neo

joined 4 years ago
[–] neo@hexbear.net 4 points 9 hours ago

Thanks for fact-checking and saving me a click 😌

[–] neo@hexbear.net 5 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I think the player is Brazilian and not a Yankee but I’m not that interested to click and learn more about this

[–] neo@hexbear.net 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You've got a back room and you're not using it as a cool-ass hackerspace?

[–] neo@hexbear.net 4 points 4 days ago

I have NOT tried this but according to https://massgrave.dev/change_windows_edition you can change the windows edition. I would not try it without backing up my most important files, regardless. I don't use Windows so the opportunity for me to try it doesn't exist, but the option is good to keep in mind.

[–] neo@hexbear.net 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Bazzite works pretty well and the ublue ecosystem is pretty cool, but there are unfortunately sometimes "decision-making strategies" you must employ. As an example, say you want to install yt-dlp. What's the best path?

  • rpm-ostree is not advised, such that you don't want to modify the core system, even though Fedora keeps yt-dlp up-to-date. So this would technically work fine.
  • brew installs yt-dlp but also a bunch of other stuff. Notably, you get an entirely second copy of Python.
  • Distrobox/toolbox works well, but now you have a whole OS container. Just for one command?
  • PIP is yet another way to install it, but using a lot of pip can lead to an insane python dependency hell (and it seems that if you want a self-deployed application pipx is the play, but you'll have to set that up yourself)
  • Manually downloading yt-dlp to avoid the drawbacks of the above, with the drawback of have to remember to update it yourself.

That said, I'm using Bazzite on my Steam Deck in particular because it allows me to have full disk encryption, which is mandatory for me because I use it as a generic computer and not just as a steam appliance. And also because with Bazzite the maintenance I personally have to do for it is about as minimal as SteamOS.

[–] neo@hexbear.net 16 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Proprietary software is a complete infringement of human dignity and freedom. Desktop Linux is also better now than it has ever been. In fact, given the direction of the latest versions of Windows and macOS, it is in many ways a better experience than those. I won't lie and say Linux is unequivocally better in every way, though.

[–] neo@hexbear.net 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

somehow i doubt this is remotely true outside of "some of us watched the movie between its release and now" and it's getting clickbait spun into "they're preparing for the real thing by watching a movie!"

[–] neo@hexbear.net 38 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Plaquemines Superintendent Shelley Ritz said Justice Department officials still visited every year as recently as 2023 and requested data on topics including hiring and discipline. She said the paperwork was a burden for her district of fewer than 4,000 students.

“It was hours of compiling the data,” she said.

Damn, I hate doing a few hours of work as part of my superintendent job.

[–] neo@hexbear.net 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Recent grads, or older ones? I graduated in 2016 from a large state school and I had many very brilliant peers in the CS program. Obviously, there were still plenty of people who were, "what are you even doing here?"-tier. I assume the younger gen of grads (2020-onwards) got mega-screwed by COVID lockdowns, remote learning, etc.

One thing I'm being a bit dismissive of is for a lot of people college is just "the next step" for youngsters who get railroaded into it, without a clear vision of what they're doing and what they want to do with their lives. By contrast, some of the bootcamp people I've seen are driven, focused, and self-motivated. They figured out what they want, and they know how to direct themselves to get it. Those kinds of people tend to be good at anything they apply themselves to, including software dev.

[–] neo@hexbear.net 13 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I just assume communities like that are dead, because SWE used to be an actually good job and fellow SWEs were probably on average more competent. Then the 2010s happened. Coding bootcamps, floods of people who are just coming into the field because it pays well but without a fundamental curiosity or interest in what's technically going on, MOOCs, FreeCodeCamp... you name it.

Everyone was told to learn to code and that they could code. I think it's even fundamentally true. I don't want to gatekeep knowledge, but the people orchestrating this kind of thing were just trying to make today's moment happen: make software engineer labor cheap.

Except what they did is they just attracted a lot of people into a field who are clueless, or as you said careerists, AND cheap. So now we're in the 2020s and ChatGPT has come and just made everything that much worse for everybody. Let's take stock of the kinds of people who became SWEs over time.

Always true: You could be very talented and self-taught. These people do exist.

before 2012: You had to pass an accredited computer science curriculum to get
into the field.
[ Up until 2012 everyone fit the above two categories. Computer science is not
an easy topic. It weeded out people who couldn't keep up with the work. This
kept the skill level relatively high. ]

2012-2021: You had to hack it in a coding bootcamp or MOOC with a basic
certificate that claims competency. More people could just claim being
self-taught than before. Especially for the web, frameworks can cover for the
harder parts of programming. Think: the NPM importer developer.
[ Now you have a lot of people joining the field with various competencies. Some
of these people are really good, but many are not. Computer science departments
expanded to accommodate more students with massive grants from places like the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, so more people are coming into these programs,
too. ]

2022-2023 (layoffs)
[ Now the situation is getting desperate for many people. People who were nicer
before are now tightening their belts because they've seen hundreds of
thousands of layoffs. Do you want to be next on the chopping block? Are you
happy with life right now? ]

2023-2025: You just ask the chatbot to give you the answer. You have no way of
assessing if it's the right answer.
[ Anyone can do this. Many people try to do this. I've spoken to very tired
recruiters who just have to sift through endless bullshit AI spam applications
and applicants. People who were bad at their job are now offloading what little
skill they used to have to this, and are therefore de-skilling themselves, too. ]

I think you want to rewind the clock, but unless you build a new community and set the rules this stuff is just dead.

 

WASHINGTON—A CIA official has been charged with leaking top-secret classified documents that revealed information last month about Israel’s plans for a military strike against Iran, according to U.S. court documents and people familiar with the matter.

Asif William Rahman was arrested in Cambodia on Tuesday and transported to a federal court in Guam to be charged. He was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia on two counts of willful transmission of national defense information, charges that can result in years in prison.

Court documents filed Wednesday say Rahman possessed a top-secret security clearance and had access to sensitive compartmented information. The documents don’t state that he worked at the Central Intelligence Agency, but people familiar with the matter confirmed his employment at the spy agency.

Rahman worked overseas for the CIA in Cambodia and elsewhere, one of the people said. It isn’t publicly known what sort of work he did for the spy agency.

In October two leaked classified reports from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes imagery gathered by American reconnaissance satellites, appeared on Telegram and X. The files were circulated by a pro-Iran account, Middle East Spectator, which says it received them from an anonymous source.

The leak set off a scramble within U.S. spy agencies—which have suffered a number of significant unauthorized disclosures in recent years—to identify the source of the breach. Officials were worried about the possibility of more disclosures, though it appears the leak was limited to the original documents. The Federal Bureau of Investigation previously acknowledged investigating the leak.

The leaked reports assessed Israel’s planning for a possible Iran attack, including the types of aircraft and munitions its military could use. They also described Israeli air-force exercises involving air-to-surface missiles, believed to be in preparation for aerial strikes inside Iran. One of the reports says the U.S. hadn’t seen any sign an attack would involve nuclear weapons, a capability Israel is known to possess but doesn’t publicly confirm it has.

The motives for Rahman’s alleged leaks weren’t immediately clear. His arrest took place the same day that Jack Teixeira, a former Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, was sentenced to 15 years in prison over a leak of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents last year on the social-media platform Discord.

Teixeira’s leaks were more voluminous and wide-ranging than the pair of documents allegedly disclosed by Rahman, and authorities said their releases were done to impress anonymous friends on the internet. Teixeira pleaded guilty in March 2024.

 

I contacted Amazon customer service for the first time since I got my Kindle PW3 in 2017 with "Special Offers". Even after years of ads they want the full $20 to disable the special offers. I said thanks, but not for me! But as part of this process to get them to remove the special offers I preemptively turned on the WiFi on my Kindle for the first time in a long while. Somehow doing so deleted all of my Calibre-managed ebooks. I'm not kidding.

BTW, if you have a kindle do not connect it to WiFi! Especially if it's still on a blessed older firmware. You do not want to let it accidentally upgrade to a version that cannot be jailbroken, not until you are in full control and awareness of the upgrade process yourself.

So with nothing to lose and all my ~~apes~~ ebooks... gone, I said to hell with it. I jailbroke my Kindle following the instructions here (THANK GOODNESS I WAS ON A JAILBREAKABLE FW). This process involves wiping the contents of your Kindle, which effectively already happened to me.

Then I followed the instructions here to install MRPI + KUAL. MRPI is like a command line package installer and KUAL is a GUI one.

In my jailbreak journey I also referenced this page https://blog.fabricemonasterio.dev/kindle-jailbreak/ for some tips and workflow ideas, including how to get a dictionary for the next step...

Which brings me to the Knock Out punch of why this was at all worth it. I installed https://koreader.rocks/. KOReader is an alternative ebook reader interface. By analogy, the experience is like taking your old mp3 player and installing RockBox on it to make it actually good. KOReader is similar, but it isn't a fully alternative operating system. It just kills the default React Native interface process and loads its own when you choose to use it. It also supports epubs natively. It is way more featureful and customizable compared to the default Kindle reader. In fact, it's a bit overwhelming at first. After getting a bit more used to it, I really appreciate what it does, and the advanced customization it offers.

I will admit that navigating its UI is a bit clunkier than Amazon's UI, but I will take a bit of clunky any day when it adds native epub and superior pdf support.

So now I have a Kindle that can load an alternative, superior interface, get epubs pushed to it wirelessly with Calibre, shows me the book I'm reading on the lock screen, and doesn't display or present any advertisements anywhere. I really like my Kindle again.

WiFi notesI use WiFi to remotely push books to the kindle. You could choose to never use WiFi and manually manage the ebooks but you have to exit KOReader and use the native Kindle interface, because USB doesn't mount in KOReader on Kindle.

I also use a KUAL extension called renameotabin to help ensure my kindle never downloads and installs a newer firmware while on WiFi. Currently the latest firmware for my Kindle, 5.16.2.1.1, is also the latest version there's a jailbreak for. But if Amazon ever decides to resume supporting what seems to be an unsupported device, I don't want to be hosed.

Bonus thoughts on the 'special offers'I honestly did not mind the special offers when I first bought my Kindle in 2017. Sure, my lock screen was an ad but otherwise the main Kindle interface was generally unobstructed and fine to use. I mostly disabled WiFi so the loaded ads would expire eventually anyway and just revert to some generic art.

One day after using my Kindle like this for years curiosity got the better of me. I thought, as many seemed to, that epub support was finally on the way, so I upgraded my Kindle. As we all found out, the feature was to send an epub by email, which Amazon then converted to an azw3. They never supported epubs on the Kindle.

I must've gone from a substantially older Kindle firmware version, because now I had a brand new UI on my Kindle. And in some ways it actually was better, but in more ways it was worse. The home screen was almost nothing but ads and suggested books to buy from Amazon. I do not know what the interface looks like on a non-special-offer Kindle, but it was so aggressively in my face that it did actually impact my experience with the device. It was annoying but I lived with it until my books were wiped for no reason.

Once that happened I did the jailbreak as I described above, which reformats the Kindle's disk drive, but I didn't enable WiFi. Good enough for me, I thought. I will just plug in my phone and use Calibre to manage the library. Except even in this way the default Kindle UI is aggressively annoying. Every time I visited my ebook "library" (list of ebooks on the device), an annoying pop-up appeared telling me that to cloud sync my books I had to log in. There is no way to disable this alert from popping up other than by logging into my account. So I did.

I had mistakenly believed the jailbreak itself would take care of the ads, but that's not so. The ads were back after logging in. And that's what led me to research removing the ads and, ultimately, KOReader (which by default isn't even designed to remove ads). So the best route I guess would've been to jailbreak, never connect my Kindle to the Internet and then install KOReader and manage it all offline. But I don't feel like wiping it again, so I just keep it off of WiFi except for when I'm managing ebooks.

 

sorry, i should have picked a lower resolution poster image whoops (e: fixed)

Also holy shit this movie still kicks so much ass. I rewatched it recently and i was blown away by how excellent it still is 25 years later. Most movies do not age this well.

 

200 OK? What if it's better than OK?

 

The beloved romhacking.net website is moving to read-only, and will not accept new submissions or updates.

Announcement here.
https://www.romhacking.net/

Commentary here for a peek behind the curtain as to why, esp. pushing back against the "dishonest and hate filled group" part of the announcement.
https://cohost.org/gideonzhi/post/7131478-rip-rhdn

 

Consider https://arstechnica.com/robots.txt or https://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt and how they block all the stupid AI models from being able to scrape for free.

 

Trivially simple script to automatically decrease the horizontal margins on the chat and video containers on hextube. By default both left and right margins are 15px per container. I set them to 1px for a 56px gain in chat and video viewing area. It's free real estate.

// ==UserScript==
// @name        New script hexbear.net
// @namespace   Violentmonkey Scripts
// @match       https://live.hexbear.net/c/movies*
// @grant       none
// @version     1.0
// @author      -
// @description 3/1/2024, 10:31:12 PM
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
    'use strict';
      document.getElementById("chatwrap").style.paddingLeft="1px";
      document.getElementById("chatwrap").style.paddingRight="1px";
      document.getElementById("videowrap").style.paddingLeft="1px";
      document.getElementById("videowrap").style.paddingRight="1px";
})();
What is ViolentMonkey?

ViolentMonkey is an open source browser extension and small alternative to GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey. It can run custom JavaScript in your browser for you automatically to modify page behavior. If you install the extension you can create a new script and copy and paste the one I wrote above. Always beware of installing untrusted scripts that you don't understand.

 

stalin-approval

 

Original Japanese title. しあわせのお面屋がピアノを弾くようです。

 

FNAF the movie was bad. But the one thing that is annoying me is I cannot find anyone else in the world commenting about how Aunt Judy is killed by Golden Freddy in the family living room (btw, they can just leave the pizzeria now), and then at the end of the film they all go home and eat breakfast the next morning. No comment on the corpse rotting in their living room.

It's just a massive oversight on the part of the filmmakers. It ties in nicely with the lack of scares and chills, the bewildering plot line, and massive under-utilization of some of the game's own tropes. IDK what they were trying to do with this movie, but that was some of the tamest "horror" I've ever seen in my life. And the only reason that is remarkable is because the game series it is based on is much scarier.

So, my concluding remark is that the movie is bad whether you are familiar with FNAF or if it is your first exposure to the franchise.

9
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by neo@hexbear.net to c/programming@programming.dev
 

Without realizing what I was getting myself into, I wrote some code using C11's threads.h (EDIT: every time I use the angle brackets < and > they just get eaten, even in the code snippet block.) I'm realizing after the fact that this is basically only supported on Linux (gcc/clang). This is my target platform, but I guess if I could cross compile to Windows or macOS that would be nice, too.

C's threads nominally appear to be a great feature. Finally, a standardized and straightforward interface to threads that would be cross-platform compatible. The reality appears to be anything but.

So is it worth just replacing that code with pthreads? Is there some near-term development on C threads that might make this worthwhile to use? I'm kind of surprised it hasn't really caught on some 12 years after the standard was introduced.

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