Hacker News: davb

New comment by davb in "UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s"

davb — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:49:38 +0000

But under Ofcom rules, it is social media if we are to assume that they’ll apply the same scoping as the Online Safety Act does for user-to-user services. I think a lot of comments here assume that only sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/X would be in scope, but I see no reason why they wouldn’t use the same definitions from the OSA (essentially any site where user-to-user communication and content posting takes place, including forums and aggregators).

New comment by davb in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

davb — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:48:50 +0000

Yes!! The Dell WD19 was notorious for that. My wife’s company used those - we couldn’t leave her WFH dock connected to our home network because of the wild broadcast storms causing our core switch to stop processing frames from her home office desktop switch. My org used HP Dock G5 units which behaved much better (besides the occasional firmware update killing video output until a power cycle, and inconsistent MAC address pass through between hardware revisions).

New comment by davb in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

davb — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:39:55 +0000

Indeed. We look after a huge, very diverse set of users (university science faculty - many thousands in our faculty, but tens of thousands across all faculties and professional services teams). According to https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Chrome has over 65% market share for desktops - not supporting Chrome would be overly restrictive.

Our users interact with a huge array of internal and external sites and web apps, virtually all of which will be tested on Chrome. Our LMS, collaboration tools, internal apps, SIEM tooling, HR systems, ERP, knowledge exchange partner portals - it's all been tested on, and works with, Chrome. And we're not in a position to force thousands of vendors to make sure their applications are standards compliant and work in less popular browsers (as much as we might like to). Not to mention the deluge of tickets we'd be dealing with when incompatibilities arise; banning Chrome would cripple us.

Google have backed us into a corner with this one by making a careless default choice that takes advantage of their market dominance and forces us to work around their decision.

New comment by davb in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

davb — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:49:39 +0000

An extra 4GB per user on our NFS home file server is going to be a huge pain (several thousand students). And for our Windows lab machines, they end up in AppData\Local (which isn’t redirected for operational reasons) so we either leave the profiles in place and let them accumulate (suboptimal) or clear out the profiles as we normally do and let it redownload, over and over again.

As much as I’m against unexpected 4GB bloat for an AI model, I’d much prefer it to install one copy, system-wide. 4GB per Windows or Linux lab machine, rather than a 4TB minimum load on our NFS server and 4GB downloads per user, per machine on our Windows labs.

New comment by davb in "Unix co-creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, distros and NixOS"

davb — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 22:30:38 +0000

I actually found it really reassuring and a little enlightening that he had so little to say about those technologies. I find it very easy to get sucked into a technology vortex (especially on Hacker News), where the imposter syndrome creeps in and you feel like a failure for not knowing some trendy technology that “everyone knows, duh!”. The next time I feel like that, I’m going to remind myself that Brian Kernighan doesn’t know Nix, only used Rust once (and didn’t like it) and doesn’t even know what Linux distro he uses. And no one would ever accuse him of being an imposter or a failure!

New comment by davb in "Mac app launches slowed by malware scan (2024)"

davb — Thu, 01 May 2025 22:01:46 +0000

Related, I found that even after designating an application (iTerm2) as a "Developer Tool" in System Settings -> Privacy & Security, there were circumstances where notarisation checks were still carried out. Particularly, launching tmux then detaching and reattaching would cause the processes to no longer be exempt. This applies to any executable (+x), including shell scripts. I put together a test script that proves it at https://gist.github.com/davebarkerxyz/4111276ae1fb4a7566b271... (the second run is much quicker than the first one after a tmux reattach, but within applications marked as Developer Tools the times should be nearly identical).

Fortunately as of Sequoia (15.4.1), I'm no longer able to reproduce the issue.

New comment by davb in "Espressif's ESP32-C5 Is Now in Mass Production"

davb — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 23:42:47 +0000

Fortunately it’s only £16.40 with VAT and shipping to the UK. Approx $21.85. Comparable to the £9 M5Stack AtomS3 Lite (ESP32-S3) I picked up from Pi Hut recently.

New comment by davb in "Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work"

davb — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 21:45:52 +0000

Anyone who has maintained code that written by engineers new to the industry, who didn’t understand the context of a system or the underlying principles of what they’re writing, may disagree.

New comment by davb in "TikTok goes dark in the US"

davb — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:22:53 +0000

I’ve seen other versions of this like https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1i4nm32/rip... - none of which mention Trump. I do wonder if this version (mentioning Trump) is real - the domain from the link is Foxnews…

New comment by davb in "Software engineer pay heatmap for Europe"

davb — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 19:34:31 +0000

Yeah, having the whole of the UK being one colour is pretty useless, given the huge disparity in wages and cost of living between central London and the rest of the UK.

New comment by davb in "Phishers Love New TLDs Like .shop, .top and .xyz"

davb — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 20:47:32 +0000

I use a .xyz for my personal domain (I could get my real name as the domain, and it was cheap). I use FastMail for email. Deliverability has been fine, with one exception - Radisson Red hotels. I’ve had two occasions in the last year when I’ve needed to email different Radisson Red properties, and both silently dropped emails from .xyz domains.

New comment by davb in "VirtualBox KVM Public Release"

davb — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 12:06:17 +0000

Thanks for the clarification, that’s really helpful. I think a paragraph under a “License” header in the README just reiterating what you said in that reply would be pretty clear.

I’m sure some people would make the assumption that it’s under the same license as the upstream package but in some environments absolutely clarity around licenses is really appreciated.

New comment by davb in "VirtualBox KVM Public Release"

davb — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 11:45:35 +0000

That appears to be the VirtualBox OSE license, copied from the original Oracle package, not the license for this specific release. It’s unclear how this new derivative or work is licensed.

New comment by davb in "VirtualBox KVM Public Release"

davb — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 11:28:19 +0000

The blog post mentions an open source license but I can’t immediately see it in the post or the repo (perhaps I’m just missing it). Any idea what license this is released under?

New comment by davb in "Sqlite3 Utility in the Browser"

davb — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 19:31:10 +0000

I was looking for something just like this the other day. I’ll often import a CSV into SQLite to do some ad hoc data analysis and transformation, but realised how useful it would be to have a JS/WASM based tool I could host on a static site for my colleagues (academics who don’t necessarily feel comfortable working in the terminal). Being able to say “import your CSV here and run some of these example queries” would be so useful. No complex web app or reporting suite to host, and nothing to install.

New comment by davb in "Pigging"

davb — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 10:26:59 +0000

Similar experience here - I was making changes to the internal phone directory program and seen an entry for the “Pig Launcher” on a platform. As someone new to oil and gas, I thought it was quick funny.

New comment by davb in "Os.js – open-source JavaScript web desktop platform with a window manager"

davb — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 14:45:40 +0000

It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a terminal supporting background images (indeed, this is very well supported). It was that I couldn’t find anyone referencing using subtly textured (slightly noisy) images to avoid a very solid background.

New comment by davb in "Os.js – open-source JavaScript web desktop platform with a window manager"

davb — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 11:04:03 +0000

Meta, but I love the simplistic design of the landing page. That textured background is so much less brutal than a solid colour. I thought about using a background like that in my terminal (to give it a very subtle paper like quality) but was surprised to find nothing online about other people doing the same (I had hoped for screenshots and texture packs).

New comment by davb in "Techdirt has been deleted from Bing and DuckDuckGo [fixed]"

davb — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 21:25:31 +0000

Whatever the complaints about DDG, I still commend yegg for engaging here. I can’t imagine the head of Google Search or Bing doing the same.

New comment by davb in "Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI"

davb — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 19:53:39 +0000

Agreed. And chatbots also leave no room for discretionary exemptions. My headset microphone broke recently (after the warranty period) - emailing the company and asking if there was any way I could buy a new one netted me a free replacement and a nice note from a real person. I’m 100% convinced that a chatbot would have told me that based on the serial number my headset was out of warranty and ended the chat.