OhMeadhbh

The funny bit is that when I got a big-screen TV 10 years ago, I ripped it apart and desoldered the microphone from the control board. I also removed the microphone from the remote control when I got a chromecast. It just seemed easier than reversing the code and recompiling w/ a root cert I control (so I could MiTM the stream coming from the TV.)

I think I'm lucky... my TV doesn't seem to try to connect to open wi-fi networks. You have to explicitly give it an SSID and tell it to connect. I have chosen not to do that.

I think my SCAAAS service would advertise "Sure we spy on you, but we're too incompetent to do anything with the data."

I appreciate everyone has a different definition of "minimalism" and that I'm a bit of an outlier. But my version of minimalism includes a) using a dumb phone, b) doing most of my browsing via a text based browser in a terminal and c) I've heard of social media, but don't see the point (though you could argue that maybe the HN comments section is sort of like social media.)

Which is not to diminish the author's point (which I interpret as twitter is a cess-pit and think hard about what social media you want to engage in and the interface you want to use.) My point is you don't have to spend time on twitter to benefit from this world-view.

I know I'll get downvoted for this, but here goes. I was in a position to see some of the mythos derived results early. In my organization everyone was running around with their hair on fire. I asked whether or not any of the vulnerabilities mythos found were also found with existing static analysis tools. The result was blink blink "what are static analysis tools?"

I'm not saying mythos didn't find anything new, but several people who should have known better were not using SAST/DAST tools to find potential vulnerabilities before pushing their code into the great unknown. One person I talked to said they didn't bother because GitHub automatically runs SAST tools against pull requests. I looked. Their CICD pipeline had no such tool configured. I'm pretty sure it's more appropriate to say GitHub CAN run SAST/DAST tools, if you configure it, but it won't run SAST/DAST tools by default.

This was a very small sample, but I wonder how common this type of confusion is.

Talking about DPS... People will tell you that the Quartz/PDF rendering engine is just the same as DPS, but they're wrong. NEWS was... delightful. It was close enough to DPS as to make little difference, but running on SPARC processor. I just looked at some NeWS screen-shots and they look much worse than I remember. Greyscale NeXTStep on the mono monitor was a tough act to follow. Even the colour NeXTStations weren't as sharp.

I'm reporting what I remember hearing. Around this time there were people who would code in C, but use a C++ compiler to get the few features that weren't present in C compilers yet. I'm thinking of things like "const" and double-slash-to-the-end-of-line comments.

name one.

Maybe ODMs can monetize this service. Pay me X amount for the part or X + Y amount to ensure some third-party didn't embed a back door or explosive in your part.

There's probably an argument that it's okay when states do objectionable things. Certainly there are large portions of the population that are opposed to actions their states take on their behalf? What's the difference between the US bombing an Iranian pre-school and ISIS decapitating journalists? Mostly that one is sanctioned by a powerful state and the other is not.

Maybe we could do a survey of old mobile phones and pagers to see how many of them have explosives in them. I never thought of myself as a terrorist but if one of my phones wound up with a small bit of C4 in it, that would be a finding.

I suspect the speaker was "diet pepsi hitler" before becoming "crack hitler."

This reminds me of an observation a flat-mate made when I was at university: Drugs amplify your personality. If you were cool before-hand, you would be more cool on drugs. If you were an asshole, you would be more of an asshole on drugs.

I've noticed the same thing about agentic coding. Not really the agents, but the way people responded to agents. If you were the kind of coder who was a little unsure of yourself, agents made you more unsure of yourself. If you were confident with your abilities, you were more confident.

By the transitive nature of HN comments, we can therefore conclude that LLM coding agents are drugs.

I am now wondering if there's a conversation to be had about Dunning-Kruger and Impostor Syndrome. In the modern agentic era, is it better to hire people who know less than experts, though clearly somewhere above complete novice? Perhaps this is why I find it difficult to find a job. Perhaps I am "overfit" to the world before descriptive ambiguity was an advantage?

I am reminded of the words of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs: "act like a dumb-sh*t and they'll treat you like an equal."

Anyway... yes... I agree with @freefaler on this one. AI is a qualia amplifier.

Alas, it renders less well on my favourite browser, lynx.

In '93 I was (among other things) the Vice President of DaNG (Dallas area NeXT Group). At one of our meetings we had a couple of kids come in and show off this FPS they were working on... I thought it was great they were building games for NeXTStep, but was surprised to hear they wrote it in C++ instead of Objective-C. They said they did C++ 'cause that made it easier to port to DOS.

Just get a modern Mac and remove half the RAM. That should get you the same experience. The visual design was first class, but I remember when I went from NeXTStep to NEWS to X11 and was very relieved to not have to have my mouse spin for minutes at a time.