madethemcry

I don't see why this is different to a careless developer allowing an agent to run rm -rf. I recognize the different angle with the exploits but boy wasn't this the exercise with ExploitGym?

Similar to how the basic thought "nobody gives you something for free" protects you from being ripped off in many situations we should apply "no AI company tells you about precious internals for transparency". It's stupid marketing and it's baffling to me how people give them any credibility.

Exactly! Whenever I feel offended by someone, I remind myself of David Foster Wallace's message in "This is Water." It's become a positive reflex for me, one that safes me from a rush of aggression as we all know it. However, I still find myself cursing fiercely in my car from time to time, it's just a stronger reflex, it releases some energy and I know I'm hurting nobody anyway

https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

Hey thanks a lot, that should be the actual link behind the submission. Very interesting technique that boils down to encode a url with a ton of carefully shaped random numbers hidden in the fragment to generate the actual art.

That's the example url from the linked blog introducing this technique http://swtch.com/pjw/#123456789...

Source Code (Go) is here: https://github.com/rsc/qr/tree/master/qart

DHH also famously describe why and how they are leaving the cloud https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...

I'm not a fan boy of DHH but I really like his critical thinking about the status quo. I'm not able to leave the cloud or I better phrase it as it's too comfortable right now. I really wanted to leave redis behind me as it's mostly a hidden part of Rails nothing I use directly but often I have to pay for it "in the cloud"

I quickly hit an issue with the family of Solid features: Documentation doesn't really cover the case "inside your existing application" (at least when I looked into it shortly after Rails 8 was released). Being in the cloud (render.com, fly.io and friends) I had to create multiple DBs, one for each Solid feature. That was not acceptable as you usually pay per service/DB not per usage - similar how you have to pay for Redis.

This was a great motivation to research the cloud space once again and then I found Railway. You pay per usage. So I've right now multiple DBs, one for each Solid feature. And on top multiple environments multiplying those DBs and I pay like cents for that part of the app while it's not really filled. Of course in this setup I would also pay cents for Redis but it's still good to see a less complex landscape in my deployment environment.

Long story short, while try to integrate SolidQueue myself I found Railway. Deployment are fun again with that! Maybe that helps someone today as well.

That is so beautiful. The underlying algorithm is perlin noise (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise) and it's over 40 years old!

It's such a fabulous tool as the generated images can be used for effects like glass/ice displacements, cheap water-like effects, but you can also generate terrains from it or just cool visual effects that benefit from random patterns. The core property to me is that it feels very organic/natural.

This was such a common tool in Flash AS3 back in the days to create stunning effects, games and such. I'm not active in building visual stuff like that anymore but I bet it's still very common in this field, because why not?

Hey, I didn't mean to sell another tool over yours! It's just an experience that popped into my mind and I wanted to share. I appreciate your work and contributing to the problem space of exposing a local service. Thank you.

I used ngrok when it was the to-go answer for serving localhost (temporarily, not permanent) to the public, but the last time I searched for alternatives I stumbled upon the following jewel.

   > tailscale funnel 3000

   Available on the internet:

   https://some-device-name.tail12345.ts.net/
   |-- proxy http://127.0.0.1:3000

   Press Ctrl+C to exit.

I did not play this (yet!), but just by watching this video I see how it overlaps with the coding games on https://code.org/en-US (Hour of Code!) in terms of having a code + gaming view to solve a challenge.

When I was teaching coding to kids, code.org was the to-go place besides using Scratch, to introduce coding patterns (mostly: conditional, loops).

An example is the famous Minecraft labyrinth [1]. There is also a Frozen themed one. If you have kids (~6y+), that's some fun way to get started instead of diving directly into actual code.

[1] https://studio.code.org/courses/mc/units/1/lessons/1/levels/...

That gives me a quite literal flashback.

Back in the Macromedia Flash 5 days (25 years ago!), Robert Penner popularized the easing concept. I can't imagine the void we had before that. I clearly remember me starring at the formulas in ActionScript 1.0 (see [1]) without any chance of understanding them - but usage was clear, easy and fun!

Those formulas basically generated the required tweening numbers mathematical (comparable to the Bezier approach mentioned in the article). That's a much different concept to the linear interpolation described in the linked blog article where you pass in a static list of numbers. The more complex your curve the more numbers you need. That's when the author links to the external tool "Linear() Easing Generator" by Jake Archibald and Adam Argyle. It was a fresh and nice reading even though animations are less a topic for me then it was back with Flash.

Here an example of an easing function from the linked source file. The tween executing function would pass in time (t) and other parameters I can't name to calculate the resulting value continuously.

  Math.easeInOutBack = function (t, b, c, d, s) {
      if (s == undefined) s = 1.70158; 
      if ((t/=d/2) < 1) return c/2*(t*t*(((s*=(1.525))+1)*t - s)) + b;
      return c/2*((t-=2)*t*(((s*=(1.525))+1)*t + s) + 2) + b;
  };

[1] https://robertpenner.com/easing/penner_easing_as1.txt [2] https://robertpenner.com/easing/

I missed the "About" link in the footer but still found my way to the repo [1], where the project is briefly explained including a ton of great example images. Thanks for that!

This website (technology demo) allows you to aggregate and visualize massive amounts of air traffic data. The data is hosted in a ClickHouse database and queried on the fly. You can tune the visualizations with custom SQL queries and drill-down from 50 billion records to individual data records.

[1] https://github.com/ClickHouse/adsb.exposed/

Yeah there are some issues. PR is stuck at "Checking for the ability to merge automatically..."

By accident I landed on https://us.githubstatus.com/ and everything was green. At first, I thought, yeah sure, just report green, then I realized "GitHub Enterprise Cloud" in the title. There is also a EU mirror: https://eu.githubstatus.com

Edit:

The report just updated with the following interesting bit.

We identified a faulty network component and have removed it from the infrastructure. Recovery has started and we expect full recovery shortly.

Content wise a nice idea, but I also like the conclusion about how AI made this possible in the first place. The author itself mentions this motivation. AI is undoubtedly perfect for utilities, small (even company internal) tools for personal use where maintainability is secondary as you can ditch the tool or rebuild it quickly.

Two years ago, I wouldn’t have bothered with the rewrite, let alone creating the script in the first place. The friction was too high. Now, small utility scripts like this are almost free to build.

That’s the real story. Not the script, but how AI changes the calculus of what’s worth our time.

Just F#$%^& use Rails.

No, just no. Or maybe it depends. But if you want to provide a lovely, modern, interactive frontend, you can't just blindly ignore what evolved on the frontend ecosystem for the sake of your purity. It's arrogant and dismisses all the people who love to craft enjoyable frontends.

Following some thoughts about how to merge Rails and modern frontend approaches and how Inertia finally solved that question for me.

--

I consider myself more frontend focused but I have a deep love for Rails and some advanced experience, for sure less than in frontend though.

I tried hard following the route of hotwire, stimulus and friends knowing that DHH and the rest of the community loves those JS patterns.

Creating reusable stuff, cresting just a little bit more complex components, sharing those components through the UI.. it's just horrible cumbersome, repetitive and far, far away from all those best practices and patterns we've developed in the frontend.

I tried creating a diff viewer with comment functionality with stimulus. It worked, I was kind of proud but it was cumbersome the define components and share functionality. Maintainable? No way.

Then I wanted to create a double list where you can drag items from left to right. It was the hell to include css, js, manage the hierarchy and then I just gave up. I was demotivated by the constant nagging of my brain how much more simple this would have been with a single, simple react/vue component.

Then I went the wrong route: Rails API plus React. That's just giving up on most of what Rails gives you and I wasted ton of my time creating an additional auth layer on top of the session that Rails would give me. And then the horrible duplication of your state. One in Rails and then the same stuff in React. The same nagging in my brain now told me: That's wrong.

And then I found the holy grail of modern Rails development: Inertia.js. I heard about it very often but never at the right time. So I forced myself to try it out.

And here I am: I use Rails with Inertia Rails. I have the full pleasure of Rails but I can create React components that represent any page I like to write in React. Inertia will serialize and pass in the data from my controller. So no state. Just pure UI building.

If you love Rails and the frontend: Try out Inertia. It feels like I'm using the best of both worlds. The layer inertia creates is very shallow and optional. So the risk is low.

I relate absolutely zero with their reasoning around AI. It's so fabricated.

While staying true to Google’s iconic four colors, the brighter hues and gradient design symbolize the surge of AI-driven innovation and creative energy across our products and technology.

That was as great reading, thank you.

I've a related observation. In my experience the amount of hallucinated urls with structured output (think of a field `url` or `link`) is pretty high. Especially compared to the alternative approach, where you let the llm generate text and then use a second llm to convert the text into the desired structured format.

With structured output, it's like the llm is forced to answer in a very specific way. So if there is no url for the given field, it makes up the url.

Here a related quote from the article:

Structured outputs builds on top of sampling by constraining the model's output to a specific format.

Can you please give any sources? While it sounds plausible and interesting it's nothing more than a wild conspiracy theory without some background information.

I truly wonder what people do when they want JS full stack both frontend an backend especially with a DB involved. ORM situation looks pretty fragmented or you write pure sql. And then you still have to decide on the backend. Going raw with express? Next.js, well known, but with a questionable agenda (, Remix, Astro, TanStack, and so on. It's a mess, because you always have to recalibrate and re-evaluate what to use.

I often see myself going back to Ruby on Rails for my private stuff. It's always a pleasure. On the other side, there are so few rails people available (compared to js) that it's not viable for any professional project. It would be irresponsible to choose that stack over js and often java for the backend.

Anyone have similar feelings?

I had the same experience, go to layers and there you'll find it under a new section "Explore". Select it to deactivate it.

Hey, while being on that topic and somehow related. There seems to be kind of a default company that creates those catchy tech marketing videos, explainers etc: https://sandwich.co

Examples you may know:

  - https://sandwich.co/work/playdate/
  - https://sandwich.co/work/auth0-2/
  - https://sandwich.co/work/slack-wfh/

Small world. Only yesterday I read that great comment from user adameasterling about credential stuffing in another thread [1]

Troy Hunt is such a treasure. And for us web application developers, there is no excuse for not having protection against credential stuffing! While the best defense is likely two-factor, checking against Hunt's hashed password database is also very good and requires no extra work for users!

That user even listed 23andMe [2] as an example but it's from 60 days ago. This incident is referenced on the techcrunch article.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38521106

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37794379

Great little story. Thanks!

NV is kind of a sentinel value to signal "not visible" and to differentiate it from actual plates isn't it? Only that it comes from external (the officer) and the systems involved are not aware of its special meaning which causes all the trouble.

Or how would you name this special value?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_value

I had to look it up: CPAP = continuous positive airway pressure; to treat sleep apnea disorder

I do have sleep apnea disorder but probably a mild one as I don't feel exhausted at all. Reading your comment sparked the idea that it might be a good idea to verify the severity. If there will be any CPAP machine involved I will for sure think of its privacy impact.

That's interesting. Every normal white feels pale and boring after seeing that white. I'm not writing this as a joke, everything that is supposed to be white looks like a greyish, washed out white right now.

First standalone components to get rid of modules and now signals. There is quite some innovation happening in Angular while being a really mature framework.

I enjoy Angular as much as I love React, Vue or Svelte. It's always about picking the right tool. And when thinking of Angular it's that batteries-included framework that is godsend for big enterprises where any decision given by the outside is something you don't have to battle for.

Often I describe Angular as a hidden champion. It's loved and trusted by enterprises while they are not really talking about it. Plus they hide all the package downloads behind their own npm caching servers like Nexus or Artifcactory.

On the other side there are tons of individual engineers working with React or Vue (for good reasons) and writing blog post after blog post. Maybe that's one reason why folks think Angular is dying? I don't see any signs of that though.

Well, the simple explanation is probably that the author isn't aware of `lsof` and might even learn something from your comment.

lsof isn't something you automatically pickup if it's not your daily business (like so many other things). I for myself often forget about it but I have some usual ports to kill. So these days I simply search my shell history by port to find lsof again.

Important to note that it's "zero-alcohol beer" though.

I wonder how to put the alcohol in there. Crystals? Is that a thing? Or just ship the ethanol separately in a small bottle like a sauce?

My thoughts on video editing:

I'm a dad of two young kids and my photo hobby transitioned into recording random videos of our daily life together. Just for us. Maybe sharing with the close family. I use my Camcorder, Phone or sometimes my Canon R6. In that order.

First thing I solved quickly: Storage/Backup. Got a NAS and done. Second thing to solve was more complicated. What to make with all those videos I record? I'm a kid of the 80s. So VHS-sized videos are kind of my guiding star from the past. 30min-60min and clips are shown in order I recorded them. This means usually I throw videos into iMovie and create ~30min clips themed after the age of the kids or the seasons. Add some transitions and text. That felt good for the past 2-3 years.

I then enjoyed editing so much that I got Final Cut Pro (FCPX). I wanted to learn some advanced editing in my very spare time. Some tracking, some color grading, some faster cuts. But learning was slow as hell being busy with many other duties. The raw video material piled up in the past months as I didn't want to admit that I should go back to iMovie so I just forced myself through FCPX. Sometimes with joy, sometimes it feels like a duty and often loose myself because of the advanced tool FCPX is. I already recorded less because I sense the pressure of every new recording on my shoulders.

The thing that I recognized only a few days ago: The initial idea to create VHS-sized movies was ill-advised. That pattern put the pressure on me because it always involves most/all recordings. Selection is super difficult when I want to showcase what happened in an entire season without having a specific topic. I should see the raw videos as my VHS. I should make it accessible on my TV or somehow shareable. That's it. Skip that stupid editing of everything. Nobody cares for that anyway and you can watch the individual files anyhow.

What I should do instead: Pick a very specific topic. Like the first steps of my kids, a birthday party or highlights from our vacation. Something short enough while being really worth, so I spend my precious hobby time with joy.

Maybe that helps some other video recording mum or dad out there. I'm glad I came to that insight so I can enjoy reading articles like the one linked here again.

Me too!

I don't trust to open my network to the internet though. So I've created a VPN to connect with my ubiquity network from mobile. Sadly, I can't share photos with other folks or allow my family to participate easily.

I'm a layman in terms of networking. I always wonder how people can sleep if they open their home network. In this case either by using QuickConnect or forward ports and access the machine through a custom domain secured by TLS. I mean that would be perfect but I just can't convince me to take that burden of maintaining that open door into my network.

I've read about creating sub networks with the power of ubiquiti (or any other router), but I will never trust anything I configure there either because I can't confirm it's secure.

So I'm stuck with Google Photos additionally to Synology Photos because of the convenience of sharing.

The images looks neat but the stories are a little bit too simple/shallow aren't they?

Another thing. Don't you have a bad feeling uploading images of your kids, conveniently tagged with their age, to a random web service that promises to delete the images without even revealing the makers?

I mean yes, it looks legitimate and you can find a person on Twitter who seems to be the maker of it, but that's not a guarantee for the safety of the uploaded images. I'm not a data paranoid, but careless sharing my kids' images with a random service like that crosses a border.

I think that's a pretty good point about maturity. If it's just working people use it without talking much. Similar to Ruby on Rails (RoR) for example, although Angular still changes a lot more than Rails these days.

Another point going into the same direction especially for Angular: It's a very important framework for big enterprises in industries like banking & insurance and probably more I'm not aware of. There are large networks of developers organized in isolated or self-hosted GitHub Enterprise or GitLab instances of enterprises working with Angular, but most of them are not able to talk publicly about it.

I'm sure there are hidden projects based on React, Vue or Svelte too, but I have the feeling the biggest enterprises rely a lot on Angular but don't talk about it, which skews the way people perceive the overall framework landscape.