Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cursed Knowledge

immich.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 165 posts

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#31

Post by 8organicbits »

bigyabai wrote: post #5

> Some phones will silently strip GPS data from images when apps without location permission try to access them. That's no curse, it's a protection hex!

I think this is written unclearly. Looking at the linked issues, the root cause seems to be related to a "all file access" permission, not just fine grained location access.

It seems great that an app without location access cannot check location via EXIF, but I'm surprised that "all file access" also gates access to the metadata, perhaps one selected using the picker.

https://gitlab.com/CalyxOS/platform_packages_providers_Media...

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#32

Post by Aurornis »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #13
LeoPanthera wrote: post #12

"Some phones will silently strip GPS data from images when apps without location permission try to access them." Uh... good?

I'm torn. Maybe a better approach would be a prompt saying "you're giving access to images with embedded location data. Do you want to keep the location data in the images, or strip the location data in this application?" I might not want an application to know my current, active location. But it might be useful for it to get location data from images I give it access to. I do think if we have to choose between strip…

> saying "you're giving access to images with embedded location data. Do you want to keep the location data in the images, or strip the location data in this application?"

This is a good example of a complex setting that makes sense to the 1% of users who understand the nuances of EXIF embedded location data but confuses the 99% of users who use a product.

It would also become a nightmare to manage settings a per-image basis.

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#33

Post by godelski »

Looks like they're missing one. I'm pretty sure the discussion goes further back[0,1] but this one has been on going for years and seems to be the main one[2]

  05/26/23(?) Datetimes in EXIF metadata are cursed
[0] https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/2581

[1] https://github.com/immich-app/immich/issues/6623

[2] https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/12292

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#34

Post by godelski »

Centigonal wrote: post #3
treve wrote: post #2

The '50 extra packages' one is wild. The author of those packages has racked up a fuckload of downloads. What a waste of total bandwidth and disk space everywhere. I wonder if it's for clout.

It's probably a clout thing, or just a weird guy (Hanlon's Razor), but a particularly paranoid interpretation is that this person is setting up for a massive, multi-pronged software supplychain attack.

Those don't have to be mutually exclusive. Often those with clout are targeted for supplychain attacks. Take xz as an example. Doesn't seem unreasonable that a solo dev or small team looks to either sell their projects or transfer them to someone else (often not even with money exchanging hands). Or even how old social media accounts are hacked so that they can appear as legitimate accounts.

I'm big on Hanlon's Razor too, but that doesn't mean the end result can't be the same.

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#35

Post by qdw »

One of their line items complains about being unable to bind 65k PostgreSQL placeholders (the linked post calls them "parameters") in a single query. This is a cursed idea to begin with, so I can't fully blame PostgreSQL.

From the linked GitHub issue comments, it looks like they adopted the sensible approach of refactoring their ORM so that it splits the big query into several smaller queries. Anecdotally, I've found 3,000 to 5,000 rows per write query to be a good ratio.

Someone else suggested first loading the data into a temp table and then joining against that, which would have further improved performance, especially if they wrote it as a COPY … FROM. But the idea was scrapped (also sensibly) for requiring too many app code changes.

Overall, this was quite an illuminating tome of cursed knowledge, all good warnings to have. Nicely done!

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#36

Post by joshdavham »

This is awesome! Does anyone else wanna share some of the cursed knowledge they've picked up?

For me, MacOS file names are cursed:

1. Filenames in MacOS are case-INsensitive, meaning file.txt and FILE.txt are equivalent

2. Filenames in MacOS, when saved in NFC, may be converted to NFD

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#37

Post by LoganDark »

fastball wrote: post #18
armchairhacker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dd/mm/yyyy is most common worldwide (particularly Europe, India, Australia) followed by yyyy/mm/dd (particularly China, Japan, South Korea). https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_by_c... IMO the best format is yyyy/mm/dd because it’s unambiguous (EDIT: almost) everywhere.

Not only is YYYY/MM/DD unambiguous, but it also sorts correctly by date when you perform a naive alphabetical sort.

I believe YYYY-MM-DD is even less ambiguous than YYYY/MM/DD.

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#38

Post by o11c »

Izkata wrote: post #20
armchairhacker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dd/mm/yyyy is most common worldwide (particularly Europe, India, Australia) followed by yyyy/mm/dd (particularly China, Japan, South Korea). https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_by_c... IMO the best format is yyyy/mm/dd because it’s unambiguous (EDIT: almost) everywhere.

For a really cursed one that breaks your last comment, check out Kazakhstan on the list by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_countr... > Short format: (yyyy.dd.mm) in Kazakh[95][obsolete source]

Even ISO has used the cursed date format.

ISO-IR-26 was registered on 1976/25/03.

Re: Cursed Knowledge

#40

Post by [deleted] »

treve wrote: post #2

The '50 extra packages' one is wild. The author of those packages has racked up a fuckload of downloads. What a waste of total bandwidth and disk space everywhere. I wonder if it's for clout.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN