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Peacefulz

166 karma · joined May 7, 2024

> "The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are." — Jim Morrison

I'm a millennial hobby technologist out of North Carolina. My focus at the current time is Web Security and Classical Computing. When I'm not honing my skills, you can find me playing RuneScape, or spending time with my family.

[My Personal Site](https://dowdy.dev)

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Peacefulz··on Let's Write About Writing
Just sharing my reflection post on writer's block. If it's not evident, I'm no professional writer. I'm hardly an amateur writer. I like to write though, and I hope these reminders serve others that like to write as well.
Peacefulz··on YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops
Oh you haven't seen the all-white decals on white cruisers with no top lights? Or the decals that are visible only when you're directly in line with the cruiser? There was an undercover Mitsubishi Lancer back in my home town. They aren't always so up front.
Peacefulz··on Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
I'm back in to collecting physical media as well. I get my wife to use her Facebook account to find stuff on marketplace. Lightly used bundles can get movies down to like a dollar per.
Peacefulz··on Trump says anyone who uses the phrase "artificial intelligence" is "the enemy"
I wanted to give the propensity of gathering sycophants to you, as that is key to him skirting the law, but I don't think he can even be given that attribute. Being a useful idiot to the real powers may augment reach and impact, but only so long as that power values what the useful idiot makes possible, be it through policy, idiocy, or anywhere in between.

The money finds him useful, and that manifests as plot armor essentially as the puppeteers exert their will on society.

I want to touch on the for decades thing too, but I think I'm at my run-on sentence limit. Hard agree, though. John Trump had his hands up the right asses to make that a reality. It's never been Don. He's a child king.

Peacefulz··on Trump says anyone who uses the phrase "artificial intelligence" is "the enemy"
I could not care less about a single thing that the current admin thinks or feels. The quality of those opinions are the same for the local crackheads in my community. There is not a single topic, idea or concept that Donald Trump has the capacity to be an authority of.
Peacefulz··on How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
> "Everyone leaves their phones at the door"...

— watches, calculators, discrete technological devices. I've seen kids encode text as patterns of dashes on their desks, sharing the cipher solution with their desk mates in other periods.

The problem isn't skirting the effort. The problem is systemic. Why does the system reward taking shortcuts? I think it's because most areas are focused on short horizon tasks, min-maxing effort:output. It's not a problem with those technical fields. It's a problem with the current crop of the C-Suite across the entire occupational plane. They're short sighted.

Peacefulz··on There's a high chance of devices being sold with GrapheneOS preinstalled in 2027
We are going to be reinstalling GrapheneOS on the phones shipping with it.
Peacefulz··on Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP
I'm hopeful for the Motorola partnership, as well. I'm following grapheneOS wherever it ends up.
Peacefulz··on THUG2 Asset Archive
I'm making some graphics for my personal site, and while searching for assets for my THPS theme, I couldn't find any complete libraries of images. I have Tony Hawk's Underground 2 installed on my PC, so I decided to point Claude at it while I was preoccupied. The result is a seemingly complete dump of all game assets, including videos. I treasure this game, so I thought someone here might like to see them as well.
Peacefulz··on Ask HN: Are technical blogs dead?
I haven't thought about it, but it's not a bad idea! The subject matter overall is a bit eclectic, but if I value something, surely someone else who hasn't yet found it will too!
Peacefulz··on Ask HN: Are Technical Blogs Dead?
I'm searching for them harder than ever. Ironically, I have agents crawl for independent bloggers so I can add more people to my ever-growing RSS feed.
Peacefulz··on Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later – Cliff Stoll [video]
One of my favorite books is "The Cuckoo's Egg". I read it at least yearly. Cliff Stoll has had an incredible impact on my interests. I'm happy to see him doing talks.
Peacefulz··on 88x31 Badge Creator
Just wanted to share my 88x31 badge maker utility. I noticed that there aren't a ton of tools out there that support frame-by-frame animation. This tool is exportable and runs entirely in the browser. Feel free to save and/or distribute copies to your friends and family.
Peacefulz··on OpenLogi
Finally. I've been stuck with my onboard selections for a year now due to lack of motivation to deal with windows. Definitely gonna be checking this out.
Peacefulz··on Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out
I don't know how I missed such a cool redirector back in Web1.0.

The Old Web was, as most people here state, left behind in favor of the Walled Gardens of social media. The barrier to the watering hole was so low. I don't blame technical people for following their friends and family into these places. It kinda sucks that they let their marks on the web fade and expire.

That didn't have to happen. My personal site is going to live on the web as long as I do, and hopefully further if I can manage it. I don't care how much traffic I generate.

Peacefulz··on The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
I've moved between three managers in the past two years and all of them supported importing and exporting your full lists. That could be a recent development, though. I admit, I haven't used an apple product in a long time, so you could be right. I don't trust SMS, because I don't trust cleartext over the air. Too many people have too much time on their hands and information is too readily available.
Peacefulz··on The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
I suggest exporting your password manager && your topt keychain onto an encrypted flash drive. I went through the horrors of having a phone die on me after migrating my topt to a local solution. Having a valid login cookie on bitwarden on my laptop was the only thing that saved me.
Peacefulz··on Delete DoorDash
The Socials doc is creepy. You'd think an organic local movement wouldn't require what amounts to a Turf doc.
Peacefulz··on Show HN: Nightcrawler – A local AI pentesting agent running on a smartphone
If getting it out there in the world is more important to you than stamping your name on it, pass it out to a friend who can publish it. Continue any related development in private. They can't stop you from distributing something they don't know you're developing.
Peacefulz··on The lost civic life of movie rental stores
As I age, my desire for friends for friends' sake diminishes. If someone doesn't offer something to my life that I value, I'll have a hard time putting energy into them.

It was so easy to make strong bonds as a kid, captive with other kids in a building most of the time. Now there is a cost:benefit I have to weigh a persons worth to me against.

Peacefulz··on A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
Hmm. No mention of a need for subpoena on the google end... Wonder why that is? Is that rubber stamp just public knowledge at this point? Google and Apple both are appendages of the State.
Peacefulz··on Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info
I love bobdahackers work. Always a treat to see.
Peacefulz··on IRGC claims it destroyed Amazon's Bahrain data center
An aggressor state doesn't get to cry foul play. I don't care what Ukraine has to resort to so they can defend their sovereignty. If Russia doesn't like how the game is being played, they can take their ball and go home.
Peacefulz··on Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story
I agree with your stance mostly. I get the sentiment, but both of your examples seem civil to me. Both of those situations can and ideally should be resolved out of the courts, and neither carry social weight.

If one entity is injured by another, and subsequently made whole, however the two parties define that, then it is none of my business.

Peacefulz··on The Kids' Guide to Piracy
I got shut off for seeding Wrestlemania. No warnings or letters. Just a disconnect. AT&T fiber, I believe.

I reached support who told me the reasoning. I fed that tech a line saying I let a house-sitter use my computer while out of town and they reinstatated me.

I got kind of disproportionately agitated decided to learn networking/security, so I can figure out just how much they (the ISP) knows, are able to know, and how I can mitigate it. Now, here we are.

Peacefulz··on I turned my bearblog into a text based adventure
I decided that rather than let my Bearblog account rot, I would repurpose it into a text-based adventure. The platform is surprisingly good at accommodating this use case.

This is an impulsive prompt on Claude Fable 5. I have a terrible imagination.

Peacefulz··on Chatto is now open source
Let Chatto cast a shadow on your private communications!

The marketing practically writes itself.

Peacefulz··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
I was hoping to see the classic doctor redirect banner when I hit that link. Still so very cool that they kept their domain active this whole time!
Peacefulz··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
What is objectivity?

“There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.” — Nietzsche:On the Genealogy of Morals III

It's a target. Objectivity does not appear in nature in a stable form. Nothing is fixed and certain. Some things just appear that way from our point of view.

Peacefulz··on GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17
I started rebuilding my phone from factory tonight, and I opted for the private profile partition inside of the main profile for my play store apps. It's accomplishing everything I wanted a fully separate profile to do without the hard switch.
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