horsawlarway (u/horsawlarway)

horsawlarway commented on Thousands of U.S. farmers have Parkinson's. They blame a deadly pesticide mlive.com/news/2025/12/th... · Posted by u/bikenaga

bobbylarrybobby · 11 hours ago

Shouldn't most chemicals be assumed unsafe until proven otherwise? How many chemicals have we produced in a lab that have no harmful effects? Even medicine is bad for you, it's just better than the disease it's meant to treat. I don't know why we'd treat something designed to kill animals as safe for humans without studies showing that it's not harmful. (Well I do know why, but I don't know why voters go along with it.)

horsawlarway · 11 hours ago

Literally everything is "chemicals".

And when we're talking about things in this realm, the general saying is "The dose makes the poison"... Water will kill you if you drink enough of it.

And we do have all sorts of studies showing that harm from these substances isn't immediately apparent (they all have safety sheets, and maximum safe exposure levels) . What we're missing, mainly because it's just incredibly hard to ethically source, is long term studies.

So the question you're really asking is "what's your tolerance to risk?". I think it's fine to have different governing bodies take different stances on that scale. What's less fine is failure to act on information because of profit motives.

Long story short - this isn't so simple. You bathe in chemicals all day every day.

horsawlarway commented on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/nreece

anymouse123456 · 21 hours ago

This!

I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced.

Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.

I guess Rodney Brooks got busy with other interests, and whomever ran things didn't realize that Tim Ferris is full of shit.

It was extremely frustrating to watch these assholes destroy the company right from the outset. All they needed to do, was to slowly walk forward and iterate with improvements.

The only surprise in this news is that it took SO LONG for them to dismantle the company.

I do not think it's appropriate for an organization holding this much deeply personal data can be sold to any foreign entity.

horsawlarway · 20 hours ago

This is my take:

If the EU was concerned enough about Amazon taking them over in early 2024 to block the deal, I'm still concerned about a foreign owner in 2026...

horsawlarway commented on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/nreece

bhouston · 21 hours ago

Definitely not all live and functioning. In fact I suspect less than 10m are actively used. It is a company that has been around for years and it has run into sales issues that last few years with competition and their products have tech product lifespans of around 3 years I suspect.

horsawlarway · 20 hours ago

Personally, I have a Roomba I bought in Jan 2019 that's still doing just fine (So 7 years now).

Most of the parts are pretty easily replaced (genuinely pleasant surprise, as an aside) and the company stocked most replacement parts for a long time - I just checked again and I can still get parts for my model (I-series) incl batteries, wheels, brushes, filters, etc. Which is less than it used to be, but still enough to keep mine rolling around for another 3ish years without any likely problems.

And that's outside of the whole "unofficial" replacement parts ecosystem that popped up online.

3 years doesn't track with my experience on this one. I'd bet it's 5 to 10.

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For context, Amazon tried to buy them for exactly the same purpose ~2 years back (home/house data) and failed to get EU regulatory approval, so scrapped the deal.

I'm not thrilled to have ownership transferred to another company (I was also very unhappy to hear the Amazon rumors back then) and I think this is a pretty clear risk.

Even if a user is no longer using the device, Roomba still likely has plenty of data about their home floating around.

horsawlarway commented on VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits ipinfo.io/blog/vpn-locati... · Posted by u/mmaia

varenc · 2 days ago

Interesting to learn you can identify the real country/area of origin using probe latency. Though could this be simulated? Like what if the VPN IP just added 100ms-300ms of latency to all of its outgoing traffic? Ideally vary the latency based on the requesting IP's location. And also just ignore typical probe requests like ICMP (ping). And ideally all the IPs near the end of the traceroute would do all this too.

To use an example, 74.118.126.204 claims to be a Somalian IP address, but ipinfo.io identifies it as being from London based on latency. Compare `curl ipinfo.io/74.118.126.204/json` vs `curl ipwhois.app/json/74.118.126.204` to see. If that IP ignored pings and added latency to all outgoing packets, I wonder if that would stymie ipinfo's ability to identify its true origin.

horsawlarway · 2 days ago

There's quite a bit of effort in this space.

In my first job out of school, I did security work adjacent to fortune 50 banks and the (now defunct) startup I worked at partnered some folks working on Pindrop (https://www.pindrop.com/).

Their whole thing at the time was detecting when it was likely that a support call was coming from a region other than the one the customer was supposed to be in (read: fraudulent) by observing latency and noise on the line (the name is a play on "We're listening closely enough to hear a pin drop".)

Long story short, it's a lot more than just the latency that can clue someone in on the actual source location, and even if you introduce enough false signal to make it hard to identify where you actually are, it's easy to spot that and flag you as fake, even if it's hard to say exactly what the real source is.

horsawlarway commented on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free riviantrackr.com/news/riv... · Posted by u/doctoboggan

Rover222 · 4 days ago

Any company adding fancy hardware (beyond good cameras and inference chips) to achieve self driving is on the wrong track at this point. Software is what will win this game.

Of course, Waymo has achieved good results with A LOT of fancy hardware. But it's hard to see how they stand a chance against Cybercab mass production (probably behind schedule, but eventually).

I think Rivian has the best-looking line of EVs out there. Maybe they will be able to come from behind in self-driving tech. But this big reveal is not that promising, IMO.

horsawlarway · 4 days ago

An alternate take here:

The "fancy" hardware is going to get dirt cheap, and in a game where you're asking your customer to trust you with their lives, reliability is going to win. Combine that with time to market, and Tesla feels like a pretty clear "risky bet" at best... Maybe they make it work, but they have to do it before the other companies make lidar cheap, and prices have fallen dramatically over the past 10 years, for much better hardware.

horsawlarway commented on Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB tomshardware.com/video-ga... · Posted by u/doener

zelphirkalt · 13 days ago

So guide me through this thought process:

You are saying, that most users don't check install size of their games. Which I am not convinced of, but might even be true. Lets assume this to be true for the moment. How does this contradict, what I stated? How does users being uninformed or unaware of technical details make it so that suddenly cramming the user's disk is "caring" instead of "not caring"? To me this does not compute. Users will simply have a problem later, when their TBs of disk space have been filled with multiple such disk space wasters. Wasting this much space is user-hostile.

Next you are talking about _content_, which most likely doesn't factor in that much at all. Most of that stuff is high resolution textures, not content. It's not like people are getting significantly more content for bigger games. It is graphics craze, that many people don't even need. I am still running around with 2 full-HD screens, and I don't give a damn about 4k resolution textures. I suspect that a big number of users doesn't have the hardware to run modern games fluently at 4k.

horsawlarway · 7 days ago

The general thrust of my argument is this:

"There is a limited amount of time, money, and effort that will be spent on any project. Successful enterprises focus those limited resources on the things that matter most to their customers. In this case, disk usage in the ~150gb range did not matter much in comparison to the other parts of the game, such as in-game content, missions, gameplay, etc."

We know this, because the game had a very successful release, despite taking 150gb to install.

I'm not saying they should have filled that 100 extra gb with mission content - I'm implying they made the right call in focusing their engineering manpower on creating content for the game (the ACTUAL gameplay) and not on optimizing storage usage for assets. That decision gave them a popular game which eventually had the resources to go optimize storage use.

horsawlarway commented on Richard Stallman on ChatGPT stallman.org/chatgpt.html... · Posted by u/colesantiago

TheOtherHobbes · 7 days ago

The quality and usefulness of the service across different domains, the way it's being rolled out by management, the strategy of building many data centres when this makes questionable sense, the broader social and psychological effects, the stock market precarity around it, the support among LLMs for open source code and weights, and the applicability of the word "intelligence" are all different questions.

This reads like more a petulant rant than a cogent and insightful analysis of those issues.

horsawlarway · 7 days ago

While I mostly agree with you. I still think he's pretty spot on about the risks of depending on a tool you can't run locally.

horsawlarway commented on Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s uncloud.run/... · Posted by u/rgun

KronisLV · 12 days ago

> And no - you don't need an ingress. Just spin up a nodeport service, and you have the literal identical experience to exposing ports with compose - it's just a port on the machines running the cluster (any of them - magic!).

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/serv...

Might need to redefine the port range from 30000-32767. Actually, if you want to avoid the ingress abstraction and maybe want to run a regular web server container of your choice to act as it (maybe you just prefer a config file, maybe that's what your legacy software is built around, maybe you need/prefer Apache2, go figure), you'd probably want to be able to run it on 80 and 443. Or 3000 or 8080 for some other software, out of convenience and simplicity.

Depending on what kind of K8s distro you use, thankfully not insanely hard to change though: https://docs.k3s.io/cli/server#networking But again, that's kind of going against the grain.

horsawlarway · 11 days ago

If you just want to do development, honestly it's probably better to just use kubectl port-forward (ex - map 3000, or 8080, on your machine to any service/pod you'd like).

As for grabbing 443 or 80, most distros support specifying the port in the service spec directly, and I don't think it needs to be in the range of the reserved nodeports (I've done this on k3s, worked fine last I checked, which is admittedly a few years ago now).

As you grow to more than a small number of exposed services, I think an ingress generally does make sense, just because you want to be able to give things persistent names. But you can run a LONG way on just nodeports.

And even after going with an ingress - the tooling here is pretty straight forward. MetalLB (load balancer) and nginx (ingress, reverse proxy) don't take a ton of time or configuration.

As someone who was around when something like a LAMP stack wasn't "legacy", I think it's genuinely less complicated to setup than those old configurations. Especially because once you get it right in the yaml once, recreating it is very, very easy.

horsawlarway commented on Uncloud - Tool for deploying containerised apps across servers without k8s uncloud.run/... · Posted by u/rgun

this_user · 12 days ago

Docker Compose is simple: You have a Compose file that just needs Docker (or Podman).

With k8s you write a bunch of manifests that are 70% repetitive boilerplate. But actually, there is something you need that cannot be achieved with pure manifest, so you reach for Kustomize. But Kustomize actually doesn't do what you want, so you need to convert the entire thing to Helm.

You also still need to spin up your k8s cluster, which itself consists of half a dozen pods just so you have something where you can run your service. Oh, you wanted your service to be accessible from outside the cluster? Well, you need to install an ingress controller in your cluster. Oh BTW, the nginx ingress controller is now deprecated, so you have to choose from a handful of alternatives, all of which have certain advantages and disadvantages, and none of which are ideal for all situations. Have fun choosing.

horsawlarway · 12 days ago

This is some serious rose colored glasses happening here.

If you have a service with a simple compose file, you can have a simple k8s manifest to do the same thing. Plenty of tools convert right between the two (incl kompose, which k8s literally hands you: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/tra...)

Frankly, you're messing up by including kustomize or helm at all in 80% of cases. Just write the (agreed on tedious boilerplate - the manifest format is not my cup of tea) yaml and be done with the problem.

And no - you don't need an ingress. Just spin up a nodeport service, and you have the literal identical experience to exposing ports with compose - it's just a port on the machines running the cluster (any of them - magic!).

You don't need to touch an ingress until you actually want external traffic using a specific hostname (and optionally tls), which is... the same as compose. And frankly - at that point you probably SHOULD be thinking about the actual tooling you're using to expose that, in the same way you would if you ran it manually in compose. And sure - arguably you could move to gateways now, but in no way is the ingress api deprecated. They very clearly state...

> "The Ingress API is generally available, and is subject to the stability guarantees for generally available APIs. The Kubernetes project has no plans to remove Ingress from Kubernetes."

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingr...

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Plenty of valid complaints for K8s (yaml config boilerplate being a solid pick) but most of the rest of your comment is basically just FUD. The complexity scale for K8s CAN get a lot higher than docker. Some organizations convince themselves it should and make it very complex (debatably for sane reasons). For personal needs... Just run k3s (or minikube, or microk8s, or k3ds, or etc...) and write some yaml. It's at exactly the same complexity as docker compose, with a slightly more verbose syntax.

Honestly, it's not even as complex as configuring VMs in vsphere or citrix.

horsawlarway commented on Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB tomshardware.com/video-ga... · Posted by u/doener

zelphirkalt · 13 days ago

Which goes to show, that they don't care about the user, but only about the user's money.

horsawlarway · 13 days ago

No - because most users also don't check install size on games, and unlike renting overpriced storage from a cloud provider, users paid a fixed price for storage up front and aren't getting price gouged nearly as badly. So it's a trade that makes sense.

Both entrants in the market are telling you that "install size isn't that important".

If you asked the player base of this game whether they'd prefer a smaller size, or more content - the vast majority would vote content.

If anything, I'd wager this decision was still driven by internal goals for the company, because producing a 154gb artifact and storing it for things like CI/CD are still quite expensive if you have a decent number of builds/engineers. Both in time and money.