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verandaguy

Re:Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes on Sunday November 01, 2026 @09:56AM (#50326283)
I didn’t actually mention Europe at all in my original comment, but I guess?

I’m not above admitting I’m not up to date on how the public washroom situation in the rest of Europe has changed in the past 15-20 years, though.

Re:Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes on Sunday November 01, 2026 @09:38AM (#50326139)
My conflation comes from the fact that in Canada, you're almost guaranteed to have terrible washrooms at gas stations (and frankly, in most public venues outside of really nice hotels and restos) coast to coast to coast.

A washroom at at an Irving in rural New Brunswick will have the same weird smells and nonspecific grossness as a Petro in North Vancouver.

Granted, I also haven't visited most of Europe since being a kid, though at that time I remember a few Orlans in Poland and Elfs and Mobils in France having a much cleaner vibe than the gas stations back home.

Re:Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:46AM (#50325648)
I'm increasingly convinced that awful public restrooms are mostly a North America thing. Travelling in Iceland a few years ago I was shocked at how nice the restrooms at the major gas stations were (N1 stands out). Full-height doors and stall walls, meticulous cleanliness, no weird smells.

At a gas station off the ring road in the middle of nowhere.

Re:Restrooms along the Norwegian Scenic Routes on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:43AM (#50325627)
Almost definitionally, any amount of money spent on these kinds of washrooms would be a shitload, no?
Presumably, asking for it in person would be seen as a request (however unreasonable). I imagine that in many jurisdictions this may constitute a breach of procedure which would get you a scolding from the judge; done enough times I'm sure there'd be more material consequences.

Asking an LLM to do this through a prompt injection attack is less an unreasonable request and more an active effort to undermine the court's infrastructure and processes.

I'm not a lawyer; that's my intuition on the matter.

Re:Pico CSS is no longer maintained on Thursday October 29, 2026 @11:08PM (#50299439)
I haven't done frontend dev in a while, but one thing stands out to me here... they call out using OKLCH colours, which I had to look up. (For the uninitiated, this is a cylindrical projection of the also-new-to-me Oklab colour space, which appears largely unrelated to the older CIE L*a*b* colour space).

Do people actually use this? In particular, before LLMs ate the world, I mean. When I did frontend, it was hex, or if you felt fancy, `rgba(...)` (though at that point named colours had mostly fallen out of style).

Is using these less-intuitive colour encodings made more practical through the use of CSS variables?

CVSS is an imperfect system. Most of the time it gets the idea of how severe an issue is across, but once you go above an 8, maybe an 8.5, there are some perverse incentives at play. Even with newer versions of the framework coming out over the years, there have always been gaps.

Even before AI, there was prestige in being able to say that you (or your team) found a 9.2 in some major piece of software. You could put that on your resume in some specializations.

Now with AI vulnerability scanning being so hyper-commercialized (but not yet fully commoditized), this is cranked way up since there are more monied interests involved, and many of them are probably trying to make a quick buck before LLM-based vulnerability scans are a commodity (for better or worse).

The astronauts on the ISS must be breathing a sigh of relief, I imagine.
In Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk universe (the same one as Cyberpunk 2077), there's this point of in-universe history that the Old Net got overrun with rogue, nigh-on sentient AIs that made safe use of the internet as it was known then impossible.

Society's response to that was to build a new Net, walling off the rogue AIs of the Old Net behind the Blackwall and carrying on in a corporate hellscape.

I wonder if we'll see life imitating art on this one.

Re:Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab on Saturday October 24, 2026 @01:27PM (#50223307)

    > disguised as an open source project
A software project either is or isn't open source. Gitlab CE is source-available (here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab) with an MIT license, which is a permissive open-source license.

Gitlab CE is open-source. There exist versions of Gitlab with features that require payment. This does not mean that Gitlab (the product) is not open-source; it means that Gitlab (the company) has a core product which is open-source, and then sustains its development through the sale of licenses to product tiers beyond that.

Re:Apple Music 404 Not Found on Friday October 23, 2026 @09:05PM (#50217440)
This is so good! It's even got duplicates of songs with slightly different caps!

I don't have a lot of love for megacorps but I gotta give it to Apple on this one, goddamn.

Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @08:39AM (#50179911)
In my experience, being a parent is unfortunately a poor predictor of caring and being ready to act on climate change or its effects.

The split seems mostly generational; my parents and other parents around their age seem to not really care (there are still dinner table debates about whether Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a scam or not), but as my other-millennial friends are becoming parents, the vast majority of them do care, because this issue has been so front-of-mind for people my age. We're hyperaware of the fact that my country has more wildfires, milder winters, and hotter summers than it did when we all were growing up.

(There may be selection bias at play here; while I don't go out of my way to avoid them, I don't have many friends who deny the issue of climate change).

Many of us are also tracking the second- and third-order effects of these things; crop failures, droughts, and the migration and public services strain that come as a result of this; most frustrating is that the biggest voter blocs won't enact policy that's responsive to this, so when the inevitable (mass, climate-change-driven migration) grows over the coming decades, we'll be unprepared, and we'll either be overwhelmed by the movement of people, or complicit in one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history (and very possibly both).

Re:AI is a tool and using it well takes skill on Monday October 12, 2026 @06:47PM (#50064140)
It's a tool that promises that you can be lazy. That's, like, the whole schtick. Of course people will be lazy using it, even if they don't intend to.

And in much of the industry, using LLMs is regressing into what I've heard be jokingly called "yes engineering," where you give an LLM-generated plan the lightest of skims (if that) and just hit allow or yes with auto mode or whatever.

Guardrails are one thing, I want to see criminal and civil liability (as appropriate) for these actions. The US has given corporations exceptional latitude over the years, and this has to be rolled back; maybe with their position on the world stage faltering, they'll reconsider what it takes to be a member in good standing of the global community.
No, let's not get comfortable. Let's get angry at the fact that now we have hyperscalers acting with impunity, failing to properly sandbox their testbeds, and increasing the workload imposed on our public services.

Today it's a fake tip to the police and and exploit chain against Huggingface, but soon it could be an attack against a hospital's IT systems that could cost real lives immediately.

We should be locking things down, yes, but a hardened system is still vulnerable to zero day chains, and that's not unprecedented. Until public services have built up the IT defence capacity to deal with this, we cannot normalize this. If a country did this to another country, it should be treated as a war crime in the same way that targeting a hospital or an orphanage or other critical civilian infrastructure would be.

Complacency is a choice and we must not be complacent.

Re:REA Reverse – Engineer Anything on Saturday October 10, 2026 @08:41AM (#50032372)
Showing off can be the point. If I did something tricky and creative and got an interesting (possibly even useful!) result, why shouldn't I be proud enough of that to have a "hey, look at this cool shit I did/made" moment?

That aside, I've been lucky enough in my career to work alongside, mostly, people who have a personal interest in using software as a tool, and knowing their toolchains very well, be that a language, a command line, a system architecture, you name it. If you found something cool to do with a tool, you'd share it to disseminate the knowledge. That culture is very quickly dying off, I feel, because LLM-driven work encourages siloing to a degree I don't think gets discussed enough.

Lastly, using LLMs to write code is its own type of exhausting. I thought I could keep up my hobby by mentally checking out of work and working on projects by hand in my free time, but babysitting the LLM, reviewing the massive corpora of code and documentation it puts out (including those put out by colleagues), and the insane volume of context switches this technology encourages in the workplace makes me want to stay the hell away from computers alltogether if I can help it.

Re:REA Reverse – Engineer Anything on Saturday October 10, 2026 @07:21AM (#50031793)
Thanks for framing this in a way that I've struggled to phrase.

At every turn it seems like a lot of intellectual pursuits are just being voided by this technology.

I've heard the "one level up" argument in software with the supposition being that the work's still there, it's just becoming more abstract... but even in software, this doesn't really track.

The injection of this technology into not just intellectual but artistic pursuits (since there are now commercial AI image and music generators) should be a red alert.

What is there to live for once everything you once loved to do has been optimized for maximum revenue? Where every time you do something for fun, someone will come out of the woodwork when you show it off to either tell you AI could've done it quicker, or that they made an AI version with a flashier UI or something?

Re:Remove and Disable Apple Macos27 AI Models Tool on Sunday October 04, 2026 @06:31PM (#49958615)

    > Improving on Apple Intelligence is something of value
Not if you didn't use apple intelligence in the first place (and/or aren't interested in using it going forward).

    > as is consumerizing local-first AI
If and only if there is actual demand for it. If most users do not want this, it's a bad feature.
Re:A Map of Every Lighthouse on the Planet on Sunday October 04, 2026 @04:23PM (#49957446)
Funny enough I went into this site wondering if inland lighthouses were a thing; there are a few obvious cases, like the Netherlands using them to demarcate shoals and for navigation of inland waterways, but then there's whatever Germany's doing...
Re:A 20-year-long permanent cookie: America.gov and tracking on Friday October 02, 2026 @01:40PM (#49936274)
Just because it's not considered a problem by people without a technical or security background doesn't mean it isn't one.

We make many UX compromises in the name of security, and this is a place where that is most visible.

Re:A 20-year-long permanent cookie: America.gov and tracking on Friday October 02, 2026 @01:08PM (#49935916)
The solution here is a "keep me logged in for 30 days" or "remember me for 7 days" label on the checkbox, not a forever cookie.
Re:A 20-year-long permanent cookie: America.gov and tracking on Friday October 02, 2026 @12:56PM (#49935790)
Because in most security models, access is often time-limited.

30 days, for example, is quite long, though NIST does identify 30 days as being the maximum recommended auth token lifetime for low-risk environments.

Higher-risk environments come with 24-hour and 15-minute lifetimes, for context.

Re:A 20-year-long permanent cookie: America.gov and tracking on Friday October 02, 2026 @12:31PM (#49935464)
Why do they make sense as logon cookies?
Re:Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents" on Friday September 25, 2026 @08:21AM (#49843632)

    > Every country believes its laws apply universally
This is simply untrue and absurd at face value.

Canada has the Canada Health Act, which describes the specifics of what provinces and territories must provide in terms of public health services, and how, and how those health services are funded, how the money gets disbursed, and how the money gets reimbursed by various parties within the system. It would be absurd to think that the expectation of anyone in the Canadian government is that this should apply worldwide.

The UK has the Highway Code, which describes a number of driving laws, restrictions, conventions, and requirements of drivers, among them, their (at this point rare) left-hand drive rule. Do they expect that to be enforced universally? Do they have some kind of plan to power-project onto the rest of the world with that by having agents of their government travel abroad to, say, France, Mexico, or South Korea, and ticket people for driving on the right?

Re:Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents" on Thursday September 24, 2026 @08:51AM (#49829891)

    > The second is that it violates the first amendment of the US's own constitution, which uses universal language, not discriminating between citizens and non-citizens, nor between inside and outside US territories, nor between nationals and foreigners.
I'll push back against this interpretation since no matter what any country's constitution says, no national constitution can ever really apply to foreign nationals on foreign soil doing their own thing (diplomatic missions being a notable, narrow carve-out for that).

If you take this universalist interpretation, that would mean it's fine for US citizens to truck guns into Canada (which they can't, but they still occasionally do, largely for much more boring reasons than believing there's a constitutional justification) with no restrictions because the implication is that the US constitution supersedes other laws in other countries.

It is, however, against the spirit of the document, and it's arguably an abuse of the existing framework of sanctioning organizations which take part in terrorist efforts. It's another case of the US legal system falling short because of an assumption of good faith by those in power.

Re:Why building a Rust LSP is hard on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @07:35PM (#49824169)
At this point...

- I don't think that private-default is a universally (or more importantly, widely) reasonable default

- It adds another case where Rust is unopinionated and gives the user another way to do a basic function.

I like Rust for its unopionation, generally, but I think that the returns for this kind of thing diminish as you get to really boilerplate stuff.

Re:Why building a Rust LSP is hard on Saturday September 19, 2026 @08:25AM (#49765995)
Having worked with rust for nearly two years now (granted, on one team with agreed-upon standards):

- glob imports are rare in my experience, less for the LSP’s sake and more for code self-documentation

- the `mod foo` line exists because omitting it cannot fall back to a reasonable default visibility level (`pub`/`pub(crate)`/<none> (private))

If someone were to list out all the things this admin's fucked up during this term alone we'd be here all day. Seriously; on his watch, there's been food poisoning and child imprisonment; transparent market manipulation; rolling back of various laws and policies which represented protections for workers, marginalized groups, endangered species and national parks; direct participation in the corruption of dozens if not hundreds of US federal agencies; extortion of both US states and foreign nations; threats of violence against strategic allies; waging actual wars of aggression; striking civilian infrastructure and populations during those wars of aggression; engaging in undeclared/irregular warfare; performing strikes against targets which were not clearly combatants; kidnapping a head of state; engaging in warfare and policy shakeups which are timed too perfectly to market close/market open for it to be anything other than market manipulation; engaging in IP infringement against the Nintendo corporation; pushing the morale of the crew of an aircraft carrier strike group so low that sailors were reportedly jumping overboard; engaging in chronic suppression of the press despite the first amendment right to press freedom; reducing or withdrawing the US presence from the ROC and ROK, threatening regional and arguably global stability in doing so; undermining the financial prospects of US beef farmers by federally subsidizing Argentine beef, blaming US citizens for accidents or crimes which in some cases Trump himself may have had a hand in, lying to constituents on a variety of topics (knowingly), deepening the political divides of a country that's already deeply divided, undermining the fairness of both the presidential election as well as threatening to do so to the midterms, supporting the increasing consolidation of US private media largely on the basis of friendliness to the current admin (often as expressed through donations)...

Half of these (or at least, instances of these) happened in the past week or two; most of the rest have happened in the past 2-3 months. I'm not even being exhaustive. You could

"Everything" is an understandable shorthand in this case and while technically hyperbolic it's really understood that it really means "most things that matter on a domestic and foreign policy stage."

Re:Rust Glancer: Rust LSP using 100x less RAM on Saturday August 22, 2026 @12:06PM (#49401081)
... Right.
Re:Rust Glancer: Rust LSP using 100x less RAM on Friday August 21, 2026 @11:21PM (#49396298)
Did you just create a new account so you could keep arguing with people?

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