3
points
giamma
Joined 342 karma
meet.hn/city/45.4077172,11.8734455/Padua
- giammaHow about switching from VS Code to VS Codium? Same experience without the microsoft telemetry. I suppose Copilot won't be included due to licensing constraints.
- Good question. In general charts are not accessible because visually impaired users cannot use a mouse.
You would need an interacting charting library that works with a keyboard and that is readable by a screen reader.
- I believe that would result in non accessible content, I believe screen readers cannot properly assist impaired users with SVG content.
As such I think it's not a good idea for a document that should have a large audience.
- I am more interested in how MCP can change human interaction with software.
Practical example: there exists an MCP server for Jira. Connect that MCP server to e.g. Claude and then you can write prompts like this:
"Produce a release notes document for project XYZ based on the Epics associated to version 1.2.3"
or
"Export to CSV all tickets with worklog related to project XYZ and version 1.2.3. Make sure the CSV includes these columns ....."
Especially the second example totally removes the need for the CSV export functionality in Jira. Now imagine a scenario in which your favourite AI is connected via MCP to different services. You can mix and match information from all of them.
Alibaba for example is making MCP servers for all of its user-facing services (alibaba mail, cloud drive, etc etc)
A chat UI powered by the appropriate MCP servers can provide a lot of value to regular end users and make it possible for people to use their own data easily in ways that earlier would require dedicated software solutions (exports, reports). People could use software for use cases that the original authors didn't even imagine.
- I think the design is bad: my girlfriend would never wear it. Maybe they know already and that's why the webpage contains only picture of male hands.
Given the many smartwatches on the market which can do so much more, are lightweight and some of them with acceptable battery life (Garmin, Suunto, Amazfit), a smartring is of very little interest to me. But I often struggle to understand why certain products fascinate people, so I may be totally wrong and I wish the makers best of luck.
- I agree, that is what I meant: there were people who installed Contrib to have <if> element, but in reality you did not need that you could just use Ant's built-in features like you said. In my opinion installing Contrib to use <if> was a demonstration of not having understood how Ant works.
- Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.
Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year.
Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil.
[0] https://tech.ridefox.com/bike/owners-manuals/2979/fork--2025...
- Ant did not include IF THEN ELSE, unless you added the contrib package.
If you understood the paradigm, you could write branches in Ant files simply using properties and guards on properties ("unless"). Using IF in Ant was basically admission of not having understood Ant.
This said, I used Ant for a very limited amount of time.
- I passed the PDF to Claude and asked it to check if there is any part of the document that states that google deprioritizes good search results in favor of advertisement. Here is the output from Claude:
Yes, the document contains highly significant factual findings by the Court regarding how Google deprioritized organic search results in favor of advertising. The most significant findings: The Court documents that the positioning of Google's AI features (AI Overviews, WebAnswers) on the search results page reduced users' interactions with organic web results - deliberately.
Relevant text:
"Some evidence suggests that placement of features like AI Overviews on the SERP has reduced user interactions with organic web results (i.e., the traditional "10 blue links")."
And:
"Placement of features like AI Overviews on the SERP has reduced user interactions with organic web results where Google's WebAnswers appears on the SERP"
Important note: these are not "admissions" in the sense of Google voluntarily confessing, but rather factual findings by the Court based on evidence presented during the trial - which is legally even more binding.
- My elderly father unknowingly installed an application on Android after seeing a deceptive ad. An advertising message disguised as an operating system pop-up convinced him that his Android phone's storage was almost full. When he tapped the pop-up, and followed instructions he installed a fake cleaner app from the Play Store. While the app caused no actual harm, it displayed notifications every other day urging him to clean his phone using the same app. When he opened it, the app — which did nothing except display a fake graph simulating almost full storage — pressured him to purchase the PRO version to perform a deeper cleanup.
In reality, the phone had 24 GB of free space out of 64 GB total. I simply uninstalled the fake cleaner and the annoying notifications disappeared.
How such an app could reach the Play Store is beyond me. I can only imagine how many people that app must have deceived and how much money its creators likely made. I'm fairly certain the advertisement targets older people specifically—those most likely to be tricked.
For better or worse, I'm pretty sure that such an app would never land into the Apple App Store.
- While I understand the reasons behind this campaign, I have mixed feelings about it.
As an iPhone user, I find it frustrating that deploying my own app on my own device requires either reinstalling it every 7 days or paying $100 annually. Android doesn't have this limitation, which makes it simpler and more convenient for personal use.
However, when it comes to publishing apps to the store, I take a different view. In my opinion, stricter oversight is beneficial. To draw an analogy: NPM registry has experienced several supply chain attacks because anyone can easily publish a library. The Maven Central registry for Java libraries, by contrast, requires developers to own the DNS domain used as a namespace for their library. This additional requirement, along with a few extra security checks, has been largely effective in preventing—or at least significantly reducing—the supply chain attacks seen in the NPM ecosystem.
Given the growing threat of such attacks, we need to find ways to mitigate them. I hope that Google's new approach is motivated by security concerns rather than purely economic reasons.
- Interesting analysis from The Register https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_bra...
- It's a nice effect, but I don't think it's usable in practice, because it's not accessible for visually impaired users: not enough contrast between foreground text and background
- Thanks, I did not know OrbStack, will give it a try.
- I am still on an x86 Mac.
When Docker Desktop changed licensing I tried to switch to Podman and it was a disaster, Podman was brand new and despite many blog posts that claimed it was the perfect replacement it did not work for me, and I have very simple requirements. So I ended up using Rancher Desktop instead, which was also very unstable but better.
Fast forward 1 year, Rancher was pretty good and Podman still did not work reliably on my mac.
Fast forward another year or so and I switched to colima.
I tried podman last time about one year ago and I still had issues on my old mac. So far colima has been good enough for my needs although at least two times a brew update broke colima and I had to reinstall from scratch.
- How about using something like Apache Tika for extracting text from multiple documents? It's a subproject of Lucene and consists of a proxy parser + delegates for a number of document formats. If a document, e.g. PDF, comes from a scanner, Tika can optionally shell-out a Tesseract invocation and perform OCR for you.
- I believe most vector databases allow you to annotate vectors with additional metadata. Why not simply add as metadata the list of principals (roles/groups) who have access to the information (e.g. HR, executives) ? Then when a user makes a request to the chatbot, you expand the user identity to his/her principals (e.g. HR) and use those as implicit filtering criteria for finding the closest vectors in the database.
In this way you exclude up-front the documents that the current user cannot see.
Of course, this requires you to update the vector metadata any time the permissions change at the document level (e.g. a given document originally visible only to HR is now also visibile to executives -> you need to add the principal executives to the metadata of the vector resulting from the document in your vector database)
- The "brew info" command provides some information, so it would be great if the tool provided a button to fetch the "brew info" output on demand and if it provided a direct link to the homepage as opposed to having to perform two clicks; a tiny home icon next to the info icon would be good.
Folllows sample output for "brew info mc"
==> midnight-commander: stable 4.8.33 (bottled), HEAD Terminal-based visual file manager https://www.midnight-commander.org/ Conflicts with: minio-mc (because both install an `mc` binary) Installed /usr/local/Cellar/midnight-commander/4.8.33 (357 files, 7.8MB) \* Poured from bottle using the formulae.brew.sh API on 2025-02-03 at 09:30:23 From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/m/midnight-commander.rb License: GPL-3.0-or-later ==> Dependencies Build: pkgconf Required: glib , libssh2 , openssl@3 , s-lang , diffutils , gettext ==> Options --HEAD Install HEAD version ==> Analytics install: 3,043 (30 days), 10,456 (90 days), 65,490 (365 days) install-on-request: 3,043 (30 days), 10,451 (90 days), 65,472 (365 days) build-error: 0 (30 days) - Nice tool, however it would be great if it could display some description and license information and/or whether the app is a trial version that eventually requires a purchase.
Otherwise as a user you end up clicking on the info icon to go to the app home page for every app before installing.
If that is not possible, a direct link to the app home page would save a click and would be highly appreciated.