cesarb

11 ms·

151.
by cesarb 11mo ago
> Once up on a time social media was called Usenet and worked offline in a dedicated client with a standard protocol. There was also FidoNet with offline message readers.
152.
by cesarb 11mo ago
> I am a citizen of country A but live and work in country B [...] I also have to pay taxes to country A, which involves more paperwork. Isn't that the case only when country A is the USA? AFAIK, nearly all countries in the world ta
153.
by cesarb 1y ago
> Or put differently, why bake the CPU instruction sets into the chips? There is more to a CPU instruction set than just instruction encodings. For instance, x86 has flags which are updated (sometimes partially) by a lot of instructions,
154.
by cesarb 1y ago
> Even if you could get some traction, you're gonna have a bad time getting banks to support this OS This already happened. Banks here in Brazil like to require an invasive piece of software (a browser "plugin", though it
155.
by cesarb 1y ago
> It's a transcript of the video at the top. Which is not obvious at all if you have JavaScript disabled by default, since it only shows up as a blank space, which could also be a blocked ad or an image which failed to load correctl
156.
by cesarb 1y ago
> You don't want software updates? Most of the time, software updates remove features, change things around for no good reason (breaking our workflows), or add unwanted features. We really should separate pure bugfix updates (which
157.
by cesarb 1y ago
> And weirdos like us can always just import a Chinese phone that doesn't have mandatory Google verification crap. No, we can't. One of the first countries with that mandatory Google verification is Brazil, and we can't im
158.
by cesarb 1y ago
Wait, are there timezones where the DST change doesn't happen at midnight? That's news to me. Now this article makes sense to me; I was wondering what made 02:00 and 03:00 special, since the DST changes would be from 00:00 to 01
159.
by cesarb 1y ago
> I often tell my friends I run an app on my phone that captures my location 24/7 [...] But then I tell them all my location data is not sent to anywhere on the Internet Your phone is on the Internet. It takes only one attack (for i
160.
by cesarb 1y ago
> What's the point of encrypting your disks if the computer automatically decrypts them anyway? The important detail you're missing is: the computer automatically decrypts your disks if you're booting into that operating
161.
by cesarb 1y ago
> but that part of the description doesn't catch how objects are automatically freed once the last reference to them (the owning one) is dropped. You're confusing the borrow checker with RAII. Dropping the last reference to an
162.
by cesarb 1y ago
> If the plan is to use solar and storage for _all generation_, though, that's the number that matters. And that's the problem with these Internet discussions: that's almost never the plan, but commenters trying to make so
163.
by cesarb 1y ago
On top of that, there was the removal of built-in J2EE; you needed to add external copies of the J2EE pieces, and some of them (like CORBA) weren't available as separate packages. And later versions of these external J2EE packages chan
164.
by cesarb 1y ago
> How much risk do you expose typical users to in the name of preserving the rights and capabilities of the tiny base of power users? Rights and capabilities are for everyone, even if they're not currently using them due to not bein
165.
by cesarb 1y ago
There's one thing I deeply dislike with Java NIO: ClosedByInterruptException. If a thread is interrupted (for instance, due to a future.cancel(true) or similar), and it happens to be in the middle of a NIO operation, the channel will b
166.
by cesarb 1y ago
> It's been many years since that was all fixed, though. AFAIK, there's still no replacement for sun.misc.Signal and sun.misc.SignalHandler, so I think "that was all fixed" is false.
167.
by cesarb 1y ago
> And in general we know when the sun is going down a long time in advance so grid operators can plan for it! This is even more important for solar eclipses: unlike normal sunrise and sunset which are gradual, the ramp in a solar eclipse
168.
by cesarb 1y ago
> Encrypt before sending to a third party? That sounds great, as long as nobody makes any mistake. It could be a bug on the RNG which generates the encryption keys. It could be a software or hardware defect which leaks information about
169.
by cesarb 1y ago
> Some payment providers ask up front to simplify the flows as it's not totally trivial to determine what sort of card it is And because the same card can be both. At least here in Brazil, most bank cards have multiple uses (credit,
170.
by cesarb 1y ago
> I wonder if we can make a chat app that doesn't use encryption but hides your messages inside random words. This technique is called "chaffing and winnowing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_a
171.
by cesarb 1y ago
> When it comes to computer graphics, iirc it's pretty normalized now - graphics drivers all seem to have tweaks, settings, optimizations and workarounds for every game. Even Mesa has them: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org&
172.
by cesarb 1y ago
> But can you elaborate on how this is enforced? The import is rejected by customs. Yes, this means there's the small loophole of traveling to another country (which is usually a long travel, this country is huge and the ocean is wi
173.
by cesarb 1y ago
> Applications do not talk to the filesystem directly, Sometimes, they do. For instance, BTRFS_IOC_CLONE to do a copy-on-write clone of a file's contents (now promoted to other filesystems as FICLONE, but many other ioctl operation
174.
by cesarb 1y ago
> So even if mass-market smartphones become locked-down completely, we will still have alternatives. [...] (Fairphone and PinePhone come to mind, I'm sure there are more) You're not looking far ahead enough. Use of these altern
175.
by cesarb 1y ago
> but general-purpose computing is very much alive and kicking in laptops, desktops, and servers. Two words: Secure Boot. The only reason we still can run operating systems without Microsoft's approval on these devices, is that alte
176.
by cesarb 1y ago
> But nope, this is not it, because the good old ls sorts my files correctly Did the author try "ls -v"? It would probably give the exact same order these file managers used.
177.
by cesarb 1y ago
> I don't understand why Microsoft chose to kill it. My personal suspicion: it's about handles. Several kinds of objects in the Windows API are identified by global handles (for instance, HWND for a window), and on 16-bit Windo
178.
by cesarb 1y ago
> Even a basic not-too-horrible screen will cost another $80 I believe the idea is that you'd plug it into the TV you already have, like we did in the 1980s.
179.
by cesarb 1y ago
> A correctly configured service should not attempt to access things is is not intended to access. If it has to check if it has access and act conditionally It's normally recommended to attempt the access and handle the denial, inst
180.
by cesarb 1y ago
> it was originally about 50% C and 50% Perl, the performance critical parts were written in C and then various git commands were written in Perl. IIRC, it was mostly shell, not Perl, and looking at the proportion is misleading: the low-

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