crote · HackerLangs

The most annoying part is that a lot of GPS gear automatically "corrects" to UTC without giving clear indication of it. Things would'be been fine if the standard was to explicitly sent out TAI timestamps, with a leap second offset for the people who insist on UTC.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

> that applies the world over

It does not. Plenty of countries have functioning labor laws preventing you from being fired for your religious or political opinions.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

The physical structure is completely different. Just compare DRAM ([0]) with compute ([1]). As a result, the production process is completely different.

If you want to know more, the Asianometry youtube channel has some fairly good deep dives, such as [2] going through a decent bunch of the 45nm production process, or [3] doing the same for (early) DRAM.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bln-v9LmZ3E

[1]: https://i1.wp.com/semiengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUgy29h0alM

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPualBNf1nM

crote

eergisterendiscuss

That's the thing: according to the post he offered it, but the offer wasn't accepted. They stayed on Github, and it was the Github repos which were compromised. They did entertain his desire to let him host a read-only mirror - but that's hardly critical, and having complete strangers mirroring Linux ISOs or package repos has been a thing for ages.

The post makes zero mention of him ever joining or being part of the core infra ops team. So where did the admin access come from?

crote

eergisterendiscuss

I have been part of the HN community for a while as well. I don't have admin access to its servers. That's the unclear part. How does it go from "offering to host it, which is refused" and "read-only mirror" to... this?

crote

eergisterendiscuss

Don't most (all?) modern CPUs have an embedded TPM? Plug-in TPMs were indeed a thing early on, but I thought that was a thing of the past by now. You can't exactly get in between the CPU and another part of the same CPU.

Also, isn't the EK (and therefore its cert) unique per-device, allowing you to tell it apart? The fact that the manufacturer used the same upstream key to sign both certs doesn't matter, just like a CA can sign multiple TLS certs with one root key.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

Bay Area salaries are well-known to be extremely inflated.

Have European engineers do it for $100k or Asian engineers do it for $50k and the math is already looking a lot sketchier.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

Because the author isn't employed by a transpiler company.

The entire point is to get people to spend money on LLMs. Writing a transpiler - even a LLM-coded one - pretty much defeats the purpose.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

"Make more money" in this case could also be "do high-profile rewrite for marketing reasons, silently abandon a year later".

crote

eergisterendiscuss

500k lines in 11 days? With 8-hour working days that's 100 lines per minute. There's no way you're comprehensively reviewing code that quickly.

The code was generated by a LLM, and the output wasn't even read by its user. That's definitely vibe coding.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

2b. You have to publish the retired private keys, or else a recipient will retain undeniable proof of message authenticity.

Depending on your perspective, this can be either a feature or a bug.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

I am quite confused about the mercury contamination being mentioned, to be honest.

There's a huge amount of mercury contamination at Y-12. The DoE wants to clean it up. The DoE asks for proposals for building an on-site plant capable of cleaning it up. And that's somehow... bad?

What's supposed to be the alternative here: shipping thousands of tonnes of contaminated dirt to an offsite processing plant? Dumping it all in the nearest lake? Burying it and pretending it doesn't exist?

There are dozens of examples of government agencies laser-focusing on one specific solution, but I just don't see how this case is bad enough that it warrants being explicitly mentioned as an example of the DoE not allowing for enough alternatives.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

How did it go from "He even performed a backup/mirror of several dozen of our repositories." to "He deleted part of our repository from GitHub. (..) [He published] an empty package in the cooker repository, which obsoleted all gnome and cosmic packages."?

I feel like there's a few steps missing there. How does it go from "a new person joins the community" to "he's able to nuke everything"? Sure, he might be reasonably well-known, but in the post it doesn't sound like he was a core maintainer, or even a very active community member. Do they just randomly hand out admin access to anyone?

crote

eergisterendiscuss

In practice most of the purposes you'd encounter in the wild are directly linked to user activity, so account deletion means most of the reasons to keep it disappear.

You still need to keep it if there's a law saying that you need to have that data, of course, but that's the exception.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

To save everyone a click:

> Personal data shall be: kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed. (..)

Note that this does not say "it must be stored for a limited amount of time" - it says "no longer than necessary".

Your basic account data (such as username and password, or an email for password recovery) is still necessary to log in to the platform and make use of your purchases. As long as there is no clear indication that the user will never log in again (such as due to death, or because they explicitly deleted their account), it would be reasonable to keep it around.

On the other hand, it may make sense to delete some data. For example, it may make sense to store your full name and address info to make checkout more convenient. If a user hasn't bought stuff in a while, it makes sense to delete it and have them re-enter it in the future.

There might be a bit of a gray space for things like game achievements (especially when there's a public profile) or savefile backups, but reading it as "you MUST delete all digital purchases because GDPR" is just not true.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

Best of all: there's no hardware rat race.

The N64 is never going to get any faster, and emulators can run on just about any potato these days. People have realistic expectations of what the platform can do, so there's no need to spend insane effort making the graphics look better. It's always going to look kinda crappy, and that is Just Fine.

This lets game developers focus on the actual gameplay itself. No "Generic Shooter vol. 26 - now with slightly prettier water!", but innovative stuff focusing on the narrative and on novel gameplay elements.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

No, you do want the network effects. Nobody wants to install yet another special snowflake chat client for a single community. Unless they are being forced to (like in a work environment) or are getting significant benefits out of joining that community, most people would just prefer not joining at all over installing an additional client.

Discord is winning because it's a dozen different communities in one single convenient client. Want your new chat platform to win? Convince all those communities to switch.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

The big question is: how do we tell the difference?

If 99.9% of LLM-smelling projects is vibecoded garbage, why should anyone assume that your LLM-smelling project is the 0.1%? If I spend all day digging through dogshit to find the one diamond, I'll just end up going home empty-handed smelling of dogshit.

AI tells are a giant red flag indicating to potential users not to waste time on it. Want people to take your new pet project seriously? Don't use AI! And yes, that does include even the genius 100x engineers who can use LLMs responsibly.

crote

eergisterendiscuss

So, an open-source Discord clone?

I mean, people have been asking for alternatives lately, so it's not like there isn't a market for it. There are even entire communities[0] for discovering them.

But considering there are already several dozen alternatives: what makes this one special? What sets it apart from Gamevox, Cinny, Element, Schildi, Echon, Neremity, Fluxer, Faction, Stoat, Guilded, Root, Loqa, Venta, Osmium, and so on and so on? Heck, a handful of vibecoded new ones spring up every week!

If you're going to release Yet Another Clone, you have to make it immediately obvious 1) how it compares feature-wise, and 2) what unique thing makes yours special enough to overcome the extremely powerful network effects of the incumbents. Reading this page Chatto looks neat I guess, but there's nothing convincing me to invest several hours into discovering whether this is truly a Discord killer, or Yet Another Clone. Same with the official website and docs: some techy mumbo-jumbo, but that's about it.

No matter how impressive it is technically and no matter how free and open it may be, without significantly better marketing material it'll have a chance at becoming relevant.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscordAlternatives/

crote

3 dagen geledendiscuss

It's their $80B+ investment in building AI infrastructure.

If Microsoft can't meaningfully integrate AI into their own products and make profit off of selling it to end users, why should anyone assume that third parties can? By extension: if nobody can make money off of AI products, what's the point of building $80B in AI infrastructure - did they just set a giant pile of cash on fire?

Microsoft has to ship AI features, or write off its massive investments as essentially worthless. Remove the crappy AI feature from Github, and you pop the bubble.

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