Hacker News: timtom39

New comment by timtom39 in "RSS and why I believe most people should come back using them"

timtom39 — Wed, 15 May 2024 15:59:54 +0000

> And you're missing on that whole important social aspect as well

My RSS reader links directly to HN comments hence how I arrived here. Other than HN most social discussions are not useful to me.

New comment by timtom39 in "US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission"

timtom39 — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 14:28:07 +0000

> I do wonder what percentage of Apple stock is owned by pension funds and the like, i.e. The Regular Person, once you unwind the levels of indirection (mutual funds, etc). It is surely a double digit percentage, but high, low? No idea.

Pretty high. The S&P 500 has ~7% apple stock which means many peoples retirement accounts have several percentage points of apple stock.

New comment by timtom39 in "Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space"

timtom39 — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 15:11:04 +0000

I would like to add that IPFS pretty much doesn't run on spinning rust or slow CPUs. A PI or other low end box can easily run torrents with an external harddrive. IPFS can't download large files at a reasonable speed on slow hardware.

New comment by timtom39 in "Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space"

timtom39 — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 15:07:14 +0000

In practice libgen uses torrents. The available seed nodes for IPFS are... few. This is largely due to the software/protocol being pretty bad compared to battle tested torrents.

New comment by timtom39 in "Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space"

timtom39 — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 15:02:13 +0000

Running IPFS at scale is horrible. Try to download a few dozen TBs of small files. Its garbage collection is rubbish (ended up nuking the ZFS dataset every couple of days instead), it is very CPU and IOPS hungry, and it has bad network throttling support.

I would claim it has failed the test of time as it has very little adoption.

New comment by timtom39 in "Fossify – Open-source fork of Simple Mobile Tools"

timtom39 — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 18:46:30 +0000

What did you find for a gallery? I never found an open one I liked other than simple gallery.

New comment by timtom39 in "Fossify – Open-source fork of Simple Mobile Tools"

timtom39 — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 18:23:33 +0000

I am happy about this fork. Simple Mobile Tools were some of the better non spying free android apps.

New comment by timtom39 in "My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy"

timtom39 — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 16:59:43 +0000

and archive.ph on cloudflare (nothing but CAPTCHAs)

New comment by timtom39 in "Korean Smartphones Have Mandatory Shutter Sounds, 8 in 10 Want It Muted"

timtom39 — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 19:15:26 +0000

Good point. I am sure the US won't just think of another reason to go to war...

New comment by timtom39 in "Ford is killing the Explorer hybrid because cops are buying all of them"

timtom39 — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 19:28:37 +0000

It is not a feature it was forced down by the EPA :/ I have such an SUV and a $20 part wired into the fuse box fixes it.

New comment by timtom39 in "California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses"

timtom39 — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 15:29:53 +0000

You can already deduct many of these and should be. Talk to an accountant but deduction is usually ratio of usage for work vs personal. Also, keep your personal and work expenses very separate in case there is ever an audit.

New comment by timtom39 in "California employers must reimburse remote workers for all necessary expenses"

timtom39 — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 15:25:25 +0000

My company is largely remote at this point and is moving away from CA for cost/tax reasons. For some portion of companies this is just one more reason to move headquarters.

That being said, I live in a pretty population dense area and my largest cost by far is dedicated home office space. It would be nice for my company to pay for that but it would have also been nice for them to pay for gas for my commute when I had one.

I think CA is likely overplaying their hand. They are not the place of choice for many remote employees (because of taxes) and are trying hard to not be the place of choice for remote companies.

New comment by timtom39 in "Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence"

timtom39 — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 15:15:42 +0000

It might stop players like FB from releasing their new models open source...

New comment by timtom39 in "Starlink's User Terminal Firmware"

timtom39 — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:12:26 +0000

Yea, favorite place I found OpenWRT was in DJI phantom 2 Wi-Fi Extender module. Managed to SSH into it. Hardware was not particularly interesting just cool to see OpenWRT in a widely purchased product.

New comment by timtom39 in "Short session expiration does not help security"

timtom39 — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 13:42:05 +0000

In Latvia what happens if you lose your ID?

New comment by timtom39 in "GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?"

timtom39 — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 13:29:27 +0000

Love the tool. One of my favorite snippets adds parallel processing to jq

#!/bin/bash

cat - | parallel --line-buffer --pipe --roundrobin jq "$@"

New comment by timtom39 in "Bots can complete CAPTCHAs quicker than humans"

timtom39 — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 13:42:36 +0000

Yes and No. They used to be much harder to solve but modern AI has made them much easier to solve in the last couple of years.

Profitability. That is what it comes down to. The price of solving these have plummeted in last couple of years.

New comment by timtom39 in "Bots can complete CAPTCHAs quicker than humans"

timtom39 — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 13:21:35 +0000

The bots would just slow down then. Their time is ~free.

reCAPTCHA is one of the better captcha because they do a decent amount of browser fingerprinting and their captcha are interactive.

Still there are services for solving them. Fun thing is you only need to pay those services for first ~50K captcha and then you can train your own solver using the data you collected.

Ultimately, captchas only serve to increase the cost of running bots. If what ever your trying to protect is worth more you will fail.

New comment by timtom39 in "Firefox desktop extensions coming soon for the upcoming Android release"

timtom39 — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 14:10:41 +0000

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/

Just read their blog. Latest three: - EU's AI Act - Fakespot school supplies? - Making trustworthy chatbots to support women plagued by violence and abuse

The first one might make sense? Second one WTF? And third is disgusting (I know people effected and the LAST thing they want is some chatbot).

None of these are related strongly to Firefox. I quit donating to them years ago after it was obvious they have their priorities messed up.

New comment by timtom39 in "More Than 40% of Japanese Women May Never Have Children"

timtom39 — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 14:41:16 +0000

To back this up because I was curious, 2.29% of Japan's population is immigrants vs 13.6% of US's population.