gruez

45,777 karma · joined February 24, 2015

gruezon Sam Altman: All the RAM Should Belong to Me, So I Can Charge People to Use It

>Should I give my solar panels to my power company so they can overcharge me too in the name of “efficiency”?

That doesn't make any sense because solar panels hooked up to the grid already benefits from high utilization. However if there is some national energy crisis, and there's a bunch of solar panels sitting idle, it might very well make sense to at least connect them to the grid so the energy isn't wasted.

gruezon Sam Altman: All the RAM Should Belong to Me, So I Can Charge People to Use It

>it's being financially manufactured by companies like OpenAI

How is this a relevant factor as long as the demand is genuine and not some attempt the corner the market? Otherwise blame all the people/companies buying the tokens.

gruezon Sam Altman: All the RAM Should Belong to Me, So I Can Charge People to Use It

>It just so happens that the highest and best use is also what makes him the most money.

Something being self serving doesn't make it false, and you don't have to rabidly deny basic economic theory just because you hate the guy.

gruezon Sam Altman: All the RAM Should Belong to Me, So I Can Charge People to Use It

Try swapping the subject for something less divisive, like cars. If some calamity hit where we can no longer makes sense to produce cars, it would certainly make more sense to reallocate everyone's private cars (with compensation) to taxi services so each car can be used most efficiently, rather than sitting on a parking lot 23 hours a day.

gruezon Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?

>With Amazon Sidewalk I don't think not hooking it up to the internet is an option anymore

"Anymore"? So far there's no evidence any TVs are using it, so you're safe for now.

gruezon Ask HN: Which TV do you recommend for privacy?

In reality that'll never work because the front of the tV needs to be exposed. At best you can make your whole room/house a faraday cage, but that'd be insanely expensive to do correctly. You might think a microwave is a faraday cage, but a phone can still get calls even if you put it inside.

gruezon It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge

>Meta doesn't want to be a social media company - so it lets facebook rot, makes 10% of its total revenue from scammers advertising to its customers, which seem to mostly be vulnerable old people and focuses on VR and AI.

Are you just going to ignore the rest of advertising that isn't "scammers advertising to its customers", and makes up the overwhelming majority of their revenue?

gruezon Russia has imposed limits on gasoline sales following attacks on oil refineries

As much as everyone likes a feel good story about the triumph of democracy and renewable energy over authoritarianism and fossil fuels, it's pretty easy to find holes in the narrative. Europe for instance famously hooked themselves up to cheap russian gas. China is at the forefront of renewable energy, were better prepared for the iran oil shock than many other countries, and even helped stabilize prices.

gruezon Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB is just an unencrypted SD card in a case

>The key is derived with PBKDF.

Which doesn't do shit even if you're using argon with 32 GB memory usage or whatever. NSA is always going to be able to out-compute you. Not to mention you need a difficulty level that's usable for daily use, but the NSA can brute-force at their leisure, possibly decades in the future.

gruezon Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB is just an unencrypted SD card in a case

You're not gonna remember a AES256 key either (or at least not many of them), not to mention the ergonomics associated with entering a AES256 key. The whole point of security chips like google's titan m2 or apple's secure enclave is to strengthen weak passwords (eg. 6 digit pins) so they offer comparable security to 256 bit keys, without having to enter 256 bit keys.

gruezon Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB is just an unencrypted SD card in a case

>any Bitlocker drive with transparent encryption

Which even microsoft admits is basically a LARP from a security point of view. It's better than nothing, but it's not meant to stand up against serious attacks. Even without the yellowkey exploit, it can be bypassed via interposer attacks on the TPM.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/operating...

gruezon Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB is just an unencrypted SD card in a case

>Anything safe from TLAs is what’s being sold only to them.

I think you're overestimating how much backdoors there are in products vs actual bugs. As we've seen with with recent vulnerability disclosures, there's plenty of bugs that were put there unintentionally.

gruezon Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB is just an unencrypted SD card in a case

>We know that Microsoft's bitlocker had at least one backdoor

Source? The closest I found was microsoft's key escrow system, but that's hardly a "backdoor" given it's publicly documented, and it's explicitly stated in no uncertain terms when you're setting it up[1]

[1] https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...

gruezon Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB is just an unencrypted SD card in a case

>The correct solution is to use free software cryptography on top of these things.

If implemented correctly, "hardware" encryption can be more secure than "free software cryptography". The most obvious benefit is protection against brute-attacks, which you can't meaningfully implement with software. Not to mention added protection of biometric authentication as a second factor, compared to typing a password into a possibly untrusted machine.

gruezon Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models

Well their justification is that distillation is bad because it means baddies can get their own models without their safeguards and then make anthrax nukes or whatever. Even though it's self serving, it's at least self-consistent.

gruezon Show HN: A USB-C LTE modem that gives my computer a phone line

>Where 2G and 3G are switched off, calls need a module firmware with VoLTE and a carrier that allows it; ask the seller.

This is a huge caveat. OP, does your setup even support VoLTE? Otherwise this might become a brick in a few years as your carrier shuts down 2G/3G, as many carriers around the world have already done

gruezon Show HN: A USB-C LTE modem that gives my computer a phone line

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Core_network_architecture

Big enough that most carriers can't even launch 5G with its associated core network ("5G standalone"), and had to use the kludge of 5G + 4G core network ("5G non-standalone)

gruezon Show HN: A USB-C LTE modem that gives my computer a phone line

It's not just spectrum, though. The core network is totally different than 5G SA or whatever 6G has. Maintaining all of that will eventually be considered not worth the trouble, and it'll be decommissioned. If anything decommissioning will be faster for LTE because unlike 2G/3G (which were needed because VoLTE support was flakely and had device whitelists) there isn't much point in keeping LTE around for legacy reasons.

gruezon AI Data Centers Could Erase 15 Years of America's Climate Progress by 2030

>I suspect that the heated debate and protests around wateruse from datacentres is intentional misdirection by big tech companies to shunt environmental thought/discussion to a managed topic instead of the one they don't want to talk about and can't avoid which is carbon emissions.

Is there any evidence of this? If anything they're pretty vocal at refuting that. Otherwise it just sounds like "everyone more radical than me are false flag industry shills to make the movement look bad, and everyone less radical than me are industry plants trying to water legislation down".

gruezon France is getting download tax for content providers (€0.055/GB)

>I wonder if this got solved anywhere yet: how do you get politicians that actually want to save money instead of raising taxes or creating new types of taxes?

???

"I'll lower/won't raise your taxes" is politics 101. The bigger issue is how you prevent politicians from promising goodies and/or lower taxes, funding them both by borrowing.

gruezon I didn't know I was lacking in Vitamin D until I collapsed at work

Just leave it next to a window?

gruezon I didn't know I was lacking in Vitamin D until I collapsed at work

>it successfully raised my levels

Right, but nobody's taking supplements to see number go up. They're after some health benefit, of which evidence is scarce.

gruezon Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace

That's not the actual hack though, it's with an extension. You could have gotten compromised this way through an extension for git or whatever.

gruezon Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates

Then users just proceeds to hit trust for everything, just like people blindly accept ssh keys.

The country comparison doesn't do much either, because there isn't a good guarantee that they'll correspond. Some guy posted a repo to distrust every CA except the top 30, and that has a bunch of weird examples, like a bunch of russian sites being signed by a Greek CA. Not to mention some of the biggest sites use CAs that don't correspond with their country of origin. GlobalSign is Belgian for instance. Guess how many of their customers aren't Belgian?

gruezon From confession to conspiracy: How the Wedgewood fake polls story spread

Prediction markets are specifically not securities though, they're commodities regulated by the CFTC.

gruezon Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates

>do you want to trust "key authorities" from outside your country?

So what happens to americans visiting french sites?

gruezon Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World

The text looks fine, but the image captions/titles has some AI vibes.

gruezon Alleged Israeli spy company targeted Starlink users

>There are dozens of firms in NATO countries and especially the US that do this kind of signals intelligence and surveillance work.

List them? I asked AI for a list of mercenary hacking firms and it turned up:

NSO Group (Israel)

Intellexa Consortium (a bunch of countries including Israel, and the founder is Israeli)

Candiru (Israel)

Paragon Solutions (Israel)

RCS Lab (Italy)

gruezon Viral Polls Are Not Representative Polls

non-response is factored in as well. https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2026/09/16/why-many-poll...

gruezon Viral Polls Are Not Representative Polls

>Almost all polls are worthless [...] because the decision to respond to the poll is itself a major portion of the signal.

But most polls I see are from professional pollsters like Pew or YouGov? For them, correcting for this is opinion polls 101. That's why you see "representative sample". They're not just randomly polling 1000 people and taking the average. They're adjusting for a bunch of other demographic factors as well.