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mikehotel

609 karma · joined August 1, 2011

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mikehotel··on Ti-84 Evo
Numworks is so much better. According to kids that have access to Ti and HP graphing calculators.

The hardware and software design similarities between this Evo and Numworks is a strong endorsement.

mikehotel··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
What if Iran refuses payment in USD? For reparations, tolls, or for future sale of oil?
mikehotel··on Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links
aka Jimbo Wales
mikehotel··on Show HN: A MitM proxy to see what your LLM tools are sending
Addon to mitmproxy: https://docs.mitmproxy.org/stable/addons/overview/
mikehotel··on Firehound is a repository of App Store apps exposing data from users
An effort led by security research lab CovertLabs is actively uncovering troves of (mostly) AI-related App Store apps that leak and expose user data, including names, emails, and chat history.

Most apps on Firehound appear to expose data via improperly secured databases or cloud storage, and many listings disclose the underlying data schemas and record counts.

mikehotel··on A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth
Apple/Google have the financial brawn to push a disrupting technology into more common use. And this is not encumbered by any restrictive licenses.
mikehotel··on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
If your threat model includes the TLA types, then backup to a physical server you control in a location geographically isolated from your main location. Or to a local set of drives that you physically rotate to remote locations.
mikehotel··on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
Decryption is not usually an issue if you encrypt locally.

Tools like Kopia, Borg and Restic handle this and also include deduplication and other advanced features.

Really no excuse for large orgs or even small businesses and somewhat tech literate public.

mikehotel··on Russinovich: From Blue Screens to Orange Crabs: Microsoft's Rusty Revolution [video]
Thanks for posting. Love to see rust as strategic direction for MS and how they are using it in core OS, Azure and security areas, and much of it open source.

I still use https://sysinternals.com (though not via their live channel).

mikehotel··on Automerge 3.0
The performance improvements are impressive:

> In Automerge 3.0, we've rearchitected the library so that it also uses the compressed representation at runtime. This has achieved huge memory savings. For example, pasting Moby Dick into an Automerge 2 document consumes 700Mb of memory, in Automerge 3 it only consumes 1.3Mb!

> Finally, for documents with large histories load times can be much much faster (we recently had an example of a document which hadn't loaded after 17 hours loading in 9 seconds!).

mikehotel··on Show HN: Sinkzone DNS – Forwarder that blocks everything except your allowlist
- single binary file deployment

- TUI based configuration

- API endpoints

mikehotel··on WhatsApp banned on House staffers' devices
See https://archive.ph/oXYXe for more info about TeleMessage version of Signal approved for use by government offices.
mikehotel··on Using Home Assistant, adguard home and an $8 smart outlet to avoid brain rot
If you don’t mind supervised mode, this can help prevent this bypass: https://www.techlockdown.com/blog/prevent-turning-off-wifi-i...
mikehotel··on Show HN: Whenish – Plan Group Events in iMessages
Congrats on publishing!

It seems like a very polished and better integrated version of https://www.when2meet.com/.

You say you do not collect info. Are you saving the meeting details and availability in a database?

mikehotel··on Google is winning on every AI front
From the terms of use:

To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your API input and output. Google takes steps to protect your privacy as part of this process. This includes disconnecting this data from your Google Account, API key, and Cloud project before reviewers see or annotate it. Do not submit sensitive, confidential, or personal information to the Unpaid Services.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#data-use-unpaid

mikehotel··on Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE
Thank you for your service!

How many from USDS are left after this group of resignations?

mikehotel··on TikTok is back in the App Store
By the majority in Congress voting to block any attempts to challenge the executive branch.

Judges are acting to stay executive orders, but judicial processes are deliberately slow and the current administration seated several current Supreme Court judges.

Civil disobedience and mass unrest seems inevitable when the rule of law and balance of powers is systemically undermined.

mikehotel··on The Deck: An open-source cross-platform multiplayer card game engine in Flutter
Physical cards also allow you to practice shuffling and card handling in general improving dexterity.

Electronic cards would allow you to play more widely (presumably we all don’t walk around with a deck in our pockets). But I don’t often get into spontaneous card games. They are usually planned and at a location with easy access to decks.

mikehotel··on The Deck: An open-source cross-platform multiplayer card game engine in Flutter
This is a good point. We are easily distracted, especially when waiting for people to take their turn. The device based distractions can be stopped by using Guided Access. It can temporarily lock a device to one app, and block notifications from popping up.
mikehotel··on Show HN: Myphotos.site – Make a gallery website from Google Photos
Most likely they are trying to degoogle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeGoogle

mikehotel··on All the electricity you'll need for 40 years
How can the use of a switch damage your installation?
mikehotel··on Bitwarden SDK relicensed from proprietary to GPLv3
This has been the case for a long time, and has not changed even in 2024. Please use a Primary Password if you are storing passwords in Firefox.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/where-are-my-logins-sto...

mikehotel··on Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?
Also: Alignments of random points https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignments_of_random_points
mikehotel··on SpaceWar is back Rebuilding the first gaming computer
True hacker spirit embodied in this project. Very well done!

“So there was a whole study to make the LEDs simulate the glow of the original lamps. And then we found out that different lamps from different years had a different glow time. Measurements were done, math was applied, but we added lamp glow. More CPU time is spent on simulating that than on simulating the original CPU!”

mikehotel··on Google ordered to identify who watched certain YouTube videos
Tailscale [0] says the private keys never leave the device.

“Security

Tailscale and WireGuard offer identical point-to-point traffic encryption.

Using Tailscale introduces a dependency on Tailscale’s security. Using WireGuard directly does not. It is important to note that a device’s private key never leaves the device and thus Tailscale cannot decrypt network traffic. Our client code is open source, so you can confirm that yourself.”

0. https://tailscale.com/compare/wireguard

mikehotel··on Henry Kissinger Has Died
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsbe...
mikehotel··on Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding
Apparently an indirect association. From [0]:

Fall 2021

Holden Karnofsky resigns from the Board, citing a potential conflict because his wife, Daniela Amodei, is helping start Anthropic, a major OpenAI competitor, with her brother Dario Amodei. (They all live(d) together.) The exact date of Holden’s resignation is unknown; there was no contemporaneous press release.

Between October and November 2021, Holden was quietly removed from the list of Board Directors on the OpenAI website, and Helen was added (Discussion Source [1]).

0. https://loeber.substack.com/p/a-timeline-of-the-openai-board

1. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fmDFytmxwX9qBgcaX/...

mikehotel··on FreeBSD on Firecracker
It doesn’t look like the moved away from gVisor due to security reasons. “We were able to achieve these improvements because the second generation execution environment is based on a micro VM. This means that unlike the first generation execution environment, which uses gVisor, a container running in the second generation execution environment has access to a full Linux kernel.”
mikehotel··on Advantages to running FreeBSD as a server operating system
You may want to check out iocage for managing jails. It has not had a release in a few years but it is maintained.

https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/iocage/

mikehotel··on The Resilience of Costco (2018)
This article states as much: “Costco loses only 0.1% of revenue to theft annually. For context, that's 90% lower than Walmart's shrink rate.”
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