whbboyd's recent activity
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Comment on I am looking for 100% ad-free apps for older adults with dementia. Things like jigsaw puzzles, coloring and the like. Paid is fine. in ~life
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Comment on Why is Google Gemini saying we should die? in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentThis analysis is good, but I just want to point out: you are anthropomorphizing the shit out of the model, which in context, may not help the point you're trying to make. The model doesn't "want"...This analysis is good, but I just want to point out: you are anthropomorphizing the shit out of the model, which in context, may not help the point you're trying to make. The model doesn't "want" or "try" to do anything. It's a colossal matrix by which tokenized input vectors are multiplied. That matrix is a black-box locally-optimized (i.e. imperfect) solution to the problem of "given <training corpus, which in context broadly means 'the Internet'> and <prompt>, what tokens most probably continue <prompt>". That continuation is, of course, de facto heavily influenced by tone, and structural similarities (or lack thereof) to the training corpus, so the behaviors you're describing are real. But they're not "intentional" in any meaningful sense, just a side effect of leading a black-box model away from the data on which it was trained.
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Comment on What is the best or recommended way to integrate my Windows 10 and Linux computers through the local network? in ~tech
whbboyd LinkI'll agree with the people saying: for your use case, it sounds like you want a NAS. This'll give you the ability to conveniently bulk transfer and store files, between arbitrary hosts on your...I'll agree with the people saying: for your use case, it sounds like you want a NAS. This'll give you the ability to conveniently bulk transfer and store files, between arbitrary hosts on your network if you use the NAS as an intermediary. You don't need specialized hardware (e.g. a Synology) for this; install network filesystem software on any computer with storage and a network connection, and tada! Network Attached Storage. =) In your case, it sounds to me like you could meet your needs by making your Plex box into a NAS.
The two main protocols for network filesystems are NFS and SMB/CIFS; either will work on both WIndows and Linux, but SMB will probably be easier overall if you've got WIndows systems in the mix. The SMB server software for Linux is called "Samba". For remote management of Linux/Unix systems (so you don't have to keep digging the computer out of its corner), everyone and their dog uses SSH; VNC or remote X (assuming it's using Xorg for its GUI, not Wayland) are possible, but would be very out-of-the-ordinary.
One thing to note about this approach is that you wouldn't have any redundancy in storage; one hard drive failure could potentially lose you a bunch of data (and with a convenient NAS, the temptation to centralize data will be very strong). If that's a concern for you, then it probably does make sense to invest in dedicated hardware for it. An integrated solution like a Synology will be very easy to set up, but you can probably save some money and get more control by throwing TrueNAS on a whitebox PC, or (if you feel really ambitious) building up from a scratch Linux install.
Another thing to note: don't limit your NAS to being just a NAS! No matter what form it takes, it's a server on your local network, and there's no reason it can't provide all sorts of services other than network filesystems. You already have Plex; depending on how you're doing your downloads, you might want to consider setting up Transmission's web UI. If you decide you want to explore home automation, drop Home Assistant on it. Et cetera!
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Comment on Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back. Rachel Plotnick's "re-buttonization" expertise is in demand. in ~design
whbboyd Link ParentI still buy all my music on CD! Buuuuut… the first thing I do with it them rip them and put them on my phone, so the CD player in the car still doesn't get any use. =PI still buy all my music on CD!
Buuuuut… the first thing I do with it them rip them and put them on my phone, so the CD player in the car still doesn't get any use. =P
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Comment on Advice Needed: Simple and Reliable notifications in ~comp
whbboyd LinkIs there a reason you can't use SES instead of Gmail to send your email alerts? For low volumes, the cost is a rounding error, and you can keep using pretty much all your exiting infrastructure;...Is there a reason you can't use SES instead of Gmail to send your email alerts? For low volumes, the cost is a rounding error, and you can keep using pretty much all your exiting infrastructure; SES supports SMTP for sends.
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Comment on Best solution to extract PDF data? in ~comp
whbboyd LinkA former employer of mine built a tool for more-or-less this exact purpose: Textricator. Unfortunately, I was never involved in its use or development, so I can't help much with using it, but we...A former employer of mine built a tool for more-or-less this exact purpose: Textricator. Unfortunately, I was never involved in its use or development, so I can't help much with using it, but we were extracting structured data from court records which had been rendered as PDFs, which sounds reasonably close to what you're doing.
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Comment on ‘I grew up with it’: readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel in ~tech
whbboyd (edited )Link ParentNo structure. This doesn't matter (and is potentially kind of an asset) when human beings use it as computerized graph paper, but it is an enormous fucking pain in the ass when they then decide...- No structure.
This doesn't matter (and is potentially kind of an asset) when human beings use it as computerized graph paper, but it is an enormous fucking pain in the ass when they then decide they need their
abominationdata liberated and hand it off to me to write software to process, which always happens eventually for any sufficiently long-lived spreadsheet.Some (almost certainly not exhaustive, I've blocked plenty of trauma from my memories) examples I've personally run into:
- Excel actually allocates cells, and it does so lazily, and there's a failure mode where it will allocate the bottom-right cell in a sheet for no reason. If you're iterating rows (which is basically the only reasonable way to try to get structured data out), you'll get your data rows, then a million empty rows, then the very last row with one empty cell in it (in a column you're certainly not looking at). This will either break your processing or just waste a ton of time, depending on how much effort you put into handling ill-structured data.
- Also, oddly enough, a hair over a million rows is not enough for lots of datasets. (And if, god help you, someone is slinging around the Office 2003 format, that has a limit of 64Ki, which is not enough for any dataset worth wasting a software engineer's time on.) It is oddly easy to silently truncate when you hit the row limit, as very infamously happened to England's public health service with COVID data.
- If there are dates in a spreadsheet, they are wrong. You should basically just count on it. Excel's date recognition and mangling is tailor-made to corrupt dates.
- Because Excel goes to great lengths to infer cell types, you can't round-trip arbitrary strings through it. It will decide some strings are a different type, convert them, then format them differently on the way out. (This is far and away most prevalent with dates, but definitely affects other types, too.)
- Of course, the data in any individual cell is totally free-form. You have a sheet that looks like a big table, with one column that looks like it's got numbers in it, but if your software isn't prepared for one of those cells to contain an embedded rickroll, it's going to crash. Excel has this nice feature where you can set a limited list of possible values, but aside from being per-cell (and thus almost certainly inconsistent), it's part of the cell's format, purely advisory, and you should probably count on some cells having data that doesn't conform.
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Comment on Morrowind doesn't have any rivers in ~games
whbboyd (edited )Link ParentOh, no, I get it. My reply is partly in kind; but I do think the video suffers for being too straightfaced. The premise is ridiculous; it needs at least some nod to that ridiculousness, or it kind...Oh, no, I get it. My reply is partly in kind; but I do think the video suffers for being too straightfaced. The premise is ridiculous; it needs at least some nod to that ridiculousness, or it kind of reads like the author is just… kind of a jerk about the limitations of 2002 videogames.
(I watched the author's Skyrim waterways video, and IMO it works a lot better, because it breaks the "fourth wall" of game design in its analysis. Why does Skyrim have a river which reverses direction at one point? Because it's a videogame! There's no actual physics acting on the water, and the designers just… needed it to be going the other way.)
Also, if you really get into the weeds, assuming the game is the platonic ideal of Morrowind is self-contradictory, since the in-game lore plays with the concepts of the "player character" and the game as window into the world. But that's some real lore dweeb shit; I'm not judging anyone for staying far afield of that rabbit hole.
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Comment on Morrowind doesn't have any rivers in ~games
whbboyd Link ParentOblivion also lacks flowing rivers. There are ponds and swamps at different elevations, in contrast to Morrowind, but the "rivers" are all, like in Morrowind, just inland extensions of the...Oblivion also lacks flowing rivers. There are ponds and swamps at different elevations, in contrast to Morrowind, but the "rivers" are all, like in Morrowind, just inland extensions of the zero-elevation overworld water plane.
(IMO the game hides this fact better, though; the Niben is broad and plausibly sluggish, and its tributaries are for the most part very remote. In contrast, the Odai runs slap through the middle of one of the major quest hubs, serves as a landmark for a handful of quests, and you're moderately likely to end up swimming in it to escape from guards.)
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Comment on Morrowind doesn't have any rivers in ~games
whbboyd LinkThis is a good analysis, but I feel the need to take a crack at its foundation: the thesis is pretty much "what do they eat"¹ levels of relevance. The rivers don't flow because Bethesda didn't...This is a good analysis, but I feel the need to take a crack at its foundation: the thesis is pretty much "what do they eat"¹ levels of relevance. The rivers don't flow because Bethesda didn't have the tech at the time to make them do so. They don't have interesting sources because that wasn't where they focused their world modeling efforts, because they didn't think most players would be interested in that. (For all the cliff racers you end up killing, Morrowind's gameplay focus is very clearly on its people and towns, especially compared to Oblivion or Skyrim.) While the Inner Sea being a volcanic crater from an ancient supermassive Red Mountain eruption may be geologically improbable, the much bigger problem with the hypothesis is that the people of the island clearly think of and talk about the Odai as being a river, in a world which clearly has flowing rivers in canon. All the game is an abstraction over a platonic "lore" world which is much deeper and more sophisticated than the game can, just due to technical limitations, fully reproduce; by far the best explanation for Morrowind's stubby, stagnant rivers is simply this.
¹ Morrowind has an NPC population just under 2,700—though that does include all the named-but-uninteresting bandits who populate the island's many caves—but something like half a dozen active farms, plus three-ish working egg mines, a quantity of food production which could not possibly sustain that population. The explanation for this discrepancy is "stop thinking about it and get back to deicide, you dummy".
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Comment on Winamp deletes GitHub repository after a rocky few weeks in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentThey think it's an asset (they likely even have a laughably arbitrary dollar value on it in their books), and the idea of giving away an asset is literally unthinkable to this sort of person....Do they really think there is money to be made off the code base for a 25 year old music player?
They think it's an asset (they likely even have a laughably arbitrary dollar value on it in their books), and the idea of giving away an asset is literally unthinkable to this sort of person.
There are two obvious things wrong with this viewpoint. First, of course, it's psychopathically antisocial. Human society is essentially built on kindness and generosity. But more immediately, a big pile of code without people with expertise to operate and modify it is literally a liability, not an asset. Attempting to do anything nontrivial with it without sinking six months to a year of (extremely expensive!) software developer time into understanding it first is overwhelmingly likely to cause it to implode in bugs and brokenness.
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Comment on Passwords have problems, but passkeys have more in ~tech
whbboyd LinkThese discussions are exhausting. So, in the spirit of finding myself in a hole with a shovel and starting to dig, here's my contribution. There are obvious tradeoffs between both approaches....- Exemplary
These discussions are exhausting. So, in the spirit of finding myself in a hole with a shovel and starting to dig, here's my contribution.
There are obvious tradeoffs between both approaches. Neither is categorically superior nor inferior. So, here's a table of the tradeoffs I see. If you have an authentication use case, pick the applicable rows in the table to see why you should vigorously reject one approach or another. ("No" is the "good" answer in each row.)
Password in head Password manager Hardware token¹ Transferrable token² Can be stolen from third party and reused Yes Yes No No Can trivially/noninteractively be phished³ Yes No No No Can complicatedly/interactively be phished⁴ Yes Yes No Yes I'm screwed if I lose my phone/hardware token⁵ No No Yes No Do you ever reuse passwords, or do you actually memorize secure unique passwords per site? Don't lie. Yes No No No Likely to be platform-locked No No No Yes
- ¹ One where it's impossible to extract the private keys, e.g. a Yubikey. Don't talk to me about chip decapping, if the CIA is after you, this whole conversation is moot.
- ² One where there is a mechanism to transfer the private keys; note that it's not really possible to reliably distinguish between another device belonging to the user and a device belonging to an attacker when transferring keys.
- ³ E.g. by typosquatting, sketchy links in emails, etc.
- ⁴ E.g. by pretending to be tech support and walking someone through revealing/transferring their secrets.
- ⁵ I'm assuming appropriate backup hygiene here. You could of course lose the only copy of your password manager DB and then be screwed, but duplicates (and encrypted cloud backups) are a normal feature of such systems.
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Comment on Passwords have problems, but passkeys have more in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentAnd does the bank issue you a smartphone which can run the app, and repair/replace it as needed? Do they support the app on less-popular platforms? Unless they do, which I seriously doubt, that...authenticating via the app that is issued via our banks
And does the bank issue you a smartphone which can run the app, and repair/replace it as needed? Do they support the app on less-popular platforms?
Unless they do, which I seriously doubt, that doesn't sound anything like a strict improvement over username/password to me.
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Comment on Winamp deletes GitHub repository after a rocky few weeks in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentIf I could somehow beat it into the head of every manager in existence that code is a liability, not an asset…If I could somehow beat it into the head of every manager in existence that code is a liability, not an asset…
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Comment on Meta fires staff for abusing $25 meal credits in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentThe article also states that these employees weren't fired for mis-spending a single $25 credit (which would be wild even in America, the land of at-will employment); rather, they were "deemed to...The article also states that these employees weren't fired for mis-spending a single $25 credit (which would be wild even in America, the land of at-will employment); rather, they were "deemed to have abused the food credit system over a long period of time", including collaborating to e.g. pool credits. This was almost certainly obviously against policy, and IMO It's likely they'd gotten warnings about it already.
In a sense it's dumb, because it makes no difference to Facebook whether those credits are spent on food or sundries, but I can't blame companies that much for enforcing non-abusive policies. The timing corresponding with a reorg is suspicious, but companies this size both reorganize subunits and fire people absolutely constantly; a priori it's at least as likely to be coincidence as a malicious plot to deprive people of unemployment.
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Comment on Best way to voice call and screenshare with audio on Linux? in ~comp
whbboyd LinkI use Google Meet for video calls. Works on any computer that can run a web browser which has survived enough of Chrome's covering fire to implement WebRTC (which is to say, Firefox, Chrome, or...I use Google
HangoutsMeet for video calls. Works on any computer that can run a web browser which has survived enough of Chrome's covering fire to implement WebRTC (which is to say, Firefox, Chrome, or any Chrome skin). I don't believe there are limits (I've never run into them, anyway); setting up screensharing on Wayland is a bit more involved than X11's "lol any client can just read the output buffer", but I think any DE will handle it for you, and uncomprehendingly following rote instructions worked for me in my Sway setup the last time I needed to do it.I really should get Jitsi installed and set up, but I have like a thousand projects I "should" do, and in the meantime,
HangoutsMeet is super lazy and works. -
Comment on A peek inside doctors’ notes reveals symptoms of burnout in ~health
whbboyd Link ParentWe would need a highly empowered NTSA (and plausibly FAA) for medicine. Guess at the odds of that happening while there's Republicans in the government. There is an important qualitative...You'd think medical software would go through the same kind of review process, ergonomic user interface design, standardization, and QA as aviation software (just as many lives are on the line), but no.
We would need a highly empowered NTSA (and plausibly FAA) for medicine. Guess at the odds of that happening while there's Republicans in the government.
There is an important qualitative difference between medicine and aviation, though. Aviation has bright lines. A plane crash is a "never" event; no crash should happen, and so every plane crash can and should be investigated, with an appropriate presupposition that something went wrong and that should be identified and corrected. In contrast, in medicine, some patients will die. (Arguably, more patients should die, or at least earlier and with less futile ICU care, than actually do.) You can't treat every patient death or significant morbidity as a mistake to be corrected, because for many, many of them the cause is "the patient was too sick to keep living". Most planes eventually get mothballed or scrapped without crashing, but every person dies.
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Comment on When is it time for an older doctor to hang up their stethoscope? We owe it to their patients to get it right. in ~health
whbboyd Link ParentFor anyone who's unaware, the modern medical residency system (post med-school specialty training, which is functionally mandatory to practice in the US, in which residents work 80-hour weeks for...For anyone who's unaware, the modern medical residency system (post med-school specialty training, which is functionally mandatory to practice in the US, in which residents work 80-hour weeks for something like a quarter the pay that an attending physician would earn for the same work) was established by a certain William Halstead, who was addicted to cocaine, and therefore presumably thought the workload was reasonable because, y'know, he was high on cocaine.
The system is essentially all downside for everyone except the hospital systems which benefit from a 75% markdown on physician labor, and it's long past time we threw it all out and started over (ideally with less input from stimulant drug abusers).
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Comment on Study of 500,000 medical records links viruses with Alzheimer's again and again in ~health
whbboyd Link ParentI cannot overstate this: they really, really are not. Viruses directly attack the body biochemically. They destroy cells; integrate themselves into cells long-term, with various followon effects;...Viruses and vaccines are inherently similar.
I cannot overstate this: they really, really are not.
Viruses directly attack the body biochemically. They destroy cells; integrate themselves into cells long-term, with various followon effects; leave behind all manner of chemical detritus; can sometimes leave permanent genetic changes in infected cells. You get illness symptoms from viral infections in significant part because they are literally causing damage to your body.
Vaccines do… none of that. The whole point of a vaccine is to expose your body to immunity-generating antigens without causing all the accessory harm that an actual viral infection would. The immune reaction can be symptomatic (which is why people often feel blah the day after a vaccination), but this is just because some immune reactions (e.g. fever) are unpleasant; there's no damage happening.
Now, to be clear and pre-address a possible objection, there are two broad exceptions to the "vaccines are inert" statement. The first is Jenner's cowpox, which is a literal disease (just a much, much less serious one than smallpox). To my knowledge, we don't use any vaccines of this class today. (They're highly circumstantial, anyway; you need an extant, related, non-virulent variant of the disease you're trying to prevent.) The second is "live attenuated" vaccines, which do contain active virus particles, but no longer infect human cells to any significant degree.
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Comment on [SOLVED] Looking for help linking to a specific comment on Reddit in ~tech
whbboyd Link ParentContext links also don't include replies to the context comments other than the linked comment. All Reddit comment links should be context links, to be honest. If you actually want to exclude the...Context links also don't include replies to the context comments other than the linked comment.
All Reddit comment links should be context links, to be honest. If you actually want to exclude the parent comment for some reason, you can say
context=0.
Nothing similar can exist on Apple until the EU finishes beating up on them, but on Android, you should basically never touch the Play Store and install apps from F-Droid instead ("solitaire", for example). It's entirely free software, which aligns the incentives completely differently. I don't think they have a hard rule against advertising, but I've never seen it.