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> Carpet bombing of cities, towns, villages or other areas containing a concentration of protected civilians has been considered a war crime since 1977, through Article 51 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing

Autonomous weapons have hardly been deployed yet, maybe at the Inner Korean border or some lunatic's backyard. Therefore I don't think there is any legislation for it yet. But it seems a very cruel way of killing, also considering in this particular case they didn't even send footage back. What kind of experiment was this? Maybe they didn't like to see the brutality, perhaps people begging for mercy not to be killed, giving up and showing a white flag. Indeed this isn't possible with carpet-bombing.


What relevance does your quote have here? The area in question has no civilians to speak of.

So I'm scrolling through this Ask HN and this is now the 3rd similar problem. Would you mind adding more details as well as the patch? Perhaps as a gist if it's unfinished?

I mean just googled https://www.google.com/search?q=kodi+crash+chromecast+4k I'm getting really a lot of issues such as https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=381239

It seems to be a quite common problem. Are you sure it was the rube goldberg fix and not a more mundane solution? Such as pulling in someone's fork from GitHub or just clearing the cache on a loop?


Here's the draft PR: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/28404

And yes, it correctly diagnosed the problem - I confirmed this morning. The cache had been partially deleted (exactly like it said) and the patched version of the software automatically detected this and rebuilt the cache rather than crashing. This was using the initial version of the patch from commit 1 of the PR.

I then talked with Claude a bit to come up with a less hacky solution that doesn't require constant cache rebuilding, and it suggested writing the "cache" to no_backup, bypassing the cache trimmer. However, this required rebuilding the .so via NDK, so it spun up a full VM in multipass, installed all the tools in there to build the fully patched APK, and built it (the VM was my suggestion, it was about to just brew install everything and mess with my local dev environment).

You can read the full log here, it's nuts: https://github.com/user-attachments/files/28659274/2026-06-0...

I think the key takeaway from this experience (and a few others recently) is that Claude Code works much, much better when you explicitly instruct it to test against real data.

Had I simply described the issue and asked it to think up a solution it likely would have just navel-gazed and then come up with a wrong solution. But by pointing it at a real working environment and actively encouraging it to get its hands dirty, it found the actual solution rapidly - in spite of the fact that I gave it wrong information twice.


It's the cache, I pin-pointed the main problem correctly without ADB access, any closer details and just google.

> // Unpack into no_backup storage rather than the cache dir. Android may

> // delete files from getCacheDir() at any time to reclaim space, which

Looking further into the issue disk space is a huge problem with Kodi discussed plenty of times. In fact even the Wiki dedicates 2 pages to it:

https://kodi.wiki/view/Archive:Reduce_disk_space_usage

https://kodi.wiki/view/Texture_Cache_Maintenance_utility

I realize from your perspective this may seem still a very convincing example in the sense of it works.

A non-programmatic solution might have been possible though:

> It's likely your thumbnail cache. That's typically the biggest piece stored locally (you also have the database). You can clear the cache (short term fix) or move it to another drive (long term fix).

> Also recommend not downloading actor thumbnails. Lot of extra images.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShieldAndroidTV/comments/1f7xfwn/ko...

I also recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging


It's not (strictly) a disk space issue. It's Android aggressively trimming cache files that Kodi assumes are never trimmed.

There's a single variable that keeps track of whether or not the cache has been "written", but Android only trims some of the cache files.


Although if it makes you feel better it turns out this issue was a dupe. Someone else's Claude probably fixed it before mine did, haha.

Thanks, I was interested at this point ;) Yeah I don't know, the other PR is from April. Not saying AI cannot be useful. On the other hand this is a "well studied" problem. Last year I worked on a project where I mostly stopped using draft PRs because the team lead (or his AI) was stealing my code all the time :D

It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this.

On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.

That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...


The software industry mostly gave up when they saw it wasn't working.

Even the music industry (of all of them!) mostly gave up.

Only Hollywood and the wider film/TV industry is so stubborn.


The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.


Steam's DRM is completely symbolic. There are widespread cracks available and Steam is AFAIK not even bothering with the cat and mouse game, and Denuvo games released this year are being cracked in < 24 hours.

I would never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to to 'crack' games. Countless online-only games have been cracked with users reverse engineering the network protocol and writing their own servers. LLMs will probably greatly ease that process as well.


The SteamDRM wrapper tool itself, freely distributed through the Stramworks SDK, used to straight up ship with a feature to strip the DRM from any exe.


Steam effectively solved game piracy as far as I can tell.

The solution is: make purchasing legitimate copies an easier and better experience than piracy. That's it. That's all you need to do. There will, of course, always be piracy by those who can't afford to purchase the software or have other ideological goals, but for the vast majority of users, making it easy and pleasant to fork over cash for goods is how you stop them from stealing.

Meanwhile music, movies, and TV have decided to sprint in the exact opposite direction. It's now so onerous and expensive to even find let alone watch something that normal users are flocking to piracy. Not because it's cheaper, but because the experience is better in every conceivable way. To most people, the fact that you now own a real copy forever is merely a bonus. The real killer feature is that if you want to watch something it is always available. You can search for anything and get a result. Torrents don't usually go away on a rotating weekly basis. If you want something, it's available, and nobody gets in your way (if you do it right).


> The solution is: make purchasing legitimate copies an easier and better experience than piracy.

They didn't.


But they did it. Buying, installing, and updating the game is incredibly easy. That’s exactly why I haven’t downloaded pirated games for at least 15 years.

> Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years

this era is well and truly over. you've got pre-release hypervisor bypasses and then a conventional crack a couple weeks later.

edit: i might've misinterpreted your comment, i expect some older denovo titles might never get the modern treatment


Oh wow that's really smart of them, now you have a reason to send your hacked version along the cad file so the user on the other side can escape from their spyware :D


> They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.

Can this be manipulated to frame arbitrary users for piracy?


Recently wanted to watch Troy and could not find it for streaming anywhere, nor a pay-to-rent on the streaming platforms like youtube. You can "buy" it but as we've learned recently these companies don't really let you own a copy and reserve the right to remove your access in the future. So I just went ahead and pirated it.


It's not strange at all. It is all about power. At that time, power was obtained by opposing P2P and opposing piracy. Today power is obtained by piracy so they do piracy.


They're organizations run by people who may or may not have something that could be described as narcissistic personality disorder.

It's not particularly strange; the rationale for organizations like Microsoft and OpenAI is to be immune to any and all rules that could possibly foreseeably impact shareholder value. If you're not paying for their wares, you're impacting shareholder value. If you're asking them to actually license out content that they're training an AI on, you're impacting shareholder value.

Rules for thee, not for me, especially when it makes me - the special person who charitably graces society with my presence - a rich person.


Companies "went to lengths to stop copying" because copying is so rampant.

I used to work with a small Aviation-related software company. There it was really not like this, the boss made jokes about it. On the other hand engineering-wise things were done really differently: no branches, fail fast, only e2e tests etc. Probably the rift between small companies and corporate culture also applies here.


The French ministry of foreign affairs (state department) have been giving advice to traveller for decades

There was a time when their advice for travels to the US of A was to not tell TSA or law enforcement that you had a bomb in your bag, as it wasn't funny anymore and they would not take it as a joke


Being from Europe as well I've also been hearing similar advice plenty of times. With time I heard stories about people from all walks of lives having been help up by TSA, from people on business travel to kids of US senators...


The modern web very much goes by the Pareto principle. But what's almost impossible to digest without full-fledged machinery are some News websites. The complexity of running ads and gdpr flows is just out of this world. It even dwarfs social media websites in that regard.


Any specific examples to support this argument


It's a German website but zeit.de. At least the last time I checked. Looking into Firefox reveals almost 8 MB for loading the front page. One could easily skip this as an exception but it's one of the 2 large weekly news magazines in Germany. Also since it's part of a publishing house, I assume other publications of them might be using the same system.


I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier and genuinely curious why. Decades ago the first time for me to see a redundant server setup was within a local newspaper's office. So it's likely not because people aren't tech-savvy or anything.


The last months didn't make Bitwarden look very good. On the other hand, what about the competition? Sure there's KeePassXC but that's essentially local. Bitwarden even has Send to quickly share with anyone.

I might self-host something at some point. But even choosing something seems a menial task, not to speak of setting it actually up...


You can host your keepass db file anywhere you like, whether that’s google drive or on a hard drive.


The Hacker ethos is mainly about how things work: sharing, openness.

I'm not entirely sure how hiding that something is GenAI fits in here. It surely doesn't have anything to do with Privacy though.


I disagree. Its mainly about having technical control and freedom. Reverse engineering how things work feels like peak hacker ethos. You don't have control of something if you can't remove it.

I think ethical considerations were always a bit secondary to technical power when it came to so called "hacker ethos".

After all, instructions on how to remove watermarks definitely feels like the sort of thing that would have been in phrack back in the day.


There's a thing called Hacker ethic which used to be referenced quite frequently in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

Probably it's worth reminding of also considering we're on HN here... ;)


Well, to quote from the article

> Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and more interesting things.

> Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.

> Mistrust authority—promote decentralization

> All information should be free

I phrased it a bit differently, and perhaps a little less sympathetically, but i think i was more or less saying the same thing.

In any case a tool like the article that strips watermarks seems exactly the sort of thing that would fit into what i quoted above. Its mistrusting authority - there is nothing more central authority then having a literal central authority adding hard to remove digital signatures to images. It promotes freedom of information - it supports explaining how watermarks work and what they are. Its fundamentally taking apart a system, which teaches us how the system works.


GitHub indeed used to be a undisputably good entity. Now I whenever I push something non-trivial I wonder if some AI will take my code without credit.

I don’t mind the lower availability to be honest but I also noticed it.

To be fair I don’t add new code on GitHub for my own private projects anymore. Public projects of course profit from the network effect but there must be a better way. Before GitHub people also did well, Linux, many well known GNU projects etc. were created without GitHub.


Physicist here: usually bin size is adjusted to change the interval over which you average. Also rpm is the unit if you want to pin it down to a single number

If writing rpm is too long, there's also a trick: write "requests/rpm:"

That means: requests measured in rpm. Thus afterwards you can write single numbers which is even shorter


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