cbdevidal

My first job in IT was at AOL tech support and we could rattle off modem strings from memory :-)

My first job in IT was at AOL tech support and we could rattle off AT modem strings from memory :)

Someone also posted a link to the Hayes command set and I was glad.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567961

That's funny. I clicked on the HN article on the home page about the AT Protocol[1] expecting an article on the Hayse set. And then I scrolled down and saw this article.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49527123

I couldn’t help but notice that there was an equally cold spike at the bottom.

OfferUp also has a ton, as does AutoTempest and even good old fashioned AutoTrader. I'm currently shopping for my son.

Facebook seems to have the lowest cost cars, but it also seems to be the least successful way of contacting people. When I bought a car for my sister in April, I contacted (no exaggeration) 70+ sellers and heard back from about ten of them. And yes, I changed the default "Is it still available?" message to something demonstrating urgency e.g. "I have cash and would like to buy." But with persistence, I found her the right car through Marketplace. Really hate the FBook search interface though, it's total garbage.

I spend most of my time looking on CList and OfferUp.

Correct, but who 25 years ago could have imagined they’d have gone so far as to roll their own? I remember the Balmer days.

But the fact that they’re rolling a distro tells me they’re likely also writing software for Linux. I’m sure their Azure Linux contains apps they wrote and maintain, used by the OS.

Then there’s Microsoft apps on Android, with Linux under the covers.

Also relevant quote that I think about when this subject comes up:

“If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.” ~Linus Torvalds

In this case, an entire freaking distro.

I personally am itching for more hardware H.264 or even H.265. There's the ESP32-P4 but it requires a second ESP32 to handle the WiFi. I got it working, but it feels like a hack, and the BOM cost is more than 2x a single chip.

Course more PSRAM and hardware encoding would drive up the price...

Air-gapped attacks are the most fascinating. Change my mind

Now you’re talking!

What fun!

I’d love to also go the opposite direction, a full-sized laptop with an ESP32 running tiny386 and Windows 95 ^_^

https://www.hackster.io/news/he-chunhui-s-tiny386-turns-the-...

It’s got more horsepower than my first desktop computer

Crash Override boot screen made me genuinely LOL. Nice touch.

https://photos.tylercipriani.com/2026-05-31_chuwi-boot-smol....

Make it your Wifi password too lol

It's funny to me that he wrote the song to prove that his fans would buy any American-sounding song no matter the lyrics, but it was such a banger that even we in America love to listen to it. Backfired in the best way possible.

Happened to me. CoPilot changing prices prompted me to cancel my CoPilot subscription and install a local coding model running entirely in VRAM. Will call Claude APIs when I get really stuck, but I should be able to handle 80% of my needs with a dumber local model.

For a long time, too. Programming languages rarely change much, techniques rarely change, so I should be able to use said model for I hope at least five years; and if at any time they optimize local models to cram even more intelligence into the same amount of VRAM, I can upgrade to that.

I like this path.

Old hardware is surprisingly effective. I've been considering a side hustle selling offline AI to local businesses who are privacy-sensitive. Medical, legal, places like that.

At the low end, I'd use old Xeons with gobs of DDR3, install some V100s, run a smaller agent for general chat inquiries, and a frontier model for the deeper stuff, with a router that passes between them depending on the complexity.

The frontier model would perform very slowly, but if it's a deep task the user can submit it in a batch in the evening e.g. "Correlate all of these cases and look for patterns" then receive the output with morning coffee.

Of course, AI helped me work out a plan for this. Haha

:-) I'll keep you in mind.

I just have never been in any kind of dedicated developer role. A sysadmin who happens to know development for the past 25 years.

And didn't know development at a high level; no one to guide, so I self-learned and acquired some bad habits that I'm now breaking, and didn't learn some necessary techniques that I'm now learning.

I’ve never known the joy of sitting with someone more experienced to ask for help; I’ve either always been the most knowledgeable in the room (which is not necessarily saying much) or I was the only one in the room.

With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help.

It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologies and techniques.

Excellent

Yeah agreed, DEET lasts way longer. I personally don't trust it, so I'm not going to use it unless I really, really, really need it. I'd rather re-apply lemon eucalyptus every hour. I like the smell, too.

But I now tend to go without bug spray even though I live in Florida. Since I started eating strict carnivore mosquito bites no longer itch, which was unexpected but super helpful. I think because I'm not eating histamines. Mosquitoes are still annoying, but at least they don't itch.

Also, when we go camping it's usually in February, and I never have to use any spray at all then. Can sit outside for hours and hours.

I don’t understand why sharing an objective study with good news would be downvoted, someone please explain?

I’m not saying you have to use it; it’s good news for people who have concerns about other chemicals. It works—less effectively, but it works.

“Repellants containing (..) oil of lemon eucalyptus have also been found to be effective.”[1]

[1] Iowa Department of Health, “Controlling Spread of West Nile Virus“ https://hhs.iowa.gov/health-prevention/providers-professiona...

The new laptop has only 32GB DDR5 and a RTX 4070 with 8 GB GDDR6 on Xubuntu, so Gemini recommended qwen2.5. I don’t think I want to run anything larger because as you said it’d run on CPU and system RAM. As it is, the 14B model will still spill over some and not entirely fit into the GPU.

Really cool!!

I just found out about this last week, but the good news is a new PC with a better GPU will arrive in about two weeks so I’ve decided to install a pair of local LLMs that are similar in competency to the free GPT-5 mini model I usually used in CoPilot. qwen2.5-coder:14b for chat and deepseek-coder:3b for autocomplete. I’ll switch to a Claude API for the really tough stuff, which I was doing with CoPilot anyway. The Continue plugin for VSCode gets all of this accomplished.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

Spray made from lemon eucalyptus works[1]. Not as well as DEET, but it works.

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/health/insect-repellent/oil-...

> The fourth thing is that I am trying out marketing ads on social media and that includes posting ads on Facebook and Reddit. I'm doing a smaller ad spend at first to see if it is worth spending extra money on advertising on certain platforms.

Drill into this. Really optimize and test. The more I learn about marketing, the more I recognize that paid ads can and do work, but you must really persist with them.

Learned a lot from Alex Hormozi, Allan Dib, and Seth Godin. Start there.