Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

  • 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I think we’re still deeply into the “shove it everywhere we can” hype era of AI and it’ll eventually die down a bit, as it with any new major technological leap. The same fears and thoughts were present when computers came along, then affordable home computers, and affordable Internet access.

    AI can be useful it used correctly but right now we’re trying to put it everywhere for rather dubious gains. I’ve seen coworkers mess with AI until it generates the right code for much longer than it would take to hand write it.

    I’ve seen it being used quite successfully in the tech support field, because an AI is perfectly good at asking the customer if they’ve tried turning it off and then back on again, and make sure it’s plugged in. People would hate it I’m sure on principle, but the amount of repetitive “the user can’t figure out something super basic” is very common in tech support and would let them focus a lot of their time on actual problems. It’s actually smarter than many T1 techs I’ve worked with, because at least the AI won’t sent the Windows instructions to a Mac user and then accuse them of not wanting to try the troubleshooting steps (yes, I’ve actually seen that happen). But you’ll still need humans for anything that’s not a canned answer or known issue.

    One big problem is when the AI won’t work can be somewhat unpredictable especially if you’re not yourself fairly knowledgeable of how the AIs actually work. So something you think would normally take you say 4 hours and you expect done in 2 with AI might end up being an 8h task anyway. It’s the eternal layoff/hires cycle in tech: oh we have React Native now, we can just have the web team do the mobile apps and fire the iOS and Android teams. And then they end up hiring another iOS and Android team because it’s a pain in the ass to maintain and make work anyway and you still need the special knowledge.

    We’re still quite some ways out from being able to remove the human pilot in front. It’s easy to miss how much an experienced worker implicitly guides the AI the right direction. “Rewrite this with the XYZ algorithm” still needs the human worker to have experience with it and enough knowledge to know it’s the better solution. Putting inexperienced people at the helm with AI works for a while but eventually it’s gonna be a massive clusterfuck only the best will be able to undo. It’s still just going to be a useful tool to have for a while.


  • We did this in Canada quite a while ago and it’s one that really does make sense.

    It only applies to cash payments where it’s usually rounded, if you pay by card it’s still charged the exact amount. Not much different than rounding to the nearest cent when applying discounts. When you’re buying items at such low prices you’re probably buying in bulk anyway, like 1000 of them for $5 or whatever.

    Some fear that everything will have to be in increments of 5 cents and that’s simply not true. It’s only the minimum granularity of individual cash transactions. The rounding is insignificant unless you buy individual $0.96 items in coins all the time which is very rare.


  • It works so well, if you stretch a window across more than one monitors of different refresh rates, it’ll be able to vsync to all of them at once. I’m not sure if it’ll VRR across multiple monitors at once, but it’s definitely possible. Fullscreen on a single monitor definitely VRRs properly.

    With my 60+144+60 setup and glxgears stretched across all of them, the framerate locks to something between like 215-235 as the monitors go in and out of sync with eachother, and none of them have any skips or tears. Some games get a little bit confused if the timing logic is tied to frame rate, but triple monitor Minecraft works great apart from the lack of FOV correction for the side monitors.

    This is compositor dependent but I think most of the big compositors these days have it figured out. I’m on the latest KDE release with KWin.










  • The website requests an image or whatever from 27748626267848298474.example.com, where the number is unique for the visitor. To load the content the browser has to resolve the DNS for it, and the randomness ensures it won’t be cached anywhere as it’s just for you. So it queries its DNS server which queries your DNS provider which queries the website’s DNS server. From there the website’s DNS server can see where the request came from and the website can tell you where it came from and who it’s associated with if known.

    Yes it absolutely can be used for fingerprinting. Everything can be used for fingerprinting, and we refuse to fix it because “but who thinks of the ad companies???”.




  • It’s going to depend on how the access is set up. It could be set up such that the only way into that network is via that browser thing.

    You can always connect to yourself from the Windows machine and tunnel SSH over that, but it’s likely you’ll hit a firewall or possibly even a TLS MitM box.

    Virtual desktops like that are usually used for security, it would be way cheaper and easier to just VPN your workstation in. Everything about this feels like a regulated or certified secure environment like payment processing/bank/government stuff.


  • but I’m curious if it’s hitting the server, then going the router, only to be routed back to the same machine again. 10.0.0.3 is the same machine as 192.168.1.14

    No, when you talk to yourself you talk to yourself it doesn’t go out over the network. But you can always check using utilities like tracepath, traceroute and mtr. It’ll show you the exact path taken.

    Technically you could make the 172.18.0.0/16 subnet accessible directly to the VPS over WireGuard and skip the double DNAT on the game server’s side but that’s about it. The extra DNAT really won’t matter at that scale though.

    It’s possible to do without any connection tracking or NAT, but at the expense of significantly more complicated routing for the containers. I would do that on a busy 10Gbit router or if somehow I really need to public IP of the connecting client to not get mangled. The biggest downside of your setup is, the game server will see every player as coming from 192.168.1.14 or 172.18.0.1. With the subnet routed over WireGuard it would appear to come from VPN IP of the VPS (guessing 10.0.0.2). It’s possible to get the real IP forwarded but then the routing needs to be adjusted so that it doesn’t go Client -> VPS -> VPN -> Game Server -> Home router -> Client.