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jakedataon I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records

He could have protected that data by dropping all the tables.

jakedataon Hitachi to double US production of small and medium-sized power transformers

I assumed it was a typo and they were actually referring to "cretons", a type of French-Canadian potted pork.

jakedataon Hitachi to double US production of small and medium-sized power transformers

A traditional transformer doesn't use semiconductors for power conversion and chunks of metal are not "solid state" despite being solid. Call it a hybrid transformer if you want, but the name seems pretty settled. The more relevant part of my comment is that introducing semiconductors and software control into a device formerly only able to operate in a few very predictable ways will lead to both greater flexibility and also new and exciting failure modes.

jakedataon Hitachi to double US production of small and medium-sized power transformers

I read about Solid State Transformers https://www.powermag.com/the-solid-state-shift-reinventing-t... with some interest. However they have some weird failure modes. At least large chunks of metal twisted around large chunks of a different metal are predictable and don't need firmware updates.

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_16.html

jakedataon DisplayMate

That site is old enough to be Slashdotted.

jakedataon Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]

Minor nitpick - the Bernoulli 90 MB removable disk was released in 1991. The Bernoulli 44 MB was late 80s. I liked them a lot better than the SyQuest drives with their hard platters which seemed much more failure prone. I still have a stack of 90 and 150 MB disks and a couple 150 MB drives. They were considerably faster than the internal 20 MB ESDI drives in the IBM PS/2 systems I backed up. I saved a stack of the classic IBM keyboards when we decommissioned all that stuff. Still using them too.

jakedataon Firewood Splitting Simulator

The most satisfying part of splitting wood is doing it in temperatures well below freezing. The wood is crystalline in hardness and really does tend to split as it does in this over-optimistic simulation. "Split your own wood and it will warm you twice".

CSB: I had no idea my uncle was unaffected by poison ivy. He invited me over to harvest some dead ash trees on his property. I was destroyed for a month by rashes and he didn't even know the wood was covered in urushiol.

jakedataon JLink JTAG Access on the Pinecil

20v everywhere plus I made up a high power DC power cord with a barrel connector. My company’s marketing department has really nice USB-C power bricks emblazoned with our logo. I also invested in a biggish Anker battery with full USB-PD support.

jakedataon JLink JTAG Access on the Pinecil

I bought a Pinecil so I could run it off a battery. I really came to appreciate the excellent temperature control and rapid heating, and use it instead of my soldering station for jobs away from the bench.

I have felt absolutely no need to touch the firmware. I try to forget that it is more powerful than my first three personal computers combined. Plug in, turn on, get hot. It meets my needs and exceeded my expectations. I suppose I could run a website from it if I wanted to make a point but as long as it doesn't require wifi and phone home to verify the license and leak my biometric data I expect to use it until I wear it out.

jakedataon Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus

Causing a 15 minute outage campuswide is not clever at all. A DOS attack was not the goal and it drew unwanted attention. If I was responding to this outage there would have been consequences - not for doing it, but for getting caught. Perhaps a 200 KB/s rate limit on every device associated with the user for escalating timeout periods if the unclever behavior remained attributable.

jakedataon Dell confirms its SupportAssist software causes Windows BSOD crashes

We pushed out a policy to ban it forever after the disruption it caused. Caused again I mean... Huge time waster.

jakedataon Doctors Just Staged the Quietest Coup in American History

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-172/iss...

It brings to mind the parable of the drowning man or "what do you want from me, I sent you two boats and a helicopter".

jakedataon Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)

Paying an expensive senior (older) employee to quietly and happily go away without raising a fuss may have saved money in the long term. I am sure they did not offer the same deal to everyone.

jakedataon Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)

I'm clever but too industrious. Clever and lazy seems to pay better.

jakedataon Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)

My dad was offered a buyout when he was around my current age. It included 10 years seniority added to his pension and health insurance until Medicare kicked in. He never looked back.

Sadly, nobody is willing to pay me to go away.

jakedataon Using the internet like it's 1999

m.fark.com looks pretty good on my phone.

jakedataon Using the internet like it's 1999

Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.

Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!

jakedataon At long last, InfoWars is ours

"Tu Stultus Es"

"Drugs Win Drug War"

"History Sighs, Repeats Itself"

and of course...

"SICKOS"

jakedataon Hospital Held Woman for Months Against Her Will. SCOTUS to decide if she can sue

Notes of the Justina Pelletier case here. I am still horrified by what happened to her and her family.

jakedataon Flock Flocked up: How a license plate camera misread unraveled one man's life

^f settlement

$35,000 for being attacked by a police dog, hospitalized and jailed for hours. Nope. I'd ride that to the supreme court. He is lucky he wasn't shot for a 'misread'.

jakedataon Giant barocaloric cooling effect offers a new route to refrigeration

To get a feel for this effect, activate an instant ice pack. Mixing ammonium nitrate with water is an endothermic reaction, instantly making the pack cool down. Being able to reverse a reaction like this simply by applying pressure is fascinating.

jakedataon Downsides to US-Canadian dual citizenship for US resident?

My US-born child qualifies for US-Canadian dual citizenship under Citizenship Act Bill C-3. I can see several upsides to having a Canadian passport but what are the potential downsides for a US citizen and resident that does not intend to relocate?

jakedataon Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.

jakedataon Television is 100 years old today

Inspired one of my absolute favorite Zappa grooves.

I am the Slime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCQcEW98OY

I am gross and perverted

I'm obsessed and deranged

I have existed for years

But very little has changed

I'm the tool of the Government

And industry too

For I am destined to rule

And regulate you

I may be vile and pernicious

But you can't look away

I make you think I'm delicious

With the stuff that I say

I'm the best you can get

Have you guessed me yet?

I'm the slime oozin' out

From your TV set

You will obey me while I lead you

And eat the garbage that I feed you

Until the day that we don't need you

Don't go for help, no one will heed you

Your mind is totally controlled

It has been stuffed into my mold

And you will do as you are told

Until the rights to you are sold

That's right, folks

Don't touch that dial

Well, I am the slime from your video

Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video

Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go

I am the slime from your video

Oozin' along on your livin' room floor

I am the slime from your video

Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Frank Zappa

jakedataon Doing gigabit Ethernet over my British phone wires

I connected self powered crank telephones to my home phone wiring for use as intercoms. Crank one and the others ring. Pick up to engage the battery powered talk circuit and you're chatting with Mabel like it's 1915. I did replace the old dry cell batteries with lithium camera cells so I don't need to think about them for a decade.

jakedataon Sega Channel: VGHF Recovers over 100 Sega Channel ROMs (and More)

If it was Nintendo instead of Sega, everyone would be slapped with a cease-and-desist backed up with the threat of lawsuits.

jakedataon Making tiny 0.1cc two stroke engine from scratch

The second I heard that engine fire it was 1986 in my brain again. I could smell the fuel and feel the finger damage from repeatedly trying to get the darned thing to start. Followed by damage on the other side of the finger when it actually did. Ouch.

jakedataon Employee quits job over an Nvidia RTX 5060

This is an extremely salient point:

...some mockingly asking whether the firm would've maintained the same tenacity and reimbursed the Intern had he been fined 50,000 RMB at the event instead

jakedataon At SC2025 the exhibitors theme seems to be on-prem again

It seemed like the future was all cloud but this year's exhibit hall was packed with infrastructure suppliers. Every third booth seemed to feature valves, pumps, massive high density power distribution systems and all the stuff you would need to cram a megawatt of electrical power into the smallest space possible and then extract the heat. Most notable to me is the waterless phase-change heat extraction provided by https://zutacore.com/. Their technology avoids massive water consumption and provides a high temperature heat source that is immediately useful for campus heating or co-generation.

jakedataon Lucent 7 R/E 5ESS Telephone Switch Rescue (2024)

Visiting Bletchley Park and seeing step-by-step telephone switching equipment repurposed for computing re-enforced my appreciation for the brilliance of the telecommunication systems we created in the past 150 years. Packet switching was inevitable and IP everything makes sense in today's world, but something was lost in that transition too. I am glad to see that enthusiasts with the will and means are working to preserve some of that history. -Posted from SC2025-