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mikeryanon I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records

Sounds like he’s gotten bug bounties from MS in the past. Might be forward thinking to keep the relationship amicable going forward.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to Microsoft it seems like a pretty complete write up. If the changes weren’t material that might have been part of it too.

And he’s 16. Parents might have had a say.

mikeryanon U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels

They probably distinguish between what they think and what they know. It could very well be they ran a “sting” and made a few transactions through the site and are only charging against those transactions to get extradition started while they assemble the larger case.

mikeryanon What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals

We do, but they tend to be clustered around urban areas. There’s vast swaths of CA that lean much more conservative and more economically challenged that are under served.

I think a lot of people don’t realize you can go 2-2.5 hours out side of SF and be in CA MAGA country.

mikeryanon Recreating Voodoo Graphics and a Late-1990s Gaming PC on an FPGA

Fun Fact. My first “tech job” was tech support at EA in the late 90s. Serious Sam was the FPS of choice for late night LAN parties for the EA tech support and QA teams. Tech support and QA were shared resources. They’d shift people from support to QA in summer for fall/winter holiday releases and back to support around the holidays.

Serious Sam was the one FPS that would run decently on our workstations.

Long story but I got promoted to maintainer of the EA game tech support site which is what got me into coding.

mikeryanon LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'

I can’t speak to how LG does this now but I ran an agency that built Smart TV apps and built one of the first ACR powered apps on LG about 10 years ago. We were working with a company called “Cognitive Networks” which later was bought by Vizio and is now their Inscape product. At that time one use case wasn’t just tracking but actual interactive “sync to broadcast” apps (you can still do this, no one does, and I don’t know why)

At that time during testing Cognitive could literally see what we were playing on our TV (not full video but the frames used for fingerprinting)

They don’t use Cognitive anymore for obvious reasons and there are several audio based ACR solutions but they always had issues with sections of video without much audio to work off of so we’re always considered inferior. They are fine for usage data however.

Anyway my $0.02

mikeryanon Rivian's gambit for full autonomy

Rivian has actually split out the software side to a joint venture with Volkswagen Group (the group independent of the car company which the group owns with others like Audi and Porsche). I think the goal is to have a platform other brands can license

mikeryanon Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger

Agreed. The synergies mentioned above are there but it’s not like one HR team can suddenly handle having twice number of employees and open reqs. HR and accounting tend to scale somewhat linearly to the size of the business. Not to mention that both those orgs have massive tasks to take on as a result of the merger so at least for the next year or two those efficiencies will be hard to realize.

In the case of media orgs like this those efficiencies are even less pronounced because it’s not like you can consolidate product lines.

mikeryanon Paramount Caught Using 'Astroturf' Group to Drum Up Fake Support for Merger

This is wrong

Which part exactly? Seems you just described why the layoffs happen? Two things can be true here, the new company can find cost savings by eliminating redundancies and have to cut deeper than desired to be able to service debt.

mikeryanon New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal

I really don’t understand how these markets survive a competent DOJ considering the rate they’re having to ban people for “insider trading”. Fully appreciate the Unions position here.

mikeryanon Study reveals UnitedHealth's profit margins four times what it claimed [pdf]

I just scanned the doc but I think your question is the core argument of the doc. It explicitly says that United is using standard accounting practices and proposes the “pass through” mechanism as a “better” metric.

Based on the source I, personally, don’t find it to be a credible argument

mikeryanon Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

It’s likely that Iron Mountain needed a court order in order to do this with legal cover.

It’s just a data warehouse and OSS likely had multiple clients data and backups. Iron Mountain can’t let one third party go searching through a defunct customers stuff that has a bunch of additional third parties property intermingled with it. Too many unknowns and potentially litigious third parties.

mikeryanon OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

Every OpenAI news cycle the board members who were unceremoniously dumped in the wake of trying to fire Sam prior to the transition to a “for profit” company seem to be proven right.

mikeryanon Designing Icons

lol. Wish I could have grabbed a pic for this but on mobile the actual Material Icon in the top left is pretty much unreadable.

mikeryanon SPCX is now Wall Street's most shorted new stock

I think the pullback from the initial IPO bump was expected. I think the news here is expectations that it has a lot more downside to come.

Particularly once it gets past the lockup period. If I had to guess I say a lot of folks are thinking a lot of people will sell post lock up and they’re timing their shorts around that date.

mikeryanon Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

In all my CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files I have a line to fix pre-existing issues. I don’t know what it is but every agent I’ve tried through Claude code (including deepseek and GLM) will actively try to avoid fixing pre-existing issues. I even added hooks to Claude and git to try to get them fixed. If I leave a bailout for myself agents will find it sit and ask if it can push with no-verify or an environment variable in the case of Claude hooks instead of trying to fix an issue it didn’t cause.

mikeryanon Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable

That and finishing a statement with an em dash — that’s what AI does.

mikeryanon CarPlay Is Additive

When I bought a Rivian I missed CarPlay. There were a few things that really stood out.

1. Proper Voice Texting

2. Google maps for routing with (good) traffic data.

The Voice Texting just a release or two ago - its okay so far but not as good as CarPlay. Google traffic landed a while back (in Rivian's map which I prefer over Google Maps)

I'll take the voice texting for what is otherwise a very elegant and well designed UI - that keeps getting better.

Full disclosure. Even when I have a rental with CarPlay I just use Spotify and google maps. Both of which are integrated into the Rivian UI. So YMMV

mikeryanon Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal

I’ve been using herdr for about a week. There is visibility into which terminals need attention and you can set up workspaces to organize it. I’ve enjoyed it so far though the key bindings are all over the place - likely due to it trying to avoid existing bindings.

mikeryanon Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

he didn’t solve content moderation.

Considering what character.ai is, maybe he should have at least taken a shot at it.

mikeryanon Show HN: Are You in the Weights?

MICHAEL RYAN HUNGERFORD MASSACRE PERPETRATOR 204 STRENGTH · TOP 35%

For fucks sake.

mikeryanon Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

I started my web dev career in 1999 so my main code references were a combination of O’reilly and “for dummies” books. As a wet behind the ears engineer I’d find myself regularly walking over to my more senior friend Dan’s cubicle for help.

Half the time on the walk over, trying to frame the question in my mind I’d figure out the answer or at least next step. It got to the point where Dan would see me heading towards him and suddenly turn around and he’d as “Figure it out?” And I’d throw him a thumbs up on the way back to my desk.

mikeryanon SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B

It’s all in a stock that may very well be near its zenith when this closes (or maybe not. This is so far past fundamentals it’s impossible to tell).

They’re spending Monopoly money.

It also seems like SpaceX is poised to Hoover up all of Elons companies so it’s might not be “just a space company” for long.

mikeryanon xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

Google also just announced a new equity raise of $80B. I have no idea if doing this via equity vs debt is trying to suck some of the wind out of the IPO Market for Anthropic and OpenAI but it’s going to be interesting to see how the markets deal with all the new equity being floated. Someone isn’t going to hit their raise targets and the later IPOs may be the ones holding the bag.

mikeryanon Open Source Isn't Dead

It’s also now ridiculously easy to simply cherry pick from open source without actually “using” it.

“I need to do foo in my app. Libraries bar and baz do these bits well. Pick the best from each and let’s implement them here”

I’d not be surprised if npmjs.com and its ilk turn into more a reference site than a package manager backend soon.

mikeryanon Sam Altman's Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Concepts

I agree this article doesn’t add to the conversation except as additional color that belongs in a larger story.

I think it’s about as strong as trying to absolve Sam by saying “he’s a CEO so he does CEO things.”

mikeryanon Sam Altman's Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Concepts

Well there's the whole issue that Open AI wasn't a "business" when it started, it was in fact a non-profit focused on safe AGI for humanity. That said the whole "He's a CEO thing" is a convenient escape hatch now that it's a for-profit business (just ignore the whole way it got there).

Just because you're a successful CEO doesn't mean you're not a shitty person or immune from so-called "hit pieces".

mikeryanon Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

JavaScript Temporal. Not sure knowing what a "workday" is in each timezone is in it's scope but it's the much needed and improved JS, date API (granted with limited support to date)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

mikeryanon The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'

No. Just no, this is backwards. Bands, especially bands early in their career made money from touring. Merch was always a huge driver. Bands got “loans” to record albums with that had to get paid back first before they made any money from album sales.

It’s better now because artists can record pro quality music at home and go direct to consumer with TikTok and Spotify.

mikeryanon We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk

That’s not how the term is being used here.

In this case “red lines” as a term is being used as “lines than can not be crossed”

Anthropic wanted guardrails on how their tech was used. DOD was saying that wasn’t acceptable.

mikeryanon We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

It also doesn’t describe any of the why the additional security measures were put in place. It sounds arbitrary, but could be an insurance or regulatory requirement that the acquiring company needed to meet. Similar for the login issue, it’s suboptimal but what constraints caused that solution to be put in place? And why wasn’t it fixed?

Sans context there’s not a lot to complain about here.