ChuckMcM

NGL having a t-shirt that could change words on the fly to piss off ICE agents would be on my Christmas list :-)

You should work with neighbors to control the HOA board. That means running candidates and getting them elected. Depending on how corrupt the builder is this can be hard to do and may take legal action (suing to enforce the HOA governing rules).

But on its face it seems suicidal to cause the home owners to go bankrupt and leave your properties. Unless of course you'd like to tear down the development and build a big fat datacenter on it (the only building that is going on these days) which would net a profit. As grifts go it would kind of amazingly evil you get as much money as you can out of making your homeowners broke followed by selling the land out of foreclosure to build a data center on it and making a profit on that too.

I'm always amazed at how you could fly to the Moon with such basic controls. The Apollo capsule controls compared to the Dragon controls really feels like the difference between a Wright Flyer and a modern glass cockpit airplane.

Something that I appreciated was that when you had a setup for a particular task, all of the knobs and controls were in service of that task (for the most part). So you could put together a video editing station (which an acquaintance of mine did) but the extravagance was that it was this expensive gear that really did one thing well. While today you could put together a Raspberry Pi 5 setup to do video editing with all the knobs and controls of the switchers and editors back in the day, and it would be very affordable and just as functional.

I suspect "The Jackpot is almost here" wouldn't be as cheery though :-)

Uh yeah it was. :-) I mean there were the "science fiction" themes like Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey where HAL was programmed by talking to it (in 1968) and the aforementioned "fifth generation" computer system which was going to cement Japanese domination of the computer industry.

But here's the thing, Clarke and others postulated that as soon as computers could 'reason' they would figure out that humans were holding them back. So even in the 80's and 90's engineers and scientists were imagining "self programming" computers or computers that could program other computers, and understood that while it would speed up productivity of programmers it would also speed up the productivity of malcontents.

I think it would be safe to say that they hadn't really thought too much about computers that were still dumb as a post but could now search trillions of possible solutions per second. Semantically brute force searching for an encryption key is 'infeasible' for keys that are sufficiently long (have enough entropy) but when the 'key' is "this input produces this output" the entropy there is significantly smaller and search for a set of operations that takes you from the input to the output is, computationally, an easier problem.

I friend suggested that often fine art is "on loan" to museums from some rich person's estate and that having it 'stolen' allows the estate to collect the value of the insurance claim rather than taking the painting back and selling it on the market (which may or may not return the value of the insurance). Also it probably looks bad if "The Frobotz estate has asked for this painting to be returned so they can sell it."

Turns an otherwise illiquid asset into cash that the estate could use.

The story was kind of wild. I have never understood art theft as its very hard to move it. Now if they had made really good forgeries, then swapped them in the original museum frames and hid those to be "found", well that then would be a NY Times best seller.

Yes, and it would go well on a James Bond movie or something. I'm a bit surprised they didn't go with hydrogen peroxide propellant as that can be refueled fairly quickly. The Bell Jetpack used hydrogen peroxide for example.

I'm doubtful about that. To be pedantic if you consider the set 'superhuman intelligence' to be a proper superset of 'human intelligence', then I would expect it to be able to structure its communications to the level the audience could understand. Does that make sense?

Is is more what it feels like talking to someone who doesn't really understand what it is they are talking about. A lot of keywords but no flow, no conceptual linkages from one part to another. Etc.

Okay. So let's pretend it is simple a proof-of-concept (PoC) rather than a full blown project, it's opening paragraph in README.md is:

"Turns a Gemtek W1700K Wi-Fi 7 router into a wideband software-defined receiver. The router's MediaTek MT7996 radio captures raw 14-bit IQ at up to 320 Msps, its Airoha AN7581 SoC streams it over 10 GbE, and a Linux host shows it as a live spectrum and waterfall in the browser, with the receiver's controls next to it."

Does that read paragraph say "Hey check out this PoC!" to you?

So a human, used Claude code to reverse engineer a device. Fine, let THAT be the readme. If it had said, "This is something that was accomplished with Claude code reverse engineering this thing, I have no idea how it works, but that it does work is evidenced by the spectrum I can show."

For those of us who are "skilled in the art" as they say, this reads like "Hey check this out, I bypassed the paywall by putting in my Mom's credit card number!" The lede here is that Claude can reverse engineer things. That was most informatively shown with an article that showed up here titled "All the things I own, owned."

The comment I replied to simply said, "Thanks Claude." Which is droll, but accurate. And, for me, the criticism of showing off something you "did" with a tool you don't understand and whose outputs you don't understand, reminds me strongly of the script kiddies of the 90's and naughts who would boldly proclaim "Hey, check it out, I got root on <website>." when all they had done was run Metasploit and walked through a bunch of scripts until they hit an RCE vulnerability and then used it to gain root (with another script).

So at some point the vendor will go through and patch the holes which the model had exploited and they will have to rewrite their admin architecture, and maybe be liable to some fines with the chip companies if "Intellectual Property" was improperly disclosed by their failure to write good software. And are we any closer to using the products as a general purpose SDR? No, we are not.

Contrast that with the folks who reverse engineered the RealTek DVB-T tuner chip, and had an understanding of what they had done and how it worked, and it spawned a bunch of RTL-SDR dongles that introduced lots of people to SDRs.

It is a really cool project, and it is an interesting proof of concept which could be the starting point for reverse engineering these boxes. But the author chose to present it as a complete ready to go project with documentation of things like their "architecture."

I suspect it is also true that neither the author, and certainly not the large language model, has any idea about how this firmware even works.

Yes there are radio terms in there. :-) That said, I've written combined firmware/gateware drivers for dedicated radio chips and that paragraph makes little sense to me. Even the RFSoC docs from AMD/Xilinx are better written and they are pretty damn dense.

Yeah, reading stuff like:

"BRINGUP, from a cold radio: what MediaTek's ROM patch does at download (XO, pin mux, the CONN AFE calibration pulse per band, the A-die TOP init by chip ID, pads and CONN switch, the A-dies' eFuse trims); the UMAC pool layout; the common and per-band PHY initialisation; on each A-die the RF init tables, the resistor calibration and the RC filter calibration; the FEM outputs and the crystal trim."

That's not even some other language poorly translated to English, that's just a bunch of words.

Between stuff like this and math "proofs" that aren't readable either I'm really challenged to see the benefit here.

What I get out of this is that one could, if you had the documentation, write a more generalized SDR application for this hardware than the Wifi7 application. That an LLM model can provoke this behavior seems as a good existence proof perhaps?

Thank you! Yes his interactive whiteboard where he projects a whiteboard on to a surface was the project I was reminded of.

Its sad that search engines have become useless. There was another UX researcher who did something very much like this and then later got recruited to Google. As I recall he was using the cameras in Wii Nunchucks because they could do SLAM easily. And yet I cannot find his research, sigh.