TacticalCoder

I never understood why so many devices were using such poor quality and noisy fans. They fail earlier, they move less air and they're noisier. Now I understand there's a cost issue, but it's not only that: a lot of it is also just poor design / poor research / poor parts sourcing.

For the little story, back in the early beige PC days (think 386 and 486), quiet PC fans didn't exist. It was all super noisy, and typically at a fixed speed.

And, coming from the Commodore 64 and then Commodore Amiga that were silent machines, this was driving me crazy.

So 18 y/o me managed to source some proper fans out of Japan (Panaflo fans IIRC) and I went bug my neighbor, who was studying to become a chip engineer...

I came to my neighbor with an idea: "Why not lower the fan speed when the PC ain't too warm and then only speed it up when the PC gets too warm, you know, like a car's fan adapts to temperature?" (cars would do that: they'd start spinning a huge fan to cool down the water in the car's radiator, but only once the water would be too warm).

And so my neighbor drew a little electronical circuit and we bought "thermistors": I would "calibrate" them with boiling water in my mom's kitchen and then we'd install the circuit with the thermistor in the PC's PSU, with Panaflo fans.

So basically: back in the 386 and then 486 days, I already had quiet PCs. I'd "muffle" my HDD in an enclosure, opened on top (so that heat could dissipate, on which I'd put a 7V panaflo fan [I'd take the 12V and the 5V and create 7V]).

Once the PC world began to wake up and the likes of Be Quiet! and Noctua became a real thing, I was delighted. My current main rig has a Be Quiet! PSU and a Noctua fan for the CPU. I cannot thank such companies enough.

P.S: for what it's worth my neighbor later on moved to southern California and became an early Broadcom employee and he's been much more successful than me for he was the real smart cookie. We're still friends to this day.

> How else can you stay safe against a threat that exfiltrates your entire digital life in like 10 seconds?

I moved part of my wealth to a private bank, on an account requiring several signatures (from different persons) plus a vetting from the banker for every single outgoing transfer. Not only are several manual signatures required, in addition to that the banker must call me before authorizing any transfer, even if it's only, say, 1 000 EUR (now it's not a retail bank and that's kinda the whole point: transfers are rare and when one is done, no matter the amount, a shitload of verification do happen).

In addition to that, I told my banker that should anything out of the ordinary happen (say an order to suddenly wire 100 K to Dubai or Erithrea or something), then he should go out of his way to make me come in person to the bank to confirm the transfer.

You must train your banker: you must demo him voice impersonation on the phone. You have to make him become totally paranoid too.

I'm not going to say he's my buddy, but he knows I know my shit and we regularly talk for 20 minutes on the phone.

Any transfer to a new bank account: long discussion explaining what that account is and why I'm moving money there.

I've also got digital files (say administrative stuff, stuff from notaries, etc.), encrypted, that I myself cannot easily access. For to access them I must physically go to my safe at a bank first. And trying to impersonate me physically at the bank to steal my stuff means: "on your way out, you risk being locked in the secure airlock and then spend years behind bars".

> Makes me want to have like 5 separate computers:

I have a setup not totally unlike that. For example one phone with one additional app: the country's official "electronic ID" thinggy. And I don't browse from that phone.

I've got several computers and there's definitely my "trash computer", complete with bogus email accounts and crappy apps, etc.

> How else can you stay safe against a threat that exfiltrates your entire digital life in like 10 seconds?

The first thing is recognizing there's an issue if someone hacking your unique email then can steal everything you have. Many people stop there: they think, as in the XKCD, "it's game over anyway if someone gets my email, so I may as well not worry about it".

That is the mentality of losers.

You're already well ahead of the crowd by recognizing there's a problem and by thinking about solutions.

Many things can be done to lower the risk of a full compromise. I've got two physical LANs and the absolute most sensitive stuff (e.g. my banking apps) are done from a computer that does nothing but email + bank.

So it's not just a separate computer: separate computer on a separate physical LAN (not a VLAN). And there a tiny Pi doing the bridging between the two LANs. And of course it's got a serious firewall (a lost art, but it could make a comeback with the help of LLMs).

Something else that can help is stuff like Google Workspace and keeping the credentials for the admin account very secure and hardly ever logging into it. That way if "[email protected]" gets compromised, there's still "[email protected]" that can help get back control of [email protected].

> - one for development only

I've got a user account for dev only.

> - one for gaming only

A dedicated computer for gaming yes.

> - one for socials only

Besides HN, I don't need those.

It's a wild world out there.

The hacks won't stop coming and you're not anywhere near paranoid enough.

Poland has been very smart: they didn't join the eurozone. They still have their own currency. And they've been the fastest growing economy of the EU since the EU began if I'm not mistaken.

They don't really need to leave the EU: even though bureaucracy and the numbers of laws/rules/regulations is insane, the absolute dumbest thing the EU did is that common currency.

I don't know how some people here can believe that that 25 years old, ill-conceived, currency that the Euro is could replace the dollar. The second biggest economy of the Eurozone is France and France is doing really terribly badly. Zero growth, insane public deficit, it's car industry got destroyed by China, public debt through the roof and impossible to service...

And yet some ideologues here explain the euro is going to replace the dollar: facepalm.

The individual is how he is but he's not saying anything insane. AI is not his domain of expertise yet he seems to have a pretty good grasp of how it works.

He's saying what we all know: Anthropic has no moat, OpenAI has no moat (and btw how'd that work? "AnthrOpenAIpic has a moat but nobody else does"? So it's some kind of a dualmoatopoly?).

We all saw the benchs for Google's latest models: they're beating AnthrOpenAIpic on basically every single bench.

Some of us are working with chinese models and they're now 6 months behind anymore.

So he's saying: no moat, attempt at regulatory capture to block chinese open-weight models, it doesn't mean the whole market is going to crash hard (btw a big part of the market --and already before yesterday-- had already crashed quite hard, which you don't notice if you're only in indexes for a few companies have pulled everybody up).

To this sounds... Reasonable?

What is he saying that's controversial here? When you see Google's Argon 4, are you really convinced Anthropic has a moat and an IPO valuation at 5% of the entire US GDP that's justified and that there's a possibility it'll 10x to 50% of the GDP?

Does anyone here really think Anthropic can do the kind of multiplier on its IPO that we saw with Amazon, Meta, Google, etc.?

Is it really that controversial to say that, for an IPO, Anthropic is overvalued?

Here's my bet: in a year Micron (ticker MU) went 10x in value in a year. 24x in value since after the 2022 tech flash crash. My bet is that Anthropic (ticker ANT) won't 10x in a year. And won't 24x in 4 years.

> If you access a web application, you end up re-downloading the application from the server thousands of times, and you are fully trusting the server each time. If the server gets hacked even one of the thousands of times that you open the site, you might be screwed. Regular old-fashioned applications (where you explicitly click "download") are better than this: you only need to trust the server to not be malicious or hacked at that exact moment once.

That's precisely why something like signed distributions packages are way more secure than curl bash'ing.

But many simply don't understand that. We had plenty of forged Web certificates likely. And even without that, with curl bash'ing anything sensitive you have to cross fingers that the server ain't serving one in 10 000 request with a backdoored version.

With curl bash'ing everybody is trusting every single time that the server ain't compromised or intentionally malicious.

At this point I've lost any hope: people simply don't understand security.

And as long as we'll have people saying that curl bash'ing is just as safe as signed distros packages, we'll have daily posts about major security incidents.

Security is a mindset and most people simply don't have it.

> I really resent pictures of human bodies being presented to me.

It is a reality however. Just as humans were doing human sacrifices by torturing little kids for as long as possible before killing them.

We have to keep that in mind to shield ourselves from those explaining that "all cultures are equal", "it's all relative", "it depends on your point of view", "all humans are beautiful snowflakes", etc.

Just as a reminder: Israel killed 50 000 people in Gaza... In response to people killing 1200 civilians and bringing hundreds back to their country as hostages, while the entire country was acclaiming the murderers and celebrating their deeds (killing mostly young people who were dancing at a music festival, enjoying life).

In January of this year the iranian regime sent its islamist guards to kill 30 000 peaceful, unarmed, protestors and publicly hung athletes who spoke against the islamic regime.

This is the world we live in and this is what we're up against.

I'd rather see the truth than become soft.

Which was predicted by some economists from day one.

One economist wrote, before the first Euro even circulated: "The euro will lead to too many public servants in France, too many industries in Germany, too many vacation houses in Spain [1], the default of Spain on its public debt and then the default of Greece on its public debt".

When Greece, not Spain, defaulted on its public debt, that same economist: "I was only wrong about the order of defaults of Greece and Spain".

The Euro, he predicted, would be one of the shortest lived currency in the history of currencies.

His name is Charles Gave and he's gotta be 80 y/o old now. Of course people are going to hate on him and spill all their hatred on him because he's neither a communism nor a socialist.

And then idiots are going to say that "euro is great because I can travel and pay in the same currency everywhere". As if they're own little convenience warranted the disaster that we're heading into because ideologues, not economists, decided to force a currency down the throat of most european citizens.

[1] btw there are many protests in Spain now because "costs of rents are too high" (yeah, no shit: there's a gigantic number of empty houses and apartment in Spain belonging to foreigners, who only come a few weeks per year).

> What is up with France?

I kept posting about it here over the years but at officially 57% of the GDP being public spending (and the actual percentage is bigger than that because a great many of the "private" companies that are monopolies are basically owned by state apparatchiks), France is already a planned economy.

And there's only one outcome for planned economies and its misery.

And when socialists succeed in establishing misery, they've guaranteed themselves an endless stream of voters. And they can only drive the country more into the ground. So more misery. So more socialism. So more planned economy.

France "offered" fiber optic to the entire country (at taxpayers' expense) and now that people have big Internet pipes, they're going to implement Bill Gates' old dream [1]: tax every single packet of information.

What's up with France is socialism. That's what up with France.

[1] in a leaked memo when the Internet began to take off, Bill Gates explained he wanted to tax every single network packet (for those who remember).

> I wonder though how a sensible architecture would look like.

Any withdrawal should only ever be authorized from wallets protected by multisig and every withdrawal should go through several machines, running different implementations of the exchanges' verification part of the codebase, replaying the user's entire deposit/trading/withdrawal history and verifying if the withdrawal the user's asking matches his balance/history.

Devs working on "verification before withdrawal" on one of the stack should be forbidden from ever touching the other stack, and vice-versa.

This would prevent SNAFUs like this one for now at least two devs would need to be independently owned before such a heist could be pulled off.

I'm not saying hacks would be impossible. But the "I still $6 bn in 20 minutes" would be much harder to pull.

Another sensible thing to do would be to not have $6 bn on a warm wallet: I really don't think Binance really that much at all times available on warm wallets?

Nothing is 100% secure: but the "one dev gets its laptop owned, hence $6 bn disappear" is just madness and, as a whole (not speaking about crypto here), we can really do better here.

For a start we can do better than thinking: "Nothing can ever be 100% secure, so there's no way to do better than seeing $6 bn vaporize in thin air when a single dev's laptop gets pwned" (I'm know it's not what you're saying: you're asking what can be done better).

So many are going to think: "But if you do that, it still can be hacked because this and that". Which ain't the point: the point is to make hacks harder to pull off, not to make them impossible to pull off.

> The nice thing is that using the private key requires physical touch.

Yeah (not talking about crypto): yubikeys (or similar) are really sweet for that. I've use them for ssh / pushing / fetching from Git etc. I use them for 2FA to various services etc.

There are also similar devices where you enter a PIN and the PIN to register to a service the first time and then the PIN to auth are different. So you can't be tricked by mistake to register to a new service when you just want to auth (you could still be tricked to register to a service which ain't the one you think while registering, but never while auth'ing).

And yup I use that with AI all the time: my agents go inside a container or inside a VM (or both), and the damage it can do is very limited.

It's also possible to do passthrough of devices (GPU, USB, ...) to VMs: good stuff.

More like Mt. Gox. FTX was downright fraud, from day one. SBF was already lying about Alameda's supposedly insane returns when it was all a ponzi.

He got tried and jailed for a long time for fraud.

Mt. Gox was just incompetence, like Binance here. But then on the other hand Binance is making so much money that to them $3.5 billion to cover the losses is just a slap on the wrist.

> And crypto is facilitating that.

I don't know about that. What I know is that dictators and criminals have existed since forever and the official estimates put the part of the worldwide GDP tied to criminal activities to between 3% and 5%, which is gigantic.

I don't think Bitcoin is to be blamed for that. If we're worried about dictators and criminals, a good question to ask would be: why do those exists at all? (and that's irrelevant to Bitcoin)

> That seems valuable, but I’m not sure how much truth there is to a story I read on the internet.

Wait you mean Venezuela didn't experience four years of hyper-inflation in a row? You mean you don't believe that story is true?

> IPv4 is old and broken

IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken? It's literally been working just fine since it came out.

That there are limited addresses is something else: it doesn't mean it's broken.

I don't care that spying/surveillance devices have more trouble spying on me with IPv4 than with IPv6 and I don't care that some apps have a harder time establishing connection.

IPv4 works. SSH over IPv4 works. Browsing the Web over IPv4 works.

Not a moat and not big but... for SMEs "Google Workspace" is a godsend from outter space.

This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.

They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).

Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.

GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.