Hacker News Reader

HeWhoLurksLateon Claude.ai and API unavailable [fixed]

that would be eight fives...

HeWhoLurksLateon A quick look at Mythos run on Firefox: too much hype?

I haven't been able to find any communities with as high of a signal-to-noise ratio and breadth of experiences as HN, especially not public ones that one can stumble their way into without knowing a guy / joining a clique

HeWhoLurksLateon Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It

I respectfully disagree - I do agree that the natural financial death of a company probably shouldn't result in bailouts, but if I as a company get breached because my fully-updated, follows-best-practices Windows Domain got hacked because of a vulnerability in Microsoft's stuff? That's hardly fair.

Shouldn't I be able to sue Microsoft for financial relief?

HeWhoLurksLateon Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It

It's all fun and games until it's your livelihood at stake, and then it makes a lot more sense to acquiesce, lick your wounds, and keep your business alive.

Getting hacked is no fun, but companies don't deserve to die because something in their tech stack was vulnerable.

HeWhoLurksLateon EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security

I appreciate a good April Fools joke, I also appreciate CloudFlare's approach of "we're extra serious today, here's some useful stuff for ya"

HeWhoLurksLateon How to turn anything into a router

"this here is a virtual network appliance, so called because it doesn't have any ports on it - wait, why are you taking off that blanking panel? That's illegal!"

HeWhoLurksLateon The sudden fall of Sora

I thought "hype" was a different thing from "organic growth" but similar

HeWhoLurksLateon Apple discontinues the Mac Pro

but what about second GPU?

HeWhoLurksLateon Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

This line of reasoning applies to nearly any way to spend time - "why are you playing videogames? Learn X instead!" or "why are you bothering with X when Y exists?" or "what, you don't know how to make sourdough? Silly goose!"

At the end of the day, we all have only finite time on this earth, and how one chooses to spend the meager time between eat, sleep, and fend for self is up to them. If a person is content to play sports in their free time, more power to them. If they want to play videogames, and find satisfaction in that, great! Broadly, I like to create. Most of my creations are engineering-adjacent much more than they art. That's fine, and I'm happy. I do everything you named on that list in addition to building stuff.

While using AI, I have caused things to exist that I want much faster than I could have otherwise - I know how to program, but I'm not very fast and I have to have the docs open all the time because the things I want to do are so broad and varied that one week it's bash SLURM scripts and the next it's adding things to my k8s config and the one after that it's something in Python and I don't have enough brain cells to keep track of seven different languages well enough to not accidentally put semicolons at the end of my Python scripts or use the wrong syntax but boy at least I have a bunch of stuff that actually works in the time frame and attention span that I have left after the rest of my life for that day occurs. It's not like I wasn't programming before AI - I've been doing bash scripts and Arduino stuff since middle school - but I have a lot more to show for the little free time I have to work with in the last year or so.

And, for the people who don't really know how to code, the incredible power of their computers is now much closer to their fingertips and usable for more than Electron apps. Want to have a thing happen? Ask, Wait, Iterate. All for cheaper than fiverr, and you might learn a few things before you finish.

HeWhoLurksLateon Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

AI Agents can write and modify base Python / C++ / Rust / whatever pretty well, and thus users aren't limited by "sorry the building blocks only go together in this one particular manner".

It's like the difference between an EZ-Bake oven and a fully furnished kitchen. The EZ-Bake oven can get some stuff done but its limits are much more severely obvious than the kitchen's, and the kitchen's first limiting factor in what can be produced is usually the human cooking in it

HeWhoLurksLateon Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program.

The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software - where now the only limits are your imagination, tenacity, and ability to keep the bots aligned with your vision, is allowing incredible things that wouldn't have happened otherwise because you now don't strictly need to learn to program for a programming-involved art project to work out.

Should you learn how to code if you're doing stuff like that? Absolutely. But is it letting people who have no idea about computing dabble their feet in and do extremely impressive stuff for the low cost of $20/month? Also yes.

HeWhoLurksLateon Federal Cyber Experts Called Microsoft's Cloud "A Pile of Shit", yet Approved It

VS Code is also open source and forkable, the Windows kernel or Azure tech stack not so much

HeWhoLurksLateon The pleasures of poor product design

It's also interesting to note that there's a distinct delineation in "before Bambu" and "post-Bambu" in communities with a DIY part to them - there's been a humongous explosion in creativity and functional, valuable output ever since the cost of entry went from "you gotta own a metal shop or a wood shop" to "buy this one $1000 machine and a hardware kit".

For example, I remember frequenting the NerfHaven forums back in the day, and people were designing Nerf blasters in Solidworks, printing drawings out, gluing them to polycarbonate, and using scroll saws to build their own blasters capable of 150fps. Nowadays, I can buy a printer, a hardware kit, and build my own 200fps capable blaster in an afternoon, and there's probably 5-10 new interesting, fleshed out concepts a month.

The explosion in depth, detail, and accessibility in DIY cosplay designs is also incredible.

HeWhoLurksLateon US SEC preparing to scrap quarterly reporting requirement

how much of that decline is due to mergers vs failing vs new private companies being formed instead?

HeWhoLurksLateon Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

Famously, there have been significant issues in the past (see Tammany Hall) but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as widespread as it used to be, and especially not at the national election level. I’m sure that there’s shady stuff happening in local (county) level elections, but that’s of significantly less importance to the rest of the general public

HeWhoLurksLateon WebMCP is available for early preview

the CNC machine I'm working retrofitting right now has XML definitions for basically the entire thing from GPIO setup to machine size parameters. Kinda crazy but at least it isn't a cursed hex file

HeWhoLurksLateon Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

why can't we go "wow they're getting really good, maybe we should invest harder in education and research?" That makes wayyy more sense to me

HeWhoLurksLateon The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

also there's a huge argument to be made that surveilling your kids is really really bad for their development

HeWhoLurksLateon The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

That's really a district-by-district / school-by-school thing, some are significantly more locked down than others

HeWhoLurksLateon We hid backdoors in ~40MB binaries and asked AI + Ghidra to find them

it also generally takes a heck of a noisy bang for internal developments to make it to the c-suite

HeWhoLurksLateon An AI agent published a hit piece on me

back in the old days we just used Tor and the dark web to kill people, none of this new-fangled AI drone assassinations-as-a-service nonsense!

HeWhoLurksLateon I'm returning my Framework 16

Upgrading to a new processor, or in the case of Framework, perhaps better hinges or keyboards or the like is IMO much more important to the long term desirability of a laptop than a 5% better keyboard or trackpad or RGB LEDs on the chassis.

I feel like the term "endgame" has completely lost its meaning - an "endgame" laptop is likely to be wholly irrelevant in at most ten years, especially so if you buy a super high end machine and expect high end machine things from it long term.

HeWhoLurksLateon Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

I mean it has happened in other Google products...

HeWhoLurksLateon Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

pretty sure they don't have a totally flat org structure anymore but I might be wrong

HeWhoLurksLateon Steam Controller

I have six of the previous generation controller and I love them, only minor annoyance is pairing them occasionally. I don't really use the haptics part all that much though

HeWhoLurksLateon Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams

on the other hand, it's how their business model is able to work? People get wayyyy more views on YouTube than they do on Patreon or federated platforms or Nebula or Floatplane or or or or or or or

HeWhoLurksLateon An eBPF loophole: Using XDP for egress traffic

in engineering there's also the "first unclassified attempt" stuff too

HeWhoLurksLateon Ireland is making basic income for artists program permanent

Could also do a 9AM mass at one church, a (9AM + mass duration + travel time + 30 minutes) mass at another, and so on

HeWhoLurksLateon How Apple designs a virtual knob (2012)

was going to say, heaven forbid we use a little skeumorphism

HeWhoLurksLateon Building the most accurate DIY CNC lathe in the world [video]

if the purpose is to bootstrap, you could also use something like a leather belt drive off a central shaft, which would require different power sources but ones that a higher percentage of could be made with a lathe