ubertaco (u/ubertaco)

ubertaco commented on Profiling without Source code – how I diagnosed Trackmania stuttering larstofus.com/2025/07/27/... · Posted by u/ibobev

ubertaco · a month ago

Very cool that the author was able to use a profiler without source code and even add debug symbols, but...the actual conclusion (a third-party script using a third-party scripting system the author had installed but never mentioned until the end was the culprit) was so obvious of a first thing to check that it made the post feel a bit contrived.

It's like if someone wrote up a post detailing a step-by-step teardown of their vehicle's engine to determine why they were suddenly getting worse gas mileage, only to end with "oh, you know what, it's probably the giant always-open drag parachute I installed right before I started getting bad gas mileage. Let me try removing that now that I've ruled out every accessible part of the engine."

ubertaco commented on Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (Chips) developer.mozilla.org/en-... · Posted by u/gslin

frizlab · a month ago

I was so disappointed a few days ago.

CHIPS is exactly what I need for my project. Safari introduced support for CHIPS in 18.4! And then removed it in 18.5… with no visibility on when they’ll add it back (they have the intention to, apparently, but they have a bug in a private framework that prevent them from doing it).

Now I have to find another solution and it is so annoying to know the proper solution exists and I have to fallback to a less elegant solution because of third-party problems.

ubertaco · a month ago

Classic Safari. If their traditional pattern holds, they'll re-add it in a year or so, but it'll be unusably broken.

ubertaco commented on What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015) old.reddit.com/r/AskReddi... · Posted by u/Tomte

ubertaco · 3 months ago

I think much of human history (not just recent US history, but that's a prominent example on folks' minds these days) proves that the biggest differentiator that the wealthy can buy is complete immunity from any sort of legal consequences.

Even if you don't already live in a high-corruption society, you can either spend some of your wealth introducing that corruption (which pays dividends), or you can just go somewhere else that's already high-corruption and bribe your way into immediate permanent residence.

Live in a democracy? Just buy public opinion by leveraging your wealth into a highly-profitable propaganda network, which will also give you an appealing platform for opportunist would-be government officials, who will then owe you, making your bribes cheaper. Maybe you can even just directly blackmail or entrap them along the way, so you don't even have to pay.

Live in an autocracy? Buy enough weaponry and PMCs to insulate yourself or even rival the government itself, or just buy the autocrat's favor directly.

Live in an oligarchy? Psh, your work is already done. Just use the system as it's designed: to be exploited by your vast wealth.

ubertaco commented on SQL pipe syntax available in public preview in BigQuery cloud.google.com/bigquery... · Posted by u/marcyb5st

_huayra_ · 7 months ago

Many such things from F# come from Haskell (given the influence from MSR UK, specifically Simon Peyton Jones before he left a few years ago), so likely Haskell or earlier imo (at least in terms of "complex" "pipe" operations that have higher-level operations than "bytes in, bytes out" of Unix).

ubertaco · 7 months ago

Worth noting that F# started out life as an implementation of OCaml for the .NET runtime [1], so most likely the pipe syntax was taken from there, although the pipeline-of-functions construction is much older than that [2]

[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2099...

[2] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/17335/wha...

ubertaco commented on Scroll-Driven Animations scroll-driven-animations.... · Posted by u/javatuts

ubertaco · 7 months ago

Basically the modern <blink> or <marquee> tag.

ubertaco commented on F-Droid's Progress and What's Coming in 2025 f-droid.org/2025/01/21/a-... · Posted by u/mappu

nosrepa · 7 months ago

Weird, I can can stream antennapod's audio to any of my Google home devices and I assumed it'd work the same should I want to use my Chromecast.

ubertaco · 7 months ago

You probably have installed it from the Google Play store rather than from F-Droid, I'd bet.

ubertaco commented on F-Droid's Progress and What's Coming in 2025 f-droid.org/2025/01/21/a-... · Posted by u/mappu

camel-cdr · 7 months ago

I'm the other way arround, 2-3 things from playstore and the rest from f-droid. Here is my list:

    Acode (text editor)
    Aegist (2FA)
    AntennaPod (podcast)
    Aurora Store (playstore)
    FairEmail (E-Mail)
    Feeder (RSS reader)
    Fennec (firefox with extension support)
    KeePassDX (password manager)
    KOReader (ebook reader)
    LocalSend (send data between devices in local network)
    Mastodon mobile client
    MuPDF viewer (PDF viewer)
    Oddysey (music player)
    NewPipe (youtube frontend)
    Offi (public transport)
    OsmAnd (map)
    QR Scanner (PFA)
    Red Moon (lower screen brightness lower than minimum for reading before bed)
    ScreenStream (stream screen to website in local network)
    Stealth (reddit client)
    Termux (linux shell eviroment)
    VLC

ubertaco · 7 months ago

I recently swapped from the F-Droid version of AntennaPod to the Google Play Store version so that I could use Chromecast, which they strip from their F-Droid builds because the underlying library isn't open-source and is deemed "impure" by F-Droid (it gets you a "This app has features you might not like" banner, when honestly it's a feature I specifically want).

A similar thing is true of Tempo (a Subsonic-client music player), where the F-Droid builds have Chromecast support stripped out, but the GitHub-published builds have it (so I also have to install Obtanium to get those updated).

"I want to listen to my audio on my devices in my house" is a weird thing to exclude in the name of open-source purity.

Otherwise, I love F-Droid. I just wish they had a bit more nuance to recognize that Chromecast support isn't the same as "constantly reports your location in the background to corporate servers", and so those shouldn't have the same severity of warning banners applied.

ubertaco commented on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable? newsletter.goodtechthings... · Posted by u/forrestbrazeal

thirdtruck · 8 months ago

Xir father used to argue the same thing.

But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.

The ask of evolution and science in general is to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.

ubertaco · 8 months ago

>But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.

This is an excellent rebuttal to the micro/macro distinction, because it's working in the correct direction, which you've stated well:

>to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.

Using the notion of "species" as a "ground truth", as though it were some biological law, is a self-defeating point precisely because the definition of "species" is "a somewhat-arbitrary taxonomy developed by people to try to group organisms together based on observed common traits."

ubertaco commented on Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable? newsletter.goodtechthings... · Posted by u/forrestbrazeal

UltraSane · 8 months ago

OK, for falsifiable how about evolution predicts patterns of genetic similarity between species that match their apparent morphological relationships - a correlation that didn't have to exist but does.

ubertaco · 8 months ago

That's not what falsifiable means. It's not experimentally verifiable. There is no way to conduct a test that would negate it if it were untrue.

It is why, being intellectually honest, the theory of evolution as the origin of species is called a "theory" in the academic sense: it's a proposed model that fits the data available on hand, but which has not been experimentally verified in its premise. Short of time-travel, I'm not sure how it can be experimentally verified.

"Falsifiable" means "I can construct an experiment that could yield an outcome that directly demonstrates this idea as false." This is sort of like the difficulty that exists with the four-color theorem [1]: yes, you can run a lot of examples using computer-assisted proof tech, but at best what that tells you is "we haven't found a counterexample yet."

Except, for non-falsifiable claims like the theory of evolution as the origin of species, there is no experiment you can run to provide a counterexample. The theory covers any possible counterexamples by simply saying "that form of life must have evolved from a different origin point and/or under different conditions (regardless of whether we can recreate those conditions)", and tucks any counterexample in neatly into itself without feeling threatened by falsifiability. It is "total" by having an "escape hatch" for any counterexamples.

That stacks it up alongside "a deity made everything, and designed an ordered universe with certain mechanics, including giving organisms the ability to adapt"; both are explanations that fit the available data, but neither can be experimentally verified. Similarly, that theory is "total" by having an escape hatch: "well, maybe the deity did something different in that case." Young-earth Creationists do this with visible starlight that is a million or more lightyears away: "maybe God just accelerated that starlight so that humans would have a pretty night sky."

That tendency is similar to "maybe the [hypothetical] organisms on Mars adapted from a different common ancestor that maybe was made of non-living substances that are similar to the non-living substances that comprised Earth's first organism." Boom, done, no need to re-examine the premise, you just fold it in with "maybe the same magic worked a little differently over there," just like saying "maybe God made starlight go faster in the direction of Earth."

As long as you don't engage in denial of the available data because of your theory, then I don't understand why holding a particular non-falsifiable theory is mandatory.

It doesn't matter if I hold to the theory that the universe began as an origin-less hypercompressed single point of matter suddenly and rapidly decompressing...if I'm in the lab next to you claiming that vaccines cause autism. The problem is not which non-verifiable theory I hold about an unrelated subject, but rather my denial of the available data on hand.

Similarly, it doesn't matter that Louis Pasteur was a Creationist when discussing the mechanisms he discovered by which vaccines work. What matters is his recognition of the reality of the data at hand, and his work to explore and build on it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem