pikelet (u/pikelet) - Readit News

pikelet commented on Microplastics shed by food packaging are contaminating our food, study finds cnn.com/2025/06/24/health... · Posted by u/gortok

taeric · 2 months ago

I'm curious what paper packaging you have in mind, that isn't also lined with plastics. Maybe we could use more wax lined items? I don't know. But it is down right comical how people will avoid some macro plastic things only to be using something that has micro plastic by design.

pikelet · 2 months ago

I think that if people are trying to avoid plastics but unknowingly using them anyway due to misleading design or greenwashing then their heart is in the right place and we shouldn't sneer at them. At least they're conscious of the problems and trying to do better. Call out the companies who are doing this. Don't blame people for being confused by something designed to be as confusing as possible.

pikelet commented on Rocknix is an immutable Linux distribution for handheld gaming devices rocknix.org/... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

zozbot234 · 2 months ago

Not seeing the point of this, all that much. I'd rather run something like Mobian or pmOS (given the tiny, mobile-like screen on most of these devices) once the hardware support on mainline kernel is up to proper standards. A lightweight environment like sxmo would probably work quite well with the custom HID controls. And it would open up this whole emerging class of low-cost devices for doing a whole lot more than just the emulator-based "gaming" that they're used for out-of-the-box.

(Not all of them are low-cost, either; there's plenty of high-end handhelds with physical buttons and analog controls these days, that could probably be usefully repurposed for productive work.)

pikelet · 2 months ago

The whole point of my retro handhelds are to be an escape from this kind of complexity. I just want to sit down without any connection to the wider world and jump into some simple games like I did in my childhood. No distractions. They're for the times I want to escape 'productive work' for awhile.

pikelet commented on Why JPEGs still rule the web (2024) spectrum.ieee.org/jpeg-im... · Posted by u/purpleko

crazygringo · 2 months ago

Because uBO Lite uses a newer Chrome function call (declarativeNetRequest) that didn't exist previously (original uBO was based on webRequest).

webRequest is slower because it has to evaluate JavaScript for each request (as well as the overhead of interprocess communication), instead of the blocking being done by compiled C++ code in the same process like declarativeNetRequest does.

uBO also has a bunch of extra features like zapping that the creator explicitly chose not to include in uBO Lite, in the interests of making the Lite version as fast and resource-light as possible. For zapping, there are other extensions you can install instead if you need that.

They're two different products with two different philosophies based on two different underlying architectures. The older architecture has now gone away in Chrome, but the new one supports uBlock Origin Lite great.

pikelet · 2 months ago

I think you're overstating it a bit. There were definitely features that couldn't be implemented due to MV3 limitations rather than because the developer chose to leave them out.

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

pikelet commented on Zod 4 zod.dev/v4... · Posted by u/bpierre

rossant · 3 months ago

I came here to say this. I clicked on the link and had no idea what this was about.

pikelet · 3 months ago

The next step is to click the project logo in the top left.

pikelet commented on How I pwned a major New Zealand service provider mrbruh.com/majorprovider/... · Posted by u/MrBruh

svarrall · 5 months ago

They mentioned the name of the app in the article “KiwiServices”

pikelet · 5 months ago

They mentioned at the top of the article that this is not the real name.

pikelet commented on How I pwned a major New Zealand service provider mrbruh.com/majorprovider/... · Posted by u/MrBruh

xupybd · 5 months ago

Kiwi bank is the most likely IMO. Almost 4 star and the kind of think GPT would do is leave in the Kiwi part.

pikelet · 5 months ago

I don't think so. The data returned talks about loyalty, rewards, and gift cards.

pikelet commented on I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs twitter.com/skdh/status/1... · Posted by u/ksec

turtletontine · 5 months ago

I literally had a developer of an open source package I’m working with tell me “yeah that’s a known problem, I gave up on trying to fix it. You should just ask ChatGPT to fix it, I bet it will immediately know the answer.”

Annoying response of course. But I’d never used an LLM to debug before, so I figured I’d give it a try.

First: it regurgitated a bunch of documentation and basic debugging tips, which might have actually been helpful if I had just encountered this problem and had put no thought into debugging it yet. In reality, I had already spent hours on the problem. So not helpful

Second: I provided some further info on environment variables I thought might be the problem. It latched on to that. “Yes that’s your problem! These environment variables are (causing the problem) because (reasons that don’t make sense). Delete them and that should fix things.” I deleted them. It changed nothing.

Third: It hallucinated a magic numpy function that would solve my problem. I informed it this function did not exist, and it wrote me a flowery apology.

Clearly AI coding works great for some people, but this was purely an infuriating distraction. Not only did it not solve my problem, it wasted my time and energy, and threw tons of useless and irrelevant information at me. Bad experience.

pikelet · 5 months ago

This is exactly my experience, every time! If I offer it the slightest bit of context it will say 'Ah! I understand now! Yes, that is your problem, …' and proceed to spit out some non-existent function, sometimes the same one it has just suggested a few prompts ago which we already decided doesn't exist/work. And it just goes on and on giving me 'solutions' until I finally realise it doesn't have the answer (which it will never admit unless you specifically ask it to – forever looking to please) and give up.

pikelet commented on Sid Meier's Civilization VII civilization.2k.com/civ-v... · Posted by u/doener

Semaphor · 7 months ago

What's the complaint? I prefer V for familiarity, but VII looks better than VI to me.

pikelet · 7 months ago

It's boring, grey, and flat. It takes up too much space on the screen for very little reason (and I'm a fan of whitespace used well). It's generally unpolished with various elements misaligned, squashed together, lacking padding, or in other cases randomly too much padding/margin. It's just a big mess... IMO. I think the actual game underneath the UI looks great at least. I really like VI, and V has plenty of character too.

pikelet commented on Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail mcc-berlin.net/en/news/in... · Posted by u/mpweiher

nsokolsky · 10 months ago

True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc.

All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).

pikelet · 10 months ago

And yet I frequently see (in New Zealand), properties with oversized double garages (often built to fit oversized American vehicles) and driveways that take up half the land on the property. Cars use a huge amount of space in roads, carparks, garages, and are responsible for pushing things further and further away from the home. And then somehow cars are seen as the solution for the very problems they create. There's plenty of real world evidence that there are better ways to solve this.

I don't think cars are responsible for bigger backyards at all. The size of the average property where I live only seems to be shrinking as the roads get more and more congested.

pikelet commented on Plain Text Accounting (PTA) plaintextaccounting.org/... · Posted by u/iscream26

rpb92 · a year ago

I’d appreciate hearing how others have used the various plain text accounting tools for their own use. Are you legitimately using it to inform yourself of your spending habits and taking corrective action? Is it simply for tracking your expenses, revenues, net worth, etc? Or is it simply about the process? I can certainly see the appeal of such an orderly, structured process.

Every time I’m reminded of plain text accounting, I have either an irresistible urge to immerse myself fully into the process, or feelings of guilt for not staying committed to my previous attempts. Right now, it’s mainly guilt, since I’ve not updated my personal ledger in a month and a half. Ultimately, I think I’m unsure about why I’m using it, and eventually feel like I’m logging transactions just for the sake of it.

pikelet · a year ago

I'm self employed and use it (Beancount, as I like the more strict approach) for my business accounts and also for my stock portfolio. Fava, the web UI, is very handy for reporting and visualising things, though I also have a few scripts to automate certain processes like importing transactions from Wise and tracking exchange rates. I really don't have the discipline to use it for daily personal expenses or budgeting though.