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JosephRedfern commented on Raycast for Windows   raycast.com/blog/raycast-... · Posted by u/a32
anaisbetts · a month ago
Why can Mac developers absolutely never resist making dated Win9x / Windows XP / BSOD references every time they make a port of their software to Windows? Zed did the same thing recently and it was just as overplayed.

Developers please, when you do this, you are telling your audience, the people you want to pay you money for your work, "Yeah, we think you suck, but here's some thing we finally got around to porting over" - why would you do that?

JosephRedfern · a month ago
I think you're being oversensitive, especially in the context Raycast adding support for Windows.

The whole purpose of Raycast is to improve productivity and UX, be that under macOS or Windows. It'd be a pretty shitty launch announcement if the blog post didn't mention the problem that they're trying to solve.

Edit: I'm not sure if the post was edited after my reply, but ATM there's no mention of BSODs - the closest I can see to a dig at Windows is:

> You know the feeling. Search that can't find your files. Apps buried in menus. Simple tasks that take too many clicks. Your computer should be faster than this. It should feel like everything is at your fingertips. That’s why we built Raycast.

JosephRedfern commented on Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts   petapixel.com/2025/08/20/... · Posted by u/mikece
doctor_radium · 4 months ago
Maybe the plaintiff is fishing, but this is the reason I never abandoned my Covid mask after the pandemic. You want to string up cameras like Christmas lights? I can wear a mask! What ticks me off more is WalMart and some grocery stores putting monitors over certain aisles, to show you're being monitored. I'll sometimes flip them off.

Aldi really annoyed me by showing live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress". Then I realized Walmart and many others have a camera notch on their monitors, too, so perhaps I should thank Aldi for at least being honest?

Anybody using facial recognition or similar may know me very well by now. I'm the guy in the mask who flips them off.

JosephRedfern · 4 months ago
> live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress"

That really winds me up too - it shows such contempt for legitimate customers.

JosephRedfern commented on Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?    · Posted by u/mbix77
dns_snek · 4 months ago
Huh, how do you imagine that would work? This "scan" is happening inside client-side javascript, delivering the file through a proxy wouldn't "detect" anything about the proxy.
JosephRedfern · 4 months ago
I imagine it may not be a proxy in the true sense, but a headless browser that's "proxying" the application process rather than the network traffic itself.
JosephRedfern commented on High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups   arstechnica.com/security/... · Posted by u/chrisjj
JosephRedfern · 4 months ago
There's a really interesting article from Tavis Ormandy about the instruction set and virtual machine used in RAR: https://blog.cmpxchg8b.com/2012/09/fun-with-constrained-prog....

The docs for the toolchain he implemented (https://github.com/taviso/rarvmtools) allude to a number of bugs, but doesn't sound (??) like they're related to this vulnerability.

JosephRedfern commented on PostgreSQL Anonymizer   postgresql-anonymizer.rea... · Posted by u/chynkm
gkbrk · a year ago
Clickhouse has something similar called clickhouse-obfuscator [1]. It even works offline with data dumps so you can quickly prepare and send somewhat realistic example data to others.

According to its --help output, it is designed to retain the following properties of data:

- cardinalities of values (number of distinct values) for every column and for every tuple of columns;

- conditional cardinalities: number of distinct values of one column under condition on value of another column;

- probability distributions of absolute value of integers; sign of signed integers; exponent and sign for floats;

- probability distributions of length of strings;

- probability of zero values of numbers; empty strings and arrays, NULLs;

- data compression ratio when compressed with LZ77 and entropy family of codecs;

- continuity (magnitude of difference) of time values across table; continuity of floating point values.

- date component of DateTime values;

- UTF-8 validity of string values;

- string values continue to look somewhat natural

[1]: https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhou...

JosephRedfern · a year ago
There's a write up from Alexey of different approaches considered for clickhouse-obfuscator here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/five-methods-of-database-obfusca....

The summary is pretty funny:

> "After trying four methods, I got so tired of this problem that it was time just to choose something, make it into a usable tool, and announce the solution"

JosephRedfern commented on Ask HN: How are you using LLMs for traversing decompiler output?    · Posted by u/mjbale116
JosephRedfern · a year ago
These guys are building foundational models for this purpose: https://reveng.ai/. The results are quite compelling, and they have plugins for your favourite reverse engineering tools.
JosephRedfern commented on The longest straight line in Great Britain (without crossing a public road)   statsmapsnpix.com/2023/04... · Posted by u/fanf2
JosephRedfern · a year ago
It'd be interesting to learn more about how this line was identified - was it by eye, or is there some neat analysis that was (or could be) performed to find it?
JosephRedfern commented on Bluesky is breaking the rules in the EU   theverge.com/2024/11/25/2... · Posted by u/cdme
Suppafly · a year ago
>But since Bluesky isn’t yet big enough to be considered a “very large online platform” under the DSA, the regulator says it can’t regulate Bluesky the way it does X or Threads.

So it sounds like they are 'breaking' rules that don't even yet apply to them?

JosephRedfern · a year ago
Yeah, this feels like a non-story.
JosephRedfern commented on Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset   simonwillison.net/2024/No... · Posted by u/po
JosephRedfern · a year ago
Because they're interesting?

u/JosephRedfern

KarmaCake day2163November 2, 2011
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