wiether's comments

On: Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States

[wiether]

  > In Plymouth, Massachusetts, a former dam has been converted to a bridge that lets fish pass unimpeded beneath it

That's a hell of an ugly bridge!

They tried to make it look "natural" with the rock tiles but there's absolutely nothing natural about it.

A plain concrete bridge would have been less of an eyesore.

[csallen → wiether]

I clicked the story just to see the very ugly bridge in question, and it turned out I think it's quite attractive

[lukeify → wiether]

In your opinion.

It's clearly being empathetic to the area's history, and it's taken from a vantage point that you won't often see anyway.

[chihuahua → wiether]

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.

It's a bridge that looks like it's made from stone. It looks slightly different from other bridges. It's not bad. There are probably many eyesores in the surrounding towns that look much worse.

On: Delta’s Biscoff cookies were supposed to be temporary

[wiether]

They're... cookies. A treat.

Looking at the nutritional profile of cookies doesn't make sense. You're supposed to eat them in such low quantity/frequency that it doesn't matter.

[prmph → wiether]

Yes, cookies are not the most healthy thing, but there are better and worse ones. It is not just even about it containing some sugar. Why replace the spices that made a traditional cookie special, with more sugar? What is distinctive about sugar?

[twijg → prmph]

There is a good reason for that. Even traditional speculaas (not Lotus or other mass produced speculoos/biscoff) contains less and less speculaas spices the further you move away from Amsterdam. Because the spices arrived there, they were cheapest there. The further away (in this case south) you moved, the more expensive they were. This leads to bakers, especially commercial ones, to use less in their recipes.

[motionlessveloc → prmph]

Biscoff is a highly spiced cookie that's less sweet than most American cookies.

And sugar is special because it's essentially a drug that our brains are programmed to seek out and eat more of.

On: 3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

[wiether]

RTO also for the servers?

On: Bitwarden Dual License Model

[wiether]

Ironic, given their name.

On: Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?

[wiether]

  > For me, having to maintain and secure it was too much work. A vps may have been easier in some ways, but harder in others.

For security you simply setup Tailscale and only allow private network to access your VPS -> 1h max to setup

Maintenance is running upgrades once a week/month -> 10mn

Depending on how critical your data is, you can rely on the provider's backup policy or setting up something as simple as a cron rsync on an external provider -> 2h to setup

On: Treg (OpenRouter for Tools)

[wiether]

Got the same feeling but still, wanted to try

Until I went to their website, which is absolutely not like OpenRouter.

Heavy, full of useless stuff.

On: Sales of sub-€25,000 electric car models set to rise sevenfold

[wiether]

I was also shocked reading OP's post, but after thinking about it a bit I came to the conclusion that they didn't meant "100km daily" but more like "having less than 100km range is not an issue because she never drive that much any day of the year".

Having to recharge the car during a single trip being seen as an issue by OP.

On: We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

[wiether]

Should be noted that the AWS feature discussed is not pure AWS, it's the "Builder" thing that is built on top of AWS, some kind of PaaS.

A regular AWS account doesn't have the notion of "project" and Cost Management doesn't have those spend limits.

On: Meta's Muse is fantastic for web scraping

[wiether]

As someone having to fight Meta's bots everyday to keep websites accessible to actual customers, I'm not surprised to read that it can be seen as something positive on the other side of the fence.

But I'm wondering: at what cost?

[Cakez0r → wiether]

The end game will be that either your site is fully open to bots and humans alike, or your site is open to humans only(×) and requires Airport security style identity verification.

(×) and their AI delegates

[STRiDEX → wiether]

I think for my own side projects i would require the user to login if they were making requests from those ip addresses or block.

On: You said no MCP

[wiether]

My own approach is to put the API key in the MCP server, apply principle of least privilege there, and firewall access to MCP with agents being on same private network with Tailscale.

Not only giving an API key to an agent can leak to the model because of harness issues or too broad reading rights, but also most providers don't give the ability to apply principle of least privilege to an API key.

I don't want to give an agent full R/W access to any of my services/accounts.