smittywerben

7 ms·

1.
by smittywerben 1y ago
HN always sides with web operators. There's probably a vc joke in there.
2.
by smittywerben 1y ago
> "The higher you go in abstraction, the more it's okay to design an alternative." What choice of paint you throw into the tarpit makes zero difference.
3.
by smittywerben 1y ago
That matches what I've heard, so I think you stated the trope perfectly. Your response is a good point about the actual difficulty. Perhaps I'm confused about what 'rolling your own encryption' means at an abstraction le
4.
by smittywerben 1y ago
I don't believe in the "never roll your own encryption" it's literally giving up. Does it make economic sense, or is it just for a hobby? That's more debatable. It's also like a foil of 'don't use reg
5.
by smittywerben 1y ago
When this happened to me it was because, I can only guess, it was the Gemini servers were overloaded. Symptoms: Gemini model, Opaque API wrapper error, truncated responses. To be fair the Anthropic servers are overloaded a lot too but they
6.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Ah, the ol' Dropbox risk management tactic where they show you a random selection of your photos when you open the page. Or any page on the site. Suggested: "Remembering Summer Vacation 2020". By the way, do you want to compr
7.
by smittywerben 1y ago
I avoided KDE after first experiencing several bad dates with Gnome. Skipped straight to xfce or a tiling wm. Years later, decided to try KDE again because someone made an arch linux joke about it. I don't remember the joke, but it scr
8.
by smittywerben 1y ago
There's olympics for persons with disabilities. TikTok is in one of those but with other similarly sized companies. News at 11: 1080p today looks worse than 5 years ago, ending a a two decade streak of innovation and improvement to the
9.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Google claimed Protobuffers are the solution but Google's planetary engineers clearly have ZERO respect for the mixed-endian remote systems keeping the galactic federation afloat with their cheap CORBA knockoff. It's like, sure wh
10.
by smittywerben 1y ago
This might sound crazy, but what if we're hitting some sort of hardware limitation, like too many people are sharing a single phone line, and Slashdot is innovative, but is like near best case solution when we're still sharing the
11.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Dare me to say costless leaky abstraction. Then I'll point to the thread next door using Chrome profilers to diagnose Chrome internals using Scratch. Then I'll finish saying that at least Unreal has that authentic '90s feel t
12.
by smittywerben 1y ago
NEW QUEST: "These New Gaming Requirements Are Unreal" OBJECTIVE: Any project that demands HDRP and Nanometric Mesh BONUS: Find the happy path
13.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Valve should also delete its chat app. You can send a game if it's that important.
14.
by smittywerben 1y ago
A user's attempt to send a sticker reveals Valve's misguided implementation of the Y combinator, where Steam App and Steam Chat exist only to question each other's purpose. The sole defender of this system, a user who bought
15.
by smittywerben 1y ago
For context, Steam has never really supported mobile devices for using the Steam store. It kind of makes sense if you think about it.
16.
by smittywerben 1y ago
I already spent time proofreading it, but I forgot that I couldn't edit it after so much time. Unless the merciful admin lets me roll the 12-sided dice to replace the above cringe with the below piece I carved out of soap. --- I always
17.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Sir, your reply is more coherent than mine. I'll give you props for that. Still, I disagree that Kafka is always overkill. When god opened a datagram socket on your computer, you needed to have been capturing this data X months ago, bu
18.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Kafka is a write-ahead log, not a queue per se. It handles transactions to the disk. Not across the network. RabbitMQ is neat out of the box. But I went with ZeroMQ at the time. ZeroMQ is cool but during current year I'd only use it to
19.
by smittywerben 1y ago
[gong sound] The Master said, “I consider my not being present at the sacrifice, as if I did not sacrifice.” The Analects (Confucius, 551-479 BCE), translated by James Legge (1815-1897)
20.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Hell even today in 2025 I installed my Wacom tablet drivers (USB drawing tablet) and the installer says "You must restart your system... Note: Shut down is not the same as Restart", like what does that even mean? It's a class
21.
by smittywerben 1y ago
C# has aged better but I feel like Java 8 approaching ANSI C level solid tools. If only Swing wasn't so ugly. They should poach Raymond Chen to make Java 8 Remastered I like his blog posts. There's probably a DOS joke in there. Al
22.
by smittywerben 1y ago
I don't understand how everyone hates Kafka I use it as a typed write-ahead JSON log with library support for most languages. Yes the systems I've built with this were overengineered but it worked and was reliable. I just bought a
23.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Thanks I didn't notice until now. I miskeyed SPARC on my iPhone keyboard.
24.
by smittywerben 1y ago
You are correct to question the premise. I don't care about Wikipedia, I am asking about some systemic decisions from decades ago that most people take for granted these days. The Red Cross doesn't need defending because the AMA b
25.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Thanks. Also, the Thumper looks awesome like a max-level MMORPG character that would kill the level-1 consumer Synology NAS character in one hit.
26.
by smittywerben 1y ago
How do I tell the difference between a profit-maximizing non-profit who says they contribute to the public using what I contributed 10 years ago to Wikipedia and thus not need to pay taxes under charity in 2025? Compared to actually helping
27.
by smittywerben 1y ago
What's wrong with being a tax-paying non-profit?
28.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Thanks for sharing I was just looking for what happened to Sun. I like the second-hand quote comparing the IBM and HP as "garbage trucks colliding" plus the inclusion of blog posts with links to the court filings. Is it fair to sa
29.
by smittywerben 1y ago
Someone made Adblock rules for Wikipedia ads that I use with Ublock Origin who refuses donations. https://gist.github.com/jnss95/0fb8872fa7ce73d7795916c84eb30... Previous discussion calling Wikipedia wasteful was not w
30.
by smittywerben 1y ago
I've been critical of Wikipedia for years. Can't they come up with a more coherent argument like it put paid encyclopedias out of business so the donations it gets for running ads should be taxed like a business.

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