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dotdi

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dotdi
·25 days ago·discuss
It's not that absolute progress is slow, it's extremely slow compared to the predictions. It might be fast in absolute terms, but the "50% of coders will be obsolete by 2023" has been renewed every six months, and it's becoming increasingly clear that there's a real chance it might not ever happen.
dotdi
·2 months ago·discuss
It being a proxy buyer means they don't really support you with issues (at least from my experience using it once). I purchased a guitar for several hundred EUR (before shipping and taxes), and it was described as functional. It arrived relatively quickly and was extremely well packaged.

However, the seller either didn't know or hid an issue. Zenmarket provided 0 support. I think they just google-translated my message, forwarded it to the seller, the seller just said "item as-is, no partial refunds", and Zenmarket just closed the issue.

For the guitar nerds: the neck was back-bowed, and it was not really playable because several frets were already buzzing. Truss rod arrived completely loose, meaning fixing this would be difficult/expensive. Try to explain to a tired customer support person that it makes some kind of sound, but not the right kind.
dotdi
·2 months ago·discuss
I feel the rug under my feet moving. Is it being pulled?!
dotdi
·3 months ago·discuss
The funny part is that I never heard a professional tell me I should use WD40 for a specific task. It's been developed for (W)ater (D)isplacement, it's really good for that; and it's passable at other tasks too. For DIYers, it's fine.

For professional use-cases, targeted products are preferred, whether they be lubricants, penetrating oils, rust remover, etc.
dotdi
·3 months ago·discuss
> We move money, so mistakes are costly and quality is contractually non-negotiable. We build on a twelve-year-old monorepo with structural bottlenecks: bloated test suites, manual code review, unstable CI, and deploy infrastructure not made for the pace we need.

In my experience, each single item on this list already is a major hurdle for AI agents. The unholy union of all of them together is something I couldn't personally be responsible for - period.

Working on that codebase - I'm sure - is already difficult and often frustrating. Having a horde of short-term-memory-only agents without any real institutional knowledge is a recipe for disaster. I'm sure the rollout looks great on paper, and long-term effects are - conveniently - not the scope of this article.
dotdi
·3 months ago·discuss
I read a moderate amount I'd say, about 2 weeks average for a book, and I was using a very old and very beat-up but still functioning 4th gen Kindle until recently.

However, I woke up from my stupor when Micro$oft's eBook store closed and purged their library from under everybodies butts. Giving Amazon complete control over my library is a horrible thought, so I'm out.

I am now a happy Boox Go 10.3 + BookFusion user. Crisp screen, great battery life, full android with play store underneath. It syncs to my phone, has most of the bells and whistles I need in terms of reading, and it supports writing handwritten notes (albeit not onto the ebook itself; that's apparently too sci-fi even for 2026), and Bookfusion can sync notes into Obisidian vaults via an Obsidian plugin. I feel in control. I buy books from alternative sites with either no DRM to begin with, or where I'm confident I can remove it. Bookfusion costs me 20EUR a year.

I'm fairly happy with my setup.

EDIT: yes, I'm aware Boox are not the good guys in this story. I have not signed up to any of their services - the device is perfectly usable without that. I turned their book shop off immediately, and I do monitor+block the Chinese IPs it's trying to reach on my router.
dotdi
·3 months ago·discuss
Important bit of information is further down in the article: OnlyOffice is Russian. I would therefore view any collaboration as a risk. It's not adequate for strategic reasons as well as sovereignty.
dotdi
·4 months ago·discuss
Several ideas from this blog post are factually wrong.

Additionally, I cannot confirm the more subjective ideas - and I've been running Macbooks for almost 20 years, and specifically working with Python both for hobby, for research, professionally, for cybersecurity, etc.

I have an old 2013 laptop that is the "couch machine". It still works adequately. No issues with sleep/wake. Time machine outlasted the external HDD it was running on. I am writing this on an M1 Max, which will be 5 years old this year, and I hope I get 5 more years, it's just that good.
dotdi
·5 months ago·discuss
I guess this image generation feature should never have been continvoucly morged back into their slop machine
dotdi
·5 months ago·discuss
The real story here is not how stupid the responses are - it's to show that on a question that even a young child can adequately answer, it chokes.

Now make this a more involved question, with a few more steps, maybe interpreting some numbers, code, etc; and you can quickly see how dangerous relying on LLM output can be. Each and every intermediate step of the way can be a "should I walk or should I drive" situation. And then the step that before that can be one too. Turtles all the way down, so to say.

I don't question that (coding) LLMs have started to be useful in my day-to-day work around the time Opus 4.5 was released. I'm a paying customer. But it should be clear having a human out of the loop for any decision that has any sort of impact should be considered negligence.
dotdi
·5 months ago·discuss
> And what's happening at CISA right now should terrify every American who depends on running water, electricity, and the ability to vote in free elections.

The answer is right at the beginning. Current administration has the explicit goal to not have free elections going forward. It has been stated plainly, on TV. The rest is collateral damage, and an attack on critical infrastructure will be a good excuse to invade the next country, declare state of emergency or outright war and get rid of elections completely.
dotdi
·5 months ago·discuss
The cryptography is sound, however, it's also frequently changing, in addition to straying from standards more or less. This makes it difficult to give a firm answer.

This ETH (i.e. Zurich) paper[0] identified several exploitable vulnerabilities (bad), which were quickly addressed by delta chat (good).

So overall, I'd see it as a good messenger, but with downsides.

[0]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/usenixsecurity24-song-yu...
dotdi
·5 months ago·discuss
> In terms of the Matrix Fdn being incorporated in the UK… I guess that means one shouldn’t use the Internet, given IETF is US incorporated? :)

The outputs of the IETF are RFCs. The Matrix foundation does more directly oversee the "de-facto" Matrix, so has more influence, could bow to government pressure or changing laws, etc. etc.
dotdi
·5 months ago·discuss
I was on a team that evaluated moving a significant portion of a product that should be used for government/healthcare onto Matrix. There were several drawbacks that made us NOT go this route:

- Olm/Megolm does not offer forward secrecy for group messaging

- Olm/Megolm does ensure end-to-end encryption for message data, but not for metadata.

- Federation makes it challenging to be GDPR compliant

- Synapse is very heavy, other implementations are less production ready

- For better or worse, the matrix foundation is under UK jurisdiction.

I'm sure I forget some of the nuance, but these were some of the major points. However, there are several government entities in Germany, France, Poland, etc, that can live with the limitations and DO self-host Matrix servers.

I won't go into the pair of high-severity vulns in 2025 (and the somewhat difficult mitigation) because that could hit anyone.
dotdi
·5 months ago·discuss
This immediately lost credibility for me with this quote:

> And vibe coding is fun. Even Bret Taylor, OpenAI’s chair, acknowledges it’s become a legitimate development approach.

Color me shocked! Bret, who directly profits by how his product is perceived, thinks it's legitimate???? /s
dotdi
·5 months ago·discuss
You _can_ blame them for several high-impact things they willingly did or at least supported, e.g. benefiting greatly from public spending yet successively voting to restrict it later on; f*cking over the real estate market and squeezing younger generations with extreme rents/prices; refusing any kind of social reforms while it has been obvious for decades that current models don't scale; decoupling of productivity from wages; and last but not least racking up huge carbon debt that later generations will pay dearly for.
dotdi
·5 months ago·discuss
My first instinctual reaction to reading this were thoughts of violence.
dotdi
·6 months ago·discuss
At the same time subsidies are being phased out. I was about to get 8kW panels + batteries installed when my country decided to pull them, and I'm not going to spend 10k out of pocket.
dotdi
·7 months ago·discuss
Still, you are comparing a non-empty program to an empty program.
dotdi
·7 months ago·discuss
This is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Python needs to load and interpret the whole requests module when you run the above program. The golang linker does dead code elimination, so it probably doesn't run anything and doesn't actually do the import when you launch it.