Weezer's Lead Singer is still strong coding | Hacker News Reader

Weezer's Lead Singer is still strong coding

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131 pointsfagnerbrack32 comments

Ooo wee yoo I look just like Alan Turing

Ohh oh and you're hella Gordon Moore

https://boingboing.net/2020/12/07/rivers-cuomo-of-weezer-tak...

Rivers Cuomo of Weezer takes online Harvard coding courses, writes band software

This used to be the expectation around computer literacy. People would write their own software tailored for their own needs. Now we have appliances that do only what the platform gatekeepers allow them to do.

I don’t know, laptops are still a thing.

Good luck replacing the first-stage bootloader with something non-proprietary. And then there’s TPM, Intel ME and who knows what else that runs black-box code with potential remote access.

> Good luck replacing the first-stage bootloader with something non-proprietary.

I mean, that's been hard for decades. It's mostly about the complexity of initializing the massive amounts of hardware.

You can certainly install Libreboot on many machines, but it's a relatively small hardware compatibility list-- thanks to the terrific amount of variation between computers out there.

Or there's a few manufacturers that will sell you a machine with CoreBoot onboard.

Well, I thought so. But then I looked at the 11th gen that I have.

The BIOS is signed by a key, and the hash of the key is fused into the HW.

Anything 11th gen or newer locks libreboot or coreboot out.

Search for FPF OTP FUSE. It is an interesting topic. I want to drop intel ASAP due to this.

> Anything 11th gen or newer locks libreboot or coreboot out.

Not all OEMs are doing this. (And some are even shipping 11th generation with coreboot). But you're right in that it's making things worse.

Well, intel ships a tool that tells the OEM that this is a misconfiguration from a secure boot configuration POV.

Linux fwupdmgr can be used to verify the secure boot status and you will fail HS2 if this is not fused.

Also.... would be happy to know who doesn't fuse it on newer machines. And even coreboot does not mean you can flash your own. You can have a lockdown where you can only load the OEMs coreboot.

Sure, but that doesn’t disallow you to run a Python IDE and learn how to code and earn some money.

That’s like saying glyphosate and glyphosate resistant crops don’t prevent farming.

Technically true, but the crops are now non-vegan (all glyphosate formulations contain animal tallow), have less key amino acids (glyphosate inhibits metabolic pathways preventing them from forming), and are intellectual property of a megacorporation which has altered the genome of the plants to make them infertile, essentially forcing farmers to buy new plants for each growing season instead of using the seed from the previous season.

Are they vegan if you use animal-derived manure on them?

Because if they're not, I've got some pretty bad news for the people who eat organic vegan food...

Certainly. But they sure as hell aren’t vegan after the crop is sprayed with animal fat.

Well, green revolution have saved billions of lives literally. The food might be a little shittier than before, but it is cheap and scaled well (also, the patents have long since expired).

We started talking about customizing software for your needs, and jumped directly to replacing the first stage bootloader.

Well, if you’re going to be customizing software, do you want there to be a layer of software you cannot know about or touch?

Yeah. I want to work on top of stable APIs that abstract everything not relevant to my problem. Sure, sometimes the problems are low level, but usually I don't need to touch any of that.

Programming is more powerful the more people you do it for. Writing software for one user is rarely the most effective thing you could be doing with that skillset.

Here's an episode of Talk Python to Me where he goes into some of the stuff he's written:

https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-to...

Good job staying professional to the end.

Was it windows 98 that came with the buddy holly song?

Windows 95! Apparently the band didn't even know about it, the record label approved it https://genius.com/a/weezer-had-no-idea-the-music-video-for-...

I didn't even realize it was a thing back in the day but I had a Windows 95 CD and happened to be poking around on it one day and discovered the video. I was like "Wow cool!"

Yes Windows 95. I remember this. Great song too.

Here he is demoing his cs50 project: https://youtu.be/3Kf4-zMNqq8

And Weezify, which he built: https://weezify.web.app/#nav/player/library

I have a strong feeling River’s wouldn’t post under his own name due to the obvious distraction of GitHub commenters referencing the sweater song. I also don’t think he’d post a photo of himself from the 1994 blue album, am I wrong?

If you do even the most cursory amount of research, such as by clicking through to his GH profile, you can see this is actually him. This kind of knee-jerk baseless cynicism is toxic.

I looked across a pretty good amount, “ Rocking the code, coding the rock” didn’t help.

Sprinkling hot new words like toxic to describe a simple doubt is pretty melodramatic no?

It’s him. He has a discord where he shares his work

Earthworms are still not insects.

Huh! Wild!

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