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dlcarrier commented on Chrome 142 will drop support for pre-Skylake CPUs without AVX2   support.google.com/chrome... · Posted by u/nsdfg
dlcarrier · a day ago
20 years ago:

    You only need oodles of RAM and the latest vector instructions if you're running enterprise software like statics modeling, CAD, or video editing.  If you're just playing games or web browsing, is overkill.
Today:

    Most games and enterprise software can run on a potato of a computer, but for a web browser, you'll need 16 GB of RAM and the latest vector instructions on your processor.  Also, something as basic as a chat window might be running in a web browser instance, so you better upgrade.
Worth's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) has saved the computing industry. Sure you could run most games on 4 GB of RAM, or probably even 2 GB, but Steam, Discord, and Slack each have their own Chrome instance, plus you probably have another one running, so good luck getting by on even 8 GB of RAM.

dlcarrier commented on YouTube steps up fight against ad blockers again   ghacks.net/2025/06/09/goo... · Posted by u/nsdfg
dlcarrier · a day ago
I'm glad there's enough bureaucracy inside Google to make these measures roll out slowly with long breaks between changes. It gives the add blockers enough time to update their blocks, before the anti-blocking measures even make it out to all users.
dlcarrier commented on Is it illegal to not buy ads on X? Experts explain the FTC's ad fight   arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/pseudolus
dlcarrier · 2 days ago
The issue isn't what decision Media Matters made, it's that you can form a 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) an openly collude, and avoid Sherman act violations. Boards don't help consumers, they help and defend their members at all costs.
dlcarrier commented on Stop Using Encrypted Email   securitycryptographywhate... · Posted by u/sweis
dlcarrier · 2 days ago
Direct video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL3LfIozJo

tl;dw: Stop using PGP but also mixing encrypted and unencrypted communications doesn't really work.

dlcarrier commented on Don't pick weird subnets for embedded networks, use VRFs   blog.brixit.nl/dont-pick-... · Posted by u/LorenDB
john01dav · 2 days ago
I think that government intervention here is needed in order to coordinate people. We'll all be better off once ivp4 is dead and buried, but the incentive for each entity to do so is minimal. It could be some other powerful entity instead of government, for example tier 1 ISPs degrading ipv4 performance substantially or Google delisting websites that don't support ipv6 (and eventually delisting websites that do support ipv4).
dlcarrier · 2 days ago
Really? The network protocol someone uses is so critical that it should be illegal to use the wrong one? What happens when IPv9 becomes the hot new thing, but everyone is stuck on IPv6, because of some outdated government regulation? Do Americans have the right to use whatever internet protocol they want, under the first amendment?

IPv6 has made enough progress that it's totally possible to run your network off of it, regardless of what everyone else is doing, and if all of your neghbors are using IPv4, it won't harm your IPv6 network.

Also, part of the delay in the switch to IPv6 is that some work is needed to ensure that home routers and IoT devices default to reasonable security settings, and the absolute worst thing to do is force them to switch first, and figure out security later.

The answer isn't to force everyone to use something before its ready; the answer is to address every impediment, so it's worth it for everyone to switch. Sure it's slower, but it's much better than making users worse off by switching, converting them to detractors instead of supporters.

dlcarrier commented on California Resident Tests Positive for Plague. What to Know About the Disease   time.com/7311474/californ... · Posted by u/mdp2021
mdp2021 · 2 days ago
> pretty common

The interpretation of "common" will vary:

> [In recent decades, a]n average of seven human plague cases are reported each year in the United States

> The last urban plague epidemic in the United States occurred in Los Angeles from 1924 through 1925

https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps-statistics/index.html

dlcarrier · 2 days ago
It's pretty common for it to have happened to someone, in a given year. It's so unlikely to happen to any given individual, that it's not worth worrying about.
dlcarrier commented on How Not to Buy a SSD   andrei.xyz/post/how-not-t... · Posted by u/speckx
senectus1 · 3 days ago
Had the same issue with a Crucial drive from amazon. looked just like the real thing but for some small discrepancies. Performed like an absolute dog and the SMART data was waaaay off.

amazon just refunded me the whole amount and I pulled it apart to see what was inside: https://imgur.com/a/NUSuuEh

quite annoying, though also amusing.

dlcarrier · 2 days ago
Run f3fix on it, and you can use whatever portion of it is real to store low-value data, like Linux ISOs, that you could re-download if you lose, but are convenient to have locally.
dlcarrier commented on How Not to Buy a SSD   andrei.xyz/post/how-not-t... · Posted by u/speckx
crinkly · 3 days ago
I usually buy second hand enterprise SSDs off eBay. No one bothers to fake them and they last longer than the consumer ones even if they are a few years old.
dlcarrier · 2 days ago
I did get a used fake M.2 drive once. Likely the seller had bought a fake drive, used it for a while, then dissatisfied upgraded to something else. It possible the seller didn't know it was fake, but I doubt it.
dlcarrier commented on Ask HN: For those without a Google account, why and how do you manage online?    · Posted by u/HarshitDoshi
dlcarrier · 2 days ago
I do technically have a Google account, although all I use on it is Google Voice and Gmail, both of which I only access through IMAP, so they would be interchangeable with any service.

I have a ten-year-old phone running Android 6 and use a seven-year-old version of K-9 Mail. I didn't expressly stop upgrading, but every time new hardware or software comes out, I compare features before upgrading. With a desktop computer running Linux or BSD, the hardware doesn't get worse, and the software rarely does, but it's easy to avoid the worse software, because it won't be the only option. With phones, both the hardware and software seems to have peeked in 2014, with newer versions being worse far more often than they are better. I've had to replace the battery in my phone a couple of times, and I've added more storage, but those updates only took a few seconds. My Note 4 has more features and a better screen than pretty much everything that came after, and with an unlocked bootloader, I could keep updating the kernel long after T-Mobile stopped releasing updates. (Although, the last update was more than six years after release.) Eventually the Kernel was too old to update, but by that point I was well into security-through-obscurity, by running a combination of Kernel and user space so obscure that nothing automated could gain access, even through known vulnerabilities.

I stopped updating K-9 mail when Google started interfering with notifications, to coerce developers into their Firebase hosted service. The old version, on an old version of Android, has 100% reliable notifications that are generated locally, when IMAP receives a push message. Also, I don't need to have my phone logged into a Google account, to receive IMAP messages, so I don't. This also means that there aren't any tokens saved on my phone that could compromise my gmail account, and I don't need to password protect my entire phone, just the email application. I also save my photos unencrypted to the microSD card, so if anything happens to the phone, they are easy to recover.

I only use Gmail, because I've had the address for over 20 years. I use Google Voice, so that I can read and send SMS messages from a computer, and can keep the same address even when switching phone lines. There's other providers that offer the same service for a few dollars a month, which I wouldn't mind paying, but every one I have looked into has requested I upload a copy of a photo ID, which is clearly a bad idea.

There are a few commercial applications that I run, and they work just fine on my phone. The only thing that I can't use natively any more is eBay, because it recently started requiring a Google account to use it, so now I just use the web page, which works equally well.

I never really used native banking applications on my phone, because banks tend to do very insecure things, like store highly-trusted tokens on the phone that are protected with low-security measures, like PINs or biometrics. Instead I use the web interface, which requires a password every time it is accessed.

When my phone was new, I used Google Pay instead of a physical credit card, for several months, but it was slow and hit and miss whether it would work, and I brought cash as a backup, which I quickly realized was even faster than the debit card I had been using before, and I wasn't at risk of credential leaks that would require I get a new card number, so after the whole experience, instead of switching from credit cards to NFC transactions, I ended up switching to cash, and as an added bonus gas is much cheaper, and several retailers I shop from often charge an extra 3% for card transactions, which I don't have to pay.

I've always carried portable electronic devices with me since the late 90's, from graphing calculators to PDAs and even a PSP, before I started carrying a smart phone. All of the most useful stuff then and now, like K-9 email client, Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, an HP-50g emulator, a 3rd-party YOuTube client, and random stuff from an audio spectrum analyzer to a WiFi spectrum analyzer are all open source, and on my phone I get them from the F-Droid market or download them directly from the developers web page or version control host. The only proprietary software I run often is Libby, a tool written by Rakutan that I use to access audiobooks from my local library, and it's just a wrapper over a web interface, so it works fine on Android 6.

Honestly, the difficulties from not following the tech industry playbook isn't specific to a phone. The biggest challenges I've faced were Reddit blocking thitd-party clients, at which point I stopped using Reddit, and now Cloudflare's capthca system is so agressive that I can't get past it without using a Chromium based web browser, which I refuse to do, so I stopped visiting several sites because of that.

dlcarrier commented on California Resident Tests Positive for Plague. What to Know About the Disease   time.com/7311474/californ... · Posted by u/mdp2021
dlcarrier · 3 days ago
That's a pretty common occurrence, especially in the mountains.

u/dlcarrier

KarmaCake day985July 30, 2024View Original