vaxman

- gerlingguy says no HDMI chip (sigh), ah well... where's my Subpac?

Want me to show you on the doll where he hurt me?

Where was this when when I was integrating an rPi0-2W into what was once an Avegant Glyph? [project inspired by https://youtu.be/RQeOm3CuUFY]

Then what was the comment I quoted?

Computer/Network gear that is designed, manufactured, sold and distributed by Chinese companies should be assumed to come with MSS-infected microcode, SecureBoot ([U]EFI/BIOS), firmware and/or operating systems that are vulnerable in ways that offer “plausibly deniability” as to the intent of the manufacturer. In some cases, the infected payload will be transmitted to the customer environment through updates supplied by Chinese websites, again in ways that allow for “plausibly deniability” as to their intent. Hacking Fortune 100 companies was one thing (because, shame on the Fortune 100 companies), but the recent move by China to hack Anthropic and use Claude as a cyber weapon is unleashing bi-partisan congressional support limits on China’s market access. Many more Chinese tech products, distributors and services will be removed from our markets, but the wheels are turning slowly and in the meantime, "Does anyone have any questions?" [https://youtu.be/_5yJZUyr_cM]

PS: The entertaining hacks (aka “influencers”) on YouTube, Reddit and in the blogger-sphere in general, are aware of these risks but recommend potentially dangerous Chinese systems and networking products anyway. In many cases, they will falsely portray the items as already being popular and The Way that everyone is doing IT. While their defense might be “don’t blame the player, blame the game”, people were shot at and died to create the freedom that they are now putting others at risk of losing with such reckless recommendations. It’s not just hardware either. These same video grifters will cheerfully recommend remote-access software (and kvm) products without even including the most basic of warnings. Should these irresponsible influencers be “de-platformed” by a faceless “Trust and Safety” team that’s somehow expected to come up to speed on the complex risks of every product that is otherwise (for the moment) still being legally distributed? No! In the 250 year history of the United States and for a century or two prior in Europe, there have been entire classes of crackpots roaming the countrysides peddling everything from hair-regrowth medicine, cult religions and life-extending hot springs (my favorite was the story of “Zzyzx” that seemed to hit on all three). The people who are making these infomercials while intentionally leaving out any account of the danger their viewers are placing themselves in by following such “advice” will ultimately feel the same wrath and suffer the common outcome associated with such behavior: being locked out of the economy and deprived of their assets. <cue https://youtu.be/BD2kWCfTcaU>

*-"eventually" leaving those public companies no choice but to...

Clarifying, because there's no way a company (public or private) is going to reduce the credit line of a major customer until it's obvious that the orders "aren't real" But if Wall Street realizes it before they do, they can lose control of their business too. This is not quite Enron or WorldCom/MFS, but it's a very similar storm on the horizon. (BTW, ever wonder why Sprint never could remain airborne and eventually was merged with TeenMobile? It's because they overspent on CapX trying to keep up with the fraud at Worldcom and could never dig out to actually use all that spectrum. Likewise, we are still dealing with the fallout of the Enron collapse on the US domestic energy grid a quarter century later.)

OpenAI will go to zero unless it agrees to be acquired because they're messing with public company stock valuations using funky purchase orders leaving those public companies no choice but to cancel their credit (at least unless they get a "government backstop" that they say they don't want or need). Those who compete with OpenAI will also "take a hit" if/when that happens, so they would be wise to be looking to make a deal to acquire OpenAI. Dude was from Y Combinator and liked to bank on hope, focusing on capturing market share and worrying about profits later, which is fine in software startups playing with Monopoly money, but when it impacts vendors that are publicly traded companies (to the point that one is now valued at $5T), post-1929 rules come into play. Anthropic has a similar issue, but there, the issue is that their C-suite is making outrageous public statements that are suspected of intending to manipulate the stock values of both private and public competitors and of the publicly held vendors to all of these players. I hope they both go away quietly and someone declares victory rather than the stock market crashing!

As far as xAI, I doubt it will go to zero or run afoul of any of those market manipulation issues because it owns Twitter/X and I think it powers the realtime Tesla cloud, but betting on it is fraught with peril because of the high likelihood that it will wind up under the control of some less capable conglomerate (ergo, GM acquisition of Hughes Aircraft and resale to Raytheon, Boeing and News/DirecTV).

Google, Meta, a handful of B actors and China are where we have to place our bets, but only if we ourselves need (or want to invest on the theory that others need) trillion parameter models (and want to risk having the valuations lowered if/when adverse actions are taken against the above competitors).

TFA had me at "Per ChatGPT:" ROFL

FORTH has been used to control deep space telescopes and planetariums --it's a great way to expose instrumentation for high-level access, but that access might not be human anymore, it could just as easily expose instrumentation to AI agents.

For example, a FORTH page could contain a prompt "Animate a galloping black and white zebra on the attached 64x32 RGB LED matrix, cache the code to do this on a FORTH page called ZEBRASHOW6432." Another could prompt "Run ZEBRASHOW6432 at the top of the hour during weekdays in the Pacific Time Zone." This might involve lifting C drivers from Arduino and CircuitPython for the 64x32 RGB LED matrix driver into FORTH (trivial) and building an MCP-to-FORTH server, but endless fun...

So I guess it's best to stop reading about FORTH and grab an rP0-2W and attach desired indicators, sensors, actuators and transceivers to see for yourself.

> i used a chip8 emu

I used CHIP8 (on an RCA COSMAC VIP out "in the garage" bought with money from mowing lawns), would never have put it on my resume ROFL. Big Bad FORTRAN programmers would have looked at it and said "awe...ain't that cute." I did have 1802 assembler on there though. By 1992, at least one interviewer suspected I might be an "Easter Bunny" (not real) before finally meeting me. That's when I started scaling it back a bit (dropping a dozen assemblers, old languages like APL, etc.) I kept scaling it back for decades until eventually it fit on one page, but the people reading it didn't know what they didn't know (citizens of the dystopia) so my resume is only a formality anyway. (I probably should reduce it down to two or three sentences at this point. But back in the day man, I was almost typing (with an actual typewriter, also "out in the garage") in the margins --heh.) Hmm, valid question: How long before LinkedIn is an AI that conducts the entire search and hiring process? Also, WTH are we reading about CHIP8 in 2025 for...it's a dopeass dystopia, that's why. :D

If it isn't on the Internet, it didn't happen right? Maybe we can change that...

Unix _is_ a play on "eunuchs" but that fact wouldn't have sold well during the mini computer [ https://www.britannica.com/technology/minicomputer ] wars, especially in the later 1980s [ https://youtu.be/IRpKHFfsH3A ] when Unix was exiting the exclusive world of academia and Bell Labs. This was an era when everyone for the prior thirty years had come up with mainframes and data centers were stocked full of "heavy iron" (IBM and IBM-clones like Amdahl) or at least very large "mini" computers from companies like DEC, which was so well run from the late 1950s on that its leader has been declared to be one of the greatest in the history of Corporate America and was studied at Harvard and Wharton for decades. The Unix technology "specialists" on the other hand were super-nerds: ghastly, feral, mostly pear-shaped, plain clothed technicians only BARELY tolerated in their own settings. [Ok, maybe all of them except Eric Schmidt heh.] Realize that the vast majority of American engineers in the 1980s still wore suits and ties --but not if they had anything to do with Unix. (Ken Olsen fer sure wore suits, but also drove a Ford Pinto, BTW.) When the demo dollies tasked with pushing any number of alternate hardware platforms up against IBM and DEC in the constant battle for those massive "heavy iron" budgets were asked to pitch UNIX (System 3, System V, System 7, BSD) up against bedrock OS/MVS and VMS, at first they would answer the obvious question (of what UNIX stood for) with "UNIX is not UNIX". That pretty much stuck in the period literature (COMPUTER MAGAZINE RAGS) too --no way they were going to answer "eunuchs"!

Also worth noting in this context: This was the era of "Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM" and the amount of money your company spent on "iron" was seen as a marker of its success AND YOUR PERSONAL CAREER STATUS in the tech universe, so you can imagine the type of customers and professionals that actually did buy into obscure UNIX-based hardware. This also created a lot of "friction" in the Industry that you can't easily learn about in this Future. It wasn't like today where people have "home labs" and can train themselves to go for whatever job they want using free software (even while sitting in a hellish ghetto of the poorest country on Earth). Back in the day, one was trained on what their school or employer had available (or they learned from carrying around books and imagination, or using X.25-based timeshare if they were lucky). Period. So maybe you landed a great job, but you had to use a shitty Unix computer with broken down terminals or maybe you had a shitty job but they gave you a coveted VAXstation. All your experience with Unix wouldn't buy you much in a DEC or IBM shop and vice versa. The implications this had on the layered applications of the day were profound, but mostly this created a lot of animosity between tech professionals of different backgrounds. There were constant attempts to address this, but the computer hardware manufacturers were complicit in it because it made it easier to lock their customers into one architecture or another.

<cue https://youtu.be/ciUfdVs-p84 >

Is it safe to now say that all general purpose operating systems except LINUX are nothing but husks to run LINUX (and whatever legacy ecosystem)? The most successful of all the 1980s demo dollies, The Scott McNealy, took a page out of DEC's playbook and instead of trying to go in with a massive super powerful Unix mini computer, he would pitch a few workstations running something called "SunOS" (BSD eunuchs) that "networked" over TCP/IP to effect "the system is the network" (a totally new concept then) before his company bet everything on a new chip (SPARC) that used RISC architecture to outperform the established industry players and make the guys in charge of those "heavy iron" budgets feel a bit inferior if they didn't buy-in a little. SunOS, SPARC and Solaris definitely caused a lot of disruption, but it really never had much of a chance to unseat IBM or DEC and was also slowly sinking into La Brea tar pit along with everything else (though it had a bit more life due to all the capX as the dot-com bubble was inflating around TCP/IP). IBM had already totally lost control of its maverick PC initiative (by under-estimating Billy The Kid who had also hired away DEC's top VMS engineer) and the ENTIRE market for mini computers (whether they ran OS/MVS, VMS or eunuchs like SunOS or NextStep) totally collapsed. Just the promise that a PC might be as powerful at VMS and could network as well as SunOS was sufficient to change perception and bet corporate budgets on a "computer, not a terminal, for every desk." More importantly, the resulting PC industry economies of scale meant that all of the tech workers could own a "home lab" and, in particular, allowed at least one kid growing up just outside the Soviet Union to go through the pages of Andy Tanenbaum's famous book on operating systems (that demonstrated key concepts for the reader through the creation of a eunuchs operating system Andy called MINIX). Combined with the political antics of a creepy academic communist at MIT and an irresponsible Defense backbone ISP in San Diego, the slow death of all operating systems has manifested (because LINUX ELF binaries and runtime support are now available on IBM mainframes, Windows and as of last June, macOS). Of course, there are still legacy shops, embedded systems and most of the new ELF-running operating systems still run LINUX in nested virtualization, but LINUX has pretty much taken over the game and eunuchs is el muerto.

Meanwhile, even the AIs incorrectly think that UNIX is "a playful reference on UNICS, the larger, more complex Multics 'project'" Sounds totally plausible like everything else coming out of an LLM, but we meat bags know better.

--- 'Now there were these places called cities and they had the knowin' of a lot of things, they did. They had skyscrapers, videos and sonic.. Then this thing called the Pockey Clips happened and you have to understand, this is Home and there's no Tomorrow Land.' https://youtu.be/rn4aIinTJBQ

This was obsoleted by UWB and Apple’s Nearby Interactions API.

https://www.qorvo.com/innovation/ultra-wideband/products/uwb...

We once called that “image activation” before the Industry was taken over by human LLMs in the wake of the dot-com crash.

| | ----> The World of Incus -> https://youtu.be/TzH2L5Bzlh8

excellent post, thank you --a grade above the vast majority of posts on HN

childhoodRoomCoveredInSpacePostersAndHangingSolarSystem == YES

didVisitVoyagerOneAtJPLasAsoCalKid == YES

midWesternUniversityFacultyNeverBelievedMe == YES

For Mac/Linux/Hybrid-Cloud shops -> "Incus" (can also host macOS and Windows instances) for most work and "Firecracker" for specialized appliances.

For Windows shops (you sick bstrds :D) -> Hyper-V

RE: Proxmox, not a hater, but errtime I read that name, I picture "Mike Myers Dieter". Seriously tho, the best they could do for themselves would be to make ProxMox into a UI for the Incus REST API (and their legacy backend) then repackage their enterprise offerings as add-ons for Incus (for email, DRS, etc.) BTW, the first person to release an "I use this exclusively everyday for months before releasing it on Github" gesture-controlled WebGL/Audio and WebXR based UX with agentic Incus REST API sensor analysis and settings controls, will win a valuable prize.

https://aws.plainenglish.io/why-even-google-is-rethinking-ku...

-> Mind earlier warnings that many people in the Industry these days tend to follow each other around on forums creating a sort of "feedback loop" so bad trends (eg, PHP) takeover the game. <cue https://youtu.be/uPWQfAv_qBQ>

Nooo. Wages only jumped in the Tech biz just before the dot-com crash and again before the AI crash that hasn't happened yet (unless you count laying off workers to pay for capX on NVIDIA hahaha). Bottom line: McDonalds is paying $20/hr now in California to flip burgers --YUUUGE, but a whole lot of people lost their jobs when major automobile manufacturers laid them off because they "didn't want to compete with McDonalds for workers"...where is that in your "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" (I'mma change that to "and LLMs" rofl).

Hey it's iPhone Day, "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish"* ---

*-nevermind the $10000 workstation named after a gf or more recently $2000 orange phones (I bought a DEEP Blue because Apple is always threatening to "Care-Deeply" me), $1000 watches and $300 earpieces for errbody. So Hungry. Also, we'll make sure you never work anywhere in Tech again if you even so much as interview for a new job outside of our company and Non-Competes Are No Longer Blocked! But What the Helly..Turtleneck also didn't invent the hungry mantra which is embraced by many other similar brilliant people, from Einstein to Elon'n-on and of course, my dad's gang one of whom brought Turtleneck back to Apple.) Get it? Got it? Good.

That is essentially how I survived the nuclear winter after the dot-com bubble burst (taking out most of the senior level tech workers across the vast majority of US domestic business --in those days, senior level meant formal training, 20+ years experience and over 40yo with kids in school, mortgages, etc..and when all the jobs go away in an industry for six years, you are forced to crack open your 401K and retire while you figure out something else...there was no coming back for them). The takeaway now is that the informally trained web people who came up without guidance beyond Google Search and forum contributions from Europe but gained control of the industry in the Crash's aftermath will live on as "vibe coders" forever and their "heavy lifting" partners at AWS, GCP and Azure will live on for a while hosting trillion+ parameter LLMs, even as the first wave of American CS graduates since the Crash are about to (finally!) hit their 20 year mark and gain control of tech across all industries (pulling the plug on the "heavy lifting cloud" that they don't need/want to budget for).

But unlike that six year gap during the tech nuclear winter (2000-2006) when you could literally follow those over-confident $10/hr kids around cleaning up one botched effort to port custom Windows apps to LAMP after another, this time it will be different. The LLMs are trained largely on the European-dominated code bases on Github and it's just enough to keep the "vibe coders" out of real bad trouble (like porting a financial application from Visual BASIC into PHP which has different precision floating point resolution between distributions/releases or de-normalizing structured customer data and storing it in KV pairs "because everybody is doing it so relational databases must be obsolete".) The work to cleanup their "vibe coded" mess will not be as intense (especially considering LLMs will help), but there will be a lot more of it this time around and re-hosting it more economically will be a Thing.

Sadly, American businesses will discover they don't need trillion parameter LLMs (due to MoE, quantization, agentic mini-models, etc.) and the supply of acceptable vector processing chips will catch up to demand (bringing prices down for "on prem" deployments) and that "AI snake oil factor" (non-deterministic behavior and hallucinations) will become more than a concern expressed over weekend C-suite golf games and yacht excursions (you know, where someone always gets fired to set an example of what happens when you don't make your numbers). AI had been dead so long that the top C-suites can't even remember the details of how/why it died anymore (hint: you could get fired for even saying "AI" up until the 2000 Crash giving rise to the synonym "ML" as a more laser focused application of AI), just that they don't trust it. The astonishing demonstrations at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google and Meta are enough to cause C-suites to write a few checks, causing a couple of ramps in the stock market, but those projects by and large are NOT working out due to the same 'ole same 'ole and I fear this entire paradigm will suffer the same fate as IBM Watson. The stock market may well crash again because of this horsepucky even though there IS true potential with this technology, just as with Web 1.0. (All it needs for that is a catalyst event --maybe not Bill Gates throwing a chair, maybe something in the dispute between Sammy and Elon.) Same as it ever was.

PS: I've been downvoted on HN for years and years for mentioning this topic. Once, someone even summoned dang. One would think that by now, with this being out in the open (why did "China H2Oh" fail again? lol) but no..threat actors gone act.. Those smart enough to listen to words of someone with nearly five decades in the Business might not lose as much money as those who don't.

DoesHaveManyCasesOf80sMagazinesStackedFloorToCeilingForSeveralYards == YES They're part of the alternate universe before the series of unfortunate events (MFNforDaCCP, MS-DOS, FSF, PPP/MSRAS, The Sculley, The Gould, The Cutler, That Face and InfoSys) that left us in the current dystopia: Three trillion dollar what? who?

I'm afraid even https://jonudell.net couldn't save us.

ok Elon.

IMHO, the real "morons" (your word) are those deploying Chinese-fabricated SoCs (like the latest ESP32, LinkStar, etc) and mainboards with Chinese-written BIOS/EFI/UEFI (like Zima) on what an increasing number of "influencers" deem "Raspberry Pi alternatives". Even when you cite the websites about things like "Moonbounce", there is a generation of workers in the Business now that become outwardly enraged and irrational about the risk and otherwise stick their head firmly in the sand while quietly knowing what they have done and will therefore likely continue to do is costing us the Country. Even if this effort wasn't part of VOLT, it certainly is consistent with the LAW in China that all companies must have CCP management and implement all requests required of them by that management. The worst part is that when you publicly confront these companies with this fact, for example, in Discord, they don't even deny it, they simply respond solemnly that "the other side does it too." (True, but our guys don't currently sell prisoner kidneys.)

Hey, I'll bet you never look at that WiFi-"enabled" power bank or HEPA/AC unit again the same way (or my favorite AI response du jour "Some Chinese scooters come with a microphone integrated into a GPS tracker or helmet, while others can be customized with aftermarket solutions. There is no single model called "Chinese scooter with microphone," but rather multiple products and approaches that fit this description.") Errbody worried about the talking LLM parrot AI and your vehicle dashboard always listening (or even watching), but that's not the most serious threat we face now.

Do your kids have Social Security Numbers yet? Let's ask Elon to use his privileged mode on xAI to have it characterize their socio economic relations among all Americans that have existed since The Great Deal, shall we?

The Solution here is as it always has been --to build furniture that's used to support students with built-in monitors that connect wirelessly (AirPlay or something like Apple's SmartConnector) when an iPhone is placed top of them (or a nearby cradle). As for the keyboard and iPhone, that's up to the Students, though there are widely available programs available to help pay for and insure them along with student discounts and public grants. This solution implies that Apple would allow a Dex-like solution on iOS, which I think is imminent based on recent iPadOS announcements and obvious increases in RAM/storage.

I legit first conceived of this type of setup in 1977-1978 where the iPhone+keyboard part was a "book safe" that contained an 1802 SBC covered by a PET-1 type keyboard and external jacks for NTSC (1861 video output) out, power in and a 5-pin DIN for TTL+audio (Q-line) cassette recorder. Students would be able to plug-in in the class, lab, library or at home. Let's just say Hollywood had thoroughly ruined the minds of the faculty and students and they lost out, despite being one of the top institutions in a region filled with Defense families. But by 1992, I was going wheels up from SJC with my PowerBook 170 still FAXing my contracting invoices via an RJ11 (POTS) phone line to a 3.5W Tandy BagPhone stuffed under my seat on my way home (will it finish before the signal fades LOL), typically telling this same story about the "textbook computer" to the unsettled random person in the isle seat.

In business, perception often is taken for reality (just look at how long people clung to DOS-Windows when there were far better Amigas and Macs for sale).

Gartner.hasHistoryOfSettingPerceptionInFortune500Companies == YES

The Way is to build another high-speed rail line connecting Tucson to the new [Brightline West high-speed rail] station in Las Vegas (stopping in Bullhead and Henderson), then a new segment from Vegas up to SLC. The Brightline West line under construction now should also be extended down from Rancho Cucamonga to Phoenix (stopping in Temecula and San Diego). A Boring Company loop is also badly needed to connect Temecula and Irvine (underneath the Cleveland National Forest), maybe meeting Brightline in Temecula and Metrostink in Irvine. It's probably also possible to do something like close the existing freeways during certain hours, like the Silver State Classic Challenge does annually, and run 200mph (Tesla) cars and 100mph electric semis, so Brightline doesn't need to be involved, but it's really not that hard to just lay e-train tracks out.

Why?

Because connecting existing cities with 220-250mph trains will maximize the current US Southwest infrastructure so we do not need to develop new federal lands.

[PS: The BLM and non-BLM region between Phoenix and Vegas is laced with Naturally Occurring Asbestos and the BLM region between Vegas and Tonopah, East to California is largely still radioactive or in active use by the federal government, so unsuitable for new city development.]

Not really. COM/OLE is a different paradigm, their answer to an infamous vaporware called Taligent/OpenDoc that bankrupted many developers. Microsoft was sort of stuck with that security nightmare though

I’m not reading thru all that, but believe me when I say the ground truth is that IBM developed REXX on its mainframes and a genius guy from that world (poor bstrd) recreated it on Amiga as a third-party product called ARexx that was, in turn, adopted and promoted by CBM Dev Relations. One of the things the fake frenching innovation team in charge of Apple for a few years did was go down in the basement where they had an Amiga in various forms of dissection and transplanted ARexx out of it, mixed with HyperCard’s vocab (which they also didn’t invent) and announced to the World their great invention: AppleScript. But I digress. Here in the (dystopian) Future, some Apple operating systems are just now gaining the kind of power that ARexx had, because these types of systems require the cooperation of the developers and they had little incentive to “donate” functions to the system just to gain integration with Siri/Shortcuts, but they can get fired/bankrupted for not doing it to integrate with Apple Intelligence (I know, I hate that identifier too). ARexx could not be ported to MacOS back in the day because it would have had to have been championed by Apple Developer Relations (Guy Kawasaki & Co —did I just wreck the “Hackers” movie reference?) and, even/especially in the 80s, they wouldn’t have approved a tech that “competed” with AppleScript. Microsoft didn’t jump on this because it descends from DEC tech (under the direction of the Cutler) which had nothing like REXX.

Erm, hey Mac, he’s quoting “TRON” -and getting downvoted by peeps who don’t remember or are from alien cultures that don’t incorporate it.

> The protocol doesn't judge your life choices. This brings me to something I discovered about MCP (Model Context Protocol) while trying to make my calendar app order takeout. Stay with me here.

What was that character in “South Park” that has a hand puppet? (White noise, flatline sound)

I’m getting there, but I was trapped in a movie that wouldn’t be made for another five years… https://clip.cafe/the-secret-of-my-success-1987/why-are-wear...