ndiddy

I don't like how citizens are allowed to have their constitutional rights violated at border crossings, but that guy should have known better. The duress PIN feature is made for extreme situations where i.e. the owner of the phone is suddenly arrested and there's information on the phone that could get people they care about arrested or killed. It's for when the owner considers getting themselves criminally charged, killed, or disappeared to be a better option than giving up what's on the phone. For something routine like a border crossing, the better option is to wipe your devices prior to the crossing and throw them away if they get searched. If the guy had either done that or not given a PIN to CBP and left the phone with them, he would have gotten off scot free. Giving a duress PIN is a big choice and you have to be reasonably informed about the legal consequences of doing so in whatever jurisdiction you're in.

RDP2 is barely any more secure than RDP1. When the processor boots, it reads the read-out protection value from flash. If it's one specific value, it's RDP2, if it's another specific value, it's RDP0, and if it's any other value, it's RDP1. This means that all you have to do to downgrade the chip to RDP1 is glitch it while it's reading that value, then you can use one of the RDP1 errata to read out the flash.

In general read-out protection only prevents the most casual of hobbyists from getting your firmware. Anyone who thought otherwise even pre-AI doesn't know what they're doing. It's sort of like how blu-ray copy protection only prevents people who don't know about MakeMKV from copying their discs, or how HDCP only prevents people who can't find a $20 HDCP terminating HDMI splitter from capturing the protected video.

A lot of the security features on microcontrollers are poorly implemented. Here's an example where someone recovered the encryption key on a consumer device with encrypted firmware: https://garyodernichts.blogspot.com/2024/10/looking-into-nin... . The microcontroller supports firmware encryption with a 128-bit AES key, which gets written to 4 32-bit write-only registers. Because it's split up like this, it's possible to find 1/4 of the key by writing every possible value to one of the registers and checking that the output matches, before repeating with the other 3 registers. This means that the number of possible combinations to check is reduced from (2^128) to (4*(2^32)), which can be brute forced in a few hours.

> Life expectancy of an adult[1] at that time was only about 48 years old

Where did you see that? I found this article https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2885717/#:~:text=20... which says that in 1790, a 20 year old American white male could expect to live to his early 60s. Interestingly, life expectancy in the US actually went down during the 19th century due to urbanization. One thing you have to watch out when you're looking at numbers like this is that they catalog remaining life expectancy. For example, the chart says "41.4" but you have to add 20 to get the total life expectancy since it's remaining lifespan at age 20.

It's certainly the end of an era. I thought this part of the article was interesting:

> For years, decompilation communities attempted to establish that decompilation is primarily for research: we love these games and want to understand how they work, and to uncover the mysteries that the original developers left behind. That's not to say that ports aren't fun too; they're just not the sole reason a decompilation exists. Sloptubers and subreddits like /r/decomps have done immense damage here, freely using "decomp" to mean "PC port".

Historically decompilations were made for the benefit of other programmers. The binary code was transformed into source code, which made it easier for the game's community to understand how the game works. AI has dramatically increased the speed of producing a decompilation, and it can just straight up answer any question you have just by looking at the binary, so it kind of kills the community aspect. Now everyone has immediate access to every aspect of how a game works, so there's no point in seeking anyone else out.

Please do!

Do you have the SimCity modification uploaded anywhere? I loved the SNES version of that game.

If Amazon stopped engaging in price fixing, then people like you who aren't shopping on price could still buy stuff on Amazon, and other people who are shopping on price could buy the same item from the manufacturer's site for 30% less with the knowledge that it'll probably arrive in a week rather than in a couple days. I'm not sure what problem you have with that.

The point the article makes is that the other online stores without access to Amazon's logistics aren't able to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of using a normal shipping carrier because of an Amazon policy that bans sellers from offering an item for cheaper elsewhere. Amazon then charges sellers high fees that inflate the price of the item everywhere because of that policy.

The way I use mine is just running a standard desktop (with the scaling turned up so it's a bit more readable) and then browsing for the video files on my NAS in the file explorer. I have one of those Logitech wireless keyboard/trackpad combos for input. Obviously this is pretty clunky, but it's a hell of a lot less flaky than something like Kodi. I use Linux on mine, but you could do the same thing in Windows if you wanted.

Games depend enough on stuff like global state or externally provided data that in practice this often isn't enough to guarantee the code actually working the same as the original. You can have tens of thousands of tests that exercise every branch in the game code, and the game still may not behave the same. You really won't know for sure that your code behaves the same under all conditions unless you're able to reproduce the same executable.

The US uses ~600,000 tons of diesel per day, so releasing 800,000 tons before the midterms doesn't seem like it would lower prices very much. It makes me wonder why Trump is even bothering with this, besides just optics to look like he's doing something about energy prices.

This is largely consistent with historical US views on international law. In 2002 the US passed the American Service-Members' Protection Act, which states that if any US service member or elected official is criminally prosecuted by the ICC, the president can use "any means necessary" (i.e. invading the Hague) to ensure their release.

In general any idea that international law is relevant except as a tool for the West to provide moral justification for its actions when it's convenient to do so is naive. At least the Trump administration being more vulgar and crude in expressing its disregard for international law compared to previous administrations may open more people's eyes.

He went into more detail on what this actually means for the end user experience in another comment:

> As I mentioned elsewhere, I agree that when I'm first watching a movie, I want to get straight to the film and not be distracted and slowed down by a bunch of crap. But the interactivity comes into play for repeat viewing where the user wants to dig deeper into the content.

> Let me clarify what I mean by scaling the movie. Lets say you are a big fan of a movie and you are watching it with some of the special features turned on, like picture in picture director commentary with pop-up factoids. On HD-DVD we could shrink the movie down to say 1/4th of the screen and have all sorts of associated content popping up around it, like storyboards, artwork, film facts, etc. All done at the authoring level. Some of the more advanced blu-rays are starting to figure out how to do some of this on the latest firmware players, but it's complicated and not fully compatible with players. However on HD-DVD that was a spec compliant feature from the beginning.

Personally I disagree with him about HD-DVD being the better format, simply because of the better storage capacity and bitrate allowed by Blu-Ray (as well as how a growing number of HD-DVDs are dying now). However, the interactivity is a pretty interesting idea.

> Despite being a much more capable format from a technical perspective, with high-resolution media, menu layers, everything offered by Blu-ray Disc Java (BD-J) and more, Blu-rays unfortunately very rarely see impressive menu presentations.

There's a good Reddit comment here from someone who worked on authoring Blu-Rays that explains why this happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vdrbr/hey_reddit_its...

Essentially, authoring a Blu-Ray is complicated, and involves using expensive and proprietary authoring software to write Java code under severe RAM limitations that limit what you can do. Authoring a Blu-Ray from scratch also involves testing your code on a ton of different players, often with incompatible Java implementations. As a result, the studios just use the same simple menu templates over and over rather than creating new menus for each title.

If you look at Cringely's blog, the author of this article has been hounding him for years over the failed Kickstarter and behaving in an unsavory manner (i.e. digging up personal information about his family, trying to cast doubt on whether his son had actually passed away or not). I agree that this seems like some unhealthy obsession for him.

I didn't back it either, but from looking at the Kickstarter page it seems like they had a viable product that was more or less working (Raspberry Pi clone running the stock Minecraft server, pre-configured to work with a dynamic DNS service that the company hosts) but then kept tacking on features after the project ended to make everything "perfect" rather than shipping. They added a web admin interface, a variety of custom Minecraft servers, seamless UPNP support, redirecting the server traffic through a VPN since they couldn't get UPNP working reliably, etc. They should have just added a FOTA capability and worked on that stuff after the fact if they got enough continued sales to warrant the R&D work.

I think the other mistake they made was offering a WiFi option rather than just making it ethernet only for the initial launch. It seems like they had a lot of trouble getting the WiFi working and ended up having to switch WiFi cards. I don't know how they would have made WiFi network authentication work reliably on a headless device, and it seems like a ton of complicated work vs. just having the customer plug the box into their router. Again, it's a "nice to have" that could have waited until after the initial shipment.

The cops know it's fake, but they enjoy driving over and yelling and waving guns around, so they don't care. From another news article about this guy (https://www.tmj4.com/about-us/lighthouse/people-have-died-th...):

> Exclusive body camera video obtained by TMJ4 shows officers arriving at the couple's home on multiple occasions, even as both officers and the couple acknowledged the calls were fake.

> In one exchange captured on body camera, an officer can be heard telling a colleague, "This guy keeps getting swatted." In another, a body camera recording from inside a squad car captures an officer describing the address as "a known swatting location."

> Despite that awareness, officers continued to respond, at times with a full tactical presence. Body camera video shows one officer pointed a gun at the couple's door on their fourth response in a single day.

I guess "AI-assisted rewrite in a language you can't use" is new, but it's functionally the same as "stopped working on the project" or "took the project commercial" or a host of other risks that have always existed with depending on someone else's work that they're providing for free with no formal relationship.

If by "really M-Disc" you mean "substantially different from standard HTL BD-Rs", this has never been the case. See this review from when they first came out in 2015: https://goughlui.com/2015/10/16/review-tested-verbatim-lifet...

> While the immediate burn quality seems relatively satisfactory, I was still not satisfied as to whether these discs were truly worth their premium over commodity blank media. Looking at the discs, it seemed that the recording layers were likely made of similar materials based on the visual aspect, unlike the obvious difference with DVDs. Also, it seemed that regular recorders were intended to be able to record to the BD-R’s (according to the Verbatim text).

...

> Digging further around the M-disc site, it is noted that their section on longevity testing actually features no data about the BD-R discs at all. Indeed, if there were tests, the reports were not actually featured on the site at all. Further poking around in M-Disc Technology pages shows only references to their DVD products. In fact, it seems their patented “etched in stone” material may only apply to their DVD products.

...

> From my research into the data, it seems likely that the M-Disc BD-R is not substantially different from other quality BD-R discs on the market as they all use inorganic recording compounds (with the exception of BD-R LTH of course). From a visual inspection, the disc appears the same bright chocolate-brown, unlike the obvious distinction with regular dye based DVDs and the M-Disc DVD which was a silver-grey. But my main concern lies in the demonstrated lifetimes of quality BD-Rs which are similar to the M-Disc DVD (to which the M-Disc BD-R is claimed to have also achieved). In essence, it appears that the MKM/Verbatim BD-R DL has already reached the same level of endurance as the M-Disc DVD had claimed without being “special” at all. It is thus, hard to justify paying more for an M-Disc BD-R, and I cannot really recommend it.

The "not really M-Disc" stuff comes from a post somebody made on the "Data Hoarder" Reddit board a few years ago. The discs were changed to enable higher burning speeds which resulted in a slight difference in appearance, but he/she didn't seem to have realized that Blu-Ray M-Discs were never substantially different from BD-Rs and instead assumed that the tweaked discs were more of a scam than the originals.

Pretty much every piece of open source software ships with a legal document saying that the software is provided as-is without any warranty or guarantee of functionality (i.e. https://github.com/rui314/mold/blob/main/LICENSE ). Unless I had a support agreement with the maintainers that superseded that document, I would not expect any special treatment from upstream. Personally, whenever I add a new dependency, I do it with the knowledge that I may have to either replace it or take on maintenance myself in the future.

Drag-and-drop visual design is the best possible approach until you add the constraint that the window has to be resizable. Then it turns into endlessly messing with the anchoring and resizing settings for each individual widget, and whenever you add/remove a widget or change the form layout you have to mess with everything again. The best experience I've had with UI development is on Palm OS, simply because all devices have the same 160x160 logical resolution and all software runs in fullscreen. You never have to worry about resizing anything so drag-and-drop design with everything just placed on absolute coordinates becomes feasible.

Thanks for mentioning that, I hadn't seen any of his non-tech stuff before and it's a great watch. Even knowing absolutely nothing about building airplanes, it had me yelling "what the hell are you doing" as the events unfold. Everyone he talks to keeps saying that it can't be done and he goes for it anyway only to realize that they were all right. Even though the actual project is an abject failure it's still very entertaining.

I found a better rip of the documentary midway through this archive.org upload of off-air PBS recordings from North Carolina: https://archive.org/details/unc-tv-1997-vhs-720p-60 . It took like an hour to download and the tape hiss was pretty bad, so I ran it through Final Cut Pro's audio denoising filter and reuploaded it to Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqxU4nnLkeA

That's fair, there's some other stuff that he seems to have verifiably lied about. There's the Lisa stuff you mention, and he lied about being a professor at Stanford when in reality he was either a TA or one level above a TA (sort of like Lex Fridman and MIT). I'm not sure that he'd lie altogether about being an early Apple employee when he was presenting a show that interviewed both Jobs and Wozniak (who would likely see the show and know that he was lying), but who knows.

You might already know this because you seem to know a lot about him, but when I was researching the Lisa claim you brought up I found a CHM oral history with Dan'l Lewin (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...), where page 20 mentions that Cringely was married to Ellen Nold while she was working on the Lisa project. Maybe that's how he got some of his anecdotes about Apple in the early 80s. EDIT: Cringely's next Apple anecdote in the talk you linked was about AppleLink, and this photo has Nold listed as manager of support programs for AppleLink: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ellen-nold-the...

I agree that his tendency to exaggerate his own past is unfortunate but doesn't outweigh all the great journalism he's done.

Cringely says here that he worked part-time at Apple for a few months as a graduate student: https://www.pbs.org/nerds/qa4.html . Mark Stephens was at Stanford at the time (he earned his master's in communication in 1979) so this lines up. I think it's entirely possible that Cringely/Stephens was in fact the 12th person hired by Apple, but didn’t get a formal employee number because he wasn't a full-time employee.

I don't really understand what your comment is trying to say, but I read through the last few pages of his blog and all the posts after the first one from 2026 announcing his return seem AI generated. I think it's a shame, as I loved his writing style in "Accidental Empires" and in his earlier blog posts and columns. It's strange to me that someone who had spent most of his life writing either didn't notice or didn't care about the drop in quality from using LLMs to write.

> Look at his last few blog posts, outlining a radical alternative to LLMs. Read closely, and at the heart of that idea we find "assume enterprise search".

I found the patent for his company's technology (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250259069A1). I always have trouble reading patents, but as far as I can tell it's basically a wrapper around commodity LLMs. The reliability improvements come from prompting the LLM to only source its data from an external database that you provide rather than from whatever it was trained on, and from prompting multiple LLMs simultaneously then doing semantic analysis on the responses to make sure they all agree. I imagine that doing this would probably reduce hallucinations, but there's no hard constraint to prevent them entirely and I'm not sure what the moat is.

At least in the US, the declining fertility rate seems to be entirely caused by a combination of fewer people getting married and fewer people having children out of wedlock. Between 2007 and 2023, the percentage of reproductive-age women who were married fell from 42% to 37% and the births/1,000 unmarried women fell from 41.0 to 30.3, but the births/1,000 married women actually went up a bit from 102.3 to 107.4. See https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/63/2/695/4092...

The amount of consumption is largely dependent on income level. There's a recent study from Moody's that says that in the US, the top 10% income bracket now accounts for roughly half of consumer spending. As wealth inequality continues to worsen, it makes more and more sense to solely target high earners because you make the same or more as selling higher amounts of lower priced product but with less overhead.

I saw news reporting about this a few days ago, then in the last 24 hours Iran has hit 4 tankers taking the US escort route with no military response from the US: https://x.com/UK_MTO/status/2104881435123339274 https://x.com/UK_MTO/status/2105229649693266101 https://x.com/UK_MTO/status/2105230089768357958 https://x.com/UK_MTO/status/2105246915625701554 . I guess Iran saw the news reporting as well and decided to ramp things back up.