Hacker News: dingdongditchme

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS"

dingdongditchme — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 09:16:05 +0000

Any alternatives to recommend?

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS"

dingdongditchme — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:30:27 +0000

I'm in the market for some wifi access points. If Ubiquiti is not so great can you name some alternatives?

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Cars collect a startling amount of data about you"

dingdongditchme — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:28:27 +0000

...not yet. But I am sure they could.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Cars collect a startling amount of data about you"

dingdongditchme — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:13:51 +0000

not the accuser but I have seen even AI to drop its usage of the emdash... thankfully! (Whats wrong with brackets?)

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Cars collect a startling amount of data about you"

dingdongditchme — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:12:28 +0000

Very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. No I am not a bot, I'm for reals.

My two cents with the EU tinted glasses. I completely agree with failures of governance that you mention. Especially the plane/train cost comparisons are infuriating. My personal view is though that the slippery slope of "security" -> "control" -> exploitation. I heard the phrase "absolute power corrupts absolutely" in history class and time and time again, authoritarian systems have exploited the masses more effectively. All it takes is one bad ruler to turn thing around and syphon more than is "acceptable". Not that the western world is looking that great right now in terms of class divide, but the laundry at least is open for everyone to see. Freedom > Security for me.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Cars collect a startling amount of data about you"

dingdongditchme — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:20:48 +0000

oh god yes... but I am carrying my self chosen surveillance device with me every single time I enter a car.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Where does next-token prediction leave us?"

dingdongditchme — Wed, 27 May 2026 06:29:53 +0000

So I am expecting the AI bubble to burst (or at least deflate) some time soon. Perhaps this puts me I an specific camp, I am not sure. But this whole "AI will replace X jobs" does not phase me, not because I think AI is useless. On the contrary I am a daily user, but in my mind, people fail to see that the economy is not built around jobs and capital, but wants (or needs) and trades. Even in a world where everything can be done better by a machine than a human, there will always be the "want" for an item that is handcrafted. AI is yet another tool that accelerates us to satisfy more "wants" and that's great. I'm looking at a whole lot of things that will be available in the future (especially software but not limited to) which are not available today, AI generated or not.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

dingdongditchme — Thu, 21 May 2026 07:00:52 +0000

As a "gun nut of tech", I have resolved this issue for myself with two computing categories for hardware I use: Hardware-I-trust and Hardware-someone-else-trusts. Sometimes these share information, and have to interact. Usually I am the one who decides how. Smartphones have never been in the category of "Hardware-I-Trust". For the first time in a long while my current employer paid for hardware is in that category for reasons of my own.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

dingdongditchme — Thu, 07 May 2026 11:58:47 +0000

and here I am reading an interaction and thinking you two are saying exactly the same thing. Language be, what it is I guess: open to interpretation.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G""

dingdongditchme — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:14:47 +0000

This is what has always made it hard for me to go beyond the Newtonian physics. The only thing I know and use daily that relies on relativity is GPS and having looked into the equations on how it accounts for this it seemed to me that I could not discount that the equations account for some arbitrary consistent (or random) error, not relativity specifically. All experiments I have run never needed precision beyond Newtonian physics, but I am not at the end of my career yet so maybe relativity will become relevant some day. I will be looking forward to it if that is the case...

New comment by dingdongditchme in "We still don't have a more precise value for "Big G""

dingdongditchme — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:07:40 +0000

Thank you for the nice read. I empathize with many of your points, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. I refute on the claim around "our greatest societal ills". I think there is a difference between confident communication and being listened to. I have many a times said confidently "I don't know", as I have made decisions on low confident bets but leant into them with all my heart. Sometimes it paid of and sometimes it did not. It has served me well in my career and in life. As a scientist at heart I still agree that too often confidence is given too much weight and the quiet voice in the room should also be heard. However, we should teach everybody to communicate confidently even if they sometimes communicate wrongly. Of course we should not confuse confidence with credibility and accept that we know little for sure and are all just trying our best with the very limited understanding we have of our universe.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Tim Davis – Probabilistic engineering and the 24-7 employee"

dingdongditchme — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:54:22 +0000

learned a new word today: "slopcoded MVP", love it! Thanks.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Human Accelerated Region 1"

dingdongditchme — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:43:03 +0000

Corn, albeit not an animal has been pretty successful in terms of number of individuals. Their bi-pedal underlings have cleared swathes of land and take meticulous care of their well-being so they can bask in the sun undisturbed.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Human Accelerated Region 1"

dingdongditchme — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:37:35 +0000

Is that a big concern? I've been pretty happy with my vagus nerve functionality until now... although I have not given it much thought to be fair.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)"

dingdongditchme — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:49:56 +0000

Hopefully you made it out of it, but I have to say that was a hilarious read! As not a stranger to pseudorandom sleep cycles I can relate.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider"

dingdongditchme — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:25:28 +0000

Yes. But also infection with a malicious package. I don't want anybody to be hacked and also don't want everybody to be hacked at the same time. If I am managing multiple software components with different levels of reliability requirements I certainly would stagger updates and updates to dependencies using "dependency cooldowns". I don't fault anybody for using them. As it stands I am very conservative with dependencies/updates in general and not using "dependency cooldowns" yet.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Dependency cooldowns turn you into a free-rider"

dingdongditchme — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:27:49 +0000

Having skimmed the article I understand the title. While I agree on some level I wholly disagree on another: to me "dependency cooldown" is a way to automate something as old as time: the late-adopter-laggard. Although I am a tech-nerd and like the latest stuff. I have almost always let other people try it out first. I've missed out on some things because of it but if you are more conservative in your actions it just happens naturally. I think it is OK to have a dependency cooldown, in fact not everybody should update to the newest stuff right away. It's good to have cascaded updates. See the crowd-strike incident in 2024. If some people want to be later in the chain so be it. They will also miss out on important security updates by their cooldown time. I'd advocate for the feature despite never having used it. So "collectively rational" in my mind.

New comment by dingdongditchme in "My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack"

dingdongditchme — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:04:10 +0000

Wait, what? You sent a single email being in a company for ten months?? Or was it the first external email?

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Arm wants a bigger slice of the chip business"

dingdongditchme — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:26:47 +0000

What do you mean by "IPR focussed design"? IPR = Intellectial Property Rights? So they should keep making designs but not compete with their customers?

New comment by dingdongditchme in "Heathrow scraps liquid container limit"

dingdongditchme — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 12:21:46 +0000

Interesting. I can only speak for FRAports Terminal A where the Lufthansa flights go and they use the new bag scanners where I just need to get rid of my coat and belt to be scanned by the infamous "Nacktscanner". The first time I went through I thought liquids were allowed from all airports in the EU until I found out it was bag scanner dependent. Smaller airports are usually OK because queues are short and then I have the time to walk TSA through each individual item personally. FRAport has started adopting the "snake-through-duty-free" before the gate (pioneered by Stansted as far as I can tell) which is criminal in my opinion (it's not as bad as Stansted yet). Commercial workflows are thus not always better when the optimize time customer has to spend "not buying" overpriced meals and consumer garbage.