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wang_li

2,140 karma · joined March 17, 2015

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wang_li··on I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable
Lots of problems with this. The noted lack of inflation adjustment. The savings interest item ignores the fact that loan interest rates were 10%+ when you could get a good rate on your savings account. The student loan one is just wrong, the average student loan debt in 2026 is $43k. You ignore the point of the avocado toast (what used to be called the latte factor) simply so you can make some pithy comment. If you don't buy $14 toast 5 days a week, you can save $3500 per year. If you do that for 5 years you have a great addition to your downpayment for a home. Or you can use the money saved to buy a brand-new Nissan Versa, a perfectly fine starter car for a young couple with 1 or 2 young kids, for $17,000. Blockbuster Friday comes out to 4 movies a month for $16. Compared to $16 for a streaming service that you can watch every single night. And everyone knows the experience of going to a video rental store and walking the aisles for what felt like hours trying to find something to watch, just a different kind of scrolling. In 30 years of working in IT, cubicles have been the norm. 30m from where I'm sitting right now there is a ping pong table. The break room is huge and has plenty of large, cushioned seating that you can lie down on and take a nap if you need to. As well as small private meeting spaces if you just have to get away from everyone. This is not a tech startup or FAANG. The summer job is still true for most state universities. Utah State University 2026 tuition and fees is $4500 per semester.

If you don't want to pay subscriptions, don't subscribe to those services. You can trivially buy Bluray, DVD, and CDs. Or you can get DRM free music from multiple sources. You can stream spotify and youtube for free. OTA TV is still a thing.

Apparently, I'm in a contrarian and argumentative mood today.

wang_li··on Networking changes coming in macOS 27
They are compatible with netatalk though. The project split between version 2 and 3, but in recent releases they folded them back into a single thing. Current netatalk releases support all versions of AFP.
wang_li··on Networking changes coming in macOS 27
Also works for System 7 based Macintoshes. In case you got frozen in a glacier in 1991.
wang_li··on Networking changes coming in macOS 27
> "Dropping support for things just because they are old" is typical commercial software behavior.

You are deluding yourself if you think open source folks are better. You can't compile and run a modern version of GCC on Solaris 10 on SPARC, for example. And we just had a story here last week about removal of bus mouse support. It's only a mild exaggeration to say that lots of folks will check the commit activity on github and of a project doesn't have commits this week it should be banned from the internet and the universe.

Then you have the problem that many dev tools are not forward compatible. CMake is a huge issue. An ubuntu system from 2020 has CMake on it, but it won't compile anything that uses CMake that was released in recent years because the cmakefiles are incompatible.

wang_li··on Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support
The real issue is that they don't have stable intra-kernel ABI/APIs. It should entirely be the case that technologies that are 10+ years old are stable and a clean abstraction layer can be created. You maintain the abstraction layer and all the things on the other side of it don't have to track random kernel changes. Things like this just keep working indefinitely.
wang_li··on Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition
It was a slight attempt to highlight that the conversation about a purely subjective thing is missing the point entirely. In the context of scientific discovery trying to qualify the outcome based on an individual's personal interpretation of descriptive words is a fool's errand. Attempting to justify one's personal habits or predilections is squarely in the flat earther camp of scientific belief.
wang_li··on Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition
The amount of caffeine that humans require to live is 0 mg. So ...
wang_li··on Your hex editor should color-code bytes
Color coding is a simplistic, half-assed way of doing semantic analysis. Go full assed and make an /etc/magic aware file decoder that decodes and highlights anomalies.
wang_li··on Your hex editor should color-code bytes
No. Why would you? Encrypted data should look no different than random. The app figures out if it is the app's data after it attempts to decode it.
wang_li··on "cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2
Yes. It’s called the X Window System and it’s been around since the ‘80s.

Also the problem here isn’t that iterm2 is trying to emulate terminals, it’s that it’s trying to do something more over the same network connection without making changes to the ssh protocol.

wang_li··on Put your SSH keys in your TPM chip
I don't know if you are missing anything. That's why I'm asking and making statements about how I understand the various processes to work. I want to understand how it is that the only device that interacts with the yubikey/tpm, when compromised, can't be subverted to the attackers ends.

Thank you for your reply.

wang_li··on Put your SSH keys in your TPM chip
I know the title says "in your TPM chip" but the method described does not store your private key in the TPM, it stores it in a PKCS keystore which is encrypted by a key in your TPM. In actual use the plaintext of your private ssh key still shows up in your ssh client for validation to the remote host.

The recommended usage of a yubikey for ssh does something similar as otherwise your key consumes one of the limited number of slots on the key.

wang_li··on Put your SSH keys in your TPM chip
For SSH to use your keys a calculation has to be done using your private key and then send the results back to the remote site so it can validate that you got the results that prove you have your private key. The TPM and your yubikey do not do this calculation. They allow software on your computer to access the private key in plaintext form, perform this calculation, and then send the result (and then presumably overwrite the plaintext key in RAM). If your system has been compromised, then when this private key is provided to the host based software, it can be taken.
wang_li··on Put your SSH keys in your TPM chip
I had a friend tell me once that his yubikey is more secure than my authenticator app on my phone because my phone has this giant attack surface that his yubikey doesn't. Yet the yubikey has an entire attack surface of the computer it is plugged into. Which is largely the same or worse than my phone's.

I'm wondering why that doesn't apply here. The TPM holds the key to the cipher that is protecting your private keys. Someone uses some kind of RCE or LPE to get privileged access to your system. Now it sits and waits for you to do something that requires access to your SSH keys. When you do that you are expecting whatever user prompts come up, the malware rides along this expectation and gets ahold of your private SSH keys and stores them or sends them off somewhere. I'm not even positive that they need high degree of privileges on your box, if they can manipulate your invocation of the ssh client, by modifying your PATH or adding an ssh wrapper to something already in your path, then this pattern will also work.

What am I gaining from using this method that I don't get from using a password on my ssh private key?

wang_li··on Cloudflare Email Service
I think you should put your money where your mouth is. For each spam message sent to a recipient server, you send $1000 to the recipient.
wang_li··on CPU-Z and HWMonitor compromised
Jesus. I see that post and comment section and I immediately expect to hear Joey telling me about how this ATM is Idaho started spraying cash after his hack of the Gibson. That is a real-life reproduction of the perception of hackers in films in the '90s.
wang_li··on EFF is leaving X
They're an advocacy organization. They should want people who don't want to hear what they have to say to hear what they have to say.
wang_li··on Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps
>...it’s not like I was going to head up there myself.

You're never going to be able to IPO your space startup with that attitude.

wang_li··on Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why
As long as Linux distros have such shit accessibility stories, MacOS and Windows being available should be a requirement for all systems in government.
wang_li··on Scotty: A beautiful SSH task runner
Ansible’s idempotency is dependent on the specific module being invoked. What ansible mainly brings to the table is the parameterized modules. Which brings us back to people adopting it because they don’t know how to compose one liners, quote them properly, and wrap them in a for loop.
wang_li··on GitHub's Historic Uptime
A better analogy is if one bulb in the right rear brake light group is burnt out. Technically the car is broken. But realistically you will be able to do all the things you want to do unless the thing you want to do is measure that all the bulbs in your brake lights are working.
wang_li··on Scotty: A beautiful SSH task runner
Ansible only exists because of an influx of people who don't know how to do this.
wang_li··on OCR for construction documents does not work, we fixed it
Why does the workflow lie at the level of a real or virtual piece of paper and not in the metadata from the applications used to create that piece of paper? Seems like a CAD tool would allow you to identify each element of the drawing, assigning metadata as required.
wang_li··on CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font
Serifs so I and l look different, monospace so it's possible to use spaces for alignment, and a slash or dot in the zero. What else do I need?
wang_li··on Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised
It turns out that it's possible for the server to detect whether it is running via "| bash" or if it's just being downloaded. Inspecting it via download and then running that specific download is safer than sending it directly to bash, even if you download it and inspect it before redownloading it and piping it to a shell.
wang_li··on Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised
>Which sounds great, but the way things work now tend to be the exact opposite of that, so there will be no trustable platform to run the untrusted code in.

This is the problem with software progressivism. Some things really should just be what they are, you fix bugs and security issues and you don't constantly add features. Instead everyone is trying to make everything have every feature. Constantly fiddling around in the guts of stuff and constantly adding new bugs and security problems.

wang_li··on Cyber.mil serving file downloads using TLS certificate which expired 3 days ago
It's entirely the second paragraph and not part of certificate expiration, in and of itself, lends to being MITM. Firefox tells me what the problem is, expired, wrong name, etc. So, it's not just saying "oh no, something is wrong." I can tell what is wrong before I choose to proceed.
wang_li··on Our commitment to Windows quality
100% of OSes are better than Linux in this regard as long as overcommit is the default.
wang_li··on Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework
It's even sillier than that. You can look at populations in the modern world and see there are huge differences in intelligence due to various factors such as cousin marriage and nutrition.
wang_li··on A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder (1992)
Trying to distinguish happiness from all those other feelings is like trying to separate depressed from all the negative things you feel during a day. Some words do not describe specific emotions, but instead indicate a general state which has all kinds of internal variation and magnitudes. A person who doesn't have much financial stress, their kid isn't having issues that require lots of problem solving from the parent, their job is fine, they are not arguing with their spouse regularly. They would say they are happy. Alternately one can have accomplishments , new PR at the gym, solved an issue at work, but still think of themselves as unhappy because they have things that they prioritize more highly that are not going well.
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