riQQ's recent activity

  1. Comment on Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link
    Original source: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/03/28/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-26200-5516-dev-channel/

    Original source:
    https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/03/28/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-26200-5516-dev-channel/

    [Other]

    • We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account.
    15 votes

  2. Comment on Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link Parent
    They're not lazy regarding evasion. They're just lazy regarding adapting their generic collection logic to specific sites to be less resource hungry, e.g. just use the repositories instead of the...

    They're not lazy regarding evasion. They're just lazy regarding adapting their generic collection logic to specific sites to be less resource hungry, e.g. just use the repositories instead of the web interfaces of code forges.

    Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale.

    [...] and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.

    (emphasis mine)

    10 votes

  3. Comment on Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link Parent
    Artificial intelligence (AI) needs a lot of data. That is collected by searching through every website and its sub-pages. Depending how this collection is done this can use a lot of computing...

    Artificial intelligence (AI) needs a lot of data. That is collected by searching through every website and its sub-pages. Depending how this collection is done this can use a lot of computing resources and thereby incur a big cost for the entity hosting the websites.
    There's an arms race between the websites and the data collectors to detect and evade detection respectively.

    8 votes

  4. Comment on Record thefts boost North Korea to third-largest bitcoin holder in ~finance

  5. Comment on Dutch parliament calls for end to dependence on US software companies in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link

    The Netherlands' parliament on Tuesday approved a series of motions calling on the government to reduce dependence on U.S. software companies, including by creating a cloud services platform under Dutch control.

    While such initiatives have foundered in the past due to a lack of viable European alternatives, lawmakers said changing relations with the United States under the presidency of Donald Trump have given the issue fresh urgency.

    20 votes

  7. Comment on Who will maintain Vim? A demo of Git Who in ~comp

    riQQ
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Thanks for the pointer. The update didn't exist when I made the post yesterday. It's always good to be explicit about the assumptions: The tool is using git's author field on every commit. If the...

    Reddit user y-c-c pointed out to me that the above analysis of Vim’s commit history is misleading because for many years Moolenaar gave credit to contributors in the commit message of patches he committed. So, during the many years where it looks like Moolenaar was the sole contributor, there were in fact other people contributing to Vim—it’s just that all of their changes were introduced to the repo via a commit from Moolenaar.

    Typically, a situation like this would be handled in Git by setting the commit author to the person who wrote the patch and the commit committer to the person actually making the commit. git who uses the author field. Still, everybody is entitled to use their tools their own way; it’s also possible this convention didn’t exist when Moolenaar first migrated Vim to Git. The fault is my own for not spot checking the commit history to see how the Vim project did things. Vim has had more external contributors and for far longer than I represent above.

    Thanks for the pointer. The update didn't exist when I made the post yesterday.

    It's always good to be explicit about the assumptions:

    The tool is using git's author field on every commit. If the repository doesn't use this field according to git who's assumptions the results will be skewed.

    8 votes

  8. Comment on Who will maintain Vim? A demo of Git Who in ~comp

    riQQ
    Link

    Bram Moolenaar, creator and long-time maintainer of the Vim text editor, died in 2023. His death was a great loss. He left behind a piece of software used and beloved by many, as well as some big questions: Who will keep Vim going now that he is gone? Are there other contributors that can take over? Has anyone been working on Vim since he died?

    I recently released an open-source command-line tool called git who that can answer some of these questions. I wanted to build the tool because I’ve long been fascinated by what we can learn about a codebase from the metadata in its commit history. The commit history embeds a lot of information, especially about the people behind the codebase. git who surfaces this information. As a Vim user myself, I’m curious to see what git who can tell me about who is working on Vim now. I also hope this example will show how git who can be useful.

    11 votes

  10. Comment on BYD unveils new super-charging EV tech, to build charging network in China in ~transport

    riQQ
    Link

    The so-called “super e-platform” will be capable of peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), enabling cars that use it to travel 400 km (249 miles) on a 5-minute charge, founder Wang Chuanfu said at an event livestreamed from the company’s Shenzhen headquarters.

    Charging speeds of 1,000 kW would be twice as fast as Tesla
    ’s superchargers whose latest version offers up to 500 kw charging speeds. Fast-charging technology has been key to increasing EV adoption as it is seen to help assure EV drivers’ concerns over being able to charge their cars quickly.

    8 votes

  12. Comment on Posteo.de or Mailbox.org - Struggling to find an alternative to Proton in ~tech

  13. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 24 in ~society

  14. Comment on Implementing achievements for MTG Arena in ~comp

    riQQ
    Link

    MTG Arena has long wanted to encourage exploration, and several of the game's systems are designed to do exactly that. The new-player experience is the first prominent example of this. MTG Arena attempts to ease you into the behemoth that is Magic: The Gathering, one color, one deck at a time, until you feel comfortable entering games against other human players. At this point, with a little more experience under your belt, we encourage you to explore via daily quests. You probably can't reliably complete daily quests with the same deck every day (though, again, if you're like me, you might enjoy the challenge of trying to make a single deck that can complete most daily quests by itself), so you find yourself reaching for techniques, strategies, and cards you may not have considered trying otherwise.

    Of course, the new-player experience and daily quests can only do so much (and you probably know where this is going). For almost as long as MTG Arena has existed, players have been clamoring for a capital-A achievement system. A way to explore, try new things, get creative, and, at the end of the day, have a nice shiny badge that shows you did the thing. As it turns out, the designers and developers of MTG Arena have been thinking about achievements for just as long. Thinking about the benefits and pitfalls, the technical challenges, and, of course, dreaming up ideas for those glorious, difficult, exceedingly challenging one-off achievements. And with the release of Aetherdrift, we're happy for the achievements feature to have finally launched!

    2 votes

  16. Comment on Donald Trump directs US Treasury to stop making pennies in ~society

    riQQ
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Correction: This is not true, only some countries with the Euro currency round their prices to 5c, e.g. Germany doesn't. 1c and 2c is still legal tender in all Euro countries. See also...

    Correction:
    This is not true, only some countries with the Euro currency round their prices to 5c, e.g. Germany doesn't. 1c and 2c is still legal tender in all Euro countries. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_coins#Price_rounding.

    6 votes

  17. Comment on Let's Encrypt is ending support for expiration notification emails in ~comp

    riQQ
    Link

    Since its inception, Let’s Encrypt has been sending expiration notification emails to subscribers that have provided an email address to us. We will be ending this service on June 4, 2025. The decision to end this service is the result of the following factors:

    1. Over the past 10 years more and more of our subscribers have been able to put reliable automation into place for certificate renewal.

    2. Providing expiration notification emails means that we have to retain millions of email addresses connected to issuance records. As an organization that values privacy, removing this requirement is important to us.

    3. Providing expiration notifications costs Let’s Encrypt tens of thousands of dollars per year, money that we believe can be better spent on other aspects of our infrastructure.

    4. Providing expiration notifications adds complexity to our infrastructure, which takes time and attention to manage and increases the likelihood of mistakes being made. Over the long term, particularly as we add support for new service components, we need to manage overall complexity by phasing out system components that can no longer be justified.

    29 votes

  19. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of January 27 in ~society

  20. Comment on Highlighting text in Wikipedia scrolls up too fast? in ~tech

    riQQ
    Link
    Just to describe the workaround you mentioned: you can create a Wikipedia account and select the old theme in your account settings. Wikipedia will then always use this theme when you're logged in.

    Just to describe the workaround you mentioned:
    you can create a Wikipedia account and select the old theme in your account settings. Wikipedia will then always use this theme when you're logged in.

    4 votes