justauserid

One of the things of an M1 Pro I depend a lot on is fingerprint reader (ie TouchID) and sadly that won't work on Asahi or any such distro on a mac. That's one reason I've not tried it again. Because I just come back to it (I am also used to keeping kinda long mac passwords).

Aslo, when I parted ways with my last employer I was given this 16GB piece as a temp laptop and the 32GB Pro (iirc M2 or M3) was in repair (sound issues). The "parting" happened during the repair. The IT helpfully suggested if I want they could delay all that if I don't sign the F&F settlement (great team; good to okay company). But I just wanted to get done with all that. I regret it though – I could certainly live without that mac's speaker working, but living with 32GB and local models isn't that nice :D

Then what would you say to big boys and girls (i.e., the moneybags) getting into bed together and decide that the best for all the big boys and girls is to ensure that the public holds the bag – via obvious pathways of funds, pension, and retirement scehemes etc?

> gave politicians arbitrary veto power

:-) That ship has sailed for USA (at least for the time being and its trailing smoke is visible from far away)

> and you thought you would just ask

Yes, I did.

> in a completly unrelated discussion

I disagree with this point. One of the reasons I have not been able to start on it is I don't know what OSes are secure for this purpose.

> orbstack server or multipass

I will try this. Thank you.

tl;dr: What is a good vm/container tool (and OS to live inisde that) for a 16GB RAM m1 pro mac that doesn't guzzle up the resources and is safe/easy enough.

-----

I am thinking of setting up a VM/container on my 16GB M1 Pro mac. The purpose mainly is to move harnesses (and the world of NPM et al) to it. Currently I am using few harnesses – Pi, OpenCode, Claude, Codex, and agy (mostly opencode, cluade code, and agy) – kinda controlled by sandbox-exec. It has wroked sufficiently well, as much as sandbox-exec can faciliate that. But what makes me unconfomrtables are things like:

1. I still have to give these harnesses write access to folders I'd otehrwise not be comfortable (esp. at the time of upgrade etc)

2. The face at which updates arrive – and then you accept that and that could be unsafe, you don't accept that and that could be unsafe

3. The asntronomical number of packages/dependencies that get updated everyday (sometimes in one hour) and it's needed for these harnesses. That makes me very nervous.

What tool + OS should I pick for my container environment? (I am comfortable with cli but have enver used VM before other than just installing and playing with it for a few minutes)

My main goals are:

1. less RAM usage (I don't have a lot left after normal OS and few programs I'd like to have running; often I also try some local models – sometimes just for STT; but just the 3-6B range) - so would appreciate if RAM overhead by the cotnainer OS and tool isn't a lot.

2. If possible use available disk space flexibily (without having to reserve in advnace; or I should be able to change/increase the image/container's disk usage capacity)

3. relatively safe and easy to use

4. Then I am going to clean up the mac (and possibly remove apps so that I might find it hard to even see a npm or .npm folder on it in a manner of speaking)

I am not a native English or French speaker but the way I've heard Luke being said in UK/US English and the way I have heard the filmmaker's name pronounced that Luc doesn't really sound like Luke. I feel the u and c are shorter and subdued.

I have recently tried to check around goodreads alterantives and I came face to face with these ISBNs and ASINs and how these are a hot mess. There's really no truly open metadata source that is "enough". App developers often depend on proprietary sources and sadly those are the ones which are more complete and go their own way for every source. How did you deal with that?

I also finally tried "Thinking, fast and slow" recently and realised it was absolutely not for me. Even the audiobook version didn't cut it. I found it completely dry and trite. I am not trying to offend anymoe (esp. with "trite"), and I am aware how storied and awarded the author is – to me it just came across as "yet another self-help kind of book" sadly. But then a clear lack of fiction for a long time in "top all-times" puts into perspective why that book is up at the top. I think the general hn reading-taste is quite different from mine. Also, it's not about what was book about, because I never reached that, it was rather how it was written.

Any plans to add some sort of tag/genre to search feature?

Signal hates anyone who even thinks about using this IM app as the de-facto IM app, or with more than that one person who also tries Singal as an annual ritual in your friend circle. I tried to use the app again after a year or so. Gave it full contact permission and it wasn't able to pick friends who are alreasy on Signal. I was not even able to send them messages using the number. But a friend was able to send it a message to me. After 2-3 days finally the app started showing friend's name that's in contact. Tut there were scary warnings (I know, I know that's for my safery). The whole UX just feels at odd with anything and everything I've used. They manage to look and feel worse than WhatsApp of today and that I'd say is an achievement.

For most people, who are end users, it's really not that simple and no you are not wrong.

This comment is a tangent to the article and my experience of trying to use crypto for the first time few weeks ago after watching it from pretty much the day 0. Maybe day 2 or 3 as when bitcoin was launched I was few months shy of leaving college and I just thought it was just an "Internet thing" like many of us did. And I am aware that evne among decentralsied coins BTC might not have been the first, but let's just say it was.

So a few weeks ago, I wanted to make some payment to some sites. There were/are 4-5; one of them is openrouter and similar, but there's one that helps with Linux ISOs. I definitely didn't want to leave my credit card number on those sites (not even on openrotuer). I am wary of leaving my credit card numbers to sites outside my home country India. It's not about better or worse security, it's just about a sense of comfort, or maybe even habit.

There was no expectation or plan for anonymity, privacy whatsoever. Though I would not have minded a bit of privacy on those immediate businesses/sites – as in if someone hacked their systems/DBs they'd find my throwaway email and crypto address (maybe) but if some legal entity investigated they could easily trace it back to my via exchanges and I was fine with that. Yes, I could explore temporary cards and everything but I still had to manage things more than I wanted to.

I created accounts on three crypto exchanges (one was Binance, two from India). I needed those to be complaint to my country's fin/tax laws and I dind't want to deal with anything even remotely p2p (oh, it's quite active here and rarely ends well for end or occasional users like me).

The crowded UX, dark patterns, and absolutely no easy way to figure out how can I just:

- buy some coins

- transfer to my personal wallet (this is deliberately not made straightforward and on some exchanges downright impossible – sometimes hiding it behind some sort of eligibility to do so and even that is hidden further behind some sort of automatic and random eligibility check process)

- get done with it

were just too much. Add to it that I learnt I had to buy some other type of coin(s) just to pay for the gas (chain/network exepenses?). Then suddenly there were additional KYC requirements from payment related parties and then a request for a recorded video of myself.

At that point I was done and had all three of my KYC'ed account closed.

I have always felt crypto coins were a bit weird (as anything unusual feels) but I had never tried it and had assumed as weird as those sounded, those would be very easy to use. How wrong I was. It's a mess and not only because at the end of the day it had to be complaint to real world finance regulations which is what it was supposed to replace in the first place - or was part of the popular appeal at least. It's just a complicated, often costly, and quite often slow mess.

Luckily Apple Pay launched in my country around that time and I was able to use that instead (otherwise I was going to dust off my ancient PayPal a/c) and Apple Pay is an underimplimented and under-supported thing in its own right but that's another story.

Not sure what league people with a five-year old M1 Pro with 16GB of unified RAM fall into :)

I had stopped going to it quite some time ago.

1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).

2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.

3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.

This was before LLMs or COVID.

In my experience Ghostty consumed much less RAM but when being used Ghosstty used much more. In similar scenarios/usage.

> Just do an export

I have a feeling you already know this. You can direct its unnecessarily monstrous .plist file to a folder of your choice and that way it will remain synced and/or backed up all the time if that folder is. [General > Settings > External settings]

I am an iTerm2 user but I find its .plist config file a lot anachronistic and, if I may say so, quite absurd. I have tried too many settings and I still struggle with keyboard inputs getting trapped wrongly, lost, et cetera, the warnings that appear out of nowhere and I notice was wrong. But iTerm2 is the only terminal app that looks the best on mac (even better than the Terimnal.app itself) and somehow sits naturally with everything else around. I am sure for a lot of terminal users it might not even the last concern but for me it is. I tried Ghostty but I just couldn't like it. Kitty won't even be a consideration for many reasons (one is better off not discussed here). cmux is indeed quite good but it has become a HYDRA and will keeps on growing in every direction. iTerm2 would do great to keep the outer clothes and possibly adopts the base of something else. It isn't particularly snappy either. I moved back from Ghostty to iTerm2 even though I felt usage wise Ghostty was suprior. Ghostty just felt out of place.

I would like to use a harness that integerates with an IDE very easily. This will be helpful for me when coding in a language I largely don't know. I can kinda check things quickly in front of me. I know it just needs an editor and maybe a language server setup – but the cost of visual context switching is still costly heavy for us humans. Often things out of sight are also out of mind.

I was aiming for VS Code but since I have used Intellij and android studio a lot maybe I'll give it a try.

I might want to try that. DS 4.1 Flash anyway fares much better at it than GLM (which is quite not so good at this aspect). Hope Kimi is even better.

That's been my experience as well. AGENTS.md just doesn't work. No matter how to-the-point and short, or detailed I keep it. Sending something what you have mentioned in the current prompt works much better. I thought of tweaking it around with a extension/hook or so. But then I decided it was better to use a few text-expansions.

Do you use OpenCode Go? Any way to speed-up the response times? It's painfully slow right now. Or that's the cost? :)

What's the best bang for the buck ≈$10–20 (per-month/equivalent) subscription for a good enough model these days?

I just want to know what happened to the cat, eventually. Like for real – beyond the (academic) (un)certainties.

People who are still facing this on a mac (like I was) - something I tried (and I am not sure this fixes it or not - or at least somewhat):

went to keychain access app and found all emudhra and emsigner certs -> there were 4 -> clicked "get info" for each -> under Trust section of the pop-ip -> selected "When using this certificate: Never Trust".

Now all checks on https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com pass for me.

It's my laptop and I can't easily revoke the certificates myself.

edit: I went to keychain access app and found all emudhar and em signer certs -> there were four -> clicked get info for each -> under Trust section of the pop-ip -> selected "When using this certificate: never trust".

Now all checks on https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com pass for me.

> Your browser trusted 4 of 14 compromised certificate chains.

Just now on M1 Pro Safari.

On M1 Prp Firefox: none.

On iPhone 17: Safari: none, Firefox: none.

Well the data was up on the hard disk. Fault lies with the electricity and cables.

Configurable gaps would be great and also multiple instances (somehow in sync? maybe?). In case someone chose a longer gap and then one instance went down. I personally wouldn't want anything below multiple weeks (at least; 2-3 months would be ideal for me).

This will be a good e2ee'd hosted service though (at least for someone like me). The problem is how to de-e2ee when the person is gone. Might be workable if the dependent receipient might also be well versed with encryption and had an open public key or so. Yeah, this is tricky.

But either way, it's kinda weird to setup something that will be sued after they are dead and that something is supposed to be maintained and kept up by them.

The new WhatsApp global head Kunal Shah is right at home. He literally fits perfectly with culture and ethics of Meta/WhatsApp. Made for each other.