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apparia

@ apparia @discuss.tchncs.de

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Joined
7 mo. ago

  • Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America

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  • The headline is dramatic but the reality, and the article content, are more equivocal.

    For comparison, Statcounter recorded Linux at 5.52% in June 2026, so the share nearly doubled in one month

    This seems... optimistic? As the article notes this is really the proportion of HTTP requests made from that operating system, not the actual number of desktops running it. What are the odds this spike is due to some Sparkling Botnet (AI company) doing a scraping run with agents that identify themselves as Linux desktops? I think that or any number of other scenarios are more likely than that the entire increase is truly new organic desktops running Linux.

  • Tech ain't that deep - and that's a problem

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  • From the perspective of this thread they're probably similarly good and "deep". My instinct would be to err away from anything object oriented for beginners since OOP has always felt a little cultish to me and I think it's maybe something "shallow" (at least shallower than plain C) that has a habit of masquerading as the one true "deep" way to do programming.

    C also has the practical advantage of being fucking everywhere.

    Rust

    I like Rust, but beyond the subset that is "ugly C" -- using unsafe everywhere and eschewing like 90% of std -- it's definitely shallow.

  • OpenAI admits responsibility for HuggingFace Attack - an agent from an internal evaluation is reportedly the cause

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  • "Responsible disclosure" is a term of art, I think that's why they use the word there.

  • Tech ain't that deep - and that's a problem

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  • Great article. I've always been of the opinion that C should be one of, if not the, first things taught to programmers. You can explain Python in terms of C, but you can't explain C in terms of Python.

  • More likely than not you're using bubble wrap wrong

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  • Not convinced?

    Below, what Perplexity Pro had to say.

    If you think your own blog post is going to be less compelling than a screenshot of a fucking chatbot, why are you writing anything at all? This is pitiful.

  • The banality of surveillance | On an internet where everything is tracked, our privacy is maintained mainly because our data is too boring and time consuming to sort through. But AIs don't get bored.

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  • I think this comment is based on an extremely optimistic -- bordering on fantastical -- outlook.

    The complexity of dealing with such large amounts of information will keep increasing forever as the amount of information also grows

    The capacity and capability to handle the data will grow too.

    AI struggles with conflicting information and mistakes, which happen a lot especially when humans are involved, so eventually you will have lots of “garbage in garbage out” issues causing problems

    This is what data analysis is though. Extracting patterns from noisy data. Ignoring outliers. I don't think anybody is suggesting they'll just dump a CSV of your web history into ChatGPT and ask it if you're probably going to a protest this weekend (although does it sound so far fetched that that might actually work?), it'll be used in combination with existing and constantly improving data mining techniques.

    The data one might be able to track will continuously be challenged or removed on legal/compliance bases over time, reducing its availability

    Are you implying data protection laws will not only not be inexorably eroded year upon year by increasingly surveillance-hungry governments, but will actually get a significantly better than their current milquetoast state? I've gotta say, that's seeming increasingly unlikely to me; right now we're seeing mandatory identity verification being legislated on more and more things by more and more governments.

    Yes the NSA might want our chatbot logs, but after enough people realize they might be/are getting them, people will stop feeding it as much, or introduce noise on purpose

    This has to be a sarcastic reference to Snowden, right? The thing where the entire world found out about the how NSA absolutely is -- not "might be" -- monitoring your internet and conversation logs, and basically nobody did a fucking thing to change? That was 12 years ago.

    And the sheer volume of information relative to the computing power necessary to process everything will also become a problem if they keep trying to process every single thing.

    Good thing they're not doing anything crazy to get more computing power, like buying up practically the entire global supply of RAM or building data centres at an exponentially increasing rate.

  • On the unfortunate need for an "age verification" API for legal compliance reasons in some U.S. states

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  • Is it really not as easy for them as saying "hey btw don't use this distro if you're in California" and fully expecting nobody to comply? I'm not sure if Ubuntu is based in Cali in which case I can see it being more difficult.

    Also this "age bracket" thing seems to have an obvious flaw in that any application that's running semi-regularly can just poll the API every day and find out the user's DOB by checking when they roll into the next bracket. It's actually leaking more data about children than about adults in that case. Brilliant.

  • Show HN: Respectify – a comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

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  • TMSJ;BI (Too Much Shitty Javascript; Barely Interacted):

    Is there some kind of award for "most irredeemably 'HN' HN post"? Just spam a bunch of LLM comments to drive the numbers like everyone else, no need to add the whole extra step of making sure anyone trying to actually engage knows exactly how much contempt you have for their opinion.

    Also, the website is so vibecoded that the logo has the wrong number of fingers. Can't make this shit up.

  • Removed

    the one where ross says a slur

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  • I'm surprised how many people seem offended by this comic. I found it pretty relatable. That doesn't mean I "don't understand context", or think the writers were bad people, or that the shows aren't worth watching. It just means I find it personally unpleasant to find these jokes in a work I'm otherwise enjoying.

    When kids study older literature and media in school, generally when there's a slur or racist reference or joke, the teacher will stop and explain the context and get the kids to reflect on it and why it's probably not acceptable today. Even though I understand this and know it going in, I'm still kind of doing an abridged version of that in my head when something like this comes up in a show -- I've been following along, laughing with the writers, and then suddenly I'm backing up and distancing myself from one joke or idea. It's jarring, it pulls me out of the show, and it's just not fun.

    In some cases it also comes across as incredibly lazy and unoriginal. So many sitcoms from that era have "the trans episode", "the gay episode", "the lecherous character" -- and they all make the same unfunny jokes, and it's a reminder than a lot of these shows, even in their time, were just not that creative. Plenty of modern shows have the same problem, but they don't draw attention to it by having large classes of "stock jokes" that simply do not land today.

  • TIL that I18n is Internationalization, and why

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  • And "a11y" is the most obscure -- dare I say... inaccessible -- fucking abbreviation of "accessibility". For years I only saw them in passing and assumed both these things were like, quirkily-named Javascript frameworks or niche standards documents or something, despite knowing quite well the concepts they actually refer to.

  • How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

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  • No mention of how it compares to existing spatial indexing methods such as R[*]-trees. That was my first thought reading the article, but they only give a comparison to naïve NxM testing. I assume this method is still an improvement in the presence of sharding, but doubt it's the 400× quoted.