dada78641 (u/dada78641)

dada78641 commented on Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year' 9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/ti... · Posted by u/achow

paxys · a month ago

Appointing John Ternus is going to be a pretty clear indicator to investors that Apple plans on continuing its iterative hardware, supply chain and operations focus and isn't looking to shake things up from a product or vision standpoint. Which may be the best move for the company (this strategy has definitely worked wonders for the last decade and a half), but I can't help feel that among all the large tech companies Apple is the one most at risk of a major disruption. It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.

dada78641 · a month ago

> It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.

I get what you're saying, but thinking about it, I'd be very surprised if the personal computing world ends up seeing anything like a paradigm shift that is so unprecedented it will catch the likes of Apple unprepared. And I realize it might sound arrogant or even ludditic to say this, but we'd need some sort of shocking new concept that no one ever came up with even in sci-fi. It's no longer really a matter of being able to technically implement something, but more about coming up with a human interface that is both totally novel and more convenient and practical than what we have now.

The qwerty layout comes from 19th century typewriters and we're still using it. The mouse was conceived of in the 1960s. Tiny computers that fit in the hand and voice operated devices have been utilized in early sci-fi works. And there's obviously VR, even though I think that's more of a toy than anything.

The only thing that is potentially in that same league of usefulness that I can think of is a brain-computer interface of some sort but those are currently so far away from having competitive practicality that there's a huge amount of runway.

dada78641 commented on ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair cnn.com/2025/09/17/media/... · Posted by u/VikingCoder

dada78641 · 3 months ago

It really is kind of incredible. I just saw the clip and there really is absolutely nothing there. This is not even 10% as poignant of what Jon Stewart would say in his day. He doesn't even say anything about Kirk himself, or even about the murder—he just talks about the reaction to it.

I already thought it was very suspicious that Sinclair's official press release just talks about how the remarks were "inappropriate and deeply insensitive" without describing anything about the actual remarks. And it even calls for the FCC to get involved?

What this really says is: you should be very afraid, because we will completely demolish if it suits us and we don't need a pretext.

dada78641 commented on Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords blog.danielh.cc/blog/pass... · Posted by u/max__dev

DecoPerson · 4 months ago

The attack pattern is:

1) User goes to BAD website and signs up.

2) BAD website says “We’ve sent you an email, please enter the 6-digit code! The email will come from GOOD, as they are our sign-in partner.”

3) BAD’s bots start a “Sign in with email one-time code” flow on the GOOD website using the user’s email.

4) GOOD sends a one-time login code email to the user’s email address.

5) The user is very likely to trust this email, because it’s from GOOD, and why would GOOD send it if it’s not a proper login?

6) User enters code into BAD’s website.

7) BAD uses code to login to GOOD’s website as the user. BAD now has full access to the user’s GOOD account.

This is why “email me a one-time code” is one of the worst authentication flows for phishing. It’s just so hard to stop users from making this mistake.

“Click a link in the email” is a tiny bit better because it takes the user straight to the GOOD website, and passing that link to BAD is more tedious and therefore more suspicious. However, if some popular email service suddenly decides your login emails or the login link within should be blocked, then suddenly many of your users cannot login.

Passkeys is the way to go. Password manager support for passkeys is getting really good. And I assure you, all passkeys being lost when a user loses their phone is far, far better than what’s been happening with passwords. I’d rather granny needs to visit the bank to get access to her account again, than someone phishes her and steals all her money.

dada78641 · 4 months ago

This is a 100x better explanation than what's in the blog post. The blog post is practically a tweet.

dada78641 commented on Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website 404media.co/anyone-can-pu... · Posted by u/mahkeiro

rsynnott · 10 months ago

This is about the level of Musk's understanding of tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729

Games are written for Windows, therefore webapps should be written with "Microsoft C++" (presumably meaning Visual C++, though I suppose there's an outside chance that he means "Microsoft C/C++", from the early 90s).

He's not new to being... bad at this.

dada78641 · 10 months ago

Reading that set of quotes, it really is incredible how little Musk knows about even extremely basic things. He doesn't understand there are different problem spaces in tech, and that different problem spaces require completely different approaches and skill sets. To him, something like World of Warcraft is very impressive, so if you build Paypal on the same technology it will be impressive too. Like, honestly it's shocking that this guy is allowed near anything that has a button.

dada78641 commented on Llms.txt llmstxt.org/... · Posted by u/polyrand

bawolff · a year ago

I'm not that familiar with llms, but surely we are already at the point where web pages can be easily scrapped? Is markdown really an easier format to understand than html? If this is actually useful wouldn't .txt be supperior to markdown for this usecase?

Does this solve a problem llms actually have?

Not trying to be negative, i'm honestly curious.

dada78641 · a year ago

I hate to be this person, but... it's scraping, not scrapping. You're scraping the information off the page regardless of what its structure is.

dada78641 commented on California Grid Breezes Through Heatwave with Batteries thinc.blog/2024/07/14/cal... · Posted by u/ChuckMcM

dada78641 · a year ago

"The uploader has not made this video available in your country."

First video on the page. I'm guessing this is probably a news report, right?

dada78641 commented on The Origins of DS_store (2006) arno.org/on-the-origins-o... · Posted by u/edavis

dada78641 · a year ago

> Back in 1999 I was the technical lead for the Mac OS X Finder at Apple. At that time the Finder code base was some 8 years old and had reached the end of its useful life. Making any changes to it require huge engineering effort, and any changes usually broke two or three seemingly unrelated features. For Mac OS X we decided to rewrite the Finder from scratch.

Not that I don't appreciate your work from back then, but as a longtime daily Mac user I cannot wait for the day that this is done once again. The Finder has so many bizarre quirks and it's so slow to proliferate updates that it's just embarrassing. Not to mention it's actually capable of locking up waiting for network access in some circumstances.

I don't know what the Finder source code looks like today but I bet it's a similar kind of hell project as the Classic Finder was back then when they first rewrote it, considering how reluctant they are to do anything to it.

dada78641 commented on Open Source YouTube to MP3 Downloader github.com/PackJC/Youtube... · Posted by u/packjc

thot_experiment · 2 years ago

for those of us comfy with the console:

    yt-dlp -x [YouTube or other url]

dada78641 · 2 years ago

I have a command set up that basically does this:

    yt-dlp -i --format "bestaudio" -x --convert-thumbnail jpg --add-metadata --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail --audio-format "best" -o "%(autonumber)02d %(title)s (%(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s) [%(id)s].%(ext)s" "https:// ... youtube URL ..."

This adds some tags and the thumbnail as cover file. It will save to whatever format the video itself has, usually .opus.

dada78641 commented on The Internet Archive's last-ditch effort to save itself lunduke.locals.com/post/5... · Posted by u/rbanffy

lucb1e · 2 years ago

"last-ditch effort to save itself" is the title, "things aren't looking good for the Internet's archivist" the subtitle. But no mention of what losing the lawsuit actually means for IA: is it actually existential as the title and subtitle are alluding to? That's the only thing I care about if we assume (1) the IA is important and (2) they're gonna lose, both of which I think virtually everyone thinks are realistic statements. Bit disappointed by the article because it's rehashing what we know

Edit: found the answer

> per Wikipedia, as of eight months ago (August 2023), the lawsuit parties already reached & had the court approve a negotiated settlement that caps the potential costs to the IA at a survivable level

^from another comment, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203627>, nearly at the very bottom of the thread (perhaps because it looks like a wall of text at first glance? But the most important info is first). Thanks, gojomo!

I just hope this appeal cannot make it worse than it is. Sounds like it will soon again be a good time to donate to the IA: they survive, plaintiffs see there is nothing more to take, then we fund their regular operations and hope for no more "emergency" ideas

dada78641 · 2 years ago

> I just hope this appeal cannot make it worse than it is

It cannot. The IA already basically got the worst possible judgment.

This is also not an existential threat to the IA, and payment has already been agreed upon. The reporting on this is extremely sensationalist.

dada78641 commented on FTC says Amazon executives destroyed potential evidence using apps like Signal theverge.com/2024/4/26/24... · Posted by u/belter

branon · 2 years ago

Good, this is why E2EE and user-controlled communications need protected at all costs. Citizens need to defend the right to communicate privately and ephemerally from government snoops. Because if they can force (or try to) Amazon to fork over comms records, they can do the same to me or to you.

Destruction of evidence is one thing, let them get nailed for that. But they weren't afraid to communicate privately and neither should we.

And we can't let the government hold these antitrust suits up as an example of "this is why we need to break encryption, so we can protect consumers from the big bad monopolies" either. I bet that'll be the narrative at some point.

dada78641 · 2 years ago

> Because if they can force (or try to) Amazon to fork over comms records, they can do the same to me or to you.

Since when am I a trillion dollar company?