bunnie your book "Hacking the XBox" taught me how to get started on reversing electronics, took the fear out of the process, and replaced it with fun. Thanks for the multi-decades long effort you've made to make these tools available and accessible and approachable, your contributions to the hacker community are immeasurable and I cannot say thank you enough.
If code becomes essentially free (ignoring for a moment the environmental cost or the long term cost of allowing code generation to be tollboothed by AI megacorps) the value of code must lie in its track record.
The 5-day-old code in chardet has little to no value. The battle-tested years-old code that was casually flushed away to make room for it had value.
What you describe is essentially what happened, the AI result working from specs and tests was more performant than the original. The real AI you describe just rewrote chardet without looking at the source, only better.
Is there any visibility or accountability to record exactly what it did and not look at? I doubt it. So we're left with a kind of Rorschach test: some people think LLMs follow rules like law-abiding citizens, and some people distrust commercial LLMs because they understand that commercial LLMs were never designed for visibility and accountability.
There should exist a .jsonl file somewhere with exactly that information in it - might be worth Dan preserving that, it should be in a ~/.claude/projects folder.
I've never understood the concept of an app wrapper for a link aggregator (HN, reddit, etc). The whole goal is to provide links to external sources, and now I'm browsing the web in a limited web browser without all my extensions etc.
Am I missing some core concept here? Why would I want to browse the web in this app as opposed to a web browser?
Sometimes I like to save the links and comments I find particularly interesting with the "favorite" button, though lately I've debated saving them somewhere else too with a more complicated setup that could also archive both the links and the comments.
As someone who used to use native RSS readers a ton back in the day, the limited web browser usually isn't a problem for just reading a few articles.
I like native apps for things, even link aggregators, because my I want to use my OS's native window management and app management instead of just shoving everything into a browser tab, of which I already have too many. Because then it's just CMD+Tab to Chrome, and then figure out which of the 20+ tabs I'm trying to get to instead of CMD+Tab directly to that specific app.
Anyway, just a bit of old man yelling at cloud but I've always disliked the proliferation of "web app all the things." Might as well not even use a desktop OS at this point and just have a full screen browser window and call it a day.
I'm trying to understand your position here. An app with it's own way to manage multiple browser windows is better, because you have too many tabs open in your browser. If you have multiple links open, the tab management is now a problem in your desktop app instead of the browser. If you don't, then you don't have to manage tabs anyway. What does this solve that a separate browser window doesn't, except not having any way to add extensions like ad blockers or tampermonkey scripts etc?
I guess you could make a web app or app clip but I think this is a cool project. would be good to have a theme engine.
Look at NetNewsWire how good a native app of this kind can be. NNW in particular has great shortcuts, like or opening links in the native browser, and read/unread functionality
I usually don't have multiple HN articles open at a time, but I can see how that would just be replacing one problem (too many browser tabs) for a worse problem (too many, now limited, browser tabs).
It's just nice to have HN as it's own app instead of just another tab in a single app. Same reason I use mail.app vs. webmail, native music app vs the web player, etc.
PWAs also solve the problem, more or less, but it is nice to have something native.
Some people love giving up as much customization and control over their software as possible. iOS over Android. MacOS over Linux. Chrome over Firefox. App stores over installing programs yourself. Apps over websites.
There are various arguments for it (better compatibility/cohesiveness, minimalism, less debugging) but it overall seems like the opposite of the "hacker" mindset which makes how much market share MacOS has in the space very strange.
You can do this for much cheaper - all four of your tires are broadcasting a unique ID to report tire pressure, the radio to pick it up is cheap (because cars), and TPMS has no facility to randomize or otherwise secure this.
It’s actually even easier, your car has a plate on the front with a unique ID that a camera scans, often to automatically track your park time for ticketing.
I can’t really care about obscure Bluetooth tracking when every business has CCTV doing facial recognition.
I can assure you this is not the case with all Toyota models or even most. It's often integrated into the radio instead of a separate module, or simply not on a dedicated fuse, but sometimes it is. Disabling it can also lose other features of the car such as navigation, remote start, the Bluetooth mic, or the mandatory eCall feature if you're in the EU.
and similar things have happened about once a year ever since. Now in the news article I linked to a huge part of the problem was that the police didn't follow it up correctly, went to where the accident had been reported rather than where it had occurred, didn't see anything, and then gave up.
But if the car had rung from where it had actually crashed then the incident would have EISEC[1] data tagged to it, which would have given them actual co-ordinates to hit.
Even easier, electromagnetic radiation can be used to detect the presence and exact location and movements of not just automobiles, but also people! Many people have detectors for these things that can literally see through transparent material that makes up large sections of the walls of many houses and apartments.
A camera has quite a few failure modes (bad lighting, fog, dirty lens, obscured by plant growth, privacy laws, etc.) which a TPMS receiver & directional antenna don't.
The plate is pretty trivial to fake though. For one thing you can just remove it, but it's trivial to alter with just spray paint. Or using an outdated plate, or someone else's plate, etc. it's identifying sort of how an phone number is supposed to be identifying: nominal, but not secure and trivially abused for fraud
It's trivial if you're concealing your conceal your identity when committing a crime, but a huge pain in the ass and a crime itself if you just want to protect yourself from creeps tracking you.
Sure it is, but people can't realistically think to randomize their plate numbers to avoid tracking... IANAL but is it probably a criminal offense to do so.
In Europe and the US all new vehicles now have a visible ID under their front window glass, it’s called a VIN. It’s even standardized where it must be.
I'm pretty sure it should be possible if one really wants to do it. Think of a high-power IR flash and a high-res camera synchronized with the flash, with fixed focus on where the VIN would be passing. If the flash pulse is short but strong enough, it should be possible to read the VIN. Maybe some polarizing filters to remove glass reflections are needed.
Only reason I know is because I wondered if I could walk to the booth and press the button for a new parking ticket and pay for 5 minutes instead of 4 hours..
I believe that every morning someone in the tech industry wakes up and devises a new place to cram some sort of radio. And it's appealing enough the the unwashed masses such that it becomes widely adopted and then unavoidable. I don't want TPMS in my tires. It's not as if checking tire pressure is difficult. No one will consider moving away from TPMS. You'll only hear technologists say "yes, but we could improve the standard! Perhaps encrypt it." They only know how to solve technological problems with more technology.
Not all cars have active TPMS. my Volvo xc90 had them but in later models they switched back to passive ones. So it is not even a given for higher end models.
That's not as far as BLE or TPMS can work at, but it's not exactly like the NFC arrangement in a credit card, either. 5 meters is enough for a motivated attacker to do some undetected bulk data collection.
> The cannonball crashed into the church and went through a first wall. It then ended on the altar of the Chapel of the Virgin. [...] The cannon ball was walled into the left wall of the Chapel and a commemorative epigraph was added to it.
It wasn't showing the wall where it had crashed through, it's showing where the ball has been mounted into the wall for display.
Really looking forward to NY funding upgrades to the computers connected to CNC machines which tend to be pre-2000 vintage running software that's even older.
The entire concept is absurd on about 10 different levels.
If your goal is to buy the cheapest machine you can find in the world, chances are good everything you buy is going to come from China. That Prusa Mk3 you bought ages ago can be upgraded to the latest model, which means you have the option of turning that device into a lifetime machine, something ONLY Prusa offers.
Yes, the initial purchase price is higher, the lifetime price might not be.
Last time I looked, the MK3->MK4 upgrade kit is basically the same price as a complete MK4 kit (very little can be reused. New electronics, motors, extruder)
The upgrade kits are definitely a good thing, going from MK3 to MK3S to MK3.5S was a worthwhile upgrade path and has prolonged the useful life of the printer. But they have their limits.
(And with 3D printing going more mainstream, there's a large segment of the market that has no interest in building printers from kits or stripping down printer to install upgrades - even though some of us find that quite enjoyable)
The Blender project is the model I hope FreeCAD can eventually follow. Like digital animation, the 3D digital design field has a pretty rough selection of tools and the UI on all of them leaves a lot to be desired. FreeCAD has been on an upward trajectory in the past couple years as more people lean into the project out of frustration over increasingly hostile pricing from the commercial solutions. KiCAD has seen incredible advances since CERN started pouring resources into it, I'm sure Netflix money is going to help Blender. Now to get some large engineering shop to consider FreeCAD as their exit path to Siemens/et al...
Unfortunately it’ll be a lot harder for CAD because of all of the other lock in like PLM/ERP integration. A good PLM is half the product. I know a good amount of companies that do not use solidworks because their PLM is absolutely crappy (but I haven’t been a MechE for a couple years now so things could have changed)
True, but PLM is an area where the bar for UX is very low indeed. I think the main barrier to an OSS one is the will to make one and the large list of checkbox features they're often selected by.
The democrats did try to do things like pass a huge expansion in immigration enforcement. Harris promised to have a republican in her cabinet. She campaigned with Liz Cheney. Did republican voters suddenly jump on board? No.
The Biden administration slow-rolled prosecution of Trump for his crimes because they wanted to court moderates and republicans. That failure enabled Trump to run again from somewhere other than prison.
"If only the dems had run Romney for president, then they would have won" is not serious.
> The democrats did try to do things like pass a huge expansion in immigration enforcement.
IIRC, Biden hemmed and hawwed on border environment until like a couple months before the election, when he issued some executive orders that actually had an impact. But that was too little, too late.
> Harris promised to have a republican in her cabinet. She campaigned with Liz Cheney. Did republican voters suddenly jump on board? No.
Except that was misunderstanding "republican voters" and the energy Trump was tapping into. Getting Liz Cheney on board was just Dem elitists trying to ally with the dying and unpopular elitist wing of the Republican party.
I'm talking about something far more radical than some warmed over 2000s centrism: jettison the much of the social-justice activist baggage and co-opt some of Trump's populist appeal, like his rejection of neoliberalism and support for effective border enforcement.
So Harris goes on stage and says that we are going to amend Title 7 to expressly exclude LGBT people from its protection. This would have led to victory?
> IIRC, Biden hemmed and hawwed on border environment until like a couple months before the election
You recall incorrectly. The Biden admin was trying to push congress to pass a bi-partisan immigration bill. It was torpedoed by Trump when he wasn't even in an elected position on the basis that it would help his campaign run on Biden's "immigration failures".
Trump does not support effective immigration enforcement whereby the rule of law is carried out. Rather Trump supports similarly ineffective immigration enforcement, just with the incompetence accruing in the opposite direction.
The point is twofold. First, we need to stop letting the fascists own this idea that they're effective at anything beyond causing unnecessary human suffering (that many of their sick supporters actually seem to relish).
Second, regardless of the Democrats' policies, the fascists won by promising a siren song of simplistic fairy tale answers that were never going to work out (obvious to anybody using half their brain). There is no way to remain honest and overcome this when the People want to choose feel-good lies over uncomfortable truths. And if you try to compete by adopting similarly dishonest tactics, you're never going to catch up to the fascists who have years of a head start and an emotionally-resounding message of restorative cruelty.
I disagree. The Dems shot themselves in the foot for several reasons:
- trying to appeal to the "center" instead of going the other way and channelling the more radical elements' rage against Trump. I believe Bernie would have beaten Trump as the nominee. Yes, the GOP would have painted him as a "Communist destroying the American Way of Life", but they did that to Harris anyway so being centrist gave the Dems nothing.
- not focusing on prices and jobs from day one, in simple terms the average uneducated worker could understand, and mostly, trying to say "things are good/better" which may have been true, but everyone else thought they were not when they went to buy eggs
- Biden trying to stay in for a second term instead of bowing out at the start
> It was massively selfish and incompetent for them not to make major policy pivots with the goal of just annihilating Trump and his movement. Instead they just treated it as a regular election, where the goal was to eek out a victory for their partisans.
It sounds a lot like you actually agree; those are all reasons why every Democrat constituent should be livid with the party "establishment". Instead, any time this point is brought up, people respond instantly with the "it's not a 'both sides' issue" thought-terminating cliché. In this case, one person says, "Okay, but obviously the other people shot themselves in the foot" and the response is "I disagree, here's how they shot themselves in the foot".
I think so. Something more in the Sanders direction would have been way better, though with a keener eye towards not alienating working-class folks (like putting a massive student loan forgiveness plan front-and-center did), with Trump's rejection of free-trade dogma, and jettisoning the social justice activism that loses rural areas and many working-class voters.
> Instead, any time this point is brought up, people respond instantly with the "it's not a 'both sides' issue" thought-terminating cliché
"Both sides" itself is also often a thought-terminating cliche. It is always important to look at the larger context these points are being made in.
Here, the original comment was taking individual Republican voters to task for supporting this performatively-cruel societally-destructive con man with a proven track record. This is something that every individual Republican voter directly did, while Democrat voters did not do and would not have ended up doing [had Harris won]. Harris, for all of her faults and would-have-been letdowns, did not openly run on a platform of destroying our society. Reasonable people can disagree with her policies, but she appeared to be poised to at least lead the country rather than deliberately divide us.
But the comment responding to that then tried to equate that blame to "both sides", going so far as to use the word "collectively" to try and bootstrap personal responsibility from the (obviously terrible) actions of the Democratic party.
So no, that is not an equal criticism in the context of criticizing Republican voters who actively voted for overt evil! The many failings of the Democratic party is something that definitely needs to be discussed, but not in the context of the much larger and more serious problems in the Republican party. Rather, bringing it up here seems like yet another instance of the only-Democrats-have-agency fallacy.
(I presume the downvotes without comment are just the same old fascism supporters who hate my framing because it clashes with the lies they tell themselves about what they voted for. The funny part is I'm no friend of the Democratic party either - I'm a libertarian who actually believes in many of the issues Trump abuses to rabble-rouse. But my country called, so I swallowed my own independent individualist pride and answered that call rather than falling for the siren song of destructionist grievance politics)
This is nonsense, I'm sorry. Trump literally got elected off of pure partisan vilification, insults and just bullshit in general. The idea that the left need to go high while Trump and the GOP openly courted shit like pizzagate is just nonsense.
The fact that the dems are weak assholes unable to make even symbolic measures towards someone that's openly violating the constitution and harassing citizens is symptomatic of the deeper rot of attempting to be a 'big tent' party and having zero actual spine or policy.
> This is nonsense, I'm sorry. Trump literally got elected off of pure partisan vilification, insults and just bullshit in general.
Did you pay any attention at all to the 2024 election? Biden's age? Inflation? The half-hearted, too-late pivot on border enforcement? What you say is nonsense. It's twisted misinformation. There was a lot more going on.
> The idea that the left need to go high while Trump and the GOP...
Yeah, it's cathartic to act like a kid on a playground, and unleash your inner asshole because some other kid was mean, but it's stupid and immature.
> The fact that the dems are weak assholes unable to make even symbolic measures towards someone that's openly violating the constitution and harassing citizens is symptomatic of the deeper rot of attempting to be a 'big tent' party and having zero actual spine or policy.
The dems are weak, but that's because they want to stay exactly as they are instead of becoming a truly majoritarian party. If the dems make Trump-like power grabs (as many liberals fantasize about), it'll just make Trump stronger, because he can and will use the backlash.
> Did you pay any attention at all to the 2024 election? Biden's age? Inflation? The half-hearted, too-late pivot on border enforcement? What you say is nonsense. It's twisted misinformation. There was a lot more going on.
Did you? Biden and the Democratic party was entirely focused on attempting to appeal to 'centrists' and Republicans, exactly what you wanted and they lost because of it.
> Yeah, it's cathartic to act like a kid on a playground, and unleash your inner asshole because some other kid was mean, but it's stupid and immature.
No, it's called having an actual policy and stance. If someone's behaving like a dumb asshole then they should be called out on being a dumb asshole. We should expect more from our politicians and one of those things involves actually calling this shit out.
> The dems are weak, but that's because they want to stay exactly as they are instead of becoming a truly majoritarian party. If the dems make Trump-like power grabs (as many liberals fantasize about), it'll just make Trump stronger, because he can and will use the backlash.
At this point, the only recovery from the damage Trump has inflicted upon this country is going to be a massive power grab. That means dissolving ICE and arresting everyone involved, packing the supreme court, pulling out all of the Trump appointees and criminally investigating everyone involved with this administration. And let me be very clear: any Dem that does not agree not only deserves to lose, but they deserve to be harassed for the rest of their life and never, ever hold another job again. There is no middle ground anymore.
> attempting to appeal to 'centrists' and Republicans, exactly what you wanted
Why do you think this is what they wanted?
> At this point, the only recovery from the damage Trump has inflicted upon this country is going to be a massive power grab. That means dissolving ICE and arresting everyone involved, packing the supreme court, pulling out all of the Trump appointees and criminally investigating everyone involved with this administration. And let me be very clear: any Dem that does not agree not only deserves to lose, but they deserve to be harassed for the rest of their life and never, ever hold another job again. There is no middle ground anymore.
This just ignores the point from the parent comment it is in response to; regardless of how agreeable these actions would be to you and others (myself included), there are many who could be easily convinced that the result will be harmful to them pretty much "because it's 'the Democrats' doing it". You can arrest however many thousands of politicians and agents; the problem would be exacerbated in that case since the same people who voted for Trump twice would feel even more aggrieved. Many of them like what (they think) he's doing and would jump at any opportunity to vote for someone similar.
What you describe would not be the recovery you hope for, at least not long term. Granted, I don't know what would be, but this issue is one of "post-truth" where significant amounts of people can simultaneously be convinced of conflicting opinions about an event, even given videos from multiple perspectives, as we learned recently. Throwing an easily-contested "massive power grab" into the mix is not a serious suggestion. The political machine that got Trump elected will easily get another demagogue elected off the back of lies mixed with truths about said power grab.
>> At this point, the only recovery from the damage Trump has inflicted upon this country is going to be a massive power grab.
> This just ignores the point from the parent comment it is in response to; regardless of how agreeable these actions would be to you and others (myself included), there are many who could be easily convinced that the result will be harmful to them pretty much "because it's 'the Democrats' doing it".
And I a key point is: rejection of Trump is not an endorsement of the Democrats, let alone a full-throated one. Remember: the Democrats are still really unpopular. A Trump-like Democratic power grab is just as unacceptable to many people, and putting voters in the position of choosing between two unacceptable power grabs to not a recipe for resounding electoral success. It's likely a recipe for failure.
A power-grab would emotionally satisfying for partisan Democrats, as they are angry at Trump and would be happy with the result. The problem is they aren't even close to a majority, and they're exactly the kind of people who should be told to hold their nose instead of being catered to.
>> And let me be very clear: any Dem that does not agree not only deserves to lose, but they deserve to be harassed for the rest of their life and never, ever hold another job again. There is no middle ground anymore.
The GP has a totally unreasonable attitude. It sounds like emotional lashing out rather than anything helpful or productive.
Thanks man!
reply