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kayson

2,135 karma · joined January 8, 2020

Circuit design automation @ Qualcomm

hn<at>aram<dot>nubmail<dot>ca

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kayson··on How Protein Took over the World
I would hardly draw that conclusion from this paper. It's a meta analysis of a handful of studies with fairly low sample sizes, and it wasn't immediately clear that there was any controlling factor wrt amount consumed. There are also a lot of statements pointing out there was no statistically significant difference for various metrics...
kayson··on Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project
That doesn't preclude their point from being true.
kayson··on Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project
It definitely sounds like Claude.
kayson··on Results from the ASIC puzzle
The EE/IC Design part of me loves this for trying to build a community around what is typically a very opaque and secretive industry. The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
kayson··on Two American Airlines Flights End Up with the Same Flight Numbers
It's even worse than just the same flight number. Both were at PHX, one landing, one taking off at the same time. Kudos to a clever ATC for preventing what could've been a catastrophe: https://youtu.be/93lLXNsWp9Q
kayson··on VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)
Security of using a battle tested ssh binary vs whatever random javascript library is being used.
kayson··on VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)
I wonder if the same reverse code execution risk applies to the VSCodium extensions
kayson··on VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)
I very much dislike this extension because it uses a built-in ssh client that is far from feature complete and does a lot of reinventing the wheel. Microsoft's extension uses the system ssh binary, as does https://open-vsx.org/extension/aergic/zygos-vscodium which I much prefer. After discovering the latter, I uninstalled VSCode and have fully moved to VSCodium.
kayson··on VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)
See https://open-vsx.org/extension/aergic/zygos-vscodium
kayson··on Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 Series
Yeah there was a blog post about it but seems not much came from the effort
kayson··on Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
I'm the opposite. I started as a die hard iPhone fan, eventually switched to Android and never looked back. My wife has an iPhone and every time I use her phone I find myself wondering wtf their UX designers are thinking.
kayson··on An open DNS recursive service for free security and high privacy
> But without it if you run your own recursive resolver your ISP sees all your queries, and many others see portions of them, unencrypted.

This hopefully shouldn't be an issue for long with stuff like RFC 9539 and OOTS/SVCB.

kayson··on Htmx 4.0
I'm not very familiar with htmx but at first glance it seems similar to Angular. I thought Angular lost favor because of all the extra attributes and boilerplate. What makes htmx different?
kayson··on Repair Cafe – Fix Your Broken Items
I love this idea. A lot of repair knowledge is buried in non-English forums or unsearchable Discord servers (grr Discord). We need to localize it and rebuild community expertise.
kayson··on Ntfy – open-source Push to Mobile
Who cares? Battery consumption of Gotify is negligible (it uses websockets). Same with CPU/RAM. What's the benefit of giving Google your notifications?
kayson··on Ntfy – open-source Push to Mobile
I've been using Gotify [1] for a very long time and have been quite happy with it. Basically no impact on battery life. For devs - there are mature libraries like shoutrr [2] and apprise [3] that let you support multiple notification systems with no extra work.

1. https://gotify.net/

2. https://shoutrrr.nickfedor.com/v0.17.0/

3. https://github.com/caronc/apprise

kayson··on Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index
- load bearing -
kayson··on Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
The tools can definitely recognize static logic gates purely from the topology (nothing special in the GDS needed). I don't know that I've tested it for anything more complicated, but as you've pointed out, if the hierarchy is in the GDS it's trivial to recover
kayson··on Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
Getting a logic-gate-level netlist from a GDS is trivial with industry standard chip design tools. Circuit designers do this every day. The hardest part will be reverse engineering the functionality.

I wish I had more time and I'd throw Calibre at it.

kayson··on Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
Yes. There is exactly that, and we call it an "extraction" tool. It takes a GDS (text representation of shapes in the physical layout), and gives you back a "netlist" (text representation of components and connections in a circuit schematic).

Circuit designers use these tools basically daily for two reasons - the first is Layout Versus Schematic. We want to make sure that the physical layout matches the schematic, so the tool turns the layout GDS into a netlist and compares that to the netlist created from the schematic (basically a diff, but more complicated). The second is so we can run simulations that take into account the "parasitic" resistances and capacitances of the wires and metal shapes in the physical layout. It's basically the same procedure as LVS with an extra step that analyzes the metal shapes to determine said R's and C's.

kayson··on Securing Services with Rootless Containers
I'd still rather use docker. I don't mind that the daemon runs as root because there are some things that you need root for anyways! Like binding to privileged ports or setting up networks (use `internal: true` and the daemon will automatically set up iptables rules that limit traffic).

I deploy docker compose files with ansible so everything comes with built in security defaults like rootless, dropped caps, no new privileges, etc. I wish more containers supported running read only (its usually pretty easy to add, just overlooked) and distroless (common for go apps, less so otherwise).

There was a pretty good comment on reddit a while back with a list of hardenings for compose files [1]

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1pr74r4/comment...

kayson··on FUTO Swipe – A new swipe typing model
I've been using it for a while. The insistence of keyboards on having a large bar of autocorrect suggestions taking valuable vertical space annoys me to no end.

I really liked using Fleksy which let you swipe up and down on the keyboard to change autocorrect results, including adding words to your dictionary. I'm still not sure if FUTO even has that option.

kayson··on United Wizards of the Coast recognized by NLRB
I feel that. I really do. But I also LOVED the Avatar crossover. To be fair, I haven't played any other ones, but this one played so well and seemed to be very well thought out. They really did the IP justice.

It's also probably worth pointing out that Lego was nearing bankruptcy and was saved by a ton of licensing (and Ninjago, to be fair). Fortunately, they've used that income stream to still consistently put out a lot of high quality first party sets. Hopefully WotC doesn't lose sight...

kayson··on Love systemd timers
I love systemd timers! I've slowly moved all of my ansible-deployed cron jobs to timers (now just an ansible copy!). The integration with journalctl, especially in a newer OS like Debian 13 where syslog is gone, is really nice. It's also really nice to be able to start the service manually for debug. Having a cron job that didn't work was an annoying exercise in copy/pasting or writing an extra shell script. Don't even get me started on the black hole of cron job stdout. I can monitor systemd services like I already do and get a notification on failure.

I've noticed more and more open source projects recommending timers as a deployment method and I think that's great!

kayson··on Print with dozens of colors: Our new open-source ColorMix for PrusaSlicer
I wonder if you would get good enough results by just extruding two separate filaments simultaneously. Sure, they won't fully mix, but with thin enough layers, you'd benefit from the same visual processing that makes alternating layers look like a solid color...
kayson··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
This doesn't exactly answer your question, but MIT added test scores back recently and wrote a blog post explaining why: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...

I think the "paradox" is that you'd expect disadvantaged students to perform worse on standardized testing.

kayson··on Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes
> In further digging, we noticed that the URL the phone opens up is “kira-abboud.com,” a website that references fashion influencer “@kirasfashionfinds.” Notably, this exact URL isn’t listed anywhere on Abboud’s social media, and the affiliate codes don’t match up either. The redirect coming from Motorola phones is using Amazona affiliate code “sramz-kff-008-20” which is completely different from any of the codes we saw from links shared by Abboud’s accounts and linked websites.

Something funny is up; this doesn't seem deliberate.

kayson··on BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork
> The standard defense for something like this is "the plugin is a separate work, so it's not subject to copyleft." That argument falls apart on contact with the actual software. BS cannot do its primary job without the plugin. The plugin cannot do anything without BS.

But that's just not true? You can connect a printer in LAN/dev mode and print directly from slicer to printer. There are apparently some issues with more complex network setups but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

I think the concerns he has generally are valid, but I have yet to see something from a legal perspective (e.g. precedent) that convinces me this constitutes a license violation. Would love to see one.

kayson··on YAML? That's Norway Problem
I wish there were a "strict" yaml. Another subset a la json, where you don't have nonsense like no === false, but "no" does not, but you also get the block style which to me is easier to read and write. I don't mind requiring quotes for strings. Modern IDEs make it easy enough and it removes ambiguity.
kayson··on Deno 2.8
It's surprising to me that bun is so much faster serving web requests. The article mentions Zig as a factor, but is micromanaging memory really gaining over 2x vs node?

Similarly, it seems, though they didnt exactly say, that they're running bun with a warm package cache... What about the others? Do they have caches?

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