alekratz (u/alekratz)

alekratz commented on Windows Is Free for Business (2008) davegutteridge.com/window... · Posted by u/walterbell

RajT88 · 6 months ago

There still is a relatively easy Windows10/11 activation crack - which Microsoft support has even been caught sharing with customers.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-sup...

Back in the late aughts, there was an article from someone at Microsoft talking about how they weren't that interested in going after people pirating Windows in the developing world, because they saw it as an opportunity for turning them into paying customers. Really - that piracy is expanding the Microsoft ecosystem, which back then was important because they viewed Linux on the desktop as a huge threat. (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?)

The ease with which Windows is cracked still is probably no accident, but nobody's talking about it. If you're running a business at some point your security folks are going to point out that using cracked software is how you invite attackers inside your security perimeter. (Seriously, down that path lies losing all of your bank accounts)

alekratz · 6 months ago

> (Is it the year of Desktop Linux yet?)

I know this is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment but I would argue that the year of the Linux desktop was in 2022 when the Steam deck, albeit a non-desktop machine, was released. It's a pretty popular console and really forwarded the idea of playing video games on Linux being seamless. The state of gaming on Linux is/was one of the main reason why so many people are/were holding out on Windows, and with a few exceptions of massive games like Fortnite, it's basically here. Adoption, however, is a different story.

alekratz commented on Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014) setosa.io/ev/markov-chain... · Posted by u/mrcgnc

ngriffiths · 6 months ago

Markov chains are super useful in statistics but it isn't obvious at first what problem they solve and how - some further reading that I found helpful:

https://twiecki.io/blog/2015/11/10/mcmc-sampling/

Note that the point of the markov chain is it's possible to compute relative probabilities between two given points in the posterior even when you don't have a closed form expression for the posterior.

Also, the reason behind separating the proposal distribution and the acceptance probability is that it's a convenient method to make the Markov process stationary, which isn't true in general. (Wikipedia page on MCMC is also useful here).

alekratz · 6 months ago

For anyone curious, MCMC = "Markov chain Monte Carlo" - the article doesn't actually tell you what it stands for until a number of paragraphs down.

(This is a massive pet peeve of mine - if you are going to call something "X for dummies", don't bury the lede! Tell me what "X" is as soon as possible, especially if it's an acronym!)

alekratz commented on Discussion: Reduce error handling boilerplate in Golang using '?' github.com/golang/go/disc... · Posted by u/omani

teeray · 7 months ago

I feel like error handling in Go is divided between people who have been using the language for a long time, and those who are new to it. If you're used to exceptions, and languages with some kind of '?' operator, typing `if err != nil` all the time is probably excruciating. They seem to be the most vocal in the survey about wanting beloved error handling features from their favorite languages.

Once you've been using the language for awhile, you begin to dislike the elaborate system of rugs other languages have to sweep errors under. Errors in Go are right there, in your face, and undeniable that the operation you are doing can be faulty somehow. With good error wrapping, you can trace down exactly which of these `if err != nil` blocks generated the error without a stack trace. If it bothers you that much, you can always make a snippet / macro for it in your editor.

alekratz · 7 months ago

I'm not a Go programmer, but I feel like I've sort of "grown up" around them as the language has evolved. for a while I thought that the `if err != nil { ... }` was silly to put everywhere. As I've grown and written a lot more code, however, I actually don't see a problem with it. I'd even go as far as to say that it's a good thing because you're acknowledging the detail that an error could have occurred here, and you're explicitly choosing to pass the handling of it up the chain. with exceptions, there can be a lot of hidden behavior that you're just sweeping under the rug, or errors happen that you didn't even think could be raised by a function.

alekratz commented on Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018) estherschindler.medium.co... · Posted by u/mooreds

alekratz · 7 months ago

there's this wisdom I read a long time ago: "there's millions of photos of the Grand Canyon. There's only one or two photos of the Grand Canyon with you in it."

alekratz commented on IRC Driven – modern IRC indexing site and search engine ircdriven.com/... · Posted by u/pabs3

alekratz · 8 months ago

some of us do not want to be found. obviously the easiest way to opt out of (most) of these things is to use a port other than 6667 and 6697, but when you've been operating on those ports for 10+ years, and you have an old friend who wants to pop in, how do you announce that you've moved to port 12000? adding a server password is another option, but we run into the same problems.

my IRC network in the past has had issues with script kiddies disrupting us and causing drama and claiming that our IRC server was insecure (it wasn't), and we figured out that they had found us through another IRC indexing site - one which we weren't aware were indexing us. another problem was someone adding a "partyline" bot to our server, which opened a channel to all other "partyline" channels that the bot had been added to. cute idea, but we did not ask for this, someone just plunked it in our server and left.

I wish there was a robots.txt for IRC, or at the very least for the indexers to tell one of the admins, "hey, we're indexing your server, please let us know if you don't want us to do that". we want to be left alone.

alekratz commented on Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs theverge.com/2025/1/6/243... · Posted by u/somebee

edm0nd · 8 months ago

>A 3090 is $1000 right now.

Not really worth it if you can get a 5090 for $1,999

alekratz · 8 months ago

If you can get a 5090 for that price, I'll eat my hat. scalpers with their armies of bots will buy them all before you get a chance.

alekratz commented on Guten: A Tiny Newspaper Printer amanvir.com/guten... · Posted by u/thunderbong

alekratz · 8 months ago

Hey, I made something like this last year. It wasn't a self-contained unit, it was just a receipt printer with a script that would run every morning at 8am, getting the forecast, word of the day, and quote of the day. The idea was that if something important happened that day, I could hold onto that day's slip of paper and maybe write a note on it? I dunno, I stopped using after a month or so.

alekratz commented on Ask HN: Share your "LLM screwed us over" stories? · Posted by u/ATechGuy

bvanderveen · 8 months ago

I'm surprised at how even some of the smartest people in my life take the output of LLMs at face value. LLMs are great for "plan a 5 year old's birthday party, dinosaur theme", "design a work-out routine to give me a big butt", or even rubber-ducking through a problem.

But for anything where the numbers, dates, and facts matter, why even bother?

alekratz · 8 months ago

one thing that frustrates me about current ChatGPT is that it feels like they are discouraging you from generating another reply to the same question, to see what else it might say about what you're asking. before, you used to be able to just hit the arrow on the right to generate a reply, now it's hidden in the menu where you change models on the fly. why'd they add the friction?

alekratz commented on MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style news.mit.edu/2024/mit-stu... · Posted by u/keepamovin

alekratz · 9 months ago

I always thought it was because it needed to be rigid and specific.

alekratz commented on Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA nullpt.rs/breaking-the-4c... · Posted by u/hazebooth

avar · 9 months ago

    > is there any better way to do
    > it with a single developer for
    > a website that serves millions
    > of people a day?

No, the other reason they're using this is to make it so annoying that you'll spend $20/yr to buy a 4chan pass to bypass it.

If you're not making your free website annoying to drive revenue there's obvious ways to make it less annoying.

E.g. keep the annoying captcha, but don't show one again for the lifetime of a cookie, validate users who can make a money transfer of $0.01 etc.

alekratz · 9 months ago

>No, the other reason they're using this is to make it so annoying that you'll spend $20/yr to buy a 4chan pass to bypass it.

I think this is a really cynical outlook, especially for a website that is not run as a modern tech-centric company. 4chan's roots are in that of the Old Internet, where it is a creative and messy and interesting place to be. why would they be banking solely on using a terrible captcha as a method to drive user subscriptions, when they have the option to run circus-tent ads? if making money was their sole purpose, why would they not kick the problematic and porn boards to the curb and ban the use of slurs to make room for more friendly advertisers? there are so many other avenues to increase profitability that most websites have taken which 4chan has staunchly refused to follow. why would they choose only the 4chan pass and ads as their only opportunity at making money?