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pinebox

153 karma · joined October 22, 2016

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pinebox··on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora
As a place to park some cash, sure. But if I were running Disney there would be no character deal and I would need some kind of proprietary technology license that keeps certain AI improvements out of the hands of my competitors.

Disney really giving away the store here.

pinebox··on The 'Toy Story' You Remember
> However! that doesnt affect the colour.

That has been something I've wondered about since seeing frame comparisons of (probably) telecine'ed prints of The Matrix vs. the myriad home video releases.

pinebox··on This World of Ours (2014) [pdf]
This all seemed very clever until I read the bio and learned that the author works for Microsoft -- the last company that has any business being flip about security. Bro needs to STFU and get on with the security drudgery, because his customer's opposition very definitely is the Mossad.
pinebox··on Death by a Thousand Slops
Maybe a curl Patreon for would-be H1 contributors? Just need to figure out a donation amount that is trivial for legitimate security researchers, but too rich for spammers.
pinebox··on Gandi March 9, 2025 incident postmortem
nearlyfreespeech.net
pinebox··on Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies on YouTube?
I imagine the selection seems random because these are films that WB has the most favorable contracts for -- So there is no need for them to track number of streams so they can send some director or production company penny checks every month, etc.
pinebox··on How the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain's strangest pub chain
The article never hints at a business or regulatory angle. The author repeatedly has no answer for the sudden (and often long-term) closures.

After the first anecdote about the couple getting evicted shortly after spending weeks of 12-16 hour days cleaning a derelict property I thought it was just some asshole miser stealing sweat equity from would-be proprietors, but the larger picture seems more like mental illness than pure avarice.

pinebox··on D&D is Anti-Medieval
I have long considered the relationship of OD&D to historical medievalism as equivalent to the vaporwave genre vs. music actually produced in the 80's.
pinebox··on Blood Disorder: Unveiling the Mystery of My Poisoning in Sweden
Yes, the wife could be trying to set herself up to claim that she was mislead/mistaken about the substance she was "supplementing" her husband's diet with.

Creepy story no matter how you read it, though.

pinebox··on No More Blue Fridays
Initially I was inclined to disagree ("these things should always fail safe") however with more and more stuff being pushed into the kernel it's hard to say that you're wrong or exactly where a line needs to be drawn between "minimally functional system" and "dangerously out of control system".

I think until we discover a technology that forces commercial software vendors to employ functioning QA departments none of this will really solve anything.

pinebox··on The End-of-Line Story (2004)
When this decision was made for MS-DOS (and it may not have even been made then, but simply brought in from 86-DOS which may have cargo-culted it from CP/M-80) it is very unlikely that "what ARPAnet requires" was a consideration. Networking was not included with microcomputer operating systems at that time and network compatibility between systems from different vendors was an exotic requirement on top of that. Most microcomputers in the late 70's and early 80's either only talked to their own kind or were (more commonly) not networked at all.

People today forget or don't realize how provincial and siloed computing used to be. Even as late as the 90's it was very common for institutions to have multiple LAN's that were isolated from each other simply due to platform incompatibility.

pinebox··on Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
It was the 80's equivalent of green text messages vs. blue text messages.
pinebox··on Washington's Lottery forced to pull site after creating AI porn of lotto user
The most disturbing thing about this is that the lottery couldn't seem to confirm if it happened or not.
pinebox··on Recent 'MFA Bombing' Attacks Targeting Apple Users
Linkedin will silently change your visibility settings without your consent.
pinebox··on AI-generated content, other unfavorable practices get CNET on Wikipedia banlist
Stating the thesis then (repeatedly) re-stating it with a (very) slightly different wording was a red flag. Professional journalists don't write like that, but AI and schoolkids trying to pad out their essays do.

I'm guessing that a human did edit this AI output, just not very well.

pinebox··on Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years
> the new Microsoft Teams and its incoming-call notification sound

I absolutely have this issue and would love to know more about any suspected causes.

pinebox··on A teen's fatal plunge into the London underworld
Agreed, OP has seen too many movies. Other suspicious things (some of which suggest a longer-brewing confrontation):

- The "hint of a Russian accent" that Zac supposedly put on (but nobody except Shamji ever noticed)

- How quickly Shamji and his associates were to claim that Zac "seemed suicidal"

- The "heating up knives and clearing up blood" text from Shamji hours before Zac's death

- The traces of blood spotted by the police when they searched the apartment Zac jumped from

But hey, the cops asked a few questions and none of these shady characters instantly signed a confession so what more could they possibly do?

pinebox··on A reporter's journey into how the U.S. funded the bomb
No surprise, since it's how U.S. military spending has worked for our entire lives. Military: "We need $x to build something so secret we can't tell you what it is." Lawmaker: "Add a few more zeros, put at least $y of it into my state, and I'll sign whatever you want."

The real life version of Radar covering the clipboard with his hands while Col. Blake signs something that is "top secret".

pinebox··on That Old NetBSD Server, Running Since 2010
Thinking back on all the breaking changes I've dealt with since 2010: 32-bit Linux distros discontinued, SMB incompatible between Windows versions (and samba versions) without tweaks, root encryption certificates added/removed, OpenSSL requiring all SSH keys manually updated: This NetBSD machine may have been running for all that time, but no way was it unmanaged. Some Morlock was turning the cranks and oiling the gears.
pinebox··on Gandi.net – Pricing Update
I'm moving to netim.com which is another French registrar. They run their own email and seem to have a good reputation.
pinebox··on BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
Free version of TextWrangler was the sweet spot, for me. BBEdit is more than I need for day-to-day and seems comparatively slow. Not an "upgrade" I wanted.
pinebox··on What happened with ASUS routers this morning?
Because router vendors need some kind of "secret sauce" in order to keep selling routers, otherwise the whole thing becomes a commodity you can buy from anywhere. This is also why OpenWRT is unable to utilize all the features on a lot of routers: The closed source firmware and software pieces needed to do so have yet to be deciphered.
pinebox··on BuzzFeed News is shutting down
Sort of like moving your smelly dumpster in front of your classy restaurant to increase the dumpster's reputation.
pinebox··on The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS
There are probably some important Apple patents that would have been good candidates for this use case.
pinebox··on Disposable Root Servers
That was my first thought. Shut down voluntarily in 2019 for no particular reason after 22 years? Mysteriously back and even better? Doesn't pass the smell test.

The page talks a big game about hating criminals, but these days if you don't put up a cookie banner RoboCop will shoot you in the dick. And if someone really isn't a criminal we've got a fix for that, too: Just ship them to a country where they are!

On the other hand maybe this post-HSA, post-Snowden world has made me jaded and the site really is just good clean fun.

pinebox··on Crazy Thin ‘Deep Insert’ ATM Skimmers
Thanks, but the post you linked is making me irrationally angry. Why does a gas pump card reader need full internet connectivity?! It's outrageous! Just use the two wires to talk to a head unit in the building! Then it brings up the gas pump advertising screens which are already a sore point for me (two conveniently located stations have these, so I can't go there anymore because I find the accompanying audio intolerable).

The whole situation smells like it involves a lot of vendor lock-in, too (which I always hate to see).

pinebox··on Tell HN: After 10 years of experiments, custom username emails receive no spam
Since 2005 I have been using unique randomly generated email addresses for every retailer, rebate, forum, SaaS, etc. Out of these ~550 unguessable addresses I have deactivated ~15 due to security incidents on the other end. Notables from this short list:

- digikey.com (Feb. 2021)

- gamasutra.com (Jun. 2017)

- buydig.com

- kickstarter.com (May 2017)

- seagate.com (2016)

Of course this doesn't include the addresses I have had to disable because companies either started sending me "legitimate" promotional emails I did not request or they did not respect my unsubscribe requests (I believe this is what we used to call "ham").

pinebox··on GoDaddy locks out derivatives of Chrome
That switch from their own webmail solution to Microsoft a year or two ago was the final straw for me and the single domain I still had with GoDaddy. If I had wanted to use MS email I would have been using it already. Transferred to Gandi.net and while the webmail isn't as featureful (Roundcube) at least it's cheaper.
pinebox··on Is the DTS vs. Dolby war effectively over?
> The only real difference is that the aspect ratio of the film may change during some specific ‘Enhanced’ sections. To my mind that’s a mockery of being “as the director intended”; one must surely doubt that a director would choose to switch ratios mid-movie (unless part of the film design, a la Oliver Stone, say, or the extraordinary genre-busting Spiderman into the Spiderverse).

It is not unheard of for newer films to have specific scenes that were shot in IMAX (and for those scenes to change aspect ratio accordingly when presented in an IMAX theater). One of the first search results on the topic:

https://www.avforums.com/threads/aspect-ratio-changing-durin...

Wikipedia goes more in depth on specific films and the amount of IMAX time in each:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX#Feature_films

As shooting in IMAX is expensive and difficult, we can presume this to be the director's intent.

pinebox··on FreshTomato
It's considerably heavier than older Tomato versions, so if you have a 10-year-old router that's already running fine on an older Tomato variant I don't recommend it.
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