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bityard

11,444 karma · joined April 4, 2019

https://blog.bityard.net

charles dot hn at bityard dot net

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bityard··on Pi 1.0
Is there a version of the pi.dev website that doesn't change itself as I'm trying to read it?
bityard··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
In agreement that this is good old fashioned cargo-cult security theatre, but tom7 also coined a more catchy phrase for this, he calls it "toxic max-security." http://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf
bityard··on Pi 1.0
I had the same concern last time I looked at Pi. There's no way to tell which are useful and semi-vetted and which are junk. I came to the conclusion that most people had their AI build them whatever plugin they needed, and I think this is even something they recommend.

What harnesses do you recommend?

bityard··on Clef: Open-source decision models, and new RL fine-tuning platform
Thanks, I missed that. Fixed my comment.
bityard··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
If your ISP is assigning you a single IPv6 address, they are doing IPv6 wrong. You should be getting your own /56.
bityard··on Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
It's easy for _one person_ to fix. It's not easy for the entire git ecosystem as a whole. GitHub, large internal corporate git repos, CI/CD systems, projects with submodules, etc. The second half the article explains all of this.
bityard··on Clef: Open-weight decision models, and new RL fine-tuning platform
Clef is based on Qwen3.8-27B and Clef-flash is based on Qwen3.8-9B (edit: actually Qwen3.5-9B). So, similar in spirit to Kev by my understanding, but based on a newer model.
bityard··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
Airframe by Michael Crichton. It's riveting.
bityard··on Show HN: NSL – WSL for Linux
I was surprised I hadn't heard of this as a separate tool from systemd-nspawn. Then I realized why... the GitHub repo shows version 0.6 released in 2022, then version 1.0.0 last week, followed by a flurry of releases up to 1.8.0 yesterday.

So basically, it's been all Claude'd up extremely recently.

That said, the landing page, docs, and git README are much higher quality than I normally see out of LLM-generated projects, so at least the author knows how to reign in the needless verbosity and write for a technical audience. So I will give him credit for that at least.

bityard··on Show HN: NSL – WSL for Linux
The naming is a bit awkward now, but an original design goal of the Windows NT kernel was the ability to host different types of OS "personalities" (userspace, essentially) on top of the Windows kernel, and these are called "subsystems." Win32 is one such subsystem, although there was no need to formally call it "Windows Subsystem for Win32" because everyone understood that it was just Win32 ported to NT.

The NT kernel designers came from VMS, and during development MS made various half-hearted promises that NT would be able to run VMS software as well but never actually followed through. If they had, there would likely have been a Windows Subsystem for VMS.

bityard··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
Thank you! Yeah, I'm well familiar with Jason Scott's efforts to archive/preserve/present BBS culture and information. I've been a fan of his work for ages.

The other links are new to me, thank you for passing them along. I'm particularly interested in that BoardWatch magazine archive. I didn't know that existed. Although now I have yet _another_ side project: figure out how to index and search it all!

bityard··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
I'm working on a blog article about my adventures on toll-free BBSes before I had access to the Internet. It's about halfway done, and I hope to have it ready to publish soon, somewhere between a week and a year from now.
bityard··on So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes
I think it's fairly obvious that Google doesn't _want_ hobby developers in the play store at all. Their app development, publication, and review process seems quite intentionally designed to be penetrable only to those who are willing to make it (or already is) their full-time job.

There's just no money in it for them, and a lot of support burden. Hobbyist apps are either free, or a few bucks. For Google, the income is a rounding error compared to ad revenue for household-name apps or in-app purchases inside blockbuster mobile games.

(I will be first in line to buy the first working and affordable Linux smartphone.)

bityard··on Hijacking the PS5's RTMP stream
Man, that article has _all_ the AI smells. Here's the only interesting part:

    gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! videoconvert ! autovideosink sync=false
I guess it just has an HDMI capture chip on-board. If you have a spare USB port, these are under $20 everywhere.
bityard··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
> everything you put out on the internet never goes away

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.

I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.

bityard··on Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC
I have half-wondered many times whether it would be possible/practical to build a chat system on top of MQTT or similar. Chat seems like mostly a pub/sub problem from where I sit.
bityard··on My Recent Woodworking Projects
Eh, pine can look pretty great with a light stain. But it takes dark stain poorly in my experience.
bityard··on My Recent Woodworking Projects
DIY around the house is so much fun. Over the years I've built picture frames, shelves, cabinet doors, even a bed frame.

If I could offer one piece of advice to those interested: Understand that for nearly every project you see on Youtube where some dude is using a whole workshop full of power tools, you can build a LOT with a few small tools and proper technique. Don't get sucked into the mindset of, I want to build a few projects, therefore I need $2000 worth of new power tools.

You can do quite a lot with just a couple of hand saws (one for cross-cutting, one for ripping), a square, and a drill. The next step up would be a table saw, miter saw, and circular saw for time savings and increased precision. Much more than that is leaning into the territory of fine woodworking. Learning how to build your own jigs for specific tasks will save you hundreds or thousands in lieu of specialized tools.

bityard··on Drawgent: Coding agent on a live Excalidraw canvas
Wow, I just can't agree with this take at all. The README is only 161 lines (very short for a git repo README!) and took me about 15 seconds to skim and decide whether or not it was interesting enough to keep the tab open.

Most of the project pages I have seen with videos either animate things at hyper-speed, meaning you can't actually follow is what happening, or drag on for minutes just to communicate something that I could have read in seconds. My time is more valuable than that.

Images are cool, however. We should do more of those.

bityard··on Plan mode is dead
> wastes a ton of time

It wastes a ton of tokens as well and those are not cheap.

bityard··on Plan mode is dead
When I draft my idea for the implementation of a feature or bug fix, I don't even trust a _human_ to understand what I mean the first time. There are _always_ either errors on my part, or erroneous assumptions on theirs. Everything from "this accounts for X and Y, but not Z which breaks the whole thing" to "this part of the idea directly contradicts what with you said earlier, what do you want to do about it?"

I can't bring myself to trust that an LLM understands what I mean better than any human would, no matter how "good" people claim they are getting.

TFA seems to be advocating for regular old vibecoding. Code now and ask questions later. Which is their choice, and is perhaps even a valid choice in many cases. But at least call it what it is.

bityard··on Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
> I guess i'm not cut out for stock trading.

As it turns out, neither is anyone else, even people who do it for a living. (If we constrain the definition of "stock trading" to mean researching and picking individual stocks.)

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

bityard··on Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits
Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to imply that cable didn't have ads.
bityard··on Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
I love KDE to bits and pieces, it's the best desktop I've had the pleasure to use in all my decades of computing.

I am fully behind the idea of continual improvement and experimentation. But if KDE ever decides _yet again_ to tear down and rebuild the whole experience from scratch, I swear, I am going to start paying more attention to the intrusive thoughts of my inner pyromaniac.

bityard··on Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profits
Don't forget: Cable pricing but also with ads.
bityard··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
You likely have no idea just how lucky you are.
bityard··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
Your experience is very atypical.

If you grew up in a house with smokers, you would not find the smell unusual.

Only the first 2-3 in your life are any kind of challenge to get through, after that it's smooth sailing, unfortunately. For most people.

Count yourself lucky I guess.

bityard··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
I don't know if that last line was meant to be funny, but it gave me a good laugh. We should all be so "lucky!"
bityard··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
I had a very different experience. I would start smoking again for various personal but uninteresting reasons and found that it was much easier if I went to vaping for a week or two before quitting completely.
bityard··on People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes
For context, I vape because nicotine helps me focus. There's a lot more to it than that but I'm not going to elaborate because if I do, I'll get about a zillion replies from preachy, argumentative people who don't know anything about me and I just don't have the time for that today.

Anyway, one of those big 5% disposables lasts me about 6 weeks at the rate I use them. I deliberately seek out the high nic content because I don't want to ingest more glycol or whatever than is necessary. Nor do I want to sit there and chain vape all day like I used to back when freebase liquids were all you could get. I can limit my intake to 2-3 puffs every 1-2 hours and that's what works for me.

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