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I don't think it's some conspiracy to make anyone more likely to get malware. Instead it's that for their business model of mostly being used on business PCs where the same dozen tools are installed all over the world they can be overzelous in protection and it is what most customers want. Really, they should leave the "piracy is malware" thing in defender, it should just be off by default if your PC isn't connected to a domain or setup as "work PC".

Until recently the exception for me was music software/VSTs. I definitely did get a few infections over the years doing so, but after finding some safe sources it went pretty well. To some extent, I still see advise it, actually, just with purchasing first but never using the key, just because DRM in the music software world is so aggressively bad. iLok is a cancer on that industry.

I think to an extent Microsoft is the guilty party here. For may cracks Windows Defender will trip saying "Win32/Keygen" even if there's no actual malware

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/malware-encyclo...

This trains people that do a lot of piracy to be used to turning off their antivirus to let something through, which is fine until it's not. It's like drugs, if we know a subset of the population will do them no matter what, we should make it safe for them to the extent we can. False positives, causing people to ignore actual positives, creates a market for these things.

I think this sort of just points to modern security tooling is more-or-less redundant: The leads in the title "Loose on an internal network"... don't do that. You will never, ever, ever configure everything on your network to be 100% safe, keep everything up to date, etc. Crowdstrike, Sophos, don't care- you can't run anything that will catch everything, so the answer is boring: Isolate and prevent any intrusion to begin with. Limit external connections, use sane firewalls, don't depend on cloud infra, and KISS.

If this didn't work, every single small to medium business would be a malware aquarium - and while some are - generally most are fine because the boring, basic stuff and not going out of your way to misconfigure the hell out of things or give anything more permissions than necessary is 95% of the battle. Have guests using your wifi? Have a guest wifi (Vlan) for them. Congrats, you're not already doing better than like 2/3 of easy targets.

Like, this would be interesting if if was "We told OpenClaw our external IP and said go to town" but some insecurity in the internal network is often just outright necessary to not be a total PITA when doing day-to-day operations.

This can still be a useful testing idea for some orgs, but I feel like the applications are very, very limited.

I suspect there's a lot of people on the 2028 refresh train. If you bought a 1700 in 2017/2018 - which a lot of people did, because it was so good $/perf, you could ride the AM4 platform to a 5900(x/xt) now and be still pretty happy, but AM4 is a dead end now and the X570 motherboards are hard to find. So, if you want more PCIe, DDR5, etc. it'll be time to jump once it starts to feel sluggish for high end tasks (gaming, etc.) around that time.

If you need Docx compatibility to interface with the rest of the world, are you better off with the at-least open source option or the sign-your-life-in-eula-and-O365-subscription option.

This isn't rhetorical. I don't know which is worse. I lean disliking Microsoft more, because jazz hands at Windows11, and OnlyOffice at least runs on Linux, but it's still not a fun position to be in.

LibreOffice and other alts definitely don't have as good of Docx compat.

Hi Tim, it's Jim, your manager. Please stick to the officially released statement:

"We tried to put ads in our product and it made people upset, upon realizing that this has angered our already paying users, we realize we should try again in a month. We're also aware GitHub is down, and are doing our best to deliver you a single 9 of reliability"

This helps us establish a strong, cohesive brand image inline with what customers of GitHub expect.

---

Edit: I don't mean anything bad to Tim here, seems like a nice guy with good technical experience, etc. Rather, I'm expressing the almost comical extent to which I and - to the best of my understanding - many other community members see GitHub in a very negative light now, being unreliable and, as the article points out, enshitified. So, this is at GitHub, Not Tim, it's just addressed to him for the bit.

Tim, I do actually appreciate you responding to this thread and if you do have the power to make things better, using that power to do so.

This is definitely fluff, but the fluff is sorta news in itself: This reads as "We messed up, we messed up because we're putting all our resources into moving to Azure, and we're going to keep doing that" to me.

Or you have a heavy, inbalanced object in your car you don't want sliding, something fragile in tow you don't want to have fast decelaration, or just don't have super-human reaction time since some light have extremely fast yellows.

Or, a deer jumped out on the side and you briefly looked away at it.

Or you could tell the driver behind you wasn't slowing down, so the safer option is to go.

Or. Or. Or. Real life is messy, and there's a million reasons to go though a yellow instead of slowing down.

TT Tunings: See https://www.guyguitars.com/truetemperament/eng/tt_thidellF1....

I don't know that's it's obvious standard would matter, if it was actually 12TET, I would expect shifting up/down to be fine. And, really, it should still be, and I think would give you different just intonated keys if you do, and you shouldn't even need to re-intonate since you didn't move the octave. I think it's just that they don't tell you the offsets you need easily if you do this.

I don't think TT can get much closer to 12TET than a normal, well intonated guitar, even if they explicitly went for 12TET. I'm not certain, but my intuition is that given the placement of the octave (12th fret) is literally the halfway point and you can already adjust intonation, beyond that equal temperament should just be placing the frets on a log scale inbetween, which should look normal - no squiggle required.

IIRC, On a piano, the complexity of intonation is because you don't have harmonics so much as partials - the way they work, you don't get perfect harmonics, a string with a 100Hz fundamental won't necessarily have harmonics at 200Hz, 300Hz, etc. it 'll be peaks at different multiplies, and IIRC not spaced consistently even between partials. This makes it so you may want to tune so the partials are pleasant sounding even if it makes the fundamental off a bit. Mostly reciting things from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoKVuo-87l8 from memory here, you might give it a watch.

Tuning can be a problem even in the studio if your guitar is a pain to tune. I have a 7 string floyd that legitimately takes about half an hour to get right every time, but the stability is great such that (assuming little temp variance) it'll stay in tune for months.

As for sucking, sucking is the first step to not sucking. Also, if you though enough ambient and distortion pedals at it, even suck can sound ethereal ;)

Another victim of True Temperament fret marketing - no, it's not closer to a piano (12TET). It's actually further off for some scales. They use "Thidell Formula One temperament" and it's why they recommend a programmable tuner that can handle it, see https://support.strandbergguitars.com/article/257-how-to-tun...

So, it will be closer to JI for some scales, further for others.

If you really care, imho, you should just get either a fretless or a scalloped and learn to hear it and adjust yourself.

Also, guitars go out of tune constantly unless they have something like an Evertune. Additionally, without VERY good fretting technique (no pressing too hard or slight, accidental bending) the True Temperament frets won't matter that much anyway.

Instead, they do make it particularly awful to use any non-standard tunings.

I have a lot of weird guitars (Fretless, scalloped, MIDI guitars, even a 7-string with a septaphonic pickup so I can get a different out from each string!) but didn't get TT because if you actually read and figure out it's not closer to 12TET, which it seems their marketing implies, it feels sorta scammy.

I feel like the price here is a bit dorky, at $10/yr, sure. $30/yr? No.

They obviously know some people just want to make one quick purchase decision and that's why they have a much more expensive, single month plan - but then, just make it pay for 1 week access for like $5 and don't make me have to remember to cancel.

I'd happily give them $10/yr, but $30/yr is better off just spending more on a given product under the assumption money=quality for anything below $500. Anything more expensive, and there's other review sites. Just all around weird pricing.

I'm a guitarist, but also have a modular.

With the right interface, I think the synth can be more expressive. Look at the Haken Continuum or ExpressiveE Osmose - both can be used with something like the Expert Sleepers FH-2 to get MPE data to the modular.

I do see your point, and agree the amount of articulation you can do with guitar is hard to beat, but I do think a synth can win, if the setup is built for it.

So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again?

I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups.

The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.

Being instant-on is so, so cool. I really like seeing projects like this and Adafruit's Fruit Jam as they really show "Yeah, by having all this junk in the way, we do lose some things"

Absolutely would give something like this to a kid as a first computer.

> This is opinion, not fact

Not OP, but it wasn't presented as a fact. Literally used the word Seams.

> There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them

Seatbelts? Circuit breakers? Literally any safety equipment. You're required to have them because it's not just good for you, but expensive to society if hospital beds are low or there's not enough firetrucks to go around.

Similarly, if you're polluting more than you have to be due to the source of your electricity, that's bad for everyone. I also rent, but I still understand that it's to the public's benefit that home owners (a class that is already above me in assets and wealth) be given motivation to consume cleaner energy if I don't want to have the climate get even worse. It's the same thing, just the effects feel less direct. That doesn't make them any less valid.

You've already stopped replying, but I think an anecdotal stories might do you some good:

When I was 18, I had a situationship with a girl with abusive parents. One night she texted me to go get her because they were being awful (Mostly to each other) and she wanted to get away from it. When I took her back, even though they had told her she could go in the first place, they were angry with her for being out. The dad, angry with me, yelled at ~10PM and pointed a gun at me in my car.

Latter, the police came by my place and tried to give me a Disturbing the Peace citation. I felt wronged: My only involvement had been to remove a younger person from an already un-peaceful situation! The girl's dad had pointed a gun at ME. I wanted to defend myself.

My mom is a lawyer. She went with me to the station when the police wanted to question me, and she told me to just shut up. Don't answer any questions. Even if it was defending myself. Just. Shut. Up.

She was right, but it was still hard. At one point she kicked me pretty hard under the table to tell me to not talk as the office kept trying to get me to. By doing so, they didn't have enough evidence to do anything. They couldn't press charges, so nothing happened. I would've been innocent either way, and would've won any case, but it was sure a lot easier and avoid a waste of everyone's time for me to not defend myself, because by not defending myself then, I didn't have to waste time in court.

Years later, the incident itself is irrelevant. I doubt anyone else by my mom and I remember it - the notable bit was that the entire situation ended that night because I didn't let my strong desire to show my innocence and wrongful persecution win over the advice of my lawyer-mom telling to STFU.

Now, this isn't to say there aren't time where being very, very vocal is the right call. I could rant and rave to you about the time I really pissed in the cheerios of https://www.scanoss.com/ (With some of it happening here on HN, and me actually "Doxxing" one of their employees after he posted on the HN thread claiming to not be affiliated and accusing me of "falsifying information, impersonation, and even extortion" which was comical levels of bullshit.) but I had public opinion firmly on my side, getting constant pings in discord and slack servers as people wanted to know the latest juicy details and how I was sticking it to them.

Full recap https://opguides.info/posts/scanoss/

But optics matter: It was a David and Goliath situation, where the entire incident happened in a short time frame, and as an individual I wasn't representing anybody other than myself. Those are the factors that change your situation.

You're involving Adafruit in drama and posting quickly, not as formal, adult response.

You're a golliath too, with Adafruit being a pretty big name that everyone in this community knows.

You're involving years old drama, where details are murky and intent and other relationships aren't easy to understand from the outside.

All of that combined makes you look bad, regardless of you're the "good guy" or "bad guy" here. Optics matter.

Sparkfun, by being vague and making an at least surface-level professional page here controlled the optics pretty well. It's only on the surface - as others point out, there's definitely some smells to it too - but rash, fast posting from an individual is what's making the optics bad for you - just like how the CTO of ScanOSS directly responding in my situation made him get over 100 thumbs downs on the GitHub thread in that story.

I think, honestly, that everyone involved - you, the person that's saying you dox'd them, Limor, etc. are great people doing great things that got a little too riled up and let things explode into public drama when really even just being the bigger person and making your FOSS Teensy pin-compatible board would've been retaliation enough in a way that nobody would've seen you as anything but the good guys for.

Honestly, if I were you, even if you believe you did nothing wrong, I'd apologize. Say you're sorry for using their real name. Say making extra accounts to contact them when they didn't want to be wasn't cool. Say you felt hurt, and have been stressed, but didn't realize how what you did would affect them. I honestly don't think you meant to dox anyone, because I don't think you saw it as doxxing. So say that, and say you're sorry. Probably in private first, if you mean it.

I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707 sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.

I had a seaboard. They didn't catch on because the surface isn't very consistent, it's hard to actually hit a note and not bend without setting the "dead zone" pretty large, and the surface itself is just not a great texture to play on.

The ExpressiveE Osmose is proving to be quite popular. I have one, as do 3 other musicians I know personally. It's a very similar idea, but a lot more mechanical.

There's other options too. The Ableton Push 3, Linstrument, Haken Continuum, and a few other MPE synths/controllers all do a better job than the Seaboard by miles. The Osmose is my reccomendation for most people currently, based on the half dozen or so MPE controllers I've had my own hands on and it's price, but I'd love to get my hands on a Continuum.

It didn't augment your skills, it replaced skills you lack. If I generate art using DallE or Stable Diffusion, then edit in Krita/Photoshop/etc. it doesn't suddenly cover up the fact that I was unable to draw/paint/photograph the initial concept. It didn't augment my skills, it replaced them. If you generate "music" like that, it's not augmenting your poetry that you wish to use as lyrics - which may or may not be of good quality in it's own right - it replaced your ability to make music with it.

Computers are meant to be tools to expand our capabilities. You didn't do that. You replaced them. You didn't ride a bike, you called an Uber because you never learned to drive, or you were too lazy to do it for this use.

AI can augment skills by allowing for creative expressions - be it with AI stem separation, neural-network based distortion effects, etc. But the difference is those are tools to be used together with other tools to craft a thing. A tool can be fully automated - but then, if it is, you are no longer a artist. No more than someone that knows how to operate a CNC machine but not design the parts.

This is hard for some people to understand, especially those with an engineering or programming background, but there is a point to philosophy. Innate, valuable knowledge in how a thing was produced. If I find a stone arrow head buried under the dirt on land I know was once used for hunting by native Americans, that arrow head has intrinsic value to me because of its origin. Because I know it wasn't made as a replica and because I found it. There is a sliding scale, shades of gray here. An arrow head I had verified was actually old but which I did not find is still more valuable than one I know is a replica. Similarly, you can, I agree, slowly un-taint an AI work with enough input, but not fully. Similarly, if an digital artist painted something by hand then had StableDiffusion inpaint a small region as part of their process, that still bothers many, adds a taint of that tool to it because they did not take the time to do what the tool has done and mentally weigh each pixel and each line.

By using Suno, you're firmly in the "This was generated for me" side of that line for most people, certainly most musicians. That isn't riding a bike. That's not stretching your muscles or feeling the burn of the creative process. It's throwing a hundred dice, leaving the 6's up, and throwing again until they're all 6's. Sure, you have input, but I hardly see it as impressive. You're just a reverse centaur: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-11...

... Did you just complain about modern technology taking power away from users only to post an AI generated song about it? You know, the thing taking away power from musicians and filling up all modern digital music libraries with garbage?

There's some cognitive dissonance on display there that I'm actually finding it hard to wrap my head around.

You had me thinking "This is a reasonable argument even if I disagree" until the last line. That's completely disingenuous of the argument.

That makes a lot of sense to me: You only get chat with people you know. You can still even have mixed people-you-know and stranger lobbies, but you have to explicitly make them "someone you know" to do it.

That would likely mean everyone just sends chat requests at the start of each game though, which is more annoying, like a cookie popup.

There's a natural tension between freedom and protection here. Anyone on HN is aware of all the debate for and against section 230. We're also probably the crowd most vocally against ID verification laws for adult sites or just age verification for non-adult content, like YouTube or Discord.

I, personally, am in the "Parents gotta parent" camp, but know that doesn't cover all the problems, plus only addresses children when there's also real harm to adults too.

This turns into a big mess of a discussion involving data privacy laws too, and before you know it you have people talking about how the US needs a GDPR equivalent and someone else complaining about cookie banners, loosing the thread entirely as it turns into this big swirling mess of a problem with some people worried about kids, some worried about privacy, some worried about actual personal impacts/addiction, etc.

I feel like a lot of it quickly becomes disconnected from reality. Let's pick on the adult site age verification laws. I live in Nebraska, which means if I go to HornPub, it tell me "Govenment said no"

Now, I'm not going to pretend they're some beacons of moral authority, but I at least think for their own business interest they'll keep CSAM and revenge content off their platform. But what happens when a 16 year old that absolutely will find a place to watch adult content anyway goes looking? Would we rather them wind up on a platform that's moderately safe, or somewhere that serves the worst of the worst?

That, I think, is the problem: Any rules, laws that say "Let's restrict what websites can serve users" mean either a total country-wide mass surveillance system tied into every ISP filtering every domain and blackholing any request to all but approved DNS servers and aggressively blocking VPNs, or it's a law only hurting the companies at least trying to comply with the laws that do matter.

This article has undertones of asking for better parental controls, but kids will always bypass them unless they're aggressive enough that adults are uncomfortable with them too.

I have seen adults in my life fall victim to addiction to social media (Facebook, tiktok) , online shopping (Temu, Amazon), and I can't help but think the solution is pretty obvious:

Don't kill the product, regulate it's abuse. Facebook? Make algorithmic feeds / infinite scrolling illegal (At least as the default), not social media. Temu? Make gamling-esque UI illegal. Make new data protection laws. Hold executives that violate these laws criminally liable. Fine the companies more than the cost of doing business.

Roblox, Minecraft, and other games with user-created mini-games/servers/etc and random encounters with strangers online? Competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat? We all bitch about them, but the answer has always been obvious: Don't hang out with random strangers. The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default. Ta-da, problem solved, by social means, not technical means.

Other countries should loosen copyright terms. The only reason other countries previously benefited by adopting the US's draconian copyright terms was because of trade deals that have now been steam rolled by tariffs. If CA, AU, or the EU were to say "Nah, we're done - we're opening our own appstores, our own music distribution channels, making it easier for musicians to make more money and make derivative works" it would cripple the the US, deservedly, because they've been captured by the MPA and RIAA's and Disney's and other publisher's greed and control via the DMCA and repeated copyright extensions.

- making music, making musical tools (soldering together pedals, making VCV rack modules etc.

- Longboarding

- Gaming (Minecraft, MiniGolf Games, and RoR2, mostly - all socially)

- Writing, mostly for my website ( opguides.info ) but the ocassional fiction story too

- Fursuitting and attending furry events

- Projects? Just like, generally making things. I'm always happiest when I have a few things in the works. It's usually one-off. Like, recently I did acrylic pour art. I'll probably never do it again, but it was fun.

Maybe? I feel like the most in group of people who do have the discretionary income to toss $100 at a Geiger counter for fun also have enough to toss $250 at it and would rather given the extra utility. I might be wrong though. And it certainly depends as the $100 line drops. If it's $50 for a Geiger, that's a lot closer to "I don't care money"

I had someone tell me a while back $100 is an adult $20. As in, what you saw as a kid as $20 of fun but factoring in how long it took you to get the $20, it's about the same. I know that math will be massively variable, but I like the idea of equating kid brain money to adult money for "toys" like this. A $5 toy vs a $40 toy, as a kid, is a big deal. A $40 toy vs a $70 toy almost isn't, because they're both already "expensive".

I suspect for most on HN, their toy-money equivalence leans to the Radiacode or equivalent being the better buy.

Powered by 2x AAA batteries != not high voltage. Boost converters can reach high voltages pretty easily. That's why you can get USB powered nixie clocks, for example.

There's a really good video on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGD-oSwJv3E

But even beyond that, the maximum power output will still be pretty limited. If you short the HV rails, it will almost certainly start to drop in voltage and raise in current quickly, but only to the limits of the resistance from other elements in series and the power source's output ability. I strongly doubt you could even make something dangerous from the Flipper, at least unless you attach a large cap, let it charge slowly, and attach a taser module.

This project is neat and OP did a good job, but I think the interest in Geiger counters among hackers needs an update. The Geiger kit on Adafruit (Yes, I know that makes the cost a lot higher to be from them instead of Ali, but I think is a good baseline for "finished good" price) is $99.

Meanwhile, Raysid or Radiacode let you do full on gamma spectrometry, for about 2.5x the price.

And, like, yeah, 2.5x the price. I'm not oblivious to that being significant, but to me it's sorta like an GT1030 with DDR4 - it's about $100 or you could get an RTX 3060 for a bit over $300. Like, you might have a use where you ONLY need a cheap display card, but there's a reason LTT calls the 1030 eWaste from the factory. Similarly, you might get enough out of the Geiger or it might do something the Radiacode doesn't for you but for most hobbyist, I doubt it.