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barnas2

190 karma · joined February 4, 2025

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barnas2··on The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand
I ordered from JLPCB like 2 weeks ago and didn't need to give my SSN.
barnas2··on Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat
> I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc

This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.

barnas2··on Turning a dumb AC unit smart (without losing my security deposit)
That's what I did. Just an esp32 relay board with a tiny screen and a knob. Then I put more esp32 sensors in each room to get individual temps, with HA logic to select which room the thermostat pays attention to. If HA dies for some reason it falls back to a local control and I'm back to the same situation as before, a thermostat that only pays attention to the temperature in the hallway it's installed in. All the boards were flashed with ESPHome.
barnas2··on Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
I built a portable meshtastic terminal using Claude and a Pico 2. It's written 100% of the code in MicroPython and it works great. It even wrote the driver for the E-ink screen I'm using. I built a jig to hold a webcam and the e-ink screen, then had Claude write a script/MCP that takes a photo and crops just the screen out. Then I asked it to figure out a driver, and after a 20 minute loop of taking photos and updating it's driver, it was done.
barnas2··on Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai
> Flux.ai offers a PCB design solution

"solution" is an interesting choice. I haven't talked to anyone who tried it and actually got anything useful. It completely failed when I tried using it.

barnas2··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
A company called Taalas is working on something like that. Not Opus4.6 quality, but I'm sure they're targeting larger models. Currently they're using a LLama 8B model. It runs at ~17k tokens per second, and you can test it at https://chatjimmy.ai/.
barnas2··on My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
Clear procedures are the entire point of incident response plans. You follow them because of the fact that your judgement can be compromised in the moment. They re-triggered the malware payload because they decided to just dive in and handle it on their own in the "fog of war". Which would have been avoided entirely if they'd been following the standard advice to quarantine the machine and contact security so that they can investigate properly, with the developer if necessary.

Your final sentence is completely irrelevant. Blind rule adherence can be an avenue for exploit in certain scenarios, but this wasn't a case of a developer being tricked into following a bad rule. They didn't follow a real and very well justified standard practice.

The takeaway is "wow, we got lucky, we should have security people to loop in for this next time" not your weird life philosophy about how rule followers are a problem.

barnas2··on My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack
As someone who works in security, it's really neat that you were able to discover this with the help of Claude. That being said the "I just opened Cursor again which triggered the malicious package" message is a bit eye opening. Ideally the instant you suspected malware that machine should have been quarantined and your security personnel contacted.
barnas2··on An interactive map of Flock Cams
Isn't the entire argument for these based on the fact that people don't have an expectation of privacy in a public place? Not that I'm sure they won't try to make an excuse as to why it's different, but as far as I'm aware, you're allowed to just film in public.
barnas2··on Gemini 3 Deep Think
>Poker players have intuitive sense of the statistics of various hand types showing up, for instance, and that can be a useful clue as to which build types are promising.

Maybe in the early rounds, but deck fixing (e.g. Hanged Man, Immolate, Trading Card, DNA, etc) quickly changes that. Especially when pushing for "secret" hands like the 5 of a kind, flush 5, or flush house.

barnas2··on Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app
> You could make the argument that Patreon isn't much more than a banking app.

Don't give them any ideas.

barnas2··on Show HN: Extracting React apps from Figma Make's undocumented binary format
I'm curious if you tried binwalk? That's usually my goto for mysterious files.
barnas2··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
I don't smoke/vape, but I saw some pretty absurd models available recently that really piqued my interest. One had a touchscreen, could run some basic apps, and had wifi/bluetooth support. The other had a d-pad + buttons built in and a few ripoffs of classic games you could play. I bought one of each to start ripping them apart on my work bench and playing with the firmware. Unfortunately I got busy and haven't done much more than look at the internals. They're using some sort of cheap smart watch SoC. It's wild you can get a battery, touchscreen, charging circuit, and a microprocessor for like $12.
barnas2··on RCE via ND6 Router Advertisements in FreeBSD
> We can only hope the firmware vendors are on top of their game.

You should go into comedy, this would kill at an open mic!

barnas2··on Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
Manufacturers still may not go for it, due to the potential bad publicity. To go back to the toaster example, if some fancy open source software alternative has a critical issue and causes fires, the news will not report it with nuance. "SmartCo Toaster Fires on the Rise!" will be the headline, not "Niche Modding Community Sets Toasters On Fire, And The Manufacturer Had Nothing To Do With It".
barnas2··on Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away
>On a vaguely related note, driving 3000 kilometers through Europe in an electric car was surprisingly nice.

I did 2 cross country road trips here in the US (~5000mi/8000km total) and had a similar experience. The nav's automatic charger routing did a great job, and we had 0 issues with charging.

barnas2··on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free
Incredible startup idea. While we wait for the self driving tech, maybe we could pay specially trained people to drive these vehicles?
barnas2··on Show HN: Automated license plate reader coverage in the USA
NYC already tried Snitching as a Service during COVID, and it went terribly. I grew up with a neighbor who would constantly record people and call the cops over every little perceived infraction. Everyone in the neighborhood hated her, including the cops. I do not want to live in a society that encourages those people.
barnas2··on Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
I've gotten pretty good results from saying it's someone else's idea and that I'm skeptical. e.g. "A coworker wrote this code, can you evaluate it?"
barnas2··on The RAM shortage comes for us all
They aren't overproducing consumer modules, they're actively cutting production of those. They're producing datacenter/AI specific form factors that won't be compatible with consumer hardware.
barnas2··on Jaguar Land Rover hack cost UK economy an estimated $2.5B
Honda makes an anti-rodent tape that's designed for wrapping wiring. It's loaded with capsaicin so any critter that bites down will quickly decide to stop. It's possible other manufacturers are exploring similar ideas.
barnas2··on Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol
I bet this is going to make them a TON of money. A ton of people are using chatgpt to essentially replace google, and treating it like a trusted source. The average user is going to jump at the ability to ask their "trusted" source a question and get a direct link to the thing they need to buy.
barnas2··on I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster
> SSD + HAT + PSU + Case + Cooler (+ maybe a uSD)

The only 100% required thing on there is some sort of power supply, and an SD card, and I suspect a lot of people have a spare USB-C cable and brick lying around. A cooler is only recommended if you're going to be putting it under sustained CPU load, and they're like $10 on Amazon.

barnas2··on We all dodged a bullet
Looks like it costs ~$200,000 to get your own TLD. If a bunch of companies started doing the "register every TLD of our brand", I wonder what the breakeven point would be where just registering a TLD is profitable.
barnas2··on Clankers Die on Christmas
I believe there's also some research showing that being nice gets better responses. Given that it's trained on real conversations, and that's how real conversation works, I'm not surprised.
barnas2··on Magic Lantern Is Back
"Scrobbles" will always be a funny word to me.
barnas2··on Privately-Owned Rail Cars
Strangely enough, Florida, of all places seems to be having really good success with their Brightline rail network. The initial system runs from Miami to Orlando, with a few stops in between. They're planning on expanding up north and east into the panhandle. Financially things are a bit dicey, but it got built, and it's reliable. Ridership is increasing, which takes cars of the road, and property values in the areas it stops are going up. Meanwhile California doesn't even have their tiny "initial operating segment" built, and is projecting to be up to 3-4x their original budget of 33 billion dollars.
barnas2··on ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes
I got a used tesla a few years ago that came with FSD, and I fully agree. I drove to Vegas for DEFCON a few weeks ago and the ~8 hour drive was kind of just a mild inconvenience.
barnas2··on ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes
Long drives for me used to be a fucking nightmare, especially long highway drives. Anything over 5 hours was basically an impossibility, now with medication it's really a mild inconvenience. I just moved to a new area, and I have a friend 2 hours away in another town. I don't even think about the drive when making plans, I'll happily drive up, hang out for a few hours, then drive back home. I still have limits on how long I want to drive (did 10-11 hour driving days when I was moving cross country, and that sucked), but they're way higher.

Having a car with lane centering cruise control also helps a ton, at least where I live. Not having to micro-manage a car for several hours when you're on a long drive reduces the cognitive load.

barnas2··on GLP-1s are breaking life insurance
When I took Adderall in college a few times I had a very similar feeling. You could have told me my favorite restaurant was giving away my favorite food, and it would have been nauseating while I was on the meds.
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