CursedSilicon

I don't recall doing any of that. But thanks for affirming my point? :)

Oh, I have *strong* opinions about the slop machine. But I try to temper them so I don't get buried by the usual "pro AI" mob

I will say that my projects have a "leading the pack" anti-AI policy [1]

[1] https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/AI_Policy

A while back I helped a friend (read: dumped a bunch of compute power into it) brute force the SSL keys for Sega's "Phantasy Star Online" Dreamcast game.

They used a similar kind of custom (and flawed) TLS implementation in their game(s) which allowed signing new certificates after brute forcing.

The benefit to this is that users can now play these games without needing to burn a new CD with either the SSL certs swapped, or the code patched to dummy out the checks. A "retail CD" will simply work with private servers now.

I've also been on the other side of the fence, building a "retro internet" service [1] has meant trying to implement ancient SSL/TLS services for things and people that want to use them on the network.

Getting modern OpenSSL (aka what ships in Debian) to even accept these ciphers, let alone keys that short is an uphill battle. Understandably, they're disabled by default and (in Debian at least) the cipher support isn't even compiled into the binary! This requires building a custom OpenSSL to build Nginx against to serve ancient SSL.

Presumably for the OP this kind of work was either outside of their realm of knowledge, or simply "easier" to outsource to the slop machine. Though I hope the machine they're running their demo TLS implementation on is separated completely from their own network. Rolling your own crypto libraries is always a bad idea [2] and I doubt LLM's have "improved" that

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSJsGNIDjtc

[2] https://soatok.blog/2025/01/31/hell-is-overconfident-develop...

That sounds rather tautological. If you can't even articulate the virtues in your own words

One of my favourite memories of flying Qantas when I was younger was the inflight entertainment.

If memory serves, they were celebrating some sort of milestone like "60 years without a fatal accident" or similar. Quite an impressive feat!

I'm unclear if it was directly related. But the Qantas inflight entertainment system on our flight from Sydney to Los Angeles meanwhile contained about 12 seasons of the National Geographic series "Air Crash Investigation" (Mayday: Air Disasters for Americans)

I will admit that show made an 18 hour slog of a flight significantly more enjoyable

...That sounds like entropy? As in, the thing computers are bad at (truly random numbers) and /dev/urandom in your kernel already spits out an approximation of?

Now that's not fair. Matrix gives you plenty of options to be flooded with CSAM or have all your chats become inexplicably unable to ever be decrypted again

The future is now!

I was always more of an MSN Messenger guy. But the Open OSCAR Server project is a fantastic labor of love stewarded by a kind soul.

They put up with (if not were outright amused at) me digging up the weirdest 3rd party clients I could [1] and just kicking them around against the server software to find bugs [2]

[1] https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/AIM_Clients

[2] https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server/issues/120

[2] https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server/issues/122

[2] https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server/issues/123

Not a bot. Just someone with reaaaallly bad takes it seems

Perhaps the reason nobody called you a genius is explicitly because you fail to understand the article

You literally complained nobody is calling you one in your first post

"The rest of the world" you say to a literal thread of people explaining why you're wrong

It's as if the fourth estate is bought and paid for by a side that directly benefits from these kind of money extracting policies

The legality around that has not yet been tested, so

Y'know with the exception of being run over with tanks (yet) I wasn't sure which side you were describing.

Freedom of speech only exists on paper. One side screeches about "cancel culture" but then hides behind it to mock school shootings, but god forbid you say mean things about dear leader on television!

The current admin doesn't jail people for having wrong opinions. It just sends them to other countries to do the jailing. Or to Gitmo if they happened to be in the wrong part of the world at one point or another.

Alligator Alcatraz and ICE camps sure as hell seem close enough to "re-education" camps to me

Sorry that self-improvement hurts you so

Given the state of the US, I'm not so sure that pedophiles are truly fit to run anything

Sir Mix-a-Lot tried to warn us, but we didn't listen!

...Did we suddenly abandon bettering ourselves in 2026?

That's a deliberate misreading of events but okay :)

That's quite a disingenuous response to something I said with citations and no direct stated opinions on the person.

Be better

Why remind people of the lies? We all knew they were lies. And the people who believed the lies will not have their minds changed

There's a 30% bedrock of America that appears to be simply broken beyond repair. That's his permanent voting and approval base

Given who founded Xlibre (Metux) has some...interesting history (he was banned from the X.org project due to poor code quality and practices [1]) I would say no

Metux himself also has some "fascinating" takes as archived from other projects such as the LKML [1] and Devuan [2] mailing lists

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/179...

[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyn...

If someone says "the sky is blue" and someone else says "actually the sky is polka dots!" are you going to ask for citations from both?

That's a strange take. But okay

He also wrote the book "Public Opinion" in 1922 [1] which explained how the US mass media apparatus could be used to influence the common man.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)

Ah, yes. The media. Famously the voice of the proletariat and the oppressed

Walter Lippmann is spinning in his grave

The Commodore chunk of retro computing is an extremely small pond. Of which he's an obnoxiously loud voice due to his youtube presence. Much to the chagrin of most of them (and most of us who orbit the greater "retro computing hobby")

Right, I forgot to bleat about how he was a (literal stand-in!) for Hayden Christensen on Star Wars. [1]

He got a bunch of old hats to sign their name to...what, exactly. A C64 on an FPGA? That he tried to lock down before getting backlash from the community? [2]

But none of that answers the question. What's the point?. Are "super fans" just paying through the nose because having something with the word "Commodore" on it truly means that much more to them?

"Mr. Fractic" has done nothing but shell out money and is now trying to recoup his investment. He created nothing (the phone was AI hallucinated for god sake) and seems to just be hoping that folks making actual new equipment around the C64 (and I guess Amiga?) sign on to get his blessed license. But, again. What are they buying?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190711081426/https://starwarsi...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/1svq98v/commodore_now_...

I've less than zero love for Commodore stuff, I'll admit up front. Even as a retro computing enthusiast and computer historian I think the adoration that Commodore (both the C64 and Amiga) get far outweighs any practical reasoning of what the machines are capable of

But the thing I've truly struggled to understand, particularly with PeriFractic and his bleating of "I OWN THE COMMODORE NAME NOW!" is just

...who cares? If you like Commodore stuff, great. Do things that make you happy. But does having a C64 with "the commodore name" printed on it owned by some slop peddling youtuber (both in his embracement of LLM's and that bizarre "dumb phone but also not" project) truly change anything for fans?

If you're buying an "A1200 accelerator" does the fact it says "AMIGA" on it make it more valuable than if it just said "68K accelerator" or some other generic term?

Australian but go off :)