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canada_dry

This extremely well hidden backdoor was an interesting find:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112

Hoping GrapheneOS makes it onto the Motorola Razor (Ultra) soon.
When I hear a discussion among peers about Apple AI and security I remind them of this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112

Apple's reputation of being highly secure was shattered by Operation Triangulation. This complex back door allowed the hacker the ability to utilize the on-device AI to sift through data.

Re:Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake America on Monday August 31, 2026 @07:53PM (#49516263)
The Gov't of Canada uses google maps and apparently don't have the country setting that dictates which version of Lake Ontario/America users see - so Canadians using their site get the US (Lake America).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/google-updates-maps-lake-onta...

Having experienced fed gov't IT projects I'm guessing it'll take 6-8 weeks and cost $500K-$750K to update that setting. /s

Graphene on Razr Ultra - YES! Can't come soon enough.
Re:There's no reason for software to be slow anymore on Friday August 21, 2026 @10:50PM (#49396149)
I regularly support Windows users and when I do, I cringe at just how awful the experience is! (My daily driver for the last decade have been various flavours of linux)

High end Windows 10/11 machines (like my Alienware I9 w/ 64GB mem + RTX4090) seem a bit sluggish. Low end machines with Windows are absolutely painful to use!

I've install debian onto my fairly ancient Lenovo X201 Tablet and it is exceptionally snappy.

Carney is one of the most popular "Liberal" PMs west of Ontario in decades. His popularity in Alberta is higher than Daniel Smith. This can only be good for Canada as a whole IMHO.
Re:Repair Cafe – Fix Your Broken Items on Monday August 17, 2026 @10:23PM (#49340397)
> clean your [item]

Anecdote: I gave an apprentice a small vacuum to fix, when he opened it up several live bed bugs emerged. That was fun! /s

Re:Repair Cafe – Fix Your Broken Items on Monday August 17, 2026 @10:05PM (#49340261)
I've been involved for several years. If you don't yet have one in your area, are handy at fixing things and have the inclination - contact them for info on starting one up.
Re:A Tome of Forbidden Technologies on Saturday August 08, 2026 @09:40AM (#49221763)
"get one of your factories turning out brand new copies of the 1966 Mustang fastback. You’ve still got the plans, right? Don’t change a thing. Leave out all the improvements"

I.e. OP suggests FORD leave out all the modern safety improvements (air bags, crumple zones, ABS brakes) this is exactly the argument the GOP have about capitalism: regulations simply stand in the way of profits.

The whole article is narrow minded and short sighted IMHO.

> symbols need to be lit

100% this.

One of my absolute favorite keyboard designs: G915 TKL Lightspeed got relegated to the donation pile because the symbols were NOT backlit. Such a dumb design choice to save a few cents IMHO.

Because it's backlit I'm guessing changing the eclectic number row design isn't an option that can be easily changed (for this version anyway).
Re:Donate to GrapheneOS on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @05:55PM (#49090437)
The razr forum on reddit has some examples.

It doesn't seem extremely common, but the reports are for phones that are relatively new - not even two years of use.

Re:Donate to GrapheneOS on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @04:37PM (#49089609)
Here's hoping Pixel releases a flip phone 11 and Graphene support follows.

The Motorola razr has crease issues that they seem to want to ignore and Samsung has locked down their phones so root is impractical.

Plus friends and family inadvertently give Google/Facebook (etc) your personal info via tagged photos, contacts, DMs without your consent and they gather/link/sell this collateral info to the highest bidder without anyone being the wiser.
Mine was simply an exercise to see what gpt's vision would come up with vs. the expert analysis.
Asked gpt to see if it could discern Egyptian hieroglyphs from the image of the tomb wall...

https://i.postimg.cc/Pdw7sw-0W/image.png

The "possible standing figure" on the right seems plausible. Be interested in seeing what the actual painstaking restoration eventually reveals.

I gave up on Grok.

It constantly ignores explicit instructions (e.g. do NOT remove existing comments) and it's not nearly as intuitive in knowing the right questions to ask as gpt, claude or gemini in my experience from using all of them.

Re:I think I have LLM burnout on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @11:10PM (#48840503)
The reason I'm getting LLM burnout is from dealing with the obvious neutering and opaque downgrading of all the top models.

Prior to the last 12mos AI companies were hell bent on squeezing out the best results from mediocre models.

But... now that the top models have progressed, those same AI companies have switched their efforts into reducing the computation (cost of a producing a result) as much as possible without being too obvious.

What was an exponential slope in the quality of results over the last 36 months has now nearly flat lined.

Addendum: IMHO results have 'flat lined' not because the models aren't much more capable than a year ago, but because conserving the enormous processing cost (of an over subscribed user base) supersedes the goal of following the user's explicit instructions (e.g. especially if that means more processing cost) to generate the best results.

Re:Leanstral 1.5: Proof Abundance for All on Saturday July 04, 2026 @10:58PM (#48790914)
Considering the (apparent) heaps of money and brains thrown at GROK I'd argue MISTRAL is relatively futher ahead.

Every time I go back to trying GROK it is an abysmal disappointment.

Re:If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know on Tuesday June 09, 2026 @09:59PM (#48470375)
I re-subscribed to GPT's "PLUS" plan after ditching Anthropic for lack luster results... one of the first coding tasks I gave it resulted in a progress/thinking message that said something to the effect of (it vanished too quickly to get a screen shot unfortunately):

                   Evaluating client value  
  
It took me aback. Note: the code had nothing to do with "client value".

Behind the scenes it is not hard to imagine OpenAI, Anthropic, et al simply minimizing processing for clients - like me - that are hopping from one to another to chase the just released SOTA model.

> Bitcoin doesn't really have any coherent reasoning behind it

Stocks are feeling more and more like this also.

Re:Flipper One – we need your help on Friday May 22, 2026 @03:38PM (#48240511)
Looking at the comments for that product I suspect it'll find a home in your junk drawer rather quickly.

I've ordered gizmos from Lilygo in the past and found their support/documentation/updates to be very poor. Once a product is out the door they seem to do little further with it.

Churning out new products seems to be their forte.

FreeBSD uses ZFS.

I've been using ZFS for about a decade on several systems and can't say enough good things about it: rock solid, feature rich and easy to use are the top benefits.

It really needs more love!

Re:I’ve joined Anthropic on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @11:43AM (#48194846)
> just becomes a glorified marketer

That implies Karpathy is either dumb or desperate and he is neither of those by a long shot.

Re:Computer Hobby Movement in Canada on Friday May 15, 2026 @11:09PM (#48156500)
I wonder if anyone remembers the long running computer club that met at the Forest Hill Collegiate on Eglinton Ave in Toronto?

And there was another one in the basement of the old Toronto School Board building (where the new TDSB building now stands) beside Mel Lastman Sq. in Willowdale.

Orwell never even envisioned this form of state surveillance!
Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing on Monday April 27, 2026 @12:42PM (#47923947)
This may be a more accurate analogy... "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo now only allows you a maximum of 100km of travel. You will be automatically charged extra when you go over that."
Re:Framework Laptop 13 Pro on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @07:04PM (#47855945)
Without a mockup of what all the customizable parts will look like... it's hard to commit to a build.
An aside: https://www.buchodi.com/chatgpt-wont-let-you-type-until-clou...

It seems that anthropic has added something similar to their browser UI because just in the last few days chat has become almost unusable in firefox. %@$#%

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