happyhardcore

For this I used GCP free tier -- not sure why everyone acts like Oracle are the only free tier around when GCP and AWS offer always-free tiers too. It's just runing socat to forward to the vape over tailscale. Is there something I'm missing?

I've found [1] to be the best guide for getting started with them; you need to make a copy of the firmware partitions that you re-flash after installing Linux onto it in order to get the 4G modem working. It's honestly absurd how much you're getting for a fiver with it; add a power bank (or make your own from scavenged vape batteries in the spirit of this post) and you have a full Linux machine with WiFi and 4G that can work almost anywhere.

[1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/

VPS with public ipv4, connected to home network over Tailscale and forward the traffic with socat. You'd probably be fine opening a port directly but a small VPS is free most places so might as well make the most of it.

You can generate the keys on-device during the initial provisioning and have it encrypt the flash with that key, so every device generates its own unique key and there isn't any practical way to extract it; even the developer can't flash it directly, and OTAs are required to update the firmware. This effectively means nobody can flash the chip anyway since you can't know the keys. Is there some sort of attack vector here I'm missing that gets mitigated by preventing flashing entirely?

How is this different in practice to the regular ESP32's secure boot, where you can technically flash the chip with whatever you like but unless you have the signing key the bootloader will refuse to load it?

We don't know if he's gone to the cops, but more often than not the police will not be able to help you in these sorts of situations. The way that Kiwifarms target people is incredibly hard to stop and I don't think they particularly need ammo; the way to not "give them ammo" would be to stop standing up for trans rights, and the fact that he hasn't is commendable.

I suspect this is why OpenAI is going more in the direction of optimising for price / latency / whatever with 4o-mini and whatnot. Presumably they found out long before the rest of us did that models can't really get all that much better than what we're approaching now, and once you're there the only thing you can compete on is how many parameters it takes and how cheaply you can serve that to users.

How so? Other than the security issues that get exploited by NSO group from time to time (that appear to be mitigated fairly well by lockdown mode if that's something that's important to you) or the obvious flaw that you can't talk to anyone that doesn't have an iPhone it seems to be a perfectly good platform. The alternatives either have worse encryption (Telegram, RCS), worse privacy (WhatsApp), or the same platform lock-in as iMessage (Google's RCS).

It's really impressive that a high school student [1] has managed to reverse engineer iMessage. What I'm wondering is:

1. How stable is it; would it be trivial for Apple to patch this?

2. If it's as simple as reverse engineering the protocols, how has it taken this long?

[1] https://github.com/JJTech0130

I started out using a cheap MicroSD and it only lasted a week or two before failing; I've since replaced it with a 128 GB SATA SSD with a USB3-SATA dongle I bought off Amazon. No SD card needed and it's served me incredibly well. I figured that even the best MicroSD card isn't going to be designed to run as a computer's boot drive, and SATA SSDs are cheap and plentiful.

It's worth bearing in mind that _all_ ports on the device are expansion cards, including the USB-C port that the device needs to actually charge. In any case I think WiFi is 'good enough' for most use cases, and as such the number of laptops that provide ethernet as standard is rapidly diminishing. I very rarely need an ethernet port on my laptop, but for the times I do it'd be very helpful to have it installed rather than needing a dongle flapping about.

Ah, TIL. Thanks for clearing that up!

Pancreatic cancer actually has one of the worst survival rates; in the UK around 25% of people diagnosed survive past a year, with 5% living more than five years after diagnosis [0]. Chemo in those circumstances often has the effect of prolonging life while significantly decreasing the quality of life, and as such many people choose not to go through with it.

[0] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/pancreatic-can...

This just solved a problem I have that I never knew there was a solution for! It seems really weird to me that every OS doesn't have a native solution for changing external monitor brightness; I thought it was down to the monitor but clearly it isn't. Thanks for the link and thanks for your work on Lunar!

I've easily saved a couple of minutes each day by not having to search some API docs, since Copilot already knows how my variables should fit into the function call. Even if it's just a minute a day, 20 days a month, it works out being worth $10 easily if you're on a typical western software dev salary.

I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying

    # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error

and have it print out

    if ! some_program
    then
        echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m"
        exit 1
    fi

makes it so much quicker to cobble together something that works without having to context switch and go Google something. That being said, I've found when writing more complex code it has a real tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you out if you're not paying attention.

Purely from the amount of time I've saved I'd say it's well worth the $10/mo for my employer (it only has to save a few minutes a day to be worthwhile). Very excited to see how they improve it in the future!

Looking at Ableton 11's feature set it seems they're running out of ideas; CLAP support would definitely be the kinda thing that could compel people to upgrade to a future version.

It being MIT licensed also gives it a much better chance of getting integrated into all sorts of smaller DAWs and cheaper ones too that might not have wanted to deal with all the nonsense that comes with VST.

Agreed. If I ran a SaaS startup with a team of three and $1m ARR I'd feel pretty confident that things are gonna be alright for me.

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. [0]

e: in any case, there are a number of ways of telling this story I can think of that'd be far worse than Twitter, even if I do agree that a series of tweets doesn't feel like the best way of communincating a small blog post. Plus, I feel like you end up with more engagement between the author and commenters on Twitter, such as in [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://twitter.com/PierreDeWulf/status/1508476780583206918

Roughly how much higher is the dose required for this level of detail than that which is considered safe for humans?

I was interested in this workflow, would be a big motivation to get an iPad pro when the time comes to get a compatible MacBook too. Are there any limitations you've found especially with modifier keys compared to a dedicated wacom tablet?

I'd disagree with that one, with Lightning the pins are in the connector. I've broken my iPhone before trying to get lint out of the charging port and bending the pins by accident.

USB C on the other hand has all the pins cable-side so there isn't anything to worry about ramming whatever you fancy into your phone or laptop since it's just a PCB with pads on rather than anything you can bend.

Can anyone give some insight as to why a vaccine hasn't been possible using more traditional technology?

Bearing in mind that 30k a year goes a lot further given that there's no need for health insurance and student loans are effectively just a 6% tax on earnings above 27k until either your loan is repaid or it's been 30 years since graduating.

While it's true that UK salaries are quite a bit lower than other countries if I'm honest if I earned £150k a year the only difference in how I live my life would be that I'd be driving a Tesla. 30k is more than enough to live comfortably on, even in areas with a fairly high cost of living.

FWIW £18k in 2001 is ~£30k in today's money which is on the upper end of graduate starting salaries even for today

I spent four years on a government-funded binge at university, and am now paying my taxes like a dutiful citizen. IMO anyone who wants to deny young adults the opportunity to make a load of friends and go off the rails before they mature a little and start contributing to society has forgotten what it's like to be an 18 year old!

100% agree on just making it a tax at this point. We're basically at a point where it is a tax, except: 1. The very rich can stop paying it, and 2. People who end up wanting to change degrees too late down the line end up falling through the cracks and aren't given the option to try another degree (again, unless they're very rich)

£300 a month for a student flat isn't really all that different to the rest of the UK - I lived in student accommodation in Manchester for four years and paid between £350 and £420 a month plus bills for houses in varying states of decay, with bills maybe being an extra £100 on top of that.

Discussing value for money on a free degree aside, I'd argue that the value of an EE is immense. I graduated last year studying EEE at a UK red brick uni, had the best time of my life, and learned a good number of skills that have come in handy in the last year having been employed as a professional engineer.

The debt question, at least in the UK, is more academic than anything - I'm currently earning 30k a year (which is already more than I need to live comfortably) and I'm paying £20 a month back on my loan. In 30 odd years the debt will be wiped off and given that you only pay back 6% of income above 27k it's not really like you'd ever notice it. FWIW my friends that went to uni and ended up with non-vocational degrees are earning around the 20k mark if they're working full time so chances are they won't even get close to having to consider their student loans for a good while.

In terms of the specifics I learned on my degree I would have to agree that not much of what was taught is actually helpful in my career but having four years to mature as a person, especially in an atmosphere where you're surrounded by other people who are happy to discuss engineering and related projects, has helped in a way I could never put a price tag on.