stuporglue (u/stuporglue)

stuporglue commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger

palata · 3 months ago

I understand that WhatsApp may be necessary to talk to businesses (because Signal didn't develop that, and I honestly don't think they should).

But what would prevent people from using WhatsApp to talk to businesses and Signal to talk to friends? I have been using multiple channels with friends forever: phone call, mail, email, MSN Messenger, Facebook, IRC, ICQ, WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, Slack, Discord, Matrix, ... What sucks is when I can't reach a friend. But I never saw it as a problem that I had too many choices to talk to them :-).

I don't really understand this "It has to have 100% of the market" stance. I don't want monopolies, I don't really understand why someone would say "this monopoly sucks, but I really want a monopoly so I won't ever change unless it is for a better monopoly".

stuporglue · 3 months ago

For 1:1 conversations I think you're right. Having multiple channels for communication is fine.

Where it breaks down is for group conversations. If Person A won't use Signal and Person B won't use WhatsApp, you can't easily have group communications. And it only gets worse as the number of people in the group goes up.

stuporglue commented on Debian bookworm live images now reproducible lwn.net/Articles/1015402/... · Posted by u/bertman

perdomon · 5 months ago

Can someone please ELI5? When I hear live images, I think of iOS videos that go along with pictures you take

stuporglue · 5 months ago

A live image is an operating system image which you can boot from and use vs. an install disk which can only install, but there's no usable environment available).

A reproducable build means you can get the same source code and compile it, and it will be identical to the published image. This is important because otherwise you don't know if the published image actually used some other source code. If it used some other source code, the published image might have a backdoor, or something that you can't find by reading the source code.

stuporglue commented on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals ft.com/content/1201f834-6... · Posted by u/kvee

amtc80 · 9 months ago

It isn't illogical. Americans move to suburbs because there aren't enough affordable cities. Then they complain about the cost of gas, energy, housing and taxes which are inherently worse with lower density.

Suburbs aren't for standard of living, but affordability. You take the most available labour, the most available construction, and connect it with the most available transportation and you get suburbs. All without the need for much effective planning, organization or innovation.

But eventually someone else does those things. And then suburbs are expensive in comparison.

stuporglue · 9 months ago

Suburbs are for standard of living, for me.

I want more space, both in my home and in my yard, than I can get in the city. I want a 2+ car garage where I can build and drive a go-kart with my kids, fix my own car and have a little workshop to do woodworking.

I want a garden that isn't blanketed by city air, and room for some fruit trees. I want room for a fire pit, and enough trees that I don't have line of sight into my neighbors windows.

I don't want a farm. I don't need country living. Somewhere between 0.25 and 0.5 acres is about right for what I want to do, and that means the suburbs.

I live in a Cologne, Germany right now. I have lived in Sao Paulo in the past. Big cities with lots to offer. I know big cities and their conveniences, and they're fine. But for the life I want to live, suburbs offer a better standard of living.

stuporglue commented on Ask HN: Platform for 11 year old to create video games? · Posted by u/IgorPartola

stuporglue · a year ago

My daughter is 11 and has been making simple games on Scratch.

There's a lot of assets (images, characters, backgrounds) already in the system. The sending signals and receiving signals wasn't intuitive for her at first, but now she's getting it pretty well.

I don't think she could/would have figured it out on her own yet. Her older sister is 14 and spent a lot of time learning Scratch last year, so she was able to help her over the hurdles (like signaling). The 14 year old was able to learn it on her own, though I did teach her some concepts like loops and variables at the very start.

stuporglue commented on Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/LinuxBender

JoeDaDude · 2 years ago

It was a German school in South America (no WWII refugees there, lol). I guess the school leadership was taught that way, and they were sure to make the kids learn that way too - with fountain pens!

stuporglue · 2 years ago

I moved to Germany a few years ago and my kids have to use fountain pens for all their school work, even math. It's this way for grade school and high school.

stuporglue commented on Miniature Macintosh with Raspberry Pi hackster.io/news/miniatur... · Posted by u/rcarmo

anikom15 · 2 years ago

It’s weird because all these things can be done with other (better) hardware. The supply chain issues of high-performance semiconductors makes sense to me because there is no alternative. If the price is going up, it really demonstrates the sheer indifference to price people have when it comes to low-cost computing. That is, the value of an RP is in its package and not its price.

I really hope it’s not ignorance instead of indifference. Building a computer, even a tiny one, is not hard.

stuporglue · 2 years ago

Raspberry Pis also get put in to all sorts of places where an embedded board could be used, but the Pi is so much easier.

I want to build a digital picture frame with an e-ink frame that pulls photos from a server. The right way would be a low powered processor, but then I have to figure out writing the image, sleep states and wake up, setting up networking etc. in whatever programming language my embedded board supports.

Or I can just plug in a pi, and live with the always on power consumption.

It's not that I'm ignorant, but I have a limited amount of time and may prioritize project completion over doing it completely right.

stuporglue commented on Fastback Photo Gallery github.com/stuporglue/fas... · Posted by u/stuporglue

stuporglue · 2 years ago

I made Fastback Photo Gallery for my family and wanted to share.

We have 200,000+ family photos (including scans of parent's and grandparent's photos and slides) and needed a good way to easily enjoy them.

Fastback sorts all the photos it finds by date and lets you scroll through them. A couple of key features:

  * "Rewind" button to show media taken on today's date in previous years
  * Date picker to jump to a specific date
  * Map which can either show where photos were taken or be used as a filter itself so that only photos in the map area are visible. 
  * Filter by tags - if you have been tagging photos with faces or other data, you can filter by the tags

It's old school PHP and JavaScript. It uses ffmpeg to make streamable versions of the videos and either vipsthumbnail, ImageMagick or GD to make image thumbnails.

I would love feedback. Documentation issues, installation problems, suggestions, feature requests, etc.

stuporglue commented on 20 Years of Gentoo blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023... · Posted by u/BeetleB

stuporglue · 2 years ago

In 2003 I was in college with a Mac G3 iBook.

A room mate showed me Linux and I wanted to try it out. Yellow Dog Linux (A fork from Red Hat) was the stable/best option for PowerPC newbies.

I loved YDL but quickly realized that everything was a year or more out of date and by the end of the year I had distro-hopped my way over to Gentoo where I could get updated versions of GIMP, Inkscape and Firefox.

It took a few semesters but I did finally learn not to do any exciting upgrades the week a project was due.