happyhardcore

10 months agodiscuss

https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/index.xml

10 months agodiscuss

For this I used GCP free tier -- not sure why everyone acts like Oracle are the only free tier around when GCP and AWS offer always-free tiers too. It's just runing socat to forward to the vape over tailscale. Is there something I'm missing?

happyhardcore

10 months agodiscuss

I've found [1] to be the best guide for getting started with them; you need to make a copy of the firmware partitions that you re-flash after installing Linux onto it in order to get the 4G modem working. It's honestly absurd how much you're getting for a fiver with it; add a power bank (or make your own from scavenged vape batteries in the spirit of this post) and you have a full Linux machine with WiFi and 4G that can work almost anywhere.

[1] https://wvthoog.nl/openstick/

happyhardcore

10 months agodiscuss

VPS with public ipv4, connected to home network over Tailscale and forward the traffic with socat. You'd probably be fine opening a port directly but a small VPS is free most places so might as well make the most of it.

happyhardcore

last yeardiscuss

You can generate the keys on-device during the initial provisioning and have it encrypt the flash with that key, so every device generates its own unique key and there isn't any practical way to extract it; even the developer can't flash it directly, and OTAs are required to update the firmware. This effectively means nobody can flash the chip anyway since you can't know the keys. Is there some sort of attack vector here I'm missing that gets mitigated by preventing flashing entirely?

happyhardcore

last yeardiscuss

How is this different in practice to the regular ESP32's secure boot, where you can technically flash the chip with whatever you like but unless you have the signing key the bootloader will refuse to load it?

happyhardcore

last yeardiscuss

We don't know if he's gone to the cops, but more often than not the police will not be able to help you in these sorts of situations. The way that Kiwifarms target people is incredibly hard to stop and I don't think they particularly need ammo; the way to not "give them ammo" would be to stop standing up for trans rights, and the fact that he hasn't is commendable.

happyhardcore

2 years agodiscuss

I suspect this is why OpenAI is going more in the direction of optimising for price / latency / whatever with 4o-mini and whatnot. Presumably they found out long before the rest of us did that models can't really get all that much better than what we're approaching now, and once you're there the only thing you can compete on is how many parameters it takes and how cheaply you can serve that to users.

happyhardcore

3 years agodiscuss

How so? Other than the security issues that get exploited by NSO group from time to time (that appear to be mitigated fairly well by lockdown mode if that's something that's important to you) or the obvious flaw that you can't talk to anyone that doesn't have an iPhone it seems to be a perfectly good platform. The alternatives either have worse encryption (Telegram, RCS), worse privacy (WhatsApp), or the same platform lock-in as iMessage (Google's RCS).

happyhardcore

3 years agodiscuss

It's really impressive that a high school student [1] has managed to reverse engineer iMessage. What I'm wondering is:

1. How stable is it; would it be trivial for Apple to patch this?

2. If it's as simple as reverse engineering the protocols, how has it taken this long?

[1] https://github.com/JJTech0130

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

I started out using a cheap MicroSD and it only lasted a week or two before failing; I've since replaced it with a 128 GB SATA SSD with a USB3-SATA dongle I bought off Amazon. No SD card needed and it's served me incredibly well. I figured that even the best MicroSD card isn't going to be designed to run as a computer's boot drive, and SATA SSDs are cheap and plentiful.

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

It's worth bearing in mind that _all_ ports on the device are expansion cards, including the USB-C port that the device needs to actually charge. In any case I think WiFi is 'good enough' for most use cases, and as such the number of laptops that provide ethernet as standard is rapidly diminishing. I very rarely need an ethernet port on my laptop, but for the times I do it'd be very helpful to have it installed rather than needing a dongle flapping about.

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

Ah, TIL. Thanks for clearing that up!

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

Pancreatic cancer actually has one of the worst survival rates; in the UK around 25% of people diagnosed survive past a year, with 5% living more than five years after diagnosis [0]. Chemo in those circumstances often has the effect of prolonging life while significantly decreasing the quality of life, and as such many people choose not to go through with it.

[0] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/pancreatic-can...

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

This just solved a problem I have that I never knew there was a solution for! It seems really weird to me that every OS doesn't have a native solution for changing external monitor brightness; I thought it was down to the monitor but clearly it isn't. Thanks for the link and thanks for your work on Lunar!

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

I've easily saved a couple of minutes each day by not having to search some API docs, since Copilot already knows how my variables should fit into the function call. Even if it's just a minute a day, 20 days a month, it works out being worth $10 easily if you're on a typical western software dev salary.

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

I've found copilot invaluable for throwing together quick scripts, especially in languages I don't quite understand. Writing e.g. a bash script, and being able to add a comment saying

    # Print an error message in red and exit if this program returns an error

and have it print out

    if ! some_program
    then
        echo -e "\e[31msome_program failed\e[0m"
        exit 1
    fi

makes it so much quicker to cobble together something that works without having to context switch and go Google something. That being said, I've found when writing more complex code it has a real tendency to introduce subtle bugs that can really catch you out if you're not paying attention.

Purely from the amount of time I've saved I'd say it's well worth the $10/mo for my employer (it only has to save a few minutes a day to be worthwhile). Very excited to see how they improve it in the future!

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

Looking at Ableton 11's feature set it seems they're running out of ideas; CLAP support would definitely be the kinda thing that could compel people to upgrade to a future version.

It being MIT licensed also gives it a much better chance of getting integrated into all sorts of smaller DAWs and cheaper ones too that might not have wanted to deal with all the nonsense that comes with VST.

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

Agreed. If I ran a SaaS startup with a team of three and $1m ARR I'd feel pretty confident that things are gonna be alright for me.

happyhardcore

4 years agodiscuss

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. [0]

e: in any case, there are a number of ways of telling this story I can think of that'd be far worse than Twitter, even if I do agree that a series of tweets doesn't feel like the best way of communincating a small blog post. Plus, I feel like you end up with more engagement between the author and commenters on Twitter, such as in [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://twitter.com/PierreDeWulf/status/1508476780583206918

happyhardcore

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A 0-click exploit chain for the Pixel 10

[untitled]

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