sounds

2024 - A CrowdStrike employee was pressured to push an update straight to prod. 90% of Windows installations were taken offline, but executives dodged any responsibility, and even got the shareholder lawsuit dismissed. Angry shareholders might have been told to blame the employee.

2015 - Volkswagen executives came up with "a rogue engineer" managed to make every VW diesel in the US violate emissions standards, while faking it during emissions testing.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/volkswagen-pulls...

It's already happening. Nationwide offers a discount if you agree they get to use the data feed that is already wired to them - they specifically name Toyota as the brand that delivers your driving information automatically. On other manufacturers you get the discount if you enable their app while driving (ironic, since cell phone use is strongly tied to worse driving outcomes)

The connectivity may not be fully disabled in a 2025 Acura Integra, but there is a way to disable data sharing. You then have a permanent yellow "nag icon" top right on your infotainment screen, but the spying is "disabled."

I posted this originally in the other discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49956395

The connectivity may not be fully disabled in a 2025 Acura Integra, but there is a way to disable data sharing. You then have a permanent yellow "nag icon" top right on your infotainment screen, but the spying is "disabled." I mean what this other commenter in this same thread found via GDPR after doing this very step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955366

Very cool

In today's blog post, we are all studying the enshittification of the BIOS.

In general, I agree with you that the bigger laptop makers can repair laptops and do an amazing job.

What we're all here for though is 2026. No big company is coming to fix your machines, even big companies are waiting 30+ days for parts availability from the big company bros they bought from. If you're a consumer, forget about it.

"Many of them are Ubuntu-certified as well." I'm calling BS here. Dell and HP hide their limited, paltry Linux offerings in the back of their website. Define your use of "many."

Now we're down to the BIOS. Today's blog post encountered a failed BIOS update, and takes Framework to task for it. Some of the support team at Framework are really cool and would probably have detected this customer is https://xkcd.com/806/

This time he got the strict script follower for customer support. I hope it blows up on Framework.

I guess Microsoft doesn't think in those terms.

Doesn't Microsoft want fewer, bigger games locked into their Project Helix platform? Why compete with Unreal when they can sign a sweet license for the engine?

Why build an ecosystem when they are already a huge monopoly?

I second the other commenters, and recommend watching the linked videos.

General Relativity and Entropy have not yet been unified into a single theory. In the meantime, gravity always takes priority over entropy. Or in other words, physicists don't yet know how gravity could make entropy slower or faster, so gravity ignores entropy and entropy just has to deal with whatever happens within the gravitational field.

A spaceship in a strong gravity field would not know their time was any different. Someone outside the field would give them a different relative measurement. But inside the field, entropy is not slower and not faster, because the spaceship doesn't see any change in the speed of their own clocks, even if they hear from someone else that their clocks are going at a different speed.

Good luck!

Not all cash is fungible for CapEx. For instance, much of that might hypothetically be held in an offshore account. Building a datacenter with it would trigger unfavorable VAT or sales tax or something... Hypothetically...

High cap companies use debt for this: bank loan is located in the market where it's needed most, and the debt is serviced by interest earned from securities in other markets. The net taxes are a small percent (think 3%) relative to simply transferring funds within the company. Yes, this is the low effective tax rate the EU is quite upset about.

Other reasons for not touching their holdings usually have a similar explanation. The securities are fungible for accounting purposes but not fungible enough for actual day-to-day operations. Result: securities get "stranded" and the large company grows a hedge fund appendage.

Please keep in mind this sudden burst of legislation is because Facebook recently faced a combined $1.1 billion fine for intentionally harming children. The judgment took years.

New Mexico Child Safety Case ($375 Million) was an actual judgment.

US class-action privacy lawsuit was a $725 million settlement, with no judgment.

These laws were proposed as soon as it was clear Facebook would not win. They move the liability to the Operating System, exempting Facebook.

Is there any additional info on where it was "published publicly by an unrelated third party"? From the timeline in the writeup:

> 2026-05-07: Submitted detailed information about the vulnerability and the exploit to the linux-distros mailing list. The embargo was set to 5 days, with an agreement that if a third party publishes the exploit on the internet during the embargo period, the Dirty Frag exploit would be published publicly.

> 2026-05-07: Detailed information and the exploit for this vulnerability were published publicly by an unrelated third party, breaking the embargo.

Edit: nevermind, details are further down in the thread:

https://openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/05/07/12

And

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055863

This is an interesting thought exercise. I immediately thought of the counter argument that Apple's driver quality is worse, especially for laptops nearing end of life (for the sake of argument assume this were true).

Could I then submit a warranty claim and demand Apple replace my aging laptop with their latest model?

Question: did the hints given at https://frame.work/nextgen include any secret messages you want the public to know about? Maybe the secret was missed during the run up to today?

Bank is saying it doesn't want your money, correct?

Didn't they announce they were selling it off a while back? I thought the reason was it's not very much like the other things Google does.

> I just don't know if the human capital is there.

> At my job we use HyperV, and finding someone who actually knows HyperV is difficult and expensive...

Try offering significantly higher pay.

Samsung seems to be targetting a sweet spot. "Costs less than Apple, superficially looks like an iPhone, product lineup includes smaller form factors, good enough."

It doesn't work for me, but that's because I courageously use my headphone jack.

The US clean energy tax credit is only available for equipment installed on or before Dec 31, 2025 https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/residential-clean-ene...

As a result, more used solar should become available on ebay. I'm excited to see what I can do on a shoe string budget.

"Bar Reciprocity" or "Reciprocal Admission" lets a lawyer do something like move to a different state.

Example: Maine https://www.mainebar.org/page/ReciprocalAdmission

Texas State Bar is still a thing. This means that it has split from the American Bar Association, but the legal system of Texas is still part of the US Legal system.

What I don't understand is how this new type of asset is above reproach.

I mean BlackRock and Blackstone creating securities backed by real estate in general, not only single family homes.

What if this new type of asset signals to the broader real estate market that regulators favor large investors?

Even more likely, what if this new type of asset succeeds at the expense of first time home buyers?

Do you think malware creators find out by reading HN or github? I don't understand the vitriol, the request "Github should take a harder stance" could have a chilling effect on security researchers, pushing high impact exploits deeper underground.

If you want to see a comparison against an even broader set of open source compression algos, this is lzbench (it's linked directly from the ZXC github page)

lzbench has added ZXC to its suite. This makes a nice apples to apples comparison possible.

https://github.com/inikep/lzbench

For those of us near Boulder, it's urgent.

But the stratum 1 time servers can shrug and route around the damage.

100% this. Wikipedia article on qwerty:

"The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878...

"The 0 key was added and standardized in its modern position early in the history of the typewriter, but the 1 and exclamation point were left off some typewriter keyboards into the 1970s."

There's always a few oddball variations. But desk work will probably use a qwerty keyboard in the year 2100

A college level approach could look at the line between Math/Science/Physics and Philosophy. One thing from the article that stood out to me was that the introduction to their approach started with a problem about classifying a traffic light. Is it red or green?

But the accompanying XY plot showed samples that overlapped or at least were ambiguous. I immediately lost a lot of my interest in their approach, because traffic lights by design are very clearly red, or green. There aren't mauve or taupe lights that the local populace laughs at and says, "yes, that's mostly red."

I like the idea of studying math by using ML examples. I'm guessing this is a first step and future education will have better examples to learn from.

I'm switching to DisplayPort

The writeup on phys.org is troublesome at best. Starting with the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it buries the rest of that sentence in paragraph 5: USC (University of Southern California) and the Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.

This team has made a nonlinear lattice that relies on something they call "Joule-Thomson-like expansion." The Joule-Thomsen effect is the ideal gas law in beginning science. PV=nRT. Compression heats a gas, expansion cools a gas.

Why they're studying the equivalent photonics principle [1] is that it focuses an array of inputs, "causing light to condense at a single spot, regardless of the initial excitation position." Usually the problem is that light is linearly independent: two beams blissfully ignore each other. To do useful switching or compute, one of the beams has to be able to act as a control signal.

A photon gas doesn't conserve the number of particles (n) like beginning physics would suggest. This lets the temperature of the gas control the output.

The temperature, driven by certain specific inputs, produces the nonlinear response. I didn't see a specific claim what gain they achieved.

This paper is more on the theoretical end of photonics research. Practical research such as at UBC Vancouver [2] where a device does "weight update speed of 60 GHz" and for clustering it can do "112 x 112-pixel images" - the tech doesn't compete well against electronics yet.

TSMC and NVidia are attempting photonics plays too. But they're only achieving raw I/O with photons. They can attach the fiber directly to the chip to save watts and boost speeds.

Basic physics gets in the way too. A photon's wavelength at near UV is 400 nanometers, but the transistors in a smartphone are measured at 7 nanometers ish. Electrical conduction is fundamentally smaller than a waveguide for light. Where light could maybe outshine electrons is in switching speed. But this research paper doesn't claim high switching speed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_gas

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53261-x

I (pre) ordered one. I'd be so excited if the haptic super-wide touchpad made an appearance, even if in some limited form.

Will there be more such events? I know this one is only a few days away.

Admittedly, Valorant still has a cheating problem. But cheating is already less successful due to server side sim. Next gen games will have improved cheat detection, eventually leading to cheating drying up.