broken-kebab (u/broken-kebab)

broken-kebab commented on Matrix messaging gaining ground in government IT theregister.com/2026/02/0... · Posted by u/rbanffy

bsaul · 2 days ago

I wonder why matrix isn't more widerspread at this point. It's open, it's e2ee, it works, it has client lib for integration with any tool..

What makes it not more popular ? Is it the federated approach ? The client applications that don't look really fancy ?

broken-kebab · 2 days ago

Matrix is not out-of-the-box thing.

For hosting it you really have to go through some trial-and-error before it works as you'd like, and most self-hosting enthusiasts have pretty short span of said enthusiasm.

For users its easier, but there are some idiosyncrasies in terminology, and concepts.

There are docs but they really would benefit from human editing to become fully useful.

Synapse in particular has a problem of existing in two places on GitHub, and the one which is obsolete somehow comes first in searches, and appears in AI responses constantly. Which I guess shoots quite a lot of first tries in their steps.

broken-kebab commented on Denmark's struggle to break up with Silicon Valley politico.eu/article/denma... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

Herring · a month ago

You're missing the point. I speak American so I can translate. He's basically saying journalism is a matter of National Security. It needs to be done correctly to a high level at all costs, much like education. Google (Silicon Valley) is messing with it.

broken-kebab · a month ago

National security could be a valid concern. But Danish media leveraging DK gov't to rollback the reality could never be a success story. Those media are failing not because they are not in the US. Established American media have the same troubles and complains.

broken-kebab commented on Denmark's struggle to break up with Silicon Valley politico.eu/article/denma... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

embedding-shape · a month ago

Because "business" isn't just "business" in Denmark and many other countries. Journalism for example, isn't just about the financial bottom-line, journalism has a societal role, and also the move could be seen as trying to avoid paying publishers under EU rules designed to support a free press.

I think a lot of friction between businesses and countries in Europe can be better understood if we better understood the difference in how countries treat things like "business" and other stuff. I understand in the US it's different, money basically rules, you can fire people whenever you want and so on, but in many places in the world, people have a different relationship to businesses, it's not just about money there.

Particularly when it comes to journalism. From reading news from Denmark about it, politicians been repeatedly argued that Google's framing reduces journalism to a revenue input, ignoring its democratic function.

broken-kebab · a month ago

In this context "journalism" usually refers not to a crowd of Mothers Teresas seeking to improve society in voluntary contradiction to their own market (or guild/class/whatever) interests, but a bunch of business entities which were born out of printed newspapers, feeling uncertain about their revenues after changes in technology of information delivery ruined their niche. And trying to leverage their established relations with politicians to extract more profit. It's not like Google is offending little pixies here. After all, there are youtube channels which have a societal role too, and search engines too I guess can make a similar claim.

Other commenter's note about national security issue is more on point but then I doubt that bailing out failing news platforms would make them as influential as they used to be in the bygone era.

broken-kebab commented on RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game? scottjg.com/posts/2026-01... · Posted by u/scottjg

broken-kebab · a month ago

The last days truly has come! The world is upside down, and I'm seeing people inserting their computers into their GPUs.

broken-kebab commented on C Is Best (2025) sqlite.org/whyc.html... · Posted by u/alexpadula

staticassertion · a month ago

You're swapping definitions of unsafe. Earlier you were referring to the `unsafe` keyword. Now you're using `unsafe` to refer to a property of code. This makes it easy to say things like "It is also wrong to believe 100% of the C code is basically unsafe" but you're just swapping definitions partway through the conversation.

broken-kebab · a month ago

What I see is that antirez claims that absence of "safe" (as syntax) in C lang doesn't automatically mean that all of C code is unsafe (as property). There's no swapping of definitions as I see it.

broken-kebab commented on Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017) hillelwayne.com/post/what... · Posted by u/zahrevsky

BoorishBears · a month ago

Splitting example is way too much indirection, but capturing what the code does in the code itself is a preference for me. In any high level language don't know why the middleground wasn't explored:

    var hasSymbol = getSymbol(symbolName) != null
    var replacementPending = !alreadyReplaced.contains(symbolName)

    if(hasSymbol && replacementPending){
      alreadyReplaced.add(symbolName);
      stringToReplace = stringToReplace.replace("$" + symbolName, translate(symbolName));
    }

Technically this performs worse because you lose short-circuiting, but in performance-sensitive contexts code styling is less a concern anyways. And I also wouldn't rely on short-cutting alone to avoid a really expensive operation or side-effect: at some point someone will fail to notice it.

broken-kebab · a month ago

I like your version, and it's certainly possible to split too much without any practical result just for the dogma. But wrt the particular example I can see what's going on with a glance over the split part, while I have to focus at the commented one. Comments themselves can be helpful, but they can also be misleading cause code and coder's thoughts are not guaranteed to be in harmony all the time.

broken-kebab commented on Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017) hillelwayne.com/post/what... · Posted by u/zahrevsky

broken-kebab · a month ago

IMO the example shows exactly that splitting code in smaller pieces is way better than just commenting it.

It makes it easier for dev's brain to parse the code e.g. to understand what code really does, while fattier but commented version makes it harder but tries to replace it with information about original coder's intentions. Which is maybe important too but not as important as code itself.

Not to forget that it's too easy to change code and leave comments obsolete.

broken-kebab commented on Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English npmjs.com/package/ezff... · Posted by u/josharsh

broken-kebab · a month ago

I like the idea, but a CLI utility dependent on Node.js is not a good thing frankly.

broken-kebab commented on Parasites plagued Roman soldiers at Hadrian's Wall arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/sipofwater

broken-kebab · a month ago

TL;DR Fecal matter from Vindolanda fort dated around 90 AD contains eggs of intestinal worms, and traces of antibodies to Giardia duodenalis.

Nothing of this is really news as not having parasitic worms is very recent development, and getting G. duodenalis with unsanitized water continues to be common today. Healthy immune system can deal with it, as it could in 90 AD, hence antibodies.

The story is an obvious attempt to produce as much words from as few facts as possible, and the headline is meaningless.

broken-kebab commented on Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself? infosec.press/brunomiguel... · Posted by u/pabs3

eloisant · 2 months ago

Brave is just one of the dozen Chromium-based browsers. It's still Chromium.

broken-kebab · 2 months ago

It's Chromium-based, sure. But it blocks ads and does it well