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indrora

2,557 karma · joined September 23, 2010

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indrora··on Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs
More specifically, it came at a time where they had to be very careful what they did because they had the DOJ peering down their neck.

Windows didn't ship with a competent PDF reader for over a decade and some because of the DOJ: Any attempt by Microsoft to enter a market that already had a competition was seen as anticompetitive.

It's pretty trivial to get ValidationOS running, even down to RL1 where the kernel and NT execution environment are the only things you have: https://youtu.be/Zw5ysOJcY84?t=610

indrora··on eBay Restricts Listings of Radio Equipment, but Exempts Ham-Band-Only Gear
Yes, and the FCC has been pretty lenient about the use of these modules under "modular" licensing
indrora··on eBay Restricts Listings of Radio Equipment, but Exempts Ham-Band-Only Gear
> comment section there is among the worst on the Internet

Some would argue it's right up there with HN ;)

indrora··on The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27
Did you kill the dock and re-launch it?

Most set-defaults take effect the next time something is launched, and basically all of the things that affect the dock are only read at launch time.

indrora··on I'm in a Meeting
try the British voices.
indrora··on DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit
Tracking dots were used in 2025 to uncover a ring of Pokemon beta card forgeries that caused multiple authenticity and grading companies to revoke many gradings due to high quality forgeries.

The smoking gun was almost always a mixture of quality, subtle details, and the tracking dots in some form or fashion. The writeup of the process is extremely detailed and shows just how these dots can be weaponized or utilized in the right/wrong circumstances. https://www.elitefourum.com/t/report-of-observations-regardi...

indrora··on Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation
MMMM CHIP.
indrora··on LinkedIn Larpmaxxing
Because for some areas, it's the table stakes for finding a job much less applying.

In some tech-adjacent sectors, the way you apply is through a thin wrapper around the linkedin API. Sure you can try manually entering the data but the API provides them Just Enough pre-sorted and classified data that it gets sold as "convenience"

indrora··on Fuck Android Developer Verification Program
No they need to find a way to glue a chat service onto it.
indrora··on America.gov
no, they're asking questions that your average US citizen is going to ask.

The fact that it's answering "I don't know" to what you so correctly identified as campaign promises is actually it doing (more or less) its job.

indrora··on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
Ah, that sounds like it's The Met, who have a bespoke electronic libretto system.

You're right, it is a bunch of LCDs on a bus (iirc rs485).

indrora··on Raspberry Pi blocks changing RAM chips
There are methods of doing so that identify multiple, harder to falsify things.

One that I have seen is HMAC(serial||SKU) as a datamatrix/QR, laser-etched onto the top silkscreen and burned into a PROM.

indrora··on Brood War Bench
"THIS FLY CAN BEAT YOU AT STAR CRAFT: HAS SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR????"
indrora··on RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3
There's a lot of hardware out there that does 95% of what OP's does, though you'll pay a pretty penny for it (e.g. https://www.peplink.com/products/cellular-modems-adapters/po... ) though ther's been a flood of them from noname sellers on Aliexpress and eBay under the banner of "LTE Landline Converters"
indrora··on A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history
As someone who is firmly in Portal's "target audience"

I would have enjoyed the game immensely with such an adaptive feature. Just like I appreciate the amount of work that Valve has put into closed captioning for their games.

indrora··on MartyPC is a cross-platform emulator of early PCs written in Rust
What's your favorite "What the FUCK were they smoking when they designed this?" moment?
indrora··on c100
How's the guts look? There's a lot of flash and pizzaz about aesthetics, but I work with files in the 400-800GB range on a regular basis, so I tend to prefer dumping gigantic SSDs into my work machines (I recently liquidated fortune 5 stock to get an 8tb disk[1]).

There's some words about "oh yeah you can upgrade this" but not many details. The only thing I've seen so far has been a single shot from the Pentagram splash where it looks like a fairly standard off-the-shelf mini PC that's been gutted and put on life support like a Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck.

[1] https://sabrent.com/products/sb-rkt4p-8tb

indrora··on Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
4-conductor audio, generally.

Later on there was a generation of two-conductor cables that used SPDIF/PCM Audio instead of analog audio for better fidelity.

indrora··on Olo (Color)
I've always taken it to be that the color is unique to the situation/viewer -- a sort of pearlescent void-color that can't be described in any known language, but which just Is. More a physical phenomenon than an actual color, but distinctly hued somehow.
indrora··on Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"
When many of the core datasets were being produced, a lot of these companies mangled the text to be "friendlier" to try and avoid certain issues.

The changes they made often resulted in this kind of weird nonsense: Swapping the word "Failure" for "Disappointment" in a vain attempt to keep it from saying "you're a failure", but also just stripping out words such as slurs and insults, resulting in at one point the hilarious situation in which Gemini for quite a while would INSIST that the lyrics for the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" contained "That little has his own jet airplane/that little is a millionaire" -- which in certain contexts changes the meaning of the song incredibly.

These hack-and-slash text manglings have resulted in some of these clbuttic sort of writing styles being used during LLM-assisted writing. A more famous version of this was caused by one paper: https://world.edu/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scientific-pape...

indrora··on RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better
> Designing a good 64-bit ISA [...] is easy [...] could design such an ISA in a couple of weeks

Let me know when you've got it all worked out and published. Should be easy, right?

indrora··on Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast
It's a real blast, though.

(In all seriousness, I hope we never, ever in this lifetime cause humans to suffer like we did on that day)

indrora··on DskDitto: Ultra-fast, parallel duplicate-file detector
I wrote a tool a short bit ago to handle massive parallel hashing. Originally, it was a testbed for a project I built to make multiprocessing easier in Go.

https://github.com/indrora/hyperhash

In it, I learned that there's some interesting quirks about the way the traditional shaXsum tools work, specifically that they focus on a set of inputs from the shell command line, which means that you can exhaust the shell command line length fairly easily (try hashing every file in the Linux source tree, for instance; zsh, bash, and fish will all eventually tell you "Fuck off, there's too many characters in argv")

I also discovered that Go's handling of file handles varies drastically based on OS. Windows, for instance, has no problem with you taking a file handle to every single file on a disk. Linux will get upset but eventually capitulate, macos will stomp its feet and inform you that you are a bad child and kill you off.

indrora··on Did they ghost you?
I have a leaderboard of some of the longest turn-around times from initial contact to rejection. Thus far the winners (if you can call them that) have been:

Docusign (4 YEARS); Nintendo (34 months); Google (30 months); Starbucks (22 months); Netflix (18 months); Astral (13 months); Snowflake (8 months)

But I also have a short list of shortest turn-around times. I say this because some of them are truly insane:

GitHub (3 hours); Valve (4 hours, but it was a real human with actual comments); Lockheed martin (2 hours); UserTesting (1 hour); Mozilla (30 minutes); Cloudflare (-2 minutes); Matterport (0 minutes)

The -2 minutes you see there is one of the most insane things I've ever experienced: As I'm filling in the application, I get an email simultaneously thanking me for going throug the recruitment process but saying they "reviewed my application" (that hadn't even been fully submitted yet) and that I wasn't a good fit for the role.

Matterport wins the award for "well at least they're not bullshitting" -- as soon as I had submitted the application, I didn't even get an email saying thank you, just a straight up dialog box saying "You won't be considered for this position."

My worst experience was with Microsoft. Somewhere, their system is designed such that if you ever fall out of the standard process, you're "rejected" -- I have more rejection emails for a position I ended up getting (which got canned within the year, ironically enough) than any other kind of email, including daily emails with the recruiter and hiring manager. I got an email telling me "sorry no thanks" *after* I had already signed the paperwork.

indrora··on Using PowerShell over SSH, Twenty Years Later
The most useful thing I did when I started working with powershell as my daily shell was to _remove half the default aliases_

once I broke my muscle-memory by trying to treat it as a historic shell, it became far more usable. Yes, get-childitem is a little weird to remember, but once you realize what it's doing isn't what `ls` does, you get a far better grasp on the environment.

Write some cmdlets. You'll discover how useful having a sane, object-oriented shell is.

indrora··on I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to Draw (With 9front)
I'm not sure what you expected.
indrora··on We made Grok 4.5, GPT-5.5, and Claude build the same apps
It would be nice to see how "long" -- e.g. how many self-turns/tool calls/etc the prompt takes to resolve as well.

I know that models like Gemma4-e4b will take longer self-turns but IBM's Granite models will take shorter self-turns in exchange for more tool calls.

indrora··on MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds
Unfortunately, WiX is still a pain in the ass to use and there's a lot of simple tooling that makes NSIS/InnoSetup/etc shockingly easy to use while the same MSI experience is garbage.

msix is just a different beast entirely too.

indrora··on Made a free macOS menu bar app that fixes typing in the wrong keyboard layout
This is super neat for polyglots (of which I'm not one, yet) but one little thing: My partner immediately flagged that your demo (EN->HB) flips the cursor to be in the LTR position in the run rather than the RTL one.

The most minor of things, but I now can't unsee it.

indrora··on Spoiling Linux Kernel with "sanctioned" code
A person is not responsible for the actions of their government. All governments wage war and cause suffering.

I have many close friends who are Russian by nationality. Russian by crime of accident of birth. So many of my friends in this situation abhor the actions of their government.

The Mentor stated it best. Phrack 7, 1986:

"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."

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