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flutas

2,940 karma · joined May 3, 2021

engineer, probably trying to not be cynical and failing.
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flutas··on Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions
Finding bugs is hardly a crime, selling them even isn't.

Now exploiting them? Yes that's a crime.

flutas··on Show HN: Open-Source eInk Bike Computer
IMO at least a better one to do would be a transflective LCD like the original pebble watches used.
flutas··on Tesla's Cybercab Is Being Investigated by Federal Regulators
> Regardless of any "investigation", the big change here is that Tesla is now solely responsible (and liable) for the safety of a "autonomous" driving system that still requires constant supervision.

They have been for the past year, they've had Model Ys running autonomously since June of last year (albeit with safety "passengers" at first).

flutas··on Tesla Cybercabs Hit Austin Streets in Expansion of Robotaxi Service
Media playback? It has a 21" screen in the middle.

Also as a redundant connection so they don't have a meltdown like Waymo did when they lost cell signal.

> “In limited instances on Saturday night, the [robotaxi] Driver sought additional context,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. (The company refers to its cars’ autonomous driving systems as “Drivers.”) “However, the unprecedented scale of the power outage and its impact on local connectivity resulted in some delays to those confirmations.”

https://sfstandard.com/2025/12/23/wtf-happened-waymo-blackou...

flutas··on US oil reserves are so low, the caverns holding them could be damaged
> bailout: "the provision of financial help to a corporation or country which otherwise would be on the brink of bankruptcy."

Did they go bankrupt? No? Then it wasn't a bailout.

For as much as I love HN, everyone trips over random "achustually" while ignoring the actual definitions to try and be right.

All this to try and claim Democrats were right to AVOID filling the reserves on an article screaming about trump not doing it.

Piece of art right there.

flutas··on US oil reserves are so low, the caverns holding them could be damaged
to me helping != bailout

helping = just that, helping. They might be hurting, but they aren't going to die without the help.

bailout = (as wikipedia defines it) "the provision of financial help to a corporation or country which otherwise would be on the brink of bankruptcy."

flutas··on US oil reserves are so low, the caverns holding them could be damaged
> But the Trump administration really shot themselves in the foot by loudly championing it as a bailout for big oil.

For all I hate about him and his admin, the trump admin didn't call it a "bailout" once that I can find (even with the help of AI). The only quotes I can find are Chuck Schumer / Democrats calling it that and no direct quote of Trump saying it. In fact this is what I can find:

> On March 13, 2020, Trump described it as purchasing crude oil “at a very good price.” He said filling the reserve would save taxpayers money while also “helping our oil industry.”

> On April 3, a reporter directly asked Trump whether oil executives had requested a bailout. Trump answered: “No, they didn’t ask for a bailout. No.”

> The “bailout for big oil” wording came from Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats, not Trump. Schumer’s official March 25 press release claimed that the final CARES Act had: “Eliminated $3 billion bailout for big oil.”

Would love to be proven wrong here.

> Trump didn't care about the reserve, he cared about the oil industry.

Does that even make a difference?

Either way it's filling the reserve for instances exactly like this, and was blocked by politicians to try and "win" for their party at the expense of every US citizen.

flutas··on US oil reserves are so low, the caverns holding them could be damaged
Never mind this

> On March 19, 2020, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Energy to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to maximum capacity, when oil was priced at $24 per barrel. This directive was given to help support domestic oil producers given the impending economic collapse from COVID-19 and extreme drops in international oil markets. However, funding was blocked by Congress, with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer stating that Democrats had blocked a "bailout for big oil".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...

flutas··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
Personally I think it's due to context length.

Whenever context gets towards the max length is when I've noticed it.

flutas··on Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace
For me at least, yes but it's not an EV specific rate plan just our general one.

~80mi a day + AC is the vast majority of my use (for why so much AC - it's 102f [39c] and feels like 115f [46c] right now as I type this).

flutas··on Kimi-K3 on HuggingFace
I'm in Arkansas and get rates fairly similar as quoted.

From my last bill

> KWH USAGE 2590 - $183.37

There's a base customer cost of $18 on top of that, but yeah ~$0.077/kWh taxes included.

flutas··on Should you wash your solar panels?
> At most, the buyer would need to allow the financer access to retrieve their property. The financer could then sue the seller for the buy-out cost and/or breach of contract.

Nope, at least not typically.

Typically in the US houses are sold as-is unless it's noted in the closing docs. Everything in or on the house when you close is yours. The seller would be the one fighting with the financing company, as (again unless noted in closing docs) they would be considered fixtures and considered part of the real estate sale.

flutas··on QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall
Not sure if you've heard of them, but they're starting to come to market with this exact thing aside from distance detection and more on the "which part is squeaking" side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8-5lSVCR2w

flutas··on Ryanair passenger sucked toward broken window after midair engine failure
Extremely similar to Southwest flight 1380 which killed a person in the US after they were partially sucked out of a broken window from an engine failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380

flutas··on Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries
Quoting just one of the smallest one feels a bit... charged. There's small tradeoffs among all of them when you account for weight.

For everyone else here's the full list:

Switch 2 Battery capacity: 5172mAh, approximately 1% smaller than current version (5220mAh) Weight: Approximately 411g, around 10g heavier than current version With Joy-Con 2 controllers attached: Approximately 548g, around 14g heavier than current version (approximately 534g).

JoyCon 2: Battery capacity: No change. Weight: each 2g heavier

Switch 2 Pro Controller: Battery capacity: 897mAh, approximately 16% smaller than current version (1070mAh). Weight: Approximately 228g, around 7g lighter than current version (approximately 235g).

N64 Controller: Battery capacity: No change. Weight: Approximately 234g, around 1g heavier than current version (approximately 233g)

GameCube controller: Battery capacity: 525mAh, approximately 5% larger than current version (500mAh). Weight: 215g, around 5g heavier than current version (210g).

flutas··on My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable
> I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats!

We had to define a ton of different variables to try to categorize the system, and from that we track playback events (buffering, errors, etc) and if a device family as a whole shows too many issues we kill switch the feature for that device. This is on top of device side watchdogs that kill the feature for a user specifically if we fail to have a baseline playback performance with the software decoder. It's a very hands on feature, but I'm proud of the work our team did!

> Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.

Absolutely. As an example other devices had good playback at only 360p, but couldn't hit 540p. Shield can reliably hit x2 720p streams.

It's still my daily driver for personal browsing and the device I primarily develop on (also the only 64 bit kernel ATV device currently iirc). The Walmart Onn Pro 4K boxes are the runner up in my experience, they're pretty good.

flutas··on My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable
Also really depends on what codecs are done in software vs hardware on the device.

Speaking from working on the Android/Fire TV devices, they all have at most one hardware decoder, which really limits what the streaming companies can do. My team recently launched a multiview feature on A/FTV and we had to do so much hand holding and device detection work (4K decoder) to try and make the experience good and hide it from others...

Meanwhile the mobile teams, roku, iOS / tvOS / vision pro teams can full send with 4 players because the devices all have multiple hardware decoders... for some reason Android TV devices are along in this category.

flutas··on Steam Machine launches today
When I used to do resale (~2018 - lost my CS job and was interviewing, but had to live between jobs), the easiest one was fake apartment numbers.

Instead of

    123 Main St.
You turn it into

    123 #1 Main St.
or if you live in an apartment variants of this such as

    123 #1 Main St. -> 123 #001 Main St.
This was years ago and I assume the matching work has gotten a lot better though.
flutas··on Steam Machine launches today
The account has to have bought something on steam before April 27th. They also are verifying addresses via the accounts.

> Are there any criteria for signing up?

> Customers must meet the following criteria to be able to sign up:

> You must have a Steam account in good standing.

> You must have made a purchase on Steam prior to April 27th 2026.

> Limit one signup per household. We will use payment method, shipping address, and other information to eliminate multiple entries.

flutas··on Apple WWDC 2026
FWIW: My colleague went to Google IO in person this year, he said the entire vibe was just off this year describing it as "almost somber" to quote him.
flutas··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
A "Home Agent" setup, with customized special agents to manage various aspects of the house through home assistant, learning feedback from household users to try and tune everything at the right time.

Various MCPs for above.

A "remote claude code server", that gives project level overview and lets me run projects / develop on my home server rather than locally through my laptop. Supports ssh as well as a web UI (projects in a list, shell rendered using https://xtermjs.org/, with a tile overview when working on multiple projects to watch for turn ends.

Similar to above, I have a local version that auto launches a new project scoped podman container, passess through the work directory, installs CC/Codex/Grok into it and passess through the auth / config for each agent. Then dumps you into that shell with aliases to map each agent to that agent with a few special env flags to disable permission prompts, so claude = `claude --dangerously-bypass-permissions`.

An extensive MCP for Obsidian that gives agents access to use a lot of the more advanced Obsidian functionality, such as suggesting and installing plugins / configs / etc.

It's helped some of my daily productivity, but I still prefer to get my hands dirty with code most of the time rather than full prompt it.

flutas··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
Several of these sound interesting to me, gonna check them out tonight!
flutas··on Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
Those vehicles with lidar roof racks are validation for "FSD" look up project rodeo for some news reporting (they also have cameras further up mounted on a pole to validate "FSD"s reprojection technique).

Images of the cars screens show "project rodeo controls" is the only reason I say that we know these are validation vs mapping.

flutas··on Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'
Waymo explicitly lidar scans and "HD maps" the area:

https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...

Tesla is less "HD", they have standard maps like we all think of, and a lane level "see-ahead" system where they basically just grab a satellite image tile, and align it with what the car sees for "FSD".

flutas··on Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract
...nope...?

the Ukraine war started in 2014 technically. But even if we go to the "current" wave start, that was 24 February 2022[0].

Bambu Labs released their first printer (X1C, on kickstarter) on 31 May 2022, let alone their "must go through cloud service" restriction starting in early 2025[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war

[1]: https://blog.bambulab.com/firmware-update-introducing-new-au...

flutas··on RAM prices are forcing companies to choose higher prices, worse specs, or both
Or (for some of them) they could have previously been chasing the stupid spec numbers for advertising and realized they can save money if they just stop doing that.

See Apple as an example, who really doesn't care about telling you the newest phone has 12GB of ram. It's literally not even mentioned on the tech specs page.

flutas··on RAM prices are forcing companies to choose higher prices, worse specs, or both
All of those could also be classified as "they learned consumers didn't need that much."
flutas··on 1966 Ford Mustang Converted into a Tesla with Working 'Full Self-Driving'
It's specifically talking about the "FSD" model under the hood being able to run on this retrofit even though the cameras don't align 100% like they originally would.
flutas··on Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw"
Make sure you check your extra usage.

I thought the same but then noticed that single prompt (exactly as posted) cost $0.20 of extra usage.

flutas··on The Classic American Diner
I was really sad to learn recently an old diner I went to often in Venice Beach (Cafe' 50'S, on Lincoln and Lake) burned at some point and the building is just an empty husk now.

That place was great cheap food.

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