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duck2

137 karma · joined September 29, 2016

quack hack duck2.tech
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duck2··on Post-mortem of Shai-Hulud attack on November 24th, 2025
It's a bit funny the vuln was introduced by someone with the username "haacked"
duck2··on Claude 4
This guy just told me on the Cursor window:

> Looking at the system prompt, I can see I'm "powered by claude-4-sonnet-thinking" so I should clarify that I'm Claude 3.5 Sonnet, not Claude 4.

duck2··on Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes
That's exactly why I stopped using Svelte. Claude is much more sensible when generating React. Looks like a bleak future where only the most popular library survives.
duck2··on 400 reasons to not use Microsoft Azure
it probably didn't work right away and two hours was spent on troubleshooting
duck2··on AI killed the tech interview. Now what?
That's not a typical leetcode problem though. Most companies ask things like "solve this slightly modified knapsack problem" which takes 5 minutes if you know the solution and 50 minutes if you don't.
duck2··on How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
It's not like websites are GPU bound
duck2··on Advice to a novice programmer
I found VSCode's remote plugins to be a really good option when the code lives on a shared remote machine over a slow connection. vim+scp is an extra step on each change, vim over ssh is just awkward, and sshfs isn't the most reliable piece of software.
duck2··on Verilog to Routing
This kind of stuff requires access to the complete architectural parameters of the device, so adding support for even a single device family is a huge reverse-engineering^W documentation effort.

See f4pga.readthedocs.io which consolidates pretty much everyone's efforts into a distribution, but supports only 4 device families: iCE40 and ECP5 from Lattice, some 7-series devices from Xilinx and EOS-S3 from QuickLogic.

For internal testing, VPR has "Stratix IV-like" and most recently "Stratix 10-like" architecture files but these don't try to "document" the whole thing, they just want a close enough approximation to a modern device to evaluate the tool better.

duck2··on Web-based cryptography is snake oil
Nothing old silicon and analog peripherals can't solve.
duck2··on The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
I found a previous HN submission about them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766283
duck2··on The price of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades
Maybe stuff like Upmem (many small CPUs embedded into memory) can take off then?
duck2··on The chip shortage could lead to an era of hardware innovation
Exchanges are perfectly usable from Turkey.

What is banned is 1) paying for stuff with cryptocurrency and 2) sending money to exchanges via "digital wallets", you have to use bank transactions.

Looks like they are paving the ground to trace and tax crypto investments.

So yeah, this supports your point anyway.

duck2··on We Fix: A DIY Manifesto (2014)
Most sane right-to-repair advocates don't oppose microscopic parts or glued batteries. They oppose deliberate measures against repair, such as:

- Parts which are produced by a third party who signed a contract with the manufacturer to not sell the part to other people. So you cannot find whatever $2 power management unit in your phone's main board even if you are willing to use complex equipment to replace it.

- Parts which "marry" their devices and refuse to work when you plug them into another device.

This kind of behavior actively fights against you repairing the device. I find it unacceptable.

duck2··on I asked GPT-3 for the question to “42”
If this future happens, people might "fall back" to their native languages for internet writing. I'm already thinking about this: if I wrote something which could potentially get me in legal trouble, like a reverse engineering post, I would probably write it in my native language. Kind of similar to torrent trackers in Russian or obscure phone mod forums in Portuguese.
duck2··on PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board
It's just an open instruction set architecture. You can implement an open or closed source CPU on top of it.
duck2··on Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones
Drones are easy to jam. The communication link and GPS are most obvious targets.
duck2··on Mystery of interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua gets trickier
Still interesting what would be used to polish a gold plated beryllium mirror. For instance, looks like they clean it by spraying CO2 snow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_cleaning
duck2··on Nvidia is reportedly in ‘advanced talks’ to buy ARM for more than $32B
"Building" for the latest process and large volumes is another story, but as far as I can see, large scale logic design is something not _that_ far away from software. Large scale, open source, and performant software designs exist in the wild. (see Linux, llvm, ...)

Why wouldn't we get a logic netlist which could perform reasonably well when placed on silicon by people who know what they are doing? (Yeah, lots of handwave.) I'm asking this out of curiosity. Not an expert in the field by any means.

duck2··on All Your Passwords Are Belong to FPGA
The boards have 4x Spartan 6 LX150, the same part in Pano Logic G2.
duck2··on Ghoti
Another effect is that the sound variety in the language was reduced. The new alphabet has "n" for both "ŋ" and "n" sounds. Now, in year 2020, no one spells out ŋ. See "taŋrı", "seniŋ", etc.
duck2··on Design electronics like it is 70s at CERN
First chapters of The Art of Electronics might be a good start.
duck2··on New Grad vs. Senior Dev
Computer Science existed long before there were computers. I think the Science of Computers you mention is known as Computer Architecture.
duck2··on Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years
Claiming a coup attempt as staged looks more like a conspiracy theory to me. Luckily, that was dismissed by the head of German intelligence[0].

> “The coup attempt was not initiated by the government. Before July 15 the government had already started a big purge so parts of the military thought they should do a coup quickly before it hit them too,” Kahl said.

In [0], Kahl dismisses the possibility that the Gülen movement did the coup. However, he fails to mention which other group in the military "feared" the purge and was big enough to attempt a coup.

If you combine that with: - the 2010-11 purge of nationalist-modernists from the army was directed by Gülen people[1][2] (and supported by Erdoğan[3]) - all 4 military schools were totally infiltrated by Gülenists[4]

you would see that the Gülen movement was certainly in the army, and after the purge of nationalist-modernists, there was no other group in the Turkish army big enough and pissed off with the govt enough to attempt a coup. The testimonies of suspected army officers[5] mentioning Gülen is no surprise at this point.

When I see the purge of Gülen supporters to be generalized to Erdoğan opponents, something goes off in my mind. People who are against both Erdoğan and Gülen weren't targeted for that purge. If anything, they were trusted more than before, because many pro-Erdoğan people could get into state positions using Gülen connections pre-2013.

A good guestion to ask here is why did Erdoğan facilitate Gülen's infiltration of the institutions in the first place. As I mentioned above, it was because he feared a Kemalist coup or party shutdown. So, if Turkey didn't have the habit of "fending off populists with coups", none of this would happen. Or maybe it would?

All in all, what I'm trying to say is that the whole issue is more complex than "autocrat bad punish opponents".

---

[0]: https://www.rt.com/news/381290-bnd-gulen-erdogan-coup/

[1]: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/son-dakika-ergenekon-davas...

[2]: https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/15-temmuz-darbe-girisimi/balyoz-dav...

[3]: http://www.radikal.com.tr/politika/erdogan-evet-savciyiz-888...

[4]: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/08/turkey-gu...

[5]: https://t24.com.tr/haber/15-temmuz-darbe-girisimi-ifadeleri-...

duck2··on Access to Wikipedia restored in Turkey after more than two and a half years
It's more complicated than that. The military and the judicial system had to be purged because a religious cult had colonized them, often exerting power for the cult's interests[0] and topping off with the coup attempt in 2016.

In turn, the religious cult was allowed (by Erdoğan, with the 2010 referendum) to colonize the military and the judicial system because previously they were colonized by hardliner modernists who had a history of doing coups or closing down political parties when someone they don't like come to power, and explicitly threatened Erdoğan[1][2].

[0]: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ex-exam-chief-indicted-over...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Justice_and_Development_P...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-memorandum

duck2··on What Unix Cost Us [video]
procfs is "loan-feature" from plan9 :)
duck2··on Google's Monopoly-Based Foreign Policy
Note that the regulation isn't about backdoors or data storage. Google is fined because of tying Search to Android, which is decided as anti-competitive by Russia and EU.

I think they pulled out to avoid paying the fine, but this might prove to be a monopoly exerting tactic as well. There is just no other explanation of pulling out of a market just because you have to un-tie your products now.

duck2··on Breakthrough in Synthetic Vaccine Technology Requires No Refrigeration
Eh. She looks very much like she's just playing to people's fears. If this is the rationalist argument, I wonder what are the irrational arguments.

My early childhood passed in a city where meat was sold on pushcarts and where drinking tap water was an easy way to have an infection. I guess having the unnatural disease matter filled with metals injected into my muscle might have saved me from becoming a statistic.

duck2··on The first solar road has turned out to be a disappointing failure
If you can deduce something from your current knowledge, you don't need to do an experiment for that. Certainly people knew that putting fragile semiconductors under roads isn't the best idea, but they went on and spent time and money. I would call this a waste.
duck2··on Photorealistic Path Tracer
It's simple to start! You can try writing a sphere-only, Blinn-Phong ray tracer already.
duck2··on Photorealistic Path Tracer
I meant second year in uni. Too much thinking in native language I guess.
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