thaeli's comments

thaeli | 6 months ago | on: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

I'm the same way. The scanlined, subpixeled versions just look terrible to me.

thaeli | 6 months ago | on: People Who Hunt Down Old TVs

FPGA based devices that can do this, and quite well, do exist, they're just expensive. The RetroTINK-4k Pro is the top of the line as of this writing but it's a $750 converter.

thaeli | 6 months ago | on: Ask HN: Do custom ROMs exist for electric cars, for example Teslas?

Emissions related components work very similarly, replace the software and it’s presumed to be a defeat device unless proved otherwise.

thaeli | 6 months ago | on: Ask HN: Do custom ROMs exist for electric cars, for example Teslas?

For emissions related components, EPA rules do kick in though. While the current administration appears to have paused enforcement, their position for many years has been that running anything except factory approved firmware on an ECU or other emissions related computer constitutes a “defeat device” and is illegal for an on road vehicle subject to emissions controls. (Granted, in practice 99% of the reason anyone installs new firmware on their ECU, or switches to an aftermarket ECU, is for a “tune” that does affect emissions. I’m sure there is some edge case exception, but it’s very rare in on road engines.)

The alternative, and there are a very few tunes that have done this, is to prove to regulators that the tune does not negatively affect emissions in any way. In practice this is done by getting a CARB exception since they’re the ones actually checking for tunes.

thaeli | 6 months ago | on: We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

Well, many areas have banned app-only payment requirements (along with card-only) so it’s possible we’ll get some mandated alternatives.

thaeli | 6 months ago | on: LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't

Ironically, this check would be a pretty good use for a LLM.

thaeli | 6 months ago | on: Ghrc.io appears to be malicious

Are there any additional mitigations folks are using for this? This issue is the only reason we can’t turn classic PATs off entirely.

Short lifetime mandatory reauth to enterprise SSO seems to be the best available, but it’s inconvenient for the single Classic PAT we actually need.

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

Yeah, interested to compare this with optimized and properly cached GitHub Hosted Runner builds.

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

The biggest problem with SE for me, and this is related to the culture issues you're talking about, is that the site has no good way of deprecating "formerly correct" answers. Even if a better, more correct answer is posted later, the reputation system has a huge incumbency bias in favor of older answers that have accumulated upvotes by being the best available answer at the time.

Their knowledge repository is slowly rotting under the weight of having to ask every time "okay, is this correct-sounding, highly upvoted answer actually (still) correct, or is it 10 years out of date?"

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: B.C. woman buried in Amazon packages she did not ask for and does not want

There was a common scam back then of sending cheap goods to someone, then billing them a high price, when they didn't order anything to begin with.

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: American hard hat jobs have the highest level of open positions ever recorded

Compare this to EMS, where unless you're lucky enough to be fire or hospital based, worker protections are almost nonexistent.

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

Unless we're ever ready to start treating bike thieves like horse thieves, that's unlikely to ever change. And I doubt we'll ever have the political will to do that, or even a kinder gentler version of it.

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Glassdoor is unbelievably bad, why no one disrupting it?

The concentrated force for candidates to counteract this would be an industy-wide union. Which isn't happening.. but if you look at unionized industries this is one of the major benefits for candidates, or at least for candidates who make it into the union..

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: When an app asks for permissions, it should have a “feed fake data” option

It's not ideal, per app would be preferable, but at least global can be a toggle in the global quick settings UI.

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: When an app asks for permissions, it should have a “feed fake data” option

As a user, I don't care about your ML model. I care about not sending you personal info. Coarser info isn't good enough - you can convince me you actually deserve my real info, or you can get no info (preferable), or you can get fake info (alternative if you degrade or break my user experience because I wouldn't give you that info).

I understand there are some legit use cases for validated info. Unfortunately, targeted advertising and other types of profiling are also common use cases for the same info. It's a lot like MAC randomization on public wifi - it sucks, it breaks legit use cases, but it was needed because too many companies were using it to track people.

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: Cities turn to ‘extreme’ water recycling

We do that, but we're joking.

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: NHTSA tells automakers not to comply with Massachusetts right-to-repair law

Isn't that pretty much what immobilizer bypass modules have done for years?

thaeli | 2 years ago | on: 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research

It was correct when the book was written, but isn't anymore.

thaeli | 3 years ago | on: Jaron Lanier on the danger of AI

If you read Brave New World and think of the lower "classes" as instead being automation and AI (really, most of the jobs done by Epsilons and Deltas in the book were automated decades ago, and the Gamma / Beta jobs are rapidly moving towards AI replacement as well) it's not a bad system, nor is it a dystopia.

thaeli | 3 years ago | on: Why construction projects always go over budget

The local maximum of "fix it but don't improve it" is a problem, and the requirement for major reconstruction to be done to current codes is foundational to almost all building codes. Note that small repairs and routine maintenance don't activate this requirement - it's activated when major work is being done, and there is a percentage of total project cost cap to the requirements.

If the new local maximum is "well, we won't fix it at all then" - the usual building code solution is property maintenance codes that mandate repairs.