Hacker News: alyandon

New comment by alyandon in "Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release"

alyandon — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:30:01 +0000

I'm not denying that X11 has known security issues. However, I don't tend to run untrusted random gui applications on my system so that factors into the risks I'm willing to accept.

New comment by alyandon in "Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release"

alyandon — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:28:09 +0000

I stick with LTS releases so last honest attempt would have been on a Kubuntu 24.04 LTS system.

What is a compositor - thing that actually draws window content on the screen? Whatever KDE provides?

Edit: To be fair to KDE/Wayland, the Wayland Kubuntu 24.04 experience was vastly improved over Kubuntu 22.04.

New comment by alyandon in "Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release"

alyandon — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:53:05 +0000

I empathize but every time I try a Wayland based desktop I always end up encountering weird bugs and corner cases with basic usability that drive me back to X11.

I'll be sad if that is still the case when 6.8 rolls around as then I'll be hunting for another DE.

New comment by alyandon in "Love systemd timers"

alyandon — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:35:38 +0000

That and systemd having actually useful man pages.

New comment by alyandon in "Flathub disallows AI-assisted code and documentation"

alyandon — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:54:55 +0000

I'm pretty much neutral on the whole LLM thing as it has positives and negatives just like most other technologies. If their declaration had been scoped to "don't use LLMs and automated tooling to submit PRs for our packaging workflows and processes" that would have been fine.

Instead they go well beyond that and include this:

  * Applications containing AI-generated or AI-assisted code, documentation, or other content are not allowed.

So yeah, that's pretty much hysteria at this point. It's their project and their infrastructure though so they get to set the rules - I'm just going to shrug my shoulders and continue to not use flatpaks.

New comment by alyandon in "YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken"

alyandon — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:55:41 +0000

Same here but I'm using a ssh based proxy to avoid having my local ISP data mine my web traffic. Definitely not going to turn it off either to read a blog.

I really wish admins banned based on actual behavior instead of IP address != residential/mobile.

New comment by alyandon in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

alyandon — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:59:32 +0000

Old versions of Netscape Navigator had settings where you could tweak that kind of stuff - I don't recall if IE3/4 did or not.

Given the web of the 90s didn't include tons of overly complex javascript most of the settings were targeted at how much ram/disk was used for caching website assets IIRC.

It's the principle of the thing though - we should have the ability to set resource allocation limits instead of potentially handing our entire computer's resources to a random website just because we clicked on a URL.

New comment by alyandon in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

alyandon — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 16:21:36 +0000

Back in the ancient days of the web, browsers allowed you to set resource limits (ram, cache, etc) to prevent websites from hogging the limited resources of your desktop system.

It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.

New comment by alyandon in "Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record"

alyandon — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:36:45 +0000

It seems that AI-scraping hysteria/paranoia has reached a point that more and more resource sites completely block me without any recourse (e.g. having an account) if my traffic is coming from a datacenter IP. I really wish sites blocked agents/IPs based on actual bad behavior instead of reflexively blocking by IP != residential/mobile.

I do understand the frustration though. I've had to deal with bad bots scraping every crevice of a few web based services I host and while most went away after I tweaked robots.txt there were a few I've had to blanket ban IPs assigned to entire ASNs because the bots on their networks refused to play nice.

New comment by alyandon in "Libxml2 Enterprise Edition (AGPL, from the previous maintainer)"

alyandon — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:56:34 +0000

Since I've dealt with "EE" Java in a previous life, that's actually pretty tame as far as parodies go.

I hate the fact I can say that. :-/

New comment by alyandon in ""Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker"

alyandon — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:35:59 +0000

As long as there is a financial benefit to lying, there will always be people willing to do so.

I personally believe that many of these "influencers" do not believe any of the stuff they spew into the public space.

New comment by alyandon in "Zulip.com Values"

alyandon — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:53:28 +0000

  It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open, and no once wants to read any of them.

I really wanted to like Zulip and use it as a personal chat service for a small group and it was exactly that feature that made it basically unsuitable. Forcing everything into titled threads did not make any sense for lots of user to user interactions that are ad-hoc in nature.

I didn't think it was terrible software by any stretch of the imagination - just not really suitable for informal communication.

New comment by alyandon in "Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?"

alyandon — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:44:25 +0000

It does seem like a lot of doctors prescribe GLP-1s without any corresponding education on the dietary changes one should make while on them. A friend of mine's mother was hospitalized briefly because she was basically starving herself of proper nutrition while on GLP-1s.

Since I already knew that rapid weight loss is very unhealthy, I intentionally eat very nutrient dense foods in order to keep my weight loss in a reasonable range.

New comment by alyandon in "Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?"

alyandon — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:26:10 +0000

Another N=1, I've noticed zero impact on my desire to engage in my normal obsessions while on GLP-1.

What GLP-1 did (initially) was give me horrible insomnia that peaked a couple of days after taking the injection so I had to time my dosage so that I suffered through that on the weekend. That got better over time and eventually went away after about 6 weeks.

Regardless, as another poster mentioned, it's a weekly injection and if you don't like the effects you can stop taking it.

New comment by alyandon in "When internal hostnames are leaked to the clown"

alyandon — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:31:04 +0000

Same here too. Ironically, the blog is accessible over TOR for me.

New comment by alyandon in "We X-Rayed a Suspicious FTDI USB Cable"

alyandon — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 15:27:19 +0000

Exactly - the FTDI drivers refusing to work would have been reasonable and emitting a log or error message that my device was counterfeit would have actually been helpful. Instead, they vandalized end user equipment by permanently bricking the devices which is arguably illegal.

I am not nearly sophisticated enough as an end user to spot a counterfeit FTDI usb-to-serial device so I am not going to risk buying that brand and end up with their drivers intentionally bricking the device.

New comment by alyandon in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

alyandon — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:22:57 +0000

KDE doesn't need 4 GB of ram - that's just what my laptop happens to have which is more than ample to run the OS + KDE + native applications.

New comment by alyandon in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

alyandon — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:10:00 +0000

I'm on an older LTS kernel so no support for lru_gen but I will definitely check out zramswap - thanks.

New comment by alyandon in "200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop"

alyandon — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:25:23 +0000

It's the web browser and electron based apps that are the primary consumers of ram on my desktops with the DE and OS ram usage being minimal by comparison.

I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop and related applications just fine that I use for troubleshooting stuff. However, the moment I open a web browser it basically falls to pieces.

I hate everything about this. :-/

New comment by alyandon in "Go 1.26 Interactive Tour"

alyandon — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:43:43 +0000

  https://antonz.org/go-1-26/#httptest-example

> To fix this issue, the HTTP client returned by httptest.Server.Client now redirects requests for example.com and its subdomains to the test server

I'm really conflicted about the idea that the https client should silently hijack requests to example.com in order to make a dummy certificate work... or am I just really misunderstanding?