victim even if for just a moment.

It's true that attackers can take precautions against this, but that also makes their attack harder to carry out.