dexen · HackerTrans

الشهر الماضيdiscuss

Excellent post, thank you

قبل 5 أشهرdiscuss

Gonna re-post my 2023 comment on IPv6:

>It is gradually becoming acceptable to dismiss IPv6 and suggest searching for a modern, practically minded alternative. Important first step in untangling the mess.

>Naturally opinions vary as to what exactly would constitute modern. Common complaint is the significant mixing of OSI layers, in particular application level concerns like significant baggage of encryption & authentication. And then there's my pet peeve of BSD Sockets API incompatibility which was introduced accidentally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37119627

dexen

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

Semi related: there's a browser plugin[1] available to "de-mainstream" Youtube. It removes from recommendations the well known channels of the big name media brands[2]. You can add more to the list.

--

[1] https://demainstream.com/

[2] https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-Extension...

dexen

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

Systemic fixes are needed. In the meantime you can improve your own experience (and hopefully others a bit too). When you hover over a recommendation, there's a menu icon to the right side (three vertical dots, gray). Clicking it opens menu with option to indicate "Not interested" and "Report". The former is supposed to train your own instance of recommendation algo, the later does the usual reporting.

According to the current scuttlebutt lore, Youtube makes a concerted effort to steer users towards authoritative sources (typically the big media brands), especially on spicier subjects. This is in response to the recent slew of articles accusing Youtube of user radicalization.

dexen

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

Recommendation bubbles are partly privacy matter -- without the ability to track users, there would be no recommendation bubbles. It may sound like a far-fetched possibility -- how to maintain privacy of logged in users? But I figure it is doable from technical standpoint; the key question would be how to transform the financial part of the operation to keep Youtube afloat.

At this point, even the awareness of recommendation bubbles and their shape & size can help quite a bit. It's a valid research.

It grates me that Mozilla seems to take very one-sided view on the politics of it, but hey, it's a start. Hopefully others will follow to counter-balance the Mozilla's slant.

dexen

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

>Why can't native dropdowns have an integrated search?

At least in Firefox, the normal <select> combobox does search by prefix matching the values of <option> tags as you type.

However it's pretty hard -nigh impossible?- to make a good globally generic search widget. Different datasets warrant widely differing matching rules (prefix matching vs. any place matching vs. any word matching; OR search vs AND search; case sensitivity; i18n concerns; non-alphanumeric characters).

dexen

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

>It does cost them money when they get it wrong.

Does it tho?

Google has the problem of too much advertising space vs too few advertising clients. Being able to significantly cut down the advertising space means they get better prices across the board.

Demonetizing any singular video (especially if suspect or borderline) is one time loss, long time profit.

dexen

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

A modest proposal: let's use only static libraries (plugins aside). Let's help KSM efficiently merge the R/X, and the R/O memory pages of the static libraries of running processes. To maintain the current performance, let's give KSM a hint: the hint would be a string of standardized, canonical library pathname, including name and version number.

During the (static) linking of libraries, an extra metadata item would be stored in the ELF file: the canonical pathnames of all the static libraries used, along with base addresses of R/X segments (code) and R/O segments (r/o data). Upon forking a process, the information would be provided to kernel, and passed over to the KSM, to use as basis of same-page lookup and possible merging of the pages.

This effectively inverts the current mechanism. Currently when libraries are dynamically loaded, the dynloader uses actual file pathname of the shlib as the key for operation opposite to "merging" - i.e., re-uses the already loaded R/X and R/O pages, by adding proper memory mapping.

The proposed change is three-fold:

  1) extend the linker to add the metadata to ELF,

  2) extend in-kernel ELF interpreter to extract the info upon exec() and friends,

  3a) extend the KSM with a limited mode, where it would look up & merge only the hinted memory regions, in linear fashion, right after an exec() & friends.

An alternative to 3a), to avoid fussing about with KSM:

  3b) modify the VM subsystem to extend current swap/SHM so it provides an unique address range for each static lib canonical pathname. Requesting pages from this address range would map from the shared pages, if any process already loaded one such.

To handle adversarial processes on single machine, a further extension where crypto signatures are checked is possible.

dexen

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

>I gave Firefox an honest go, but some web apps just don't work 100% in it. Chrome does not have this issue.

Used to be the same problem with Firefox vs IE6. And that was exactly when people got serious about the need to defeat the monopoly of IE.

dexen

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

>Google is probably one of the most careful companies when dealing with private data

>private data

Ah, the fabled "metadata is not data" defense. Sadly, given the scale and pervasiveness of Google, observing meta-data and cross-referencing your activity with others' activities is good enough to deduce most of the valuable information about you with reasonably good reliability. And this data, both by itself, and also aggregated with other users', is "good enough" for any privacy-busting use.

tl;dr: you are the meta-product.

dexen

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

>I noticed that several product owners / team leaders

>are significantly below targets

>and still do not work on weekends to catch up.

The CEO addresses it specifically to the middle management (POs/TLs) and not line employees.

Given that, the vocal outrage, and the calls on Twitter for the line employees to unionize are both unproductive, and also misleading. Way to discredit your position.

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