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nelgaard commented on Is it a bubble?   oaktreecapital.com/insigh... · Posted by u/saigrandhi
RyanOD · 20 days ago
Sure...that's why it's important to diversify investments. For every Pets.com, hopefully you have a Google in your portfolio.

Or, you skip all that and just put it all in an S&P 500 fund.

nelgaard · 19 days ago
But you would not have had Google in you portfolio.

The bubble burst in 2000-2001, Google IPO was in 2004.

The S&P500 also did not do very well at the time.

That is the problem with bubbles.

nelgaard commented on A telephony agent for my parents. Should I turn it into a full-fledged service?   sutrasphere.com/... · Posted by u/ranabasheer
jeroenhd · 5 months ago
It's not a new idea, seeing as Google pretty much announced this years ago. I don't know how much uptake it got (it isn't available in my country) but it's definitely one of the main real-world use cases of LLMs and related AI that I can see surviving the bubble. If you can get enough money out of it to pay for your service costs, that seems like an excellent tool.

That said, my experience with LLMs is that they tend to lie/misrepresent user input and intention, especially when translating text. Doesn't sound like a problem to me if you're just ordering pizza or scheduling a haircut, but when it comes to healthcare, that might become problematic. Furthermore, there are quite a few regulations when it comes to healthcare services that you might need to double check, just to make sure you're avoiding having to comply with difficult and expensive regulation. Not really an issue for a tool built for your parents, but when you're marketing it to people (especially vulnerable groups, like people not speaking the language of the country they're in).

Also, does this bot announce that it's a bot?

Also, how will you prevent scam callcenters from ruining your bot's reputation? Is there some kind of abuse detection in place? Because if you just have a service that will call people and tell them what you instruct it to tell them, I can guarantee that malicious people will flock to it.

nelgaard · 5 months ago
That is the problem with this kind of stuff. If it was only used by aging parents it might be OK. But it will be used by everyone. Even if OP manage to somehow prevent abuse, others will just build it themselves.

Because why would you want to make phone calls in the first place and not just send an email, or an SMS?

Because of spam filters and because people do not read their emails immediately because we get so many. But now we just get the same with phone calls.

It was already bad enough with fake Microsoft support.

nelgaard commented on Debian 13 “Trixie”   debian.org/News/2025/2025... · Posted by u/ducktective
prmoustache · 5 months ago
You can install debian and ubuntu with same DE and you'd be hard pressed to find a difference apart from the theme unless you are a power user who knows what snap is.

In fact, Ubuntu has never been an especially user friendly distro. At the beginning it was just a debian that was installed with debian's experimental installer before they decided to use it in stable. Nothing more, nothing less.

If you wanted to find a distro that was making efforts towards beginners looking for Gui config tools, you had to look at Suse and Mandrake (now Mandriva).

The only specific thing Ubuntu did for beginners is sending CDs for free at a time when not everybody had fast internet connections and would look for paper magazine to come with CD/DVD. And they have stopped doing that a loooooong time ago.

nelgaard · 5 months ago
Or unless the capacity of you harddisk is limited, filling up with huge snap packages.

Or you need something that is broken by snap. I helped a user after thunderbird after an upgrade could no longer open PDF-s in okular. It turned out that the thunderbird dpkg had been replaced with a snap and I spent quite some time trying getting it to work, filed bug reports, etc, before giving up and installing from Mozilla until I replace it all with Debian.

nelgaard commented on Taking over 60k spyware user accounts with SQL injection   ericdaigle.ca/posts/takin... · Posted by u/mtlynch
blueplanet200 · 6 months ago
From sqlmap

> Usage of sqlmap for attacking targets without prior mutual consent is illegal. It is the end user's responsibility to obey all applicable local, state and federal laws. Developers assume no liability and are not responsible for any misuse or damage caused by this program"

I don't know the legal footing these spyware apps stand on, but this blog post seems like exhibit A if Catwatchful ever decided to sue the author, or press criminal charges. Hacking, even for reasons that seem morally justified, is still illegal.

nelgaard · 6 months ago
As someone noted, there is the issue of jurisdiction.

But Daigle probably did consider being liable and what would be morally justified.

It must have been tempting to try to use the Catwatchful app to notify the victims that they are being stalked. E.g., by getting phone numbers or social media handles and then SMS/DM the victims (if the app reveals the victims handles in the recorded conversations)

Or getting the IMEI numbers and handing them over to network operators or local authorities who could do the notification.

It would probably help many victims, but it could go wrong in some cases.

nelgaard commented on Is TfL losing the battle against heat on the Victoria line?   swlondoner.co.uk/news/160... · Posted by u/zeristor
azernik · 7 months ago
"The average temperatures on the Victoria line have risen by almost seven degrees since 2013 – nearly a *30%* increase.

Conversely, the increase in the average annual temperatures across all Underground lines from 2013 to 2024 was merely *seven percent*, placing Victoria’s temperature rise vastly above that."

Using percentages to talk about changes in non-Kelvin temperatures is crazy.

nelgaard · 7 months ago
And they manage to make it even more crazy by also comparing it to average external temperatures.

== The Victoria Line average temperature in August last year was 60% higher in temperature than the average external temperature that month, measured at 19.5 degrees. ==

Certainly for January it must have been hundreds of percent higher.

And what would the numbers be for e.g., the Moscow metro in winter months where the average outside temperature is negative?

nelgaard commented on A community-led fork of Organic Maps   comaps.app/news/2025-05-1... · Posted by u/maelito
kmarc · 8 months ago
Thanks for the input.

I happened to work for a car navigation software development company 15+y ago. Cool stuff, Windows CE / PDAs as devices, android and ios nowhere. These were totally offline devices (map updates through usb / sdcard).

Even then, this offline navigation was super fast, across countries. Today I managed to wait a whole minute for a 5km bike navigation in OsmAnd. Then I uninstalled (after years of hoping for improvement. Yes, I was regularly donating money.)

nelgaard · 8 months ago
In my experience, OsmAnd is mostly slow for very long routes.

Maybe it is a matter of quality. Because of course you can find routes fast if they are not the fastest or best routes.

But there is room for improvement. brouter could be integrated even better. Or a router like that could be used directly in OsmAnd.

And long routes could be handled more flexible. E.g., when I go from Copenhagen to Barcelona, it is not super important at first to find the optimal way into Barcelona, or shortcuts in France using regional roads. It will take several days, but I would like to start with a reasonable route giving me an estimate of distance and time. At first I just need a good route to the Great Belt Bridge or the Rødby ferry -- Copenhagen is on an island.

When I drive long distances, I sometimes use several devices. The Xzent system is much faster for longer distances, but the map is not as good, especially it is missing may POI's.

Often they disagree, especially if one is optimizing for distance and other for fuel or time. Then if there is an obstacle or a bad road, I instantly have a good alternative at an intersection.

nelgaard commented on A community-led fork of Organic Maps   comaps.app/news/2025-05-1... · Posted by u/maelito
et-al · 8 months ago
> For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest (supermarkets, gas stations & such).

Am I misinterpreting something? This is because of the underlying OSM data. So one should add these places to OSM so downstream apps will show the places you want, right?

nelgaard · 8 months ago
It it not just because of underlying OSM data.

Navigation apps such as OrganicMaps and OsmAnd filter OSM data, and package it in way that takes up less space. I.e., it will omit individual trees, manholes, etc. It also omits tags from OSM objects that it does keep.

This is all to to make it possible to fit enough maps on a phone and also there have code that can use that data (for searching and displaying)

Take for example Motorhome stopovers (I have edited at lot of those). OsmAnd has name, opening, hours, power_supply, fees, dump_stations, toilets, showers, phone numbers, website, and a few more tags. But not water_point (although it has drinking_water which is not used much for stopovers).

OrganicMap has much fewer tags for motorhome stopovers.

nelgaard commented on Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming"   cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transc... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40
kmacdough · 9 months ago
Computers can and should help along the way, but Dijkstra's argument is that a) much of the challenge of human ideas is discovered in the act of converting from natural to formal language and b) that this act, in and of itself, is what trains our formal logical selves.

So he's contesting not only the idea that programs should be specified in natural language, but also the idea that removing our need to understand the formal language would increase our ability to build complex systems.

It's worth noting that much of the "translation" is not translation, but fixing the logical ambiguities, inconsistencies and improper assumptions. Much of it can happen in natural language, if we take Dijkstra seriously, precisely because programmers at the table who have spent their lives formalizing.

There are other professions which require significant formal thinking, such as math. But also, the conversion of old proofs into computer proofs has lead us to discover holes and gaps in many well accepted proofs. Not that much has been overturned, but we still do t have a complete proof for Fermats last theorem [1].

[1] https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/fermats-last-th...

nelgaard · 9 months ago
But even real translation is bad.

There has been some efforts to make computer languages with local (non-english) keywords. Most have fortunately already failed horribly.

But it still exists, e.g. in spreadsheet formulas.

In some cases even number formatting (decimal separators) are affected.

nelgaard commented on OpenStreetMap Is Turning 20   stevecoast.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/gemanor
ygra · a year ago
Mapillary or Kartaview are the typical choices here to add free street-level imagery which can then be used for OSM purposes as well.

What also works is Wikimedia Commons. There's a good mobile app. You can take pictures of a POI, upload them and later associate them with that object in OSM (or via Wikidata).

nelgaard · a year ago
Yes, and I use or have used them all.

The wikimedia app could be improved a lot to support OSM. It is a bit of a hassle to take a picture, upload it to commons, then add both categories and concepts, then open an OSM editor, find the object, and add the wikimedia_commons tag.

It would be much more helpful if you could search for an object in OsmAnd/organicmaps etc, take a picture, have it uploaded to wikimedia providing default categories based on OSM tags, and then have it added to OSM. It could also help create wikimedia categories if necessary.

nelgaard commented on A word about private attribution in Firefox   old.reddit.com/r/firefox/... · Posted by u/ghostwords
nelgaard · a year ago
It seems to me that Mozilla is gambling with the privacy of their users. The gamble might be worth it, even though I do not think so.

But even if it somehow was a good gamble, that it not how Free Software projects should work. Free software should prioritize the wishes of users. If a lot of firefox users collectively decided to give up some privacy to avoid loosing more privacy, that is their choice, but that is not what have been happening.

Using this kind of defeatist arguments, there is no end to backdoors and compromises that can be defended.

I would prefer Mozilla to fight in the arms race.

I also wonder: what is the next step? I.e., why would advertizing trust firefox instances. It is tempting to create a fork of Firefox that use and manipulate this API in all kind of ways.

u/nelgaard

KarmaCake day179January 25, 2019View Original