starkrights

I don’t think it’d be related to this if the defcon presentation was in 2025, but your description reminds me of this HN post about getting Claude to leak memories: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48916975

“I don’t understand why people love it so much” and “the system has friction that could be improved” are two extremely different statements with vastly different communications.

While it may be constructive to point out and discuss that, hey CarPlay has deficiencies and really could stand to be improved in XYZ way, vaguely gesturing at CarPlay and saying “I don’t get why people love this so much” and tacitly implying they’re wrong or stupid for doing so, is just unhelpful.

If you’d have started the whole conversation with “I get why people appreciate the improvement, but CarPlay still sucks because it doesn’t work well in vehicles you don’t own”, we’d be having an entirely different conversation right now, actually discussing and commiserating the downsides and technical limitations that Apple should definitely fix.

But alas, the message implied by “why do people like this if it’s objectively bad”, is that said people are stupid- not that we should do it. And “objectively bad” is also super broad, and dismissive of the all of the things that a lot of people probably consider objectively good, like the decoupling of updates from auto manufacturers, and some of the UI/UX behavior hereto undescribed.

I wasn’t so much fervently defending “my baby” as I was: explaining “why people love it so much”, which was the question asked; bitching about the systems of yesteryear because they sucked ass more notably than CarPlay does, at least imo; and objecting to the premise of your discussion hook for being vague and (very mildly) inflammatory.

Your response is also inflammatory. Id have loved to complain about the downsides of CarPlay and where it fails, but you basically just called me a whiny fanboy for, at the core of my response, objecting to a contentless question.

What does “not a good system in an objective sense” even mean? In what objective measures do you see it fail in?

I and basically everyone I know love it because it and android auto are made by actual UI/UX designers that aren’t embedded systems engineers- resulting in an infotainment screen that isn’t a complete and utter piece of shit, and has actual functionality. I use my phone for everything in my car anyways, especially navigation, which historically is not included in a cars infotainment system without subscription and/or vendor lock. In that one singular regard, CarPlay is literally infinity percent better than every single built in infotainment system, because I can use my fucking cars built in screen instead of my tiny phone display to navigate using software that is infinitely more well made than whatever shit is on my cars native system (a brief note: my angry tone is not directed at you or your lack of agreement with my opinion, but at how awful I perceived the car infotainment systems of yore to be. God they were useless.)

For every objective measure I can come up with in my head and not type out, it passes with flying colors compared to the alternative- so I’d love to know where your perception differs.

> certainly possible to achieve the same goal.

The barrier to entry is infinitely lower with flock than through that process though, and the scope of data collection is infinitely wider. If a police chief wants to stalk their ex or their boyfriend, they login to their floxk and search <my ex girlfriends license plate>, and acquire their entire travel history for the entirety of the time flock has existed, through highways, through non residential thoroughfares, etc.

If they want to do that via ring doorbells, they have to go ask every single person in a neighborhood to hand that over under the pretense of a law enforcement operation. And, again, those doorbells are not covering highways or large residential thoroughfares, and they’re not connected enough, nor equipped with the technology to automatically read and store license plate data forever. The LEO would have to go through every single doorbell, manually document every single car/plate that passes through, and cross reference their own markings of location-to-timestamp documentation to determine whatever path the person they wanted to track. I think it’s obvious that this is an arduous task- one that could absolutely be undertaken to pursue serious crime! But one that would be pretty damned hard to abuse due to the work involved. And also, again, is only residential!! Because ring doorbells are not posted on the side of every major interstate highway and city main road!!!

Flock automates every ounce of that completely, and with an insanely larger scope! It’s not hard to imagine that a police officer going around asking every owner of a doorbell cam for their footage would generate some hubub amongst the community about “what is this for?”, and if the what-for was invalid, generate some backlash!

Instead, a person with access to flock faces absolutely 0 friction tracking anyone, (basically) anywhere at any time in the last X years since flock has existed, **and not just residentially**! I want to point out that your own point, “police can ask the home owner”, is restricted to a very specific locale, places with doorbell cameras! These things are being installed with such frequency on so many major thoroughfares that is possible to track far, far beyond “someone left home / someone came home”, or “someone was infront of these houses or in this neighborhood.” That is an extremely significant difference.

I do want to say, I respect your inquisivity, and your willingness to ask and explore the issue. My genuine apologies for the dismissiveness present in some of my remarks. That’s not really the spirit of HN discussion, and I apologize for that.

I mean, yeah? I dont understand your lack of perceived separation. It’s seems pretty plain that there is no interconnected network of doorbell cameras that anyone can use to track someone across every possibly doorbell camera that filmed them[1]. A doorbell camera is for an individual to see what’s happening immediately on their property.

A flock camera is connected to every other flock camera, ever, period. It’d be bad enough if a whole town were tracking the movements of all of their citizens constantly and storing that data forever to be searchable without a warrant (because of the extremely obvious flashing abuse vector that has been shown to be taken advantage of multiple times- give the old google a search for police officers stalking exes and their partners via flock, or flock employee spying on children’s gymnastics gym)

BUT, it’s not even just that! You can track people everywhere that there are flock cameras if you are a part of the flock network! So you can stalk people everywhere in the country with 0 oversight. It is an insanely massive privacy issue.

It’s universal persisted tracking of literally everyone’s movements 24/7 everywhere there is a flock camera, persisted presumably forever, and currently accessible to an extremely large amount of people without any authorization or judicial check required. (Many would go to comment on the police demographic being unstable and/or uniquely situated to abuse this, but arguments about that may or may not be moot to you depending on your opinion of the police)

I feel like it’s plainly clear that any doorbell camera does not do that. Even if most doorbell cams are cloud enabled, I’d imagine it’s significantly harder to subpoena a doorbell company for “every camera you have on exactly this street that could’ve done this thing”, and infinitely more so to force them to give you all of their data history and continue to do so forever. Flock just does that as their business.

Doorbell cameras are also not particularly capable of tracking you on every major travel route you take, as they’re primarily on, well, residential doors. Maybe some businesses have them? But they certainly aren’t able to resolve every license plate that travels through a segment of highway. Not to mention that they just don’t do that at present at all anyways, even in the places they’re installed- they just record motion, and sometimes use AI to point out “a car drove by” or “a person walked up to the door.” Not “license plate XYZ1234 drove through highway 12 at 8:34 pm”.

I feel like your statement just kinda ignores all of this and is saying “well yeah, but besides all the mass movement tracking and data storage and correlation, it’s basically like a doorbell camera because they both record people/cars and store them somehow, right?”

Which, I mean yeah I guess? But the “besides” part is kind of entirely the massive problem.

[1] well, not yet.

10 year old is still DDR4, and ddr4 is still plenty fine for gaming workloads. AM4 still has some solid options out there, the 5800x3d has 3d vcache and would be an insane upgrade over any… quad core? 6th gen intel? Not sure what the AMD at the time was. 14th gen intel supports both ddr4/5 if you wanted the ram upgrade potential, but it… well, I remember it being pretty sketchy perf/degradation wise for a while, so maybe don’t go with them. I understand the sucky feeling that you’re sidegrading instead of investing in a new beastly rig for a reasonable price- believe me I’ve been in the same boat since all this GPU bullshit started. I got lucky choosing to upgrade to ddr5 years ago, but I elected not to get a GPU out of a lack of clairvoyance :(. Still though- I upgraded from an i7 6700k in 2023. The 5800x3d released a year prior to the CPU I picked up. Granted I went to zen 5, but holy shit I didn’t not realize how fucking old that 6700k was haha. The 3dvcache on AMD CPUs is a crazy, crazy boost- in addition to the fact that modern CPUs are already bounds and leagues ahead of 2016, and I would go to bet that even if it’s technically a sidegrade, you probably wouldn’t feel too horrible about the money spent. (I really want to say that you’d feel pretty satisfied with it it, but I can’t discount that I also jumped up to a higher tier zen 5 cpu, and don’t have explicit experience with the 5800x or other AM4 stuff. ymmv!)

It’s definitely a weird scenario.

It seems everyone in the Durable Medical Equipment space for diabetes stuff just wants everything to be a smartphone app now- which is fine honestly, it’s convenient for those that want to use it, but I’ve been informed that many manufacturers (at least a good number of Continuous Glucose Monitor makers) have completely forgone native controllers these days. Omnipod just seems to have said “we’ll make one program because maintaining two could be problematic for consistency (and probably certification) reasons”, and then made the logical-enough extrapolation that their native controller can just be an android device. They just chose a cheap/shit one- which is fair! It runs AN app! But it also means I have to keep USB A to C chargers on me 24/7 :/

I’m just glad they at least do that, as smartphone-only options are problematic for a number of reasons, among them being the lack of ability to bring them into restricted areas. I hadn’t thought about it before, but it’d also be a problem for events where they use those stupid yondr bags, or even schools that use them now.

I guess you could just get your own little junkpile android for the sole purpose of being a controller, but still. sigh

I know of something expensive that omits it too! My insulin pump controller is a junkpile android phone (a NUU Mobile N5004L for the curious) whose only purpose in life is to run a singular android app.

The device charges via usb-c, but refuses to do so if the charger is any relatively modern usb-c based brick. Only usb-a!

I’ve seen from a couple of places that a valver has commented that they can’t say exactly what the original price goal was, but that you can get an idea from the price increase of the steamdeck (~$200 usd)

That wouldve put the steam machine somewhere around the $800 mark for the base edition, which would’ve been so, so much sweeter of a value proposition.

Ran at ~15-16 fps on my iPhone 17 air, horizontally (2211x1245) , for about a minute until my phone got ridiculously hot and thermal throttled down to 10-12fps.

Where did you find information on the nature of the attack?

The source txtfile has since either been dos'd or deleted (at least it was when I tried to access)

Someone dumped the content into a google doc on reddit[1] if anyone's interested.

[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MTktVSwTUM5I_w7bKNGj94sT...

Can you actually explain why the phrase you cited from OP is wrong? You say that ~”files need to be linked to from somewhere” is correct. How is a file linked to from somewhere [on the internet] if it’s not being served on the internet that Google crawls (ie, HTML)? The only alternative is in… API calls? That Google probably isn’t crawling?

“Fiverr might be hosting public HTML somewhere” seems like an entirely reasonable alternative phrase to “these links must be linked from somewhere [that Google can crawl] “, at least to someone who is only superficially familiar with how search works.

The distinction you imply is obvious is not, and your point is thus rather confusing to someone who is not you.

This site never ceases to surprise me with new username jumpscares (no negative connotation intended)

I had no idea you were an (ex?) sysadmin! Apologies for the offtopic driveby reply, but what a small world we live in.

I'm entirely unfamiliar with the vr rendering space, so all I have to go on is what (I think) your comment implies.

Is the current state of VR rendering really just rendering and transporting two videostreams independent of eachother? Surely there has to be at least some academic prior-art on the subject, no?

I think it depends on whether or not you have good 6ghz connectivity. The headset comes with a 6ghz usb dongle pluggable to your rendering PC for locales without a 6ghz router or good 6ghz penetration, but due to 6ghz lack of wall-penetrating capability, that's probably going to be more/less line-of-sight. The LTT video [0] does explicitly mention the ability to use either mode of connection though- over your existing wifi network, or via their 6ghz dongle. It's somewhat unclear if the headset would function over a non 6ghz connection (regardless of quality- supposedly 2.4/5ghz VR-over-wifi is pretty rough due to channel congestion and maybe bandwidth limits)

The headset is also capable of being its own renderer, ie, it can do 'mobile' vr games (android apks like on the quest, eg). That functionality wouldn't need a connection to your PC at all.

[0]: https://youtu.be/dU3ru09HTng?t=445 - timestamped at wireless segment

Per the LTT video [0], the new Steam Frame controllers will have a (separately purchasable) accessory pack which includes a knuckles-like strap. Supposedly the controllers have enough capacitive-sensing ("on every input surface, and on the grips") for knuckles-like five finger tracking.

Linus says "just like" the valve knuckles a couple times, but who knows how they'll feel comparatively. I've personally never used the knuckles, but they seem like they'd have a different enough feel from these to maybe make a difference.

[0]: https://youtu.be/dU3ru09HTng?t=246 - timestampped @ controller section.

Are you saying that windows users are supposed get the steam hardware once a month?

I’ve had steam installed on (and more/less used daily on) probably 4-5 different windows installs since roughly 2016, and I’ve never seen it more than once a year.

It doesn't take being outside of the west for this to be relevant. Two places I currently frequent, A) the software development offices of a fortune 500 company, and B) the entire office & general-spaces (classrooms, computer labs, etc) of a sizeable university, have 1080p monitors for >80% of their entire monitor deployment.

The zed blog has an early post[0] talking some about their decision. Mainly just decrying their experience of impossible-to-meet timing deadlines for something as basic as 60fps on electron.

It doesnt really do a tech breakdown of why it’d be impossible CPU side, but mentions a couple of things about their design process for it.

[0]: https://zed.dev/blog/videogame

What a neat thing to see crop up on hackernews. I did a mini report on guédelon in one of my French courses in Uni. The name immediately threw me back to memories of trying to describe some of the ‘technical’ aspects of the project in my shoddy early French, haha.

Not sure of the rest of the world, but at least in the US, patenting “software” is a pretty murky subject legally (at least it feels that way when trying to do some basic research on it) Something that seems common among sources discussing it is that “Software Related Inventions” (eg, a computer that does XYZ) can be patentable, but software/code itself is not literally patentable. Seemingly, because we’re talking about libraries that would be pure software, not a product for sale based on it, you wouldn’t be able patent libraries like you’re talking about.

I’d provide links to some discourse of this, but honestly I think it’s better to search “can you patent software in the US” and do a brief read of various sources, because the terminology between them can seem somewhat counterfactual to eachother.

A slippery slope is fallacious when the argument is made with little evidence or reasoning to connect the current state/action to the supposed bottom of the slope. Whether or not you agree with the reasoning is one thing, but there’s been a great deal of argument and discourse talking about the ways we are approaching worse and worse things, and the ways we have purportedly already progressed down the metaphorical slope. Acknowledging fallacy is one thing, but categorically dismissing all arguments that discuss the (observed and/or potential) repercussions that can arise from current trends and actions on account “slippery slope is a fallacy”, with absolutely zero critical thinking applied to argue against the reasoning and/or alleged evidence of the slope is, well, unreasonable, I feel.

You can argue that the original comment just said “it’s a slippery slope!”, and so that specific conversation is not very valuable, but there’s a lot of surrounding discourse that makes “haha you’re wrong/your topic is invalid because you only said slippery slope!” Is obtuse at best.

And if I didn’t clarify enough, it’s not as if “slippery slopes” don’t and/or physically can’t exist. It’s just that frequently people claim there is one with no argument to support it, just that “it is” a slippery slope, and that it is scary/true just because of the way that it is. That’s fallacy.

Why is that?

It doesn’t capture the spirit of a group of friends getting together to play video games in a shared space? Or there’s a different definition of the LAN party spirit that somehow entirely precludes that aspect?

Like I could understand saying it misses out on the aspect of literally bringing your individual PCs, missing out on the neatness of everyone’s individuality as another commenter pointed out, but I don’t think they’d agree that the in person, gaming in the same place aspect is entirely precluded from “the spirit”

Good faith clarification: you’re saying you believe that preventing chicks from being born causes an equal amount of suffering to an animal as the (what would otherwise be) physical extermination of those chicks?

> a program that doesn’t matter anymore

The rest of this comment has, though gratuitously snarky, a point, but I don’t think claiming that 7zip is irrelevant as an independent statement is even remotely coherent.

Never seen WAI before, all I can come up with is Works As Intended or Web Accessibility Initiative?

Anyways- jail breaking requires being or remaining on certain iOS versions on certain specific hardware models. You can’t “just jailbreak” your apple device that you daily drive/use regularly. If you’re not on an old version on the right hardware already, you’re fucked. And waiting for a new jailbreak exploit is a (anecdotally, for me at least) nondeterministic amount of time on the order of O(years), with a significant probability that it will not be relevant for whatever device you’re waiting on.

I had the same reaction. Nano leaf is extremely cool for that.

Is there a ‘right’ (or simple/direct) way to generate this using various buildchains? I remember setting this up so I could use Sublime with intellisense a while ago, and finding that I could only get it to generate with a specific compiler chain on windows (ninja I think?)

Minor annoyance to have to make my c make project generate buildchain files for a compiler I’m not using & copy that file into my project root to commit it- unrelated to the original question, but also annoying that I have to manually generate it every time I make significant codebase changes.