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RetroTechie

Re:European RISC-V Industrial Computing Initiative on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:54AM (#50352763)
Why the emphasis on RVA23? Since when are vector instructions a minimal necessity? Plain RV64GC is mooore than powerful enough for industrial/machine controllers & the like - assuming a standard sw/hw platform.

What's missing here is the "made in Europe" bit. Currently (very few exceptions), RISC-V SoCs are designed by Chinese companies, maybe fabricated in Taiwan, and boards they go on manufactured in China.

Imho that is what Europe needs to address. With EU-made boards available, the software side is the easy part.

There is some European CPU initiative. Sounds great but where are the boards?

Re:European RISC-V Industrial Computing Initiative on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:37AM (#50352516)
Is there a cheap .dev board (assembled in EU) available for purchase by regular consumers?
Run some current and still-compiled-for-i686 Linux or *BSD distros on it. See what breaks, save logs & report issues upstream.

A lot of support for old CPUs & platforms they're on goes through emulators like QEMU. Or plain old 'go with specs, disturb code as little as possible, and assume (hope) it still works'. But nothing beats running on actual hardware. Uncommon configurations, specific drivers that may have been broken (sometimes for a looong time before someone notices), spec says A but hardware does B, etc.

Parameter count is basically storage. Including persistent like flash memory. Which (still) is subject to Moore's law.

That's discounting architectural innovations & improvements which are bound to happen somehow.

Re:Frontier Airlines Likely Breached on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:09AM (#50335754)
Sure a run-of-the-mill data leak might not do much besides ruffle customer's feathers. But disruptions to a companies' operations can become very costly, very quickly in today's tech-dependent world.

Eg. recent Albert Heijn (Dutch supermarket chain) "cyber incident" must have cost them 10s of millions of Euros.

That's real gain for any competitor NOT having such issue. See eg. Darwinian evolution on how even small (dis)advantages can lead to species being outcompeted & disappearing.

Re:Frontier Airlines Likely Breached on Sunday November 01, 2026 @04:17PM (#50329988)
Only 2 breaches/critical remote CVEs on HN frontpage today? Must be a slow news day lol!
Quite the contrary: the barrier to rolling your own <anything> was never lower.

As others have proclaimed: what matters is taste. And (perhaps?) a deep understanding of the subject matter. Which may or may not be encoded in formal specifications. But may also include 'fuzzy' domain-specific knowledge that can't be scraped from the web.

> Humans don't code anymore

I do, and I'm far from alone. Whether 'product' gains traction, that's another matter. But you know what? It doesn't matter. If it works for [author], that's enough.

I have trouble understanding why anyone would even want to be associated with a company that displayed such low ethics, repeatedly. Never mind doing business with them.

CEO... sure that beach vacation will still be nice after they've collected their golden parachute while company goes up in flames. But anyone else?

More filter options please?

  # Author
  # Date published (like enter a from-date and/or to-date)
  # License
  # Free download available y/n
  # Sample chapter available
  # Format: softcover / hardcover / ebook / audiobook etc
  # No. of pages
  # Language(s)
  # Can you watch the movie? (if so: IMDB/Wiki link)
Just to name some off the top of my mind.
> Can’t leak secrets if you don’t have RAM

Failing other mitigations, operations this sensitive could be limited to systems with on-chip RAM. That said: seems more like a theoretical than practical method. Still pretty cool though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargassum#Sustainable_uses

Find a way to lower salt & arsenic content, and it could be an excellent fertilizer.

Re:TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8 on Sunday November 01, 2026 @09:45AM (#50326191)
> I believe it's the same on Debian based

"sysctl -a | grep net.mptcp.enabled" gives "net.mptcp.enabled = 1" on Debian 13 (Trixie). That's a non-server desktop install fwiw.

Edit - security advisory is here: (dated Oct 16) https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2026/msg00...

US != rest of the world. Even within the US, it's economics more than politics that decide where things are headed. Those economics have shifted in favour of renewables.

And personally I expect that datacenter buildout to slow down. The AI bubble won't last, and average dude in the street simply won't up their spending on AI (applications) to a level that justifies the ongoing buildout.

Yes lots of resources will be wasted. But it won't last, markets & investors will correct the situation somehow.

Let's try & figure out interstellar travel first, ok?
Excessive consumption becomes unsustainable when the world runs up against resource limits. Go figure.

Can't say I'm feeling much empathy for the passengers here. That said: this companies' planning was piss-poor going by the article. Fuel prices go up & down, can't you hedge / insure against that somehow? Buy fuel in advance, take delivery in batches at locations A, B, C around the world. Something like that? Passengers paid $320k/pop, and best you could do is pass the hat & drop 'em off in the next port? Shame on you.

Edit: don't be surprised if that ship still sits in same Cambodian harbour years from now. With a fat (unpaid) bill attached, amid ongoing legal battles. What a waste...

Re:Trapped in the Technologist Factory on Saturday October 31, 2026 @07:20AM (#50314984)
> Answering what should exist and what the world is missing requires a vision for what you want the world to become.

Nonsense. All that's needed is asking around, and listen. You could literally throw the dice, go to random country X, and ask the 1st person you meet what would make their life better.

Maybe the gutter on their roof is leaking, and they need someone to fix it. If so, maybe there's more people with the same problem, and a gutter-fixer would make people happy.

Sure, if you have a 'grand vision' and (again, by asking around) find there's others sharing that vision, by all means go work on that. But to find something useful to work on, any 'vision' is really not required.

> When you launch nano without a file loaded, there's a notice at the bottom of the screen: [ Welcome to nano. For basic help, type Ctrl+G. ]

Does it also show that when invoked with a filename? If not: it should! (newbie user invoking with a filename *also* doesn't know how to use the editor. So that help pointer should be shown in both cases).

"for RISC-V hardware that natively supports fast misaligned memory copies"

That'll be server-CPU territory, most likely? (read: not supported by cheapo 4/8-core consumer CPUs)

Re:Sam Altman Thinks You're Wasting DRAM on Friday October 30, 2026 @02:13PM (#50307962)
> Is there any truly good solution to this?

Yes, what smart RAM manufacturers (or who've been longer in the business) are doing: ramp up production capacity, but do so gradually.

Those ramp-up timelines tend to be longer than the markets' boom & bust cycles. So they'll be looking at longER-term trends to decide what to invest in & when.

His logic is flawed in multiple ways:

1) Assuming that RAM in AI datacenter is doing more useful work than outside it.

Wrong! That depends entirely on what it's used for. And since mr. Altman doesn't KNOW what your or my RAM chip(s) are used for, he also can't decide which use is more important.

2) What he deems more important, is a matter of opinion. What's important to him, likely won't matter to me. And vice versa.

Go read some history books, mr. Altman! Maaany wars have been fought over "I know what's best for everyone! Now bow & kiss my toes!"

Oh and 3) all those AI datacenters are built using other people's money than the tech bros running the show. Whereas consumers pay for RAM with their own money. But hey, no doubt it's more fun to shovel *other* people's cash into a firepit.

Wow so much [attacking the messenger] in this thread, without addressing the points it makes.

Humanity is destroying this planet's biosphere in the pursuit of greed. And it might well cause our demise (not just us, btw) if we don't change our ways.

Imho it's hard to find flaws in the logic laid out in the essay. If you can: bring it on!

Re:Why Is This Fingerprinting Script Creating Bioweapons? on Thursday October 29, 2026 @09:00AM (#50288254)
Modelslapping
Re:Assembly Nights on Thursday October 29, 2026 @06:44AM (#50287000)
"But What I’ve come to realize is that there actually are some projects that are guaranteed success by simply working on them."

Try & look for this in any activity. It's analog to "attention makes [X] more beautiful". Put more effort in = get more out of it.

It's so easy to get lost in things that appear fun/useful at first, but turn into a pointless timesink that gets you nothing.

Do things that move you forward, solve problems, learn, help others, sharpen your skills. For such activities, any effort invested has a return.

Re:Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs on Thursday October 29, 2026 @05:30AM (#50286454)
> I feel like it won't be long before someone comes up with a crazy chimera of an OS that can run DOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and macOS binaries.

This is the future, imho: some tiny, cross-platform, ultra-reliable kernel (like seL4), a set of shims that offer different sets of APIs (OS "personalities" if you will) to apps, an emulator, VM or binary translation layer here & there, all happily living under the same roof.

*BSD (including Linux compat layer) + Wine + some emulators like DOSBox already goes a long way. MS Windows desktop running on top of Linux isn't outside the realm of the possible either. And be sure to check Genode OS.

Fun times ahead!

Re:Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs on Thursday October 29, 2026 @05:01AM (#50286262)
> The no cost nature of Linux, as compared to the per-client client licensing for server versions of NT, can't be understated, though.

THIS, so much. One time (~1995 or so?) I bought a boxed SUSE Linux release. Pulled out the book, and practically on the 1st page, there was a copyright notice specifically allowing anyone to copy that book & pass it on. Whereas for practically every other book I'd had in my hands up to that point, copyright notices consisted of various "forbidden to do X, Y or Z" statements.

That right there convinced me I had something different, something special in my hands. Disclaimer: I had read about "open source" before, so I did know what I was looking at. But still it felt special.

Unsurprisingly: note the documentation linked to at the end of jmmv's Unix<->NT comparison above. They're ALL Amazon "buy this book" links. Over on the Linux/BSD side of the fence, such references are typically web pages, man pages, a free-download pdf or the like.

It's not the "free beer" aspect that got me over time. It's the "open", "sharing", "community project", versus "closed", "profit", "property of BigCorp Inc".

You'd be surprised how many people don't even have drinking water stored to get through a few days. That's 2nd most essential after air to breathe.

Same with food. NONE of this type of preparation is difficult, very space / time consuming, or expensive.

As for the LNG situation: worst case is do without heating. Totally doable in UK climate; extra layers of clothing & blankets / sleeping bags do the job (been there, done that in the NL).

Remember we're talking getting through a crisis, not comfort. Although you can have both with more prep work.

Re:AlpineBSD on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:52PM (#50277929)
> Alpine userland is nice

NetBSD userland is not?

Re:Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:12PM (#50276966)
Better: a (lower cost) option without built-in network hardware.

For who 'needs' it, USB-Ethernet dongles exist.

> Is using the system CA not the way to go?

Yes, and that makes not dealing with this issue worse on Apple's part. If MacOS' setup somehow doesn't allow untangling a (still deemed trustworthy?!?) root certificate issued by eMudhra from the broken intermediate certificates, then revoke that whole chain including the root & accept collateral damage.

Failing that just provides an incentive for apps to do their own chain-of-trust implementations. Which like you said is not the way to go.

Re:Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @05:24AM (#50270985)
On [1], anyone happen to know what language that "Ook! Ook? Ook." program is written in?

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